The Globalization Project was established at the University of Chicago with the broad aim of advancing international research and scholarly exchange on the cultural dimensions of globalization. At its most general, globalization involves increasingly rapid movements of commodities, images and persons across national and regional systems. The Project aimed to stimulate inquiry into the logic of these movements by drawing together scholars trained in thse social and cultural sciences.

Recognizing that global processes are creating powerful new linkages - through markets, law, and media - and at the same time inspiring strong calls for cultural autonomy and ethnic identity, the Project sought to illuminate this paradox and develop innovative methods for debating it in the classroom as well as in more public settings. While the Project was not a grant-making or degree-granting institution, it wasactively involved in sponsoring conversations through seminars, colloquia, and international conferences both at the University of Chicago and with our partner institutions all over the world.

Globalization is creating rapid and worldwide changes in communication, politics, and patterns of human migration. The Globalization Project investigated both the force of these pervasive changes and the varying interpretations of them in different parts of the world. New links between religion and politics, between mass media and civil society, between free markets and forced migration, between new forms of sovereignty and old forms of loyalty are being created. These links pose as many challenges to international studies in our universities as they do to citizens and political leaders in the emerging global order.

The Project sought to establish new ways of engaging these complexities by encouraging local, national and transnational networks to make the first principals of inquiry negotiable. The Project also sought to participate accessibly in public policy debates about the Post-Cold war order and facilitate discussion within and beyond the University community. Contributions by journalists and human rights activists were part of the Project's brief.

In line with its quest for interdisciplinarity, the Project worked closely with various University of Chicago units, including the Center for International Studies, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation and the University's area studies centers.