How people have thought about the planet has informed the institutions, norms, and policies that have pulled it together and torn it apart.  For centuries, ideas of free trade, human rights or global governance have framed cooperation and competition, order and disorder.  Such ideas have also spawned border-crossing movements, from campaigns to end slavery to commitments to reduce carbon emissions.  In turn, global thinking and action have often reinforced commitments to national ideas and efforts to curb global exchange.  The goal of this research theme is to explore how ideas framed the understanding of interests and the making of institutions that have yielded commonness and conflict across and within borders.  We also want to understand how these ideas and practices came into being through scientific networks, foundations, and think tanks.  In addition, we will examine rival world ideas that have challenged prevailing orthodoxies.  The goal of the 2019-20 Fung Global Fellows cohort will be to explore the ways people learned to rely on or to reject strangers far away, as well as to imagine how global relationships came to be and could be different.

Jeremy Adelman
Henry Charles Lea Professor of History (2019-20)

Bastiaan Bouwman
Post-doctoral scholar

Ayça Çubukçu
Associate professor in human rights and co-director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Onur Ulas Ince
Assistant professor of political science at Singapore Management University

Sophia Kalantzakos
Global Distinguished Professor in Environmental Studies and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi

Pascale Siegrist
Post-doctoral scholar

Claire Vergerio
Assistant professor of international relations at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science