Global Cleavages: The Shape of Political Conflict across World Regions in Historical Perspective

Introduction

This project investigates the dimensionality of global politics. It analyses the cleavages that structure world politics and asks whether conflicts are shaped territorially or along functional dimensions cutting across world regions.

Research Questions

The question of whether individuals worldwide are opposed territorially or according to socio-economic and cultural groups is addressed in a long-term empirical analysis spanning historical phases from the 19th century to the present.

Objectives

The goal is to establish if, and under what conditions, international divisions opposing world regions – core−periphery, North−South, or civilizational contrasts – increasingly blur, giving way to conflict lines that oppose groups functionally, such as class or education. This is done at the level of citizens, actors, and institutions.

Methodology

GLOBAL combines a comparative approach (to detect convergence between world regions) and a supranational one (to detect functional dimensionality in global discourse and institutions). The project categorizes cleavages according to three types of inequality:

1. Socioeconomic
2. Political-military
3. Cultural

Unlike economic work, it focuses on the politics of inequality, i.e., how actors compete to politicize different inequalities, with narratives legitimizing a more or less equitable redistribution of resources to correct for inequalities.

Research Strategy

A multi-pronged research strategy based on statistical, scaling, GIS, and network methods is used to analyse electoral, socio-economic, roll-call, text, survey, and organizational data.

Leadership and Outcomes

GLOBAL will be led by Daniele Caramani and hosted at the European Governance and Politics Programme (European University Institute), of which he is the director.

It will lead to an authored book by the PI that follows – as the third instalment with common theoretical foundations – the volumes on the nationalization and Europeanization of politics (Cambridge UP, 2004, 2015), as well as a special issue, an edited volume, and 11 journal articles by the research team.