Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The twentieth century witnessed the end of colonialism. But how and why was formal imperialism excised from the repertoire of global power? More broadly, how and why do global norms change? This essay argues that the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu offers a useful approach for addressing these questions. Understanding change requires recognizing different types of field struggles and different relations between fields that shape the outcomes of those struggles. Colonial fields generated “subversive” struggles initiated by anti-colonial nationalists (the “challengers”) that offered a new heterodoxy against the prevailing orthodoxy and rules of the existing global field of empires. Field homologies facilitated the globalization of this struggle. This coupled with the location of empires at multiple fields, compelled dominant empires like Britain and the United States to adopt anti-colonial nationalism as a new form of symbolic capital.