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

This project investigates the dimensionality of global politics. It analyses the cleavages that structure world politics and asks whetherconflicts are shaped territorially or along functional dimensions cutting across world regions. The question of whether individualsworldwide are opposed territorially or according to socio-economic and cultural groups is addressed in a long-term empirical analysisspanning historical phases from the 19th century to the present. The goal is to establish if, and under what conditions, internationaldivisions opposing world regions – core−periphery, North−South, or civilizational contrasts –increasingly blur giving way to conflictlines that oppose groups functionally, such as class or education. This is done at the level of citizens, actors and institutions. GLOBALcombines a comparative approach (to detect convergence between world regions) and supranational one (to detect functionaldimensionality in global discourse and institutions). The project categorizes cleavages according to three types of inequality: socioeconomic,political-military and cultural. Unlike economic work, it focuses on the politics of inequality, i.e. how actors compete topoliticize different inequalities, with narratives legitimizing a more or less equitable redistribution of resources to correct forinequalities. 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. GLOBAL will be led by Daniele Caramani and hosted at the EuropeanGovernance and Politics Programme (European University Institute), of which he is the director. It will lead to an authored book by thePI that follows – as third instalment with common theoretical foundations – the volumes on the nationalization and Europeanizationof politics (Cambridge UP, 2004, 2015), as well as a special issue, an edited volume and 11 journal articles by the researq