Europe and World Society

Europe and World Society offers a distinctive critical approach to understanding European transformations, exploring both the progress and limitations of integration on various key policy areas such as agricultural policy, education reform, migration, and external relations, as well as the relationship between European regionalism and globalization. Due to its innovative theoretical framework, based on macro perspectives including ‘World Polity Theory', developed by Stanford sociologist John W. Meyer, this collection contributes to both the recent ‘sociological turn' in European studies, and to the constructivist critiques of rational choice accounts of modern Europe. At a time when the European integration project has been severely challenged by multiple economic, political, and social crises, this book offers a timely, global perspective that sheds light on the dynamism and multiplicity of the actors, discourses, and processes which underlie contemporary Europe. The book's distinctive global approach allows it to move the debate beyond state- and EU-centrism, and establish the ‘missing link' between Europe and its global context. This book was published as a special issue of theJournal of Contemporary European Studies.

Chris Rumford is Professor of Political Sociology and Global Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, where he is also co-director of the Centre for Global and Transnational Politics. He is the author ofCosmopolitan Borders (2014), and The Globalization of Strangeness (2013), and the edited collectionsEuropean Multiplicity (co-edited with Didem Buhari-Gulmez, 2014), and Twenty20 and the Future of Cricket (2012).

Didem Buhari-Gulmez is a TUBITAK post-doctoral research fellow at the European Institute-Research on Southeast Europe at the London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. She co-editedEuropean Multiplicity (with Chris Rumford, 2014), and Global Culture: Consciousness and Connectivity (with Roland Robertson, forthcoming).