News
As world gets smaller, Rutgers-Newark expands global affairs offerings
Archived article from Nov 7, 2005
By Mike Sutton
As economic globalization and transnational organizations make the world seem smaller, Rutgers-Newark’s Center for Global Change and Governance (CGCG) has just become a larger and even more valuable resource for scholars, aspiring diplomats and others determined to have a positive impact on the world’s future.
This semester marks the center’s evolution into the Division of Global Affairs. The division’s two-pronged goal will be to continue studying the factors shaping human society and politics and to expand its educational mission. About 130 master’s and doctoral students are enrolled in the division’s global affairs degree program this semester. There is a core faculty and an active research center plans to build on the $3 million in research funding that its faculty have recently generated. The multidisciplinary nature of global affairs research – which, for example, may team political science, economics, anthropology, law, business and biology to investigate climate change issues – led to positioning the new division under the umbrella of the Graduate School.
“We’re doing the right thing at the right time and we started doing it sooner than others did,” observes Richard Langhorne, who founded the CGCG in 1996. Until his retirement at the end of this year, he will serve as the center’s co-director and a professor of political science.
Langhorne notes that “global affairs” is a new field distinct from international affairs, which typically focuses on interactions between nations. Global affairs addresses factors such as the significance of the independent role of the global economy and the influence of independent nongovernmental organizations, such as Oxfam, and global intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank.
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