For much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, globalisation was treated as the natural horizon of political and economic life. Markets expanded across borders, supply chains stretched across continents, and interdependence was assumed to deliver prosperity and stability. In the aftermath of the Cold War, liberal markets and governance appeared not merely dominant, but enduring.
Before any painting comes alive in colour, there is a quieter beginning: the undersketch. Light pencil lines map the form, test proportion, and give direction. Some lines remain essential; others are softened or reworked when they no longer make sense. The sketch is not a masterpiece, but without it, the painting can lose coherence.
For decades, globalisation functioned as our global undersketch. An outline built on open markets, integration, and the belief that interdependence would deliver shared prosperity and stability. But we began to treat that sketch as if it were already the finished work. Even as inequality deepened, communities felt left behind, and political and environmental strains intensified, the original lines were rarely questioned.
In art, revising the sketch is not a failure; it is how stronger compositions emerge. Our present moment may be asking us to redraw those lines with greater attention to resilience, equity, and real human needs before layering more colour onto a design that no longer holds.
As a professor who taught my first course on globalisation more than a decade ago, this moment feels less like an ending than an inflexion point. Globalisation was once framed as an ascendant condition in which economic integration, political convergence, and cultural exchange reinforced one another.
Today, as power and production realign, that certainty appears provisional. We find ourselves asking not how globalisation unfolds, but what lies beyond it.
What we are witnessing is not the collapse of global connection, but the thinning of a particular model of globalisation. Dense just-in-time supply chains, frictionless capital flows, and lightly governed interdependence have proven vulnerable to pandemics, climate stress, geopolitical rivalry, and war. The lesson is clear: efficiency cannot substitute for resilience, and scale cannot guarantee security.
Political economy anticipated this reckoning. Karl Polanyi warned that markets disembedded from social and ecological foundations would provoke counter-movements to re-embed them, reminding us that “laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.” Markets are not natural forces but institutional designs. Dani Rodrik captured this tension in his globalisation trilemma: hyper-globalisation, national sovereignty, and democratic accountability cannot coexist without friction.
For decades, globalisation served as the world’s undersketch, outlining a vision of integration built on speed, efficiency, and expansion. But we mistook the sketch for the finished work
As he later put it, “We need to reimagine globalisation, not abandon it.” Today, that friction is real. Governments across advanced and emerging economies are reclaiming regulatory authority, reshaping markets through industrial policy, and controlling strategic sectors. Not as an ideological reversal, but as a pragmatic response.
Economic inequality further illuminates the limits of unfettered globalisation. The Kuznets curve suggests inequality rises early in development before declining as institutions strengthen and redistribution expands. Contemporary globalisation has compressed this trajectory, allowing wealth to accumulate rapidly while social protections lag, producing persistent inequality. The retrenchment we now witness may stabilise or reverse these trends, but only if public policy and industrial strategy are directed toward inclusion and resilience.
What stands beyond globalisation is not autarky, but a reorganisation of interdependence. Economic life is becoming more regional, selective, and explicitly political. Supply chains shorten, production clusters are nearer to trusted jurisdictions, and cooperation increasingly aligns with security as well as comparative advantage. Giovanni Arrighi’s analysis of systemic cycles reminds us that periods of expansive integration often give way to consolidation as hegemonic orders weaken and power diffuses.
This shift marks the return of the state as a central economic actor. After decades of market-led governance, industrial policy, strategic subsidies, and resilience planning have moved to the centre. Abstract debates about efficiency give way to material concerns: food, energy, water, labour, and technology.
Politics is returning to fundamentals.
Yet this is not a simple revival of Westphalian sovereignty. Ecological systems, climate patterns, financial contagion, and migration flows cross borders regardless of political intent. Classical realist frameworks struggle here. Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing common-pool resources offers a more relevant lens: durable cooperation emerges not from universal rules or unilateral control, but from layered, negotiated arrangements sensitive to place, power, and participation.
The normative implications are significant. Feminist and heterodox economists have long argued that globalisation obscured the labour of care, social reproduction, and ecological stewardship by treating them as external to “real” economic activity. As global systems thin, these domains move to the foreground. Resilience and stability increasingly depend on capacities that cannot be outsourced.
In this emerging landscape, interdependence persists, but it is no longer assumed to be benign. It must be actively governed. Cooperation becomes conditional; exposure is weighed against autonomy. The challenge is not to restore a vanished era of seamless globalisation, nor to retreat into defensive nationalism, but to design institutions capable of managing complexity without denying limits.
What stands beyond globalisation is a world more uneven and constrained, but also more legible.
Growth alone cannot resolve inequality; governance, redistribution, and social investment are essential. The systems we inherit are political constructions. And therefore open to redesign.
If globalisation once promised that integration alone could carry us forward, the present moment suggests a different task: to decide deliberately which forms of interdependence are worth sustaining, on what terms, and how to ensure the benefits are equitably shared. Ostrom’s insight that “a resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory” reminds us that durable cooperation grows from grounded, adaptive institutions rather than sweeping blueprints.
In this sense, we are returning to the sketch.
Before a painting comes alive in colour, the artist studies the form in pencil, adjusting proportion, revising perspective, and strengthening the lines that hold the composition together. Some marks are kept; others softened or reworked. The act of redrawing is not failure, but care.
For decades, globalisation served as the world’s undersketch, outlining a vision of integration built on speed, efficiency, and expansion. But we mistook the sketch for the finished work.
Now, the revisions are visible. The redrawing has begun.
What stands beyond globalisation is not a blank canvas, nor a retreat into isolation, but a more deliberate composition. The task ahead is to reshape the lines of interdependence with greater attention to resilience, equity, and the material conditions that make life secure: food, water, energy, care, and community. Only then can the colours we add (trade, technology, exchange, cooperation) form a picture that holds.
As an educator, this is where my work comes full circle.
Teaching is not just about conveying facts, but cultivating the capacity to navigate uncertainty, weigh trade-offs, and imagine systems that are both efficient and just. The classroom, like the studio, becomes a place of revision where the next version of our shared world is first sketched in thought before it is built in practice.