Sociohistorical Genesis of a Global Survival Unit

This session invites historically informed contributions that examine how changing patterns of social interdependence have been shaped by periods of economic crisis, growing inequality, armed conflict, and climate change. Drawing inspiration from figurational and process sociology, the session explores how established–outsider relations, state formation processes, global power dependences and habitus formation have evolved historically and continue to influence survival units within contemporary societies. Here, survival units refer to the social groups upon which people depend for physical and social protection, and which come to form an emotionally-valued layer of social identity in the consciousness of group members. The nation state has become the dominant form, yet global crises can both strengthen and challenge the centrality of the nation state as a survival unit. Rather than treating globalisation as a recent phenomenon, the session encourages analyses that situate present-day turbulence and crises within longer trajectories of state formation, migration, environmental change, technological transformation and struggles for democracy. Particular attention will be given to how expanding interdependence has progressively transformed humanity's conditions of existence, culminating in ‘survival units’ in which ecological, political and economic futures are increasingly intertwined. These changes will also be addressed in terms of the development of a shared global survival unit, and how such a unit may relate to existing forms of social integration at the level of the state or region.