Mission of the ASSR

As a graduate school the Amsterdam School offers a multidisciplinary program, in which Ph.D. students participate in a variety of courses and seminars. The school selects students for four-year fellowships that are not earmarked in advance for attachment to collective faculty-led research projects. It has a completion rate of over 70 percent. The research profile of the ASSR is predominantly that of fundamental research. There are also a number of research projects that are more or less applied and funded by non-academic institutions.

The research mission of the ASSR is (1) to combine the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and political science in a historical and comparative perspective with a focus on Western Europe and South and Southeast Asia and (2) to investigate social developments transcending the boundaries of the local setting or national society. In other words, the research addresses three distinct levels and their interrelations: the level of the transnational society, i.e. all social relationships that traverse and transcend the boundaries between nation-states; the level of the national society; and the level of the local or sub national society. Four related propositions provide direction:

a) Transnational relationships across large distances increasingly influence the actions of people in local and national contexts.

b) The impact of transnational relationships is differentiated locally and nationally.

c) The growing significance of transnational relationships (or 'globalisation') is not necessary or inevitable development; it depends on historically contingent conditions, is subject to impasses and stagnations, and elicits counter-movements.

d) Transnational society is characterized by unequal power-dependence relations, though there is not one centre which controls or dominates all spheres of social  life.

These propositions may be considered very general hypotheses requiring verification and specification. Statement (a) refers to terms such as transnationalization, internationalization and globalization, i.e. the expansion of interdependencies, which make people increasingly part of worldwide social networks. The intensification of long-distance communication, the growth of international travel and migration, the expansion of international flows of commodities, capital and money, and the increasing significance of transnational and international organizations are aspects of this development. The next two propositions specify the first one; they imply criticism of overly simple interpretations of globalization. Statement (b) highlights the complicated connections between 'the global and the local’, which are exemplified by processes of hybridization or creolization, i.e. the intermingling of cultural elements of different origins and different scope. Statement (c) refers to historical research on long-term trends as well as more focused research on movements of resistance and identity. Finally, statement (d) focuses on core-periphery relationships, social inequality, power conflicts, and rivalry between competing centers. The ASSR has therefore chosen not to develop a monodisciplinary approach of one society, but a transdisciplinary, problem-focused comparative approach which distinguishes it clearly from research in both area studies departments and discipline-based departments both in the Netherlands and abroad. The growing interest in research on the transnational society follows trends in international research that reflect worldwide developments in global society, but the ASSR is uniquely positioned in this field of research since it brings together in collaboration specialists of Asia, Africa and Europe. The context of international scholarship in which the ASSR participates directly through exchange and collaboration is primarily situated in the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany, South Africa, India, Indonesia, and China. Because of its transnational focus the context of national scholarship is becoming gradually less important. The products of this research are mainly books and articles, but there are also a number of members of the school who participate in public debates in newspapers, radio and television, and public fora. While the ASSR envisages its contribution primarily as an academic one and aims at the international scholarly community, it also sees it as its task to make critical contributions to public debates about social policy, nationally and internationally.