Military globalization

• 1. Introduction

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  As of 2025, military globalization has been the explicit subject of exactly one book. That is a strange fact for a process this far-reaching. Two figures dominate the attempts to explain it: David Held on one side, and Robert Keohane together with Joseph Nye on the other. They also disagree sharply about when the whole process began, one dating it centuries earlier than the other. What follows traces those competing definitions and the pieces scholars say make up the process. It also follows the unusual path one attempt to fully explain military globalization took before becoming a book.

• 2. Defining the Process

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  David Held offers the more detailed account. He calls military globalization 'the process which embodies the growing extensity and intensity of military relations among the political units of the world-system.' In his account, the process reflects an expanding network of worldwide military ties, driven by technological innovations that stretch 'from steamships to satellites.' Held argues those innovations have, over time, reconstituted the world into what he calls 'a single geostrategic space.' In that space, distant political units end up bound together whether they intend it or not. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye frame the same phenomenon differently. They describe 'long-distance networks of interdependence in which force, and the threat or promise of force, are employed.' Their definition strips away Held's historical sweep and focuses on force itself, actual or threatened, as the connective tissue between distant places. Neither definition specifies how, in practice, military power gets organized across so many different political units.

• 3. War, Arms, and Governance

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  Held's first piece is what he calls 'the globalization of the war system.' He describes it as covering the 'geopolitical order, great power rivalry, conflict and security relations' among political units. The second piece is the global system of arms production and transfers, which Held frames as the global arms dynamics. The third piece is what he calls the geo-governance of violence. He describes it as 'the formal and informal international regulation of the acquisition, deployment and use of military force.' All three pieces, Held argues, are connected to technological development, which made them possible in the first place. The result, Held argues, is increasing global interdependence and complexity, a condition he traces back further than modern technology alone might suggest.

• 4. How Far Back It Goes

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  The Age of Discovery marks the conventional starting point, when European colonial empires first began military operations on a global scale. Their competing ambitions did not stay contained. Imperial rivalry among those empires eventually led to the First World War, described as the first global conflict in world history. Robert Keohane pushes the starting line back much further than that. He dates military globalization at least from the time of the conquests of Alexander the Great, centuries before any European empire existed. That disagreement never stopped one attempt to settle the matter for good. That attempt's own history turned out to be almost as complicated as the subject itself.

• 5. From Stub to Book

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  The first version of this material dates to 2015. It began as a single chapter inside a broader piece about globalization, published on a large, collaboratively edited reference site. The site's volunteer editors decided the chapter deserved its own entry, and gave it the title Military Globalization. A year later, that entry was almost entirely deleted. The problem, editors explained, was that the site does not publish original research. They instructed the author to write using only works that dealt explicitly with military globalization as its own subject, not works on globalization in general. Almost no such works existed. By 2017, whatever could be found was thin enough to sustain only a short, stub-length entry. Faced with that gap, the author turned to a publisher of original research instead, taking the project outside the reference site altogether. The author later posed a question of their own. Given how much exists on globalization as a whole, why does its military side remain a field still waiting to be researched?