Author: Matthias Middell, Katja Mielke, Anna-Katharina Hornidge.

This chapter discusses several implications of the recent Area Studies debate, including the hypothesis that Area Studies are likely to become global studies in light of the increasingly observed mobility of goods, ideas, people, and capital across conventional boundaries. Insisting on the continued relevance of regions and observing that different generations of area or regional studies not only coexist but also interact, while successive historical eras provoke new kinds of areas as well as reflexive configurations of old ones, the author argues for a transregional perspective. Such a transregional perspective bears the potential to renew the relationship between Area Studies and macro-interpretations as developed in global studies, global history, or interpretations of global processes within the social sciences. Transregional Studies do not therefore replace Area Studies but add urgent and necessary new perspectives, subjects, and eventually also new methodological approaches.