Global ethnographic comparison

Abstract

Sociologists are increasingly using comparative ethnographic research to examine how the interplay of global and local forces shape an array of social phenomena. However, there has yet been little examination of the distinct logics, challenges, and advantages of engaging in global ethnographic comparison (GEC). This special issue remedies that lacuna by bringing together seven studies that not only take different approaches to GEC but also explicitly reflect on key methodological and practical questions arising from this kind of research. Our introductory essay frames these studies in three ways. First, we trace the roots of GEC in earlier approaches to global ethnography and macrohistorical comparison and delineate the field of global ethnographic comparison as it currently exists. Second, using the articles in this issue along with other recent examples, we develop a typology of GECs along two dimensions: the procedural order in which they are constructed, and the rationale for comparison that drives them. Finally, we consider how different approaches to GEC can shed light on key global processes in the 21st century, from the post-2008 dynamics of late neoliberalism to the current conjuncture marked by global pandemics, ecological crises, and ascendant right-wing populisms.

Introduction

Sociologists have increasingly used comparative ethnography to develop rich empirical accounts and novel theoretical analyses of how global processes unfold across varied social contexts. Recent studies in this vein have been driven by an array of urgent substantive and analytic questions. Some have sought to explain diverse local responses to global economic restructurings (Agarwala, 2013; Braga, 2017) or health crises (Decoteau, 2021; Vijayakumar, 2021); others explore national and local variations in citizen activism or democratic participation (Eliasoph and Clément, 2020; Hetland, 2023); and still others trace the different strategies and uneven impacts of transnationally linked social movements (Paschel, 2016; Shih, 2023). Underlying this substantive diversity, however, are some basic methodological commonalities. All use two or more case studies developed through sustained participant observation, and they explicitly compare those cases to illuminate how distinct constellations of global and local forces shape the phenomenon under study. In short, they are global ethnographic comparisons (GECs).

While the use of GECs is growing, to date, there has been little discussion of what distinguishes such comparisons from other approaches or how sociologists can effectively construct and conduct them. Recent scholarship has debated whether sociological ethnographers should engage in comparison at all (Burawoy, 2017; Desmond, 2014), and surveyed the advantages and limitations of the diverse epistemological frameworks and methodological approaches used in comparative ethnography in general (Abramson and Gong, 2020). However, global ethnographic comparisons present peculiar methodological challenges and analytic opportunities that warrant, but have yet to receive, systematic attention.

A long-standing consequence of this lacuna is that aspiring GEC practitioners have been left to design and justify our studies using imperfect tools borrowed from other traditions. We might take variable-based approaches derived from quantitative research, comparing multiple sites to control for some globally prevalent variables while looking for others that can account for local variations (Lee, 2020:144–145). More often, we borrow case-based approaches from comparative-historical sociology (Skocpol and Somers, 1980), conceptualizing our field sites as discrete bundles of global and local conditions that can be observed, described, and compared to explain convergent or divergent outcomes. Such approaches can yield tidy research designs that promise generalizable findings and are legible to sociologists from other methodological traditions. However, they pose serious problems for the global ethnographer. For one, the treatment of our ethnographic cases as bounded, independent units is belied by the global structures and transnational connections that invariably link them (Hart, 2018; Lee, 2020). In fact, it is often these very interconnections that motivate our comparisons in the first place. Moreover, straightforward research plans derived from conventional comparative designs are routinely confounded by the messy realities of global fieldwork. Conducting participant observation in what are often geographically distant and socially varied locales presents many practical difficulties. It also raises thorny questions about shifting researcher positionalities, temporal mismatches between cases, and uneven access to field sites, all of which have bearing on our ability to collect comparable data.

While GEC practitioners inevitably have to confront and manage these challenges, we rarely have space to explore them fully in our writing. This special issue aims to open such space by bringing together seven exemplary studies that grapple with key methodological and practical questions arising in GEC research. When and why does comparison become useful? What can global comparisons tell us that single-case ethnographies cannot? What makes seemingly distant and disparate cases comparable to one another? And how do we collect and use ethnographic data in ways that enable effective comparison? In the spirit of “productive pluralism” (Abramson and Gong, 2020: 22–23), we sought contributions that not only examined diverse questions and social contexts but also took different approaches to conceiving and carrying out global comparisons. While requiring our authors to make substantive sociological arguments, we also pushed them to explicitly convey the comparative logics, research strategies, and unexpected challenges that shaped the conduct and the findings of their studies. In other words, we asked them to lay bare what is often written out of the conventionally brief (and deceptively neat) methodology sections found in most ethnographic articles and books. The result was a rich set of contributions that illustrate the diversity in actually existing approaches to GEC, provide insights into how ethnographers can navigate the challenges these comparisons entail, and demonstrate that they can shed new light on an array of important sociological questions.

In this introductory essay, we frame the articles that follow in three ways. We first delineate the field of global ethnographic comparison, tracing its roots in global ethnography and macrohistorical comparison and distinguishing it from other related ethnographic approaches. Second, we use the articles in this issue, together with other recent studies, to develop a typology of GECs. We identify two key dimensions along which GECs vary—the procedural order in which they are constructed, and the primary rationale for comparison that drives them—and use these to map out nine distinct approaches. Finally, we consider how GECs can be used to illuminate broader global phenomena. We show how the contributions to this issue engage with the global dynamics of “zombie neoliberalism” (Peck, 2010) after the 2008 financial crisis. By comparing and connecting disparate cases, these studies shed light on how market rule persists in globally mobile policies and fragmentary local projects, fosters uneven and multiscalar crises, and elicits proliferating contestations. We also argue that GECs can play a key role today, as sociologists grapple with a global moment marked by pandemics, ecological crises, and ascendant right-wing populisms.

Methodological antecedents: extroverted ethnography and macrohistorical comparison

Global ethnographic comparisons have become more widely used only in the last decade, but they are rooted in two earlier methodological traditions: the social-anthropological tradition of global ethnography, and the sociological tradition of macrohistorical comparison. ¹ Each has been the subject of important methodological discussions and debates, which offer some useful lessons for contemporary GEC practitioners. Thus, we outline these discussions here with an emphasis on what they reveal about the promises and pitfalls of global and comparative research.

Extroverted ethnographies

The use of ethnography to study global processes and connections dates to the early years of North American sociology, though it did not prosper there (Burawoy, 2000: 7–11). Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1927 [1918–1920]) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America offers an early example of extroverted ethnography. Their account of Polish immigrants’ incorporation into the American metropolis reveals both the global economic and political forces driving migration, and the global imaginaries that shaped migrant trajectories. However, this early extroversion was abandoned as later Chicago School ethnographers turned inward, studying urban neighborhoods and institutions as discrete rather than interconnected social worlds (Hannerz, 1980), and abstracting their case studies from historical context and global social forces in pursuit of general and transposable theories (Burawoy, 2000).

The opposite path was taken by Manchester School social anthropologists working in southern Africa. Scholars like Gluckman (1940) and Van Velsen (1964) broke with the conventional anthropological practice of interpreting villages or tribes as self-contained sociocultural units—a premise they recognized as patently untenable in colonial contexts. While continuing to conduct local ethnographic studies, they identified patterned discrepancies between prevailing cultural norms and actual social practices, which could not be explained without accounting for the external political and economic forces—especially those woven by European colonialism—that impinged on African societies. Thus, their analysis of “social situations” necessary looked outward from local cases toward the broader fields of forces that constituted them (Burawoy, 2009).

The use of extroverted ethnographic approaches gained further impetus in the late 20th century. On one hand, anthropologists influenced by world-historical scholarship began to situate their ethnographic sites and subjects within the broader world system, and interpret new social and cultural forms as products of uneven insertion into capitalist markets and colonial empires (Marcus, 1995). On the other hand, sociological ethnographers entered debates over the nature of “globalization,” using local case studies to pursue questions about the production and consequences of global forces, connections, and imaginaries (Burawoy et al., 2000). This global turn fostered two methodological developments. First, it drove increasing use of “multisited ethnography” to chase people, things, and ideas across the local and national boundaries once presumed to contain them (Marcus, 1995). Second, it led ethnographers to pursue traditional case studies with new global sensibilities. While most continued to immerse themselves in a single (“local”) social world, they paid increasing attention to the wider forces and connections that shaped the settings they observed (Burawoy et al., 2000), and the “frictions” of global encounters unfolding within them (Tsing, 2005). Both of these tools are still used by GEC practitioners, as we will see below. Until recently, however, few globally oriented ethnographers used explicit comparisons between multiple cases (for exceptions, see Burawoy, 1985; Lee, 1998).

Comparative insights from macrohistorical sociology

The limited use of comparison in early global ethnography stood in stark contrast to developments in historical macrosociology. From the 1960s onward, historical sociologists used new comparative approaches to explain large-scale processes of social change, and they debated how to interpret local and national cases in relation to global social structures. These developments grew out of a shared discontent with earlier comparative traditions, particularly the “natural history” approach that sought to array national societies or “civilizations” within universal evolutionary sequences (Tilly, 1984; Wallerstein, 1974). However, they unfolded in distinct subdisciplinary siloes, institutionalized in the Comparative and Historical Sociology (CHS) and Political Economy of the World System (PEWS) sections of the ASA (Arrighi, 1999). Shaped by different genealogies and internal debates, each of these groups developed distinct comparative toolkits and insights.

The CHS approach had two characteristic features: it took states or national societies as its main units of analysis ² and used qualitative comparison of two or more such units to develop causal explanations for convergence or variation. CHS scholars were unsatisfied with the linear stage theories that prevailed in modernization scholarship, but also critical of the quantitative comparisons that were increasingly used to explain cross-national variation. The latter, they argued, made gross simplifications in reducing diverse societies to sets of purportedly comparable quantitative variables, and routinely violated the assumptions required for statistical comparison (Ragin, 1981). Thus, CHS scholars sought to develop qualitative comparative methods that could grapple with historical complexity and local nuance while still producing generalizable explanations.

Their primary pursuit was to develop methods for “macrocausal analysis,” “a kind of multivariate analysis to which scholars turn to validate causal statements about macrophenomena for which, inherently, there are too many variables and not enough cases” (Skocpol and Somers, 1980: 182). This approach entailed treating historical cases as independent instances of the social phenomenon under examination (e.g. peasant revolt, social revolution, etc.), and using Mill’s methods of agreement and difference to inductively isolate relevant explanatory variables (Ragin, 2014; Skocpol and Somers, 1980). In this way, they arrived at theoretical explanations by identifying clusters of “convergent causal conditions” that led to particular outcomes (Ragin, 1981: 110). Such approaches could be used to explain divergence—as in Moore’s (1966) account of 20th-century nation-states’ paths to democracy, fascism, or socialism—or convergence—as in Skocpol’s (1979) analysis of the common factors that led to successful social revolutions in France, Russia, and China, “in the face of other potentially important differences” (Skocpol and Somers, 1980: 185).

Practitioners of this approach recognized its limitations in relation to the conventional scientific tradition, many of which are shared by comparative ethnography. For one, there are no truly “controlled comparisons” in macrosocial inquiry. While comparing qualitative case studies permits attention to complexity and historical specificity, these features also make it difficult to isolate key causal factors from the messiness of social life (Skocpol and Somers, 1980: 193–4). They also noted the limited generalizability of explanatory models developed from a small number of cases. This led some to call for approximating quantitative rigor by including all comparable instances of the phenomenon under study and using contradictory cases to refine the causal analysis (Ragin, 2014). Most, however, sought “rules for effective generalizing comparison” (Tilly, 1984: 119) with a more modest aim: developing bounded generalizations about constellations of causal factors that could be tested, (in)validated, and refined through extension to new cases (Skocpol and Somers, 1980). Practical limitations are likely to prevent ethnographers from taking Ragin’s (2014) exhaustive approach, but ethnographic comparisons can and do produce testable propositions of the type proposed by Skocpol and Somers (1980). ³

A different set of debates unfolded in world-historical sociology. This subfield comprised several strands ⁴ but was unified by the shared premise that different parts of the world are fundamentally shaped by their incorporation into the global capitalist economy. From this starting point, PEWS scholars argued that the CHS approach to constructing comparable “cases” required an untenable act of historical abstraction. National or local cases could not be treated as isolated bundles of causal variables leading to particular outcomes. Rather, they had to be understood as interrelated parts of the same world-system, and attention had to be given to the role of systemic dynamics in explaining varied state forms, labor regimes, or processes of social change (Arrighi, 1999: 120).

In a manner that will be familiar to global ethnographers, much debate in world-historical scholarship turned around the relative explanatory weight of “global” and “local” forces. At one extreme, Wallerstein’s (1974) writings flirted with world-systemic determinism, treating social, economic, and political conditions in any given locality as dictated by the capitalist world-system’s imperative to maximize surplus-value (enforced by powerful “core” states). Others, however, challenged this deterministic view. Using historical studies of local dynamics in the global “periphery” (theoretically those areas most subject to the power of core interests) they revealed causally complex interactions of systemic imperatives with conditions “on the ground” (Mintz, 1977). On this basis, they argued that the need of the capitalist core was only one of several “motor forces” of history (Stern, 1988). Subaltern resistance, local elite interests, and intraregional dynamics also had a role to play in shaping how local parts were integrated into the systemic whole (Hough, 2022).

Comparison became a vital tool for analyzing the varying role of global and local forces, but the logic of comparison in PEWS differed considerably from that in CHS. The latter engaged primarily in “generalizing comparison, in which the cases stood as logically independent instances of the same phenomenon” (Tilly, 1984: 129). Their generalizations were thus analytic, producing theoretical propositions that could be transposed to other independent cases. By contrast, PEWS scholars compared cases as structurally connected parts of a systemic “whole” that always had to be kept in view (Wallerstein, 1974: 415). Their generalizations thus tended to be substantive rather than analytic, theorizing about the historical dynamics of global structures through comparative analysis of their component parts (McMichael, 2000).

Such generalizations could be made in two ways. The first was “encompassing comparison,” which entailed “placing different instances at various locations within the same system [and] explaining their characteristics as a function of their varying relationships to the system as a whole” (Tilly, 1984: 115). While this may seem to imply a degree of world-systemic determinism, comparing cases with similar structural locations could reveal how common systemic pressures produced divergent outcomes under varied local conditions (Tomich, 1994). The second approach was “incorporated comparison” (McMichael, 1990). This began from the premise that the world system was not a pre-given whole that exercises unidirectional causal influence on its parts but rather a historically self-forming whole constituted by its interrelated parts (McMichael, 2000: 672). Thus, comparison of different “cases” (of state forms, labor regimes, or markets, for instance) served not only to identify principles of “common and contrasting patterns of variation” but also show how they “form in relation to one another and in relation to the whole” (671). This could be done by comparing cases synchronically (as interrelated parts of the same contemporaneous system), diachronically (examining how the earlier occurrence of a phenomenon in one place shapes conditions for its later occurrence in others), or both. For instance, recent work has explained variation in labor regimes (Hough, 2022) and political regimes (Gates, 2023) by exploring how the experiences of one region’s early integration into the global economy reshaped elites’ later strategies for incorporating others—producing diachronic explanations for synchronic variation.

Debates in both PEWS and CHS yielded multiple approaches to constructing comparisons that have been useful for global ethnographers. Early work tended to frame ethnographic comparisons in terms that approximate the CHS approach, treating local cases as relatively independent instances of a common social phenomenon (Lee, 1998, 2020). However, the ever-more-visible dynamics of global interconnection have made it difficult to treat cases as discrete, bounded units that can be analyzed in isolation from one another (Arrighi, 1999). Thus, as the following sections show, global ethnographers have moved toward encompassing (Lee, 2020) and incorporated comparisons (Hart, 2018), which situate local cases in relations to the global structures of which they form part, and examine how they are connected to and shape one another.

What are global ethnographic comparisons?

GECs take multiple forms, but they share three important characteristics that set them apart from other approaches and offer distinct advantages for sociological analysis in the 21st century. First, they are global in their orientation. While sharing with other kinds of ethnography the use of sustained observation to capture on-the-ground experiences, practices, and discourses, GECs are premised on the notion that a robust account of any social phenomenon requires looking beyond the observed milieux to the broader fields of forces that condition them. This stands in contrast to more inward-looking ethnographic approaches, like the Chicago School tradition of studying neighborhoods or institutions as self-contained social worlds (Hannerz, 1980). It also contrasts with the inductive empiricism of Desmond’s (2014) “relational ethnography,” which proposes to analyze the immediate relations between different actors in a given local field, while excluding from view the wider social and historical forces that structure those relations (Burawoy, 2017: 272). GEC studies may begin with “local” empirical puzzles, but they necessarily zoom out to consider how global forces, connections, and ideas (Burawoy et al., 2000) inform people’s interpretations and actions in their social milieu. Taking a global approach means recognizing that all social phenomena are shaped by structures and processes that transcend the immediate contexts in which they unfold—and regarding failure to take account of broader forces as myopic.

Not all global ethnographies are comparative. Many in sociology analyze single cases in light of global fields of forces (Burawoy et al, 2000), but do not go beyond “shadow comparisons” (Tavory and Timmermans, 2020) with other studies of similar phenomena in the literature. Anthropological “follow-the-thing” approaches (Marcus, 1995) use multisited ethnographic methods to trace global phenomena across multiple points of connection, transformation, or friction (Peck and Theodore, 2012; Tsing, 2005), but they do not construct their sites as “cases” to be compared. It is the explicit comparison of two or more cases that distinguishes GECs from other kinds of “extroverted” ethnography.

Abramson and Gong (2020: 2–3) argued that comparative ethnography offers multiple potential advantages over traditional single-case studies: “enrichening interpretation through contrast, aiding in causal inference, showing how different contexts shape ostensibly similar phenomena, or revealing similarities across seemingly different objects.” In global ethnography, comparison is particularly useful for disentangling social forces that operate at multiple scales but become intertwined in any given context. This can be done in a number of ways. Some GEC practitioners use cross-national comparisons to understand how common global forces or processes are refracted through varied national conditions and clarify the causal importance of each (cf. Paschel, 2016). Others use subnational comparisons to investigate the variegated expressions within a single country of forces that transcend national boundaries. For example, Agarwala (2013) compares state-level cases in India to examine how informal workers engage in different forms of political claims-making when faced with global economic restructuring. Finally, some GEC studies use intra-local comparisons to investigate the effects of different transnational forces within the same local context. For instance, Lee (2017) compared how Chinese state capital and global private capital pursue different economic strategies and open distinct political opportunities for workers and state actors in Zambia’s Copperbelt. Whether cross-national, subnational, or intra-local, all of these approaches use explicit comparisons to understand how social phenomena are shaped by different constellations of local and global factors.

GEC’s third distinctive characteristic is its attention to relational interconnection between cases. This means rejecting the conceptualization of cases as discrete, bounded, and independent units that underpins conventional comparative approaches. While global ethnographers often compare geographically distant and socially diverse contexts, they do not treat their cases as independent clusters of causal conditions. Instead, akin to relational approaches in world-historical sociology (McMichael, 2000) and geography (Hart, 2018), they call attention to the multiple ways in which cases are connected (rather than discrete) or mutually conditioning (rather than independent). This tendency reflects the fact that interconnections play a key role in many of the phenomena we study. Contemporaneous social movements in multiple countries may respond to a singular crisis in the capitalist world-system (Braga, 2017; Marquez and Marwah, this issue). Moreover, the transnational reach of movements (Shih, 2023); corporations (Lee, this issue), and policy networks (Peck and Theodore, 2012) often directly link multiple instances of the social and political processes we study. Foregrounding these relational connections can complicate our efforts to construct concise explanatory frameworks (Lee, 2020). However, it also enables ethnographers to capture—in ways inaccessible via other methods—the multiscalar and multidirectional forces through which “local” phenomena are constituted and constitute one another.

Constructing global ethnographic comparisons

Even when ethnographers embark on research that is global, comparative, and relational, we are often encouraged—by mentors, colleagues, and reviewers—to design and frame our work with gestures toward the conventional scientific tradition that continues to dominate the imaginary of our discipline (Small, 2009). This is reflected in the methodology sections of many comparative ethnographic articles, which take great pains to explain how comparative cases were selected to answer a pre-established research question and control for extraneous variables; emphasize comparable data collection through similar procedures in each site; and offer obligatory handwringing about the limited generalizability of findings from a small number of cases. Yet, these efforts at disciplinary legibility and scientific legitimacy obscure the varied ways that GECs are actually conceived (most of which diverge from conventional approaches), and the adaptations often required to carry them out. Here, we invited our authors to eschew the typical methodology section and instead elaborate on the actual processes through which their comparisons emerged and unfolded. Doing so revealed remarkable diversity in comparative approaches and yielded insights into how practitioners navigate the distinct challenges of GEC research.

Table 1 arranges these approaches along two dimensions. The first—procedural order of construction—has to do with when and how comparison happens in the course of an ethnographic study. The articles that follow show that robust comparisons need not be constituted a priori. They can emerge sequentially in the course of an initial case study (Tavory and Timmermans, 2020), or be constituted a posteriori through dialogue between ethnographers of related phenomena (Montero and Baiocchi, 2022). The prevalence of these less recognized procedural orders in GEC, we argue, is shaped as much by the practical exigencies of global fieldwork as it is by premeditated methodological choices. The second dimension—rationale for comparison—relates to the intertwined questions of what can be gained by comparing, and what makes cases comparable. This dimension captures the range of sociological questions that motivate GEC, and how those questions inform the selection of cases along different lines.

Table 1.

A typology of global ethnographic comparisons.

		Rationale for Comparison
		MobilePolicy	CommonSocial Process	Theoretical Question
Procedural Order of Construction	A priori	Comparative Policy Analysis Vogt (2002) Huey (2007)	Encompassing Comparison Paschel (2016) Hetland (2023) Traditional Revisit Burawoy (1979)	Extended Case Comparison Antoine, this issue Heuristic Revisit Sallaz (2008)
	Sequential	Grounding Comparison Bustamante, this issue Koppelman, this issue Moimaz, this issue	Scope-Enhancing Comparison Lee, this issue Sequential Revisit Perlman, 2010	Cumulative Comparison Burawoy (1985)
	A posteriori	Retroactive Synthesis Pacheco-Vega, 2020	Dialogical Reconstruction Hernández et al, 2022 Eliasoph and Clément, 2020 Previsit/Revisit Ramirez & Villarreal, this issue	Linked Ethnographies Andrews and Shahrokni, 2014 Marquez & Marwah, this issue

Using these axes, we propose a typology of global ethnographic comparisons. Our aim in doing so is not to provide an evaluative or hierarchical ordering of the different approaches. Rather, it is to indicate how GECs can be pursued in multiple ways, each of which enables us to answer different questions and navigate the challenges of using comparative ethnography to study global phenomena.

Tinkering with procedural order

Conventional comparisons in the social sciences generally adhere to an a priori procedural order. In ethnography, this means that comparison is established from the outset as necessary to answer the research question, and cases are selected using representative sampling of similar contexts (Abramson and Sánchez-Jankowski, 2020), or variable-based identification of sites where theoretically relevant causal conditions differ (Lee, 2020). In the ideal-typical version of this approach, data are also collected using standardized methods and as synchronically as possible, controlling for temporal variation by cycling back and forth between cases or observing different sites close together in time.

Such procedures are relatively rare in GEC research. Few global ethnographic studies are born as a priori comparisons. And when they are, they diverge in other ways from conventional approaches. One important reason for this is practical. A priori comparisons require preliminary fieldwork to identify comparable cases where the proposed data collection is actually feasible. This may be practicable for comparing households or neighborhoods within a single locality. However, doing so across multiple cities, countries, or even continents requires time and resources that are difficult to come by. Pre-constituted ethnographic comparisons can also be risky endeavors, as careful case selection can always crumble under the resistance that field sites typically show to the entry and sustained presence of ethnographic interlopers (Anteby, 2024). Even if the ethnographer is able to access and observe all of their originally intended field sites, the conditions of her access may differ in ways that preclude standardized procedures and lead to significant unevenness in data collection (Decoteau, 2020).

This is not to say that a priori comparison is impossible for global ethnographers. For instance, Antoine (this issue) conducted preliminary fieldwork in Brussels and São Paulo. This enabled him to formulate the theoretical question driving his study of divergent pedagogical practices and identify relevant cases before pursuing full data collection. Even so, he had to grapple with differences produced by the distinct pathways available to access schools in each site, as well as his distinct positionality within them. Similarly, Hetland (2023) made prior visits to several municipalities across Bolivia and Venezuela to construct a four-way comparison of participatory politics in cases that varied in both national and local political regimes. As his methodological appendix makes clear, however, his ability to follow through on this design was contingent on successfully navigating relationships with key actors in each site.

GEC practitioners also use a priori construction in revisits (Burawoy, 2009), where the research is developed around a diachronic comparison with a pre-existing study. The classic revisit involves entering the same site previously studied by another ethnographer and comparing social dynamics at different points in time (Burawoy, 1979). However, they can take other forms, including sequential revisits, where a researcher returns to a site where they previously carried out fieldwork (Perlman, 2010), or what Sallaz (2008) calls a “heuristic revisit”—reconstructing a previous study at an entirely different, but theoretically related, site. These comparisons come with their own challenges. Procedural standardization may be limited by differences in the revisiting researcher’s positionality, and historical changes to the field site inevitably shape the new round of data collection (Perlman, 2010). Nonetheless, revisits are useful comparative tools for understanding how shifting constellations of local and global factors drive changes in the same (or similar) contexts over time.

As most of the articles that follow indicate, GECs are often not comparative endeavors from the start. Many emerge through a second procedural order, which Tavory and Timmermans (2020) called “sequential comparison. ⁵ ” Here, research begins with a single case study and develops into a comparison only if and when it proves analytically useful to do so. The comparative move can come as a way to extend the scope of analytical claims (Tavory and Timmermans, 2020), resolve emergent theoretical puzzles, or sharpen explanatory frameworks by seeking additional variation (Koppelman, this issue). The choice of subsequent field sites will be driven by the specific analytic aim and informed by “casing” done in the initial study (Gong, 2024). Notably, sequential comparisons may extend even beyond the scope of a single ethnographic project. For example, Burawoy’s (1985) Politics of Production offers a model for what we term “cumulative comparison,” in which a series of ethnographic studies, conducted across different global and historical contexts, are used to build and refine an overarching theoretical framework.

That most contributions to this issue were developed sequentially indicates the distinct advantages that this procedural order offers to GEC practitioners. Practically, it reduces some common risks of pursuing comparative global research. By first developing a project as a single case study, it provides the researcher with an “off ramp” in the event that time and resource constraints, or barriers to entry in additional sites, prevent the realization of a comparative study. Substantively, if global ethnography seeks to understand how social phenomena are produced by intersections of local histories and broader forces (Burawoy, 2000), sequential comparison can help disentangle the role of each by extending from single-case to comparative studies. For instance, Youngrong Lee’s initial ethnography of an app-based delivery worker union in Toronto showed that they developed “new unionism” strategies to organize in response to global crises. However, by expanding the study to compare Toronto with Seoul, she found that new unionism was associated with very different organizing models and subjectivities in each city—even among workers for the same multinational company. This comparative move led her to specify two local factors (worker demographics and union histories) that mediated the experience of common global forces, and thus produced a more robust account of how workers build solidarity to confront global tech platforms (Lee, this issue).

Sequential comparison can also offer a way to address unanticipated questions that emerge in the course of an ethnographic study. For instance, if officials in Lima, Peru, embraced New York City’s model of “zero-tolerance” policing, does this indicate a convergence in policing practices between Peruvian and US cities? While other scholars made this argument on the basis of shared official policies, Bustamante (this issue) tested this empirically by extending his ethnography of policing in Lima into a comparison with Oakland, California. By doing so, he showed that convergent policy discourses were refracted into very different “zero-tolerance” policing practices, and developed an explanatory framework to account for that divergence.

Sequential comparison also comes with challenges. In addition to the unevenness of data created by different characteristics of the field sites being compared (Koppelman, this issue), our contributors also grappled with how their positionalities shifted as they moved from one site to another. Comparative ethnographers may be received very differently by interlocutors when they are “natives” in one context and “foreigners” in others (Lee, this issue; Antoine, this issue). They may even begin a study as “insiders” in a familiar setting, but then become ethnographic interlopers as they extend their research to compare with new sites (Moimaz, this issue). Our contributors emphasize that these shifts make reflexivity (Burawoy, 2009) particularly important, and potentially insightful, at the moment of extension from single case study to sequential comparison.

Sequential comparisons also face the problem of temporal mismatch, as the global context can change (even radically so) between the initial and subsequent case studies. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this challenge into sharp relief for both Lee (this issue) and Moimaz (this issue). Both had to adapt their data collection strategies in response to changing public health protocols, giving their fieldwork a very different character in each of their respective sites. However, they were also able to incorporate this global crisis into their analyses, leveraging opportunities for “eventful comparison” (Lee, 2020) to show how pandemic responses revealed underlying similarities (Moimaz, this issue) or differences (Lee, this issue) between their cases. Temporal mismatch can also be managed in other ways. A more synchronic structure can be approximated when time and resources permit the ethnographer to cycle back and forth between sequential cases (Tavory and Timmermans, 2020: 199; Bustamante, this issue). Alternatively, social media and other communications with informants can allow researchers to place their subsequent cases in more continuous dialogue with initial ones, even when cycling is not feasible (Moimaz, this issue).

The third procedural order is that of a posteriori comparison (Montero and Baiocchi, 2022), in which ethnographers studying related phenomena “compare notes” (Tavory and Timmermans, 2020: 188–189) from different studies and develop comparative insights without setting off for additional field sites. ⁶ By placing separately conceived projects in dialogue, ethnographers can hone in on shared attributes of diverse sites (Hernández et al., 2022; Márquez and Marwah, this issue) or explain divergent forms of similar phenomena (Eliasoph and Clément, 2020). These comparisons can be made across space, as scholars compare related studies conducted in very different national or regional contexts (Andrews and Shahrokni, 2014; Eliasoph and Clément, 2020; Márquez and Marwah, this issue). They may also be made in a single site over time. Ramírez and Villarreal (this issue) separately studied elite responses to urban violence in Monterrey, Mexico, several years apart. This enabled them to later compare how these responses unfolded over time through different strategies and at different urban scales. They aptly term this a “previsit/revisit,” a mode of comparison that allows each ethnographer to reconsider their own data in light of the temporal perspective of the other.

Comparative dialogues can take shape at different points in the research process. Most arise only after data collection is completed, as scholars disseminate their findings and realize that they have studied related phenomena. This creates possibilities for engaging in dialogical reconstruction of their respective ethnographies around new comparative questions. Thus, Montero and Baiocchi (2022) used separate studies—one of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, the other of bus rapid transit in Bogotá—to compare the processes through which local policies become global “best practices.” Similarly, Hernández et al. (2022) compared data from three distinct neighborhood ethnographies conducted in different Latin American cities to identify broader patterns in the survival strategies of poor city-dwellers.

Comparative questions can also emerge while fieldwork is still ongoing. The discovery of related themes through the sharing of research in progress can give rise to what Andrews and Shahrokni term “linked ethnographies,” which bring together studies of different sites and social phenomena to reinterpret them as “complex, interconnected, local instantiations of global processes” (Andrews and Shahrokni, 2014: 150). The potential for forging such links is contingent on the institutional settings in which ethnographers work. While ethnography is still largely imagined and taught as a lone pursuit, ethnographic working groups with strong cultures of collaboration ⁷ can create opportunities for generative comparative dialogues, even across spatially and thematically disparate projects (Márquez and Marwah, this issue).

Three rationales for comparison

In addition to using different procedural orders, GEC practitioners build their comparisons around different analytical aims. The contributions to this issue suggest three main rationales for pursuing a comparison: following globally mobile policies, comparing common social processes, and answering theoretical questions. It is important to note that these are not necessarily discrete, mutually exclusive categories. For instance, theoretical insights can be derived from comparing common social processes, and common processes may be brought about via globally mobile policies. Nonetheless, we categorize GECs by the primary rationale driving the decision to compare, as each entails a distinct approach to identifying and justifying comparative cases.

The first rationale is to examine how globally mobile policies unfold in different local or national settings. Although ethnography remains marginal in conventional policy research, critical scholars have employed multisited ethnographic methods to study policy mobility (Peck and Theodore, 2012), and there have been growing calls to use comparative ethnography to study global trends in education (Vogt, 2002), housing (Ronald, 2011), and criminal justice (McMenzie et al., 2019) policy. Policy-oriented GEC studies bring these threads together. Their starting point is typically the observation that a certain policy idea or model is diffused across an array of national and local contexts. Comparative cases are then chosen to examine how order of adoption (e.g. originators versus imitators), variants of the model, or contextual factors (e.g. institutional trajectories, sociopolitical contexts) shape the implementation, impact, or responses to this global policy.

Policy-driven comparisons can potentially use all three procedural orders outlined above. Pacheco-Vega (2020) argues that comparative policy ethnographies usually take either a “push approach,” in which ethnographic questions drive a priori comparative design, or an a posteriori “pull approach” in which researchers retroactively synthesize ethnographic case studies to extract comparative insights. However, the three policy-oriented contributions to this issue—by Moimaz, Bustamante, and Koppelman—take the form of what we call “grounding comparisons.” Using a sequential procedure, each study began as a local case study of a global policy, but then followed that policy elsewhere to compare its implementation and consequences across different contexts. This approach has roots in the multi-sited, “follow-the-thing” ethnographies (Marcus, 1995) used to trace how ideas become mobile across national and institutional spaces. However, existing research focuses primarily on how policies become packaged and circulated as imitable “best practices” (Montero and Baiocchi, 2022), or transform as they move through elite networks (Peck and Theodore, 2012). In contrast, the “grounding” approach focuses on explicit comparison of how policies are actually deployed, understood, and contested by local actors. This requires sustained observation of the messy and sometimes unpredictable ways that mobile policies unfold on the ground in different contexts. Such comparisons are vital to grapple with how ideas that move through elite institutional circuits produce uneven social effects when put into practice, and how they elicit new practices, claims, or contestations from those whose lives they impact.

The second rationale for comparison is to understand and explain local variations or convergences in a particular social process observable in multiple contexts. In this approach, comparison begins from the premise that, especially in a globally interconnected world, there are common processes unfolding across multiple places, institutions, or groups. The process of interest can vary widely in substance and scale, from engagement in local grassroots activism (Eliasoph and Clément, 2020), to formalization of city-level recycling systems (Rosaldo, 2024), to national movements for racial justice (Paschel, 2016). However, it is the presence of a common process in two or more cases that drives the comparison and renders those cases comparable.

When developed through an a priori procedure, process-oriented GEC studies tend to resemble the macrohistorical approach of “encompassing comparison” (Tilly, 1984). The researcher starts with a global process and proceeds to examine its variegated unfolding by comparing cases conceived as local instantiations. Thus, to examine the implications of shifts in the global economy, the ethnographer can compare how workers’ experience and respond to them in different sociopolitical contexts (Agarwala, 2013). Similarly, to explain the regional advance of racial justice legislation, cases can be selected to understand how global movement discourses and claims are refracted through different national political fields (Paschel, 2016). Ethnographers can also arrive at encompassing process-oriented comparisons sequentially. Beginning from a local case study, they later extend observation to a second instance of the same process to examine how it varies under historically distinct social and economic conditions (Lee, this issue).

When process-oriented comparisons are done a posteriori, they often resemble the approach of CHS scholars and engage in analytic rather than substantive generalization. This is perhaps unsurprising, as dialogical reconstruction of multiple ethnographic cases resembles the comparative historical procedure for causal analysis: re-reading existing work on discrete cases to identify clusters of causal factors that explain shared or divergent outcomes (Eliasoph and Clément, 2020; Hernández et al., 2022). There are, however, exceptions. Braga (2017) took an encompassing approach in his a posteriori comparison of political mobilizations of the precariat. Placing his own ethnography of Brazilian call-center workers in dialogue with studies of precarious workers in Portugal and South Africa, he situates each case as a historically distinct formation within the semiperiphery of a global economy undergoing the post-2008 “crisis of globalization.” This enables him to compare workers’ political engagements not as independent instances, but rather as locally shaped but structurally linked responses to a singular global crisis.

The final rationale for comparison is theoretical. This is most associated with the extended case method tradition, which has long had a comparative bent (Burawoy, 2009), but it is also used in the “thematic comparisons” pursued by symbolic interactionists (DeGloma and Papadantonakis, 2020). Here, cases are not selected to discern empirical variation among local instances of global processes. Instead, the ethnographer poses a theoretical question and selects cases on the basis of relevance to those questions (Burawoy, 1985: 17). This can enable comparison of cases that appear “incomparable” through the lens of other rationales (Antoine, this issue). They may be distant in space and time (Sallaz, 2008), lack connection through shared policies, or differ in the social processes being observed (Andrews and Shahrokni, 2014). However, their comparability and interconnection are established at the level of theory (Burawoy, 2009). Thus, studying very different pedagogical projects implemented in two ostensibly unconnected local schools in Belgium and Brazil, Antoine sought to build a theory of how local and historical context shapes the work of teachers as practical and ideological organizers of society. His comparison emphasizes the importance of global structures not by seeking direct ties between the schools under study, but rather by analyzing their pedagogical projects in relation to Belgium’s and Brazil’s respective locations in the global political economy. In a similar vein, Márquez and Marwah compare discursive frames deployed by public health workers in northern India with those of immigrant rights’ activists in the southwestern United States. To justify this comparison, they situate both cases within the “general crisis” of social reproduction (Fraser, 2017), and show how variegated local manifestations of this global crisis galvanize diverse collective actors to frame public claims-making around care. In this way, theoretically driven GECs can produce substantive generalizations by keeping in view the global structures and processes that both connect and constitute seemingly disparate cases (Burawoy, 1985; McMichael, 2000).

Although unified by their coupling of explicit comparison with global and relational sensibilities, GEC studies are clearly diverse in the questions that motivate them, their logics of comparison and casing, and the orders in which they are constructed. While the types identified in Table 1 are neither necessarily exhaustive nor always neatly distinguishable from one another, the axes of procedural order and comparative rationale enable us to map actually existing approaches and highlight their distinct uses and challenges. In the final sections, we show how these approaches can enhance sociological understandings of broader phenomena, first outlining how this issue collectively sheds light on the post-2008 dynamics of “zombie neoliberalism” (Peck, 2010), then considering GECs’ potential for grappling with the current global conjuncture.

Excavating neoliberalism’s afterlife with GEC

For some scholars, the 2008 financial meltdown announced a “crisis of globalization” (Braga, 2017) and undermined neoliberalism’s global dominance as an economic theory and political ideology (Evans and Sewell, 2013). Yet, the explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 laid bare profound inequalities and vulnerabilities that had been deepened by yet another decade of market-driven policies and financialized global integration. Clearly, neoliberalism has outlived multiple crises of its own making. Though perhaps terminally wounded as a coherent paradigm, it endures as a fragmentary set of logics, policies, and projects that continue to shape life across many geographic contexts and social domains (Peck, 2010). How can global ethnographic comparisons help to illuminate this era of flagging but persistent neoliberalism? Drawing on the contributions that follow, we show that GECs are particularly well suited for three analytic tasks: revealing how globally mobile neoliberal policies engender diverse local practices, impacts, and resistances; understanding how global processes associated with market rule unfold differently across space and time; and using theoretical extension to reveal links between neoliberalism’s disparate crises and identify avenues for its contestation.

One particularly perverse aspect the post-2008 period is that market-oriented policy ideas continued to circulate as strategies for managing the very crises produced by earlier neoliberal offensives (Peck, 2010). Our three policy-driven comparisons examine the uneven consequences of this circulation in the domains of education (Moimaz, this issue), public security (Bustamante, this issue), and housing (Koppelman, this issue). All use the grounding comparison approach, following policies to compare their concrete unfolding in different localities. However, each points to a different potential consequence of global policy mobility: fostering convergent conditions, refracting into divergent implementations, and eliciting uneven contestations.

In his ethnography of teacher responses to education reforms in Brazil and the United States, Moimaz (this issue) shows how mobile policies can drive convergence of conditions across historically different contexts. In his case, Brazilian business elites proclaimed a “crisis” of public education to promote a package of market-oriented reforms that they claimed had been “successful” in fixing failing US school systems. These included using selective privatizations, business-derived metrics, and new economic incentives to pressure schools to deliver quantifiable results. Moimaz begins his ethnography at the “receiving end” of this elite-driven reform package, examining how it impacted teachers’ work, subjectivities, and resistance in São Paulo. However, he then retraces the model to the United States to compare with teacher experiences in “successfully” reformed schools. The comparison reveals how the success story that enabled policy mobility also obscured hidden costs that traveled with the model. Among other impacts, market-oriented reforms in both the United States and Brazil deepened teachers’ exploitation and rendered working conditions more precarious. However, he shows that when these conditions were aggravated by COVID, they also galvanized new teacher mobilizations and practices of community solidarity in both contexts. Ultimately, this reveals how neoliberalism’s circulating policies can intertwine with global crises to create both convergent forms of precarization and new grounds for contestation across diverse contexts.

Even in cases where mobile policies have similar social impacts, they can give rise to different political dynamics of contestation. This is what Koppelman (this issue) shows in his ethnography of collective responses to a market-oriented model of social housing policy. Following the “demand-subsidy” model of developer-led housing provision from its origin in Chile to its later adoption in Brazil, he compares two cities—Santiago and São Paulo—where similar policies yielded similar consequences. In both, demand-subsidy programs drove privatized mass production of segregated and poor-quality homes. They also galvanized popular housing organizations to protest developer control and demand more participatory provision. However, this “contentious participation” took very different forms, giving rise to mass mobilization to claim institutionalized participation in São Paulo, and fragmented local protests to enable project-level negotiations in Santiago. By showing how these mobilizations reflected distinct social movement legacies and state-civil society regimes in each city, Koppelman reveals the importance of local political history in shaping how citizens contest globally mobile policies.

Policy mobility does not always lead to convergent outcomes, or indeed even to similar state practices. Bustamante (this issue) shows that while global models empower local authorities to pursue similar projects in different cities, they can also be refracted into very different on-the-ground realities. He does this by comparing local efforts to restrict popular leisure activities in Oakland, California, and Lima, Peru, two cities where decades of deindustrialization and disinvestment gave way to new projects of urban entrepreneurialism. In both cases, officials drew on New York City’s model of “zero-tolerance policing” to curtail marginalized groups’ uses of public space and thus make their cities safe for investment. Rather than convergence, however, Bustamante’s ethnography reveals that local authorities developed very different “zero-tolerance” strategies—the proliferating use of legal sanctions in Oakland, and the administration of extralegal violence in Lima. To discern how a global model became refracted into such different policing practices, he disaggregates the “stages of transfer” to show how zero-tolerance changed as it was adopted, challenged, and reworked in distinct social and institutional contexts.

While mobile policies linked the cases in some studies, others used shared global processes as their basis of comparison. Lee (this issue) joins a growing literature examining how the global expansion of app-mediated gig work is reshaping union activism, comparing organizing efforts by delivery app workers in Toronto and Seoul during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her study confirms broader findings that platform capitalism fosters a turn toward strategies of “new unionism,” but she goes further to show how local organizing approaches can be grounded in very different subjectivities and solidarities. In Seoul, leadership with roots in traditional unions and a membership mainly of Korean male delivery workers fostered a narrow “class model” of organizing. In Toronto, by contrast, a largely immigrant and gender-diverse membership, as well as leaders new to union organizing, gave rise to a “multiple marginality model” of solidarity and collective claims-making. Thus, while global tech companies exert similar pressures on gig workers across much of the world, Lee shows how local union histories and worker demographics shape the construction of collective identities and practices of organized resistance.

Whereas Lee compares instances of a global process across space, Ramirez and Villarreal (this issue) use a previsit/revisit to compare the unfolding of a process in a single locality over time. The privatization and securitization of space to facilitate capital accumulation is well-established in the global literature on neoliberal urbanism. However, Ramirez and Villarreal’s study of a “defended entrepreneurial district” in Monterrey, Mexico, leverages diachronic comparison to show how business elites shifted such projects’ urban scale and legitimation strategies over time. Following a wave of urban violence related to Mexico’s drug wars, the Grupo Monterrey business association first responded by fortifying the city’s wealthiest municipality with a new public-private police force. However, the authors show how the group later shifted to carving out smaller districts beyond this “defended city” in the continued pursuit of spaces for profitable development. In their case study, business elites used a local university to anchor a district-level redevelopment, hired a Boston-based design firm that drew inspiration from US urban campuses, and sought support from local residents by enlisting their participation in the provision of public security. Their study not only reveals the tensions and exclusions that arise as capital works to privatize public space and security but leverages temporal comparison to show how local elites draw on global models to adapt and rescale urban development strategies.

Our final two contributions use theory-driven comparisons to draw broader lessons from ostensibly disparate cases that are nonetheless connected by the global dynamics of neoliberalism. Marquez and Marwah (this issue) use linked ethnographies to compare how very different kinds of collective actors publicly frame the contributions of their work. In one case, community health workers in Punjab, India, mobilized to challenge their official categorization “paid volunteers” and claim full rights and recognition as providers of a vital public service. In the other, activists on the US-Mexico border engaged in fundraising for their efforts to support migrants targeted by the US state’s repressive immigration apparatus. These actors made different substantive claims in widely distinct social and political contexts. Yet, Marquez and Marwah show that both frame their work as public forms of care. That is, they challenged the “neoliberal narrowing of who the state cares for and how it provides care” (Marquez and Marwah, this issue: ##), and articulated politicized notions of care as expanding the rights of marginalized groups. By connecting radically disparate cases, their study highlights the emergent possibilities for a robust politics of care, as well as its urgency to confront the global crisis of social reproduction (Fraser, 2017).

Finally, Antoine (this issue) demonstrates how the extended case method (Burawoy, 2009) can be used to both connect and compare seemingly “incomparable” cases of global phenomena. He uses ECM to compare contrasting pedagogical projects in two public schools—one in Belgium, the other in Brazil. While teachers in the former promoted a “civic education” centered on social cohesion, institutional politics, and NGO volunteerism, those in the latter pursued more radical initiatives to foster social justice via engagement with social movements. He traces these divergent pedagogies of political engagement to the distinct social and political conditions that marked the neoliberal moment in each country. In the school in Brussels, the civic education framework reflected a prevailing sense of the “end of history” emerging from the ostensible triumph of Western liberal democracy in the 1990s. In the São Paulo school, the social justice framework reflected teachers’ grounding in the vibrant social movements that drove Brazil’s democratization in the 1980s, as well as critical engagement with the neoliberal turn that exacerbated social inequalities over subsequent decades. Emphasizing the historical contingency of these projects, Antoine notes that school politics in both cases underwent inflections amid the “culture wars” that arose after his research. As ascendant right-wing populism dismantled the radical pedagogy of the Brazilian school, radicalization of environmental struggles in Europe fostered more critical politicization of Belgian students. By juxtaposing these “incomparable” cases, Antoine builds a theory of how the intersection of local histories and global conjunctures produces divergent pedagogies of citizenship in an interconnected world.

Rather than a straightforward narrative of enduring market rule, this special issue reveals post-crisis neoliberalism’s increasingly fragmentary, uneven, and contested nature. Engaging with its multiple manifestations—the crisis of care, privatization of the social state, securitization of urban space, or precarization of work—they use GECs to explain how market rule is expressed differently across space and time. They also bring to the fore proliferating local struggles—an inextricable part of neoliberalism’s afterlife that can be easily missed from a bird’s eye view. Waged by social movements, labor unions, and loosely organized communities, these struggles can prevent the smooth imposition of market-oriented projects (Ramírez and Villarreal, this issue) and force authorities to rethink and rework global policies (Bustamante, this issue). They also build new solidarities and multiscalar alliances (Lee, this issue; Koppelman, this issue), and develop alternative practices and visions for more democratic, equitable, and caring societies (Antoine, this issue; Moimaz, this issue; Márquez and Marwah, this issue). By combining careful ethnographic research with a comparative and global sensibility, our contributors lay bare the multiple and interconnected predations and potentialities that characterize the era of zombie neoliberalism.

What now? Global ethnographic comparison for the (Grim) present

If the 2008 crisis marks the starting point for investigating neoliberalism’s afterlife, the works in this issue are bookended by COVID-19. The pandemic exposed a deepening of social disparities in the late-neoliberal era. Not only were rates of infection and mortality stratified geographically as well as by race, class, and gender (Magesh et al., 2021), these differences were compounded by unequal access to protection from the disease and its economic fallout. As Lee (this issue) and Moimaz (this issue) both highlight, neoliberal transformations of work rendered certain categories of workers particularly vulnerable, and set the stage for their deepening exploitation under pandemic conditions. Along with other recent studies (Decoteau, 2021; Vijayakumar, 2021), these contributions point to GEC’s utility for grappling with the uneven impacts and local responses to proliferating global health crises.

GEC might also be effectively deployed for studying ecological crises. Paprocki (2021) shows how global ethnography can be used to examine the production of climate knowledge in powerful institutions in the global North, and link this with comparative analysis of how dominant (still market-oriented) solutions are experienced and contested in “vulnerable” communities in the global South. GECs could readily build on this work by comparing how different groups, places, and institutions respond to shared ecological challenges; how global expertise is used, contested, and reworked by communities with different resources and histories; or how movements build ecological solidarity and articulate alternative visions for reform or adaptation.

Perhaps the most urgent questions, however, stem from the global ascendancy of rightwing populisms. Thus far, political scientists and international relations scholars have dominated the global comparative literature on this topic. Remaining largely at the macro level, they identify “common enabling conditions” for the concomitant rise of rightwing leaders across countries and regions (Anievas and Saull, 2023: 721), use sweeping stylized comparisons to identify shared characteristics of rightwing regimes (Öniş and Kutlay, 2020); and pursue traditional paired comparisons to explain cross-national variations (Doğan, 2025). However, there have been recent calls for sociologists to develop their own comparative perspectives that grapple with rightwing populisms as globally interconnected projects, common political repertoires, and contextually specific responses to substantive social problems (Brubaker, 2017; Tuğal, 2021).

Ethnographers can contribute significantly to this agenda, and our preceding analysis suggests ways they might do so. One approach is to follow the mobile ideas and policies circulating through transnational political networks. As right-wing parties and movements appear to be “copy-pasting” from a shared playbook across different regional and national contexts (Biroli and Roggeband, 2025), “grounding comparisons” will be useful for examining how these actually unfold in situ. For instance, Corredor (2019) had shown that the anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ discourse of “gender ideology” was propagated by well-funded and organized transnational religious institutions, but became effective in national policy debates through reframing in varied regional political idioms. Comparative ethnographers could go beyond discursive analysis to examine how local actors adopt, rework, and deploy circulating right-wing ideas; understand where and how these strategies succeed in building support or shaping policy; and consider how local histories and global networks of feminist and LGBTQ+ activism create different possibilities for challenging them.

Encompassing ethnographic comparisons could also be used to examine how global structural conditions are translated (or not) into support for rightwing movements. Ethnographers have already used local case studies to examine how structural changes—rising economic precarity, hollowing out of democratic institutions, and migration—are experienced and translated into populist discourses of corrupt elites and undue favor for classed, racialized, and gendered others (Hochschild, 2018; Pied, 2019; Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco, 2020). But while acknowledging that broader forces shape local meaning-making, existing studies focus primarily on the role of “local, state, and national actors” (Pied, 2019: 770). GEC could be fruitfully used to connect these findings across national contexts and illuminate how local meanings and practices are also shaped by global structures, discourses, and connections. A posteriori comparisons between existing case studies might examine how different positions within global processes (like capital or migration flows) create distinct political opportunities for rightwing movements. New a priori or sequential comparisons could investigate contexts where similar constellations structural conditions are associated with differential support for populist parties, enhancing our understanding of the relationship between populism’s structural and symbolic dimensions (Brubaker, 2017). Alternatively, juxtaposition of contrasting cases could enable ethnographers to get at broader theoretical questions about the nature of populism—both historically and in the current global conjuncture (Tuğal, 2021).

A more extensive register of potential applications would surely exhaust the reader’s patience. However, it is clear that GECs have much to contribute as sociologists grapple with the pressing questions of the current global moment.

GECs as public sociology

Having explored the types and uses of global ethnographic comparisons, we wish to conclude by insisting that they can and should be wielded as a tool of public sociology. As scholars both deeply immersed in local contexts and attuned to the global forces that constitute them, comparative ethnographers can play a role in linking and informing the disparate struggles that confront the global crises of our day. Some social movements have long traditions of organic intellectuals and robust transnational networks (Paschel, 2016; Tarlau, 2019; Koppelman, this issue), and these will be vital to articulating and circulating resistance strategies and alternative projects. Where this is not the case, the geographic mobility and critical perspective of global comparative ethnographers can enable them to act as bridges, revealing links between seemingly disconnected struggles and diffusing analytic insights and strategic tools to empower them.

This potentiality is made explicit by Moimaz (this issue), who illustrates how the ethnographer as scholar-activist can actively seek out insights on resistance from places where neoliberal projects were piloted, and use these to challenge elite-driven “success stories” and inform resistance to their imposition elsewhere. Other opportunities abound in this issue. Márquez and Marwah (this issue) point to possibilities of solidarity between very different social actors on opposite sides of the globe, suggesting opportunities for linking local cultural frames to a global politics of care. Lee (this issue) shows how gig workers can wield the tools of different local organizing traditions to make claims on the same digital platforms that employ them. Antoine (this issue) suggests that teachers in distant schools might co-produce more compelling critical pedagogies that situate themselves and their students in relation to the global histories that link them.

Through carefully constructed and publicly engaged research, GEC practitioners can do more than document the damage done by the increasingly intertwined forces of neoliberalism and right-wing populism. They can also illuminate unexpected apertures and alliances that become possible as these forces generate new global crises and local contestations. In the present conjuncture, participants in this growing methodological tradition must engage actively with public struggles for more just and equitable societies. By placing ethnographic insights into dialogue not just with our academic interlocutors but also the organizations, movements, and communities in which we conduct research, GEC practitioners have unique opportunities to strengthen the globally linked struggles we seek to understand.