Why Global Politics Moved From Territorial Rivalries to Cross-Border Inequality

📚 What was analyzed and how:

This study tracks how the cleavages that structure world politics changed from the mid-19th century to the present. The corpus includes more than 300,000 articles from The Economist (1843–2020). A semi-supervised computational text analysis using word embeddings maps a territoriality−functionality continuum in global discourse, enabling a test of the theoretical expectation that territorial framing in politicization has declined over time.

🔎 Conceptual focus and measurement approach:

The analysis develops and operationalizes the notion of a "cleavage" at the global level and measures whether territorial divisions give way to functional politicization—specifically the politicization of different kinds of inequality that cut across world regions.

📈 Key findings:

• A long-term trend toward de-territorialization is evident, especially after World War II.
• The shift is strongest for cleavages concerning social and economic inequality; these issues increasingly appear as cross-territorial (functional) divisions.
• Temporary revivals of territorial framing occur during interstate wars across the entire period, but these surges do not overturn the underlying historical move toward cross-territorial alignments.

❗ Why it matters:

These results reframe how global political cleavages are understood: over roughly 180 years of elite discourse in a leading international outlet, territorial rivalries have waned as the dominant organizing logic for many political divisions, while functional concerns—especially inequality—have become more salient across regions. The findings bear on theories of global cleavage formation and on expectations about when and how territorial frames resurface during crises.