Alternative Global Governances

Author(s):  
Amaya Querejazu

Global governance has become part of the international relations vocabulary. As an analytical category and as a political project it is a strong tool that illustrates the major complexities of world politics in contexts of globalization. The study of global governance has expanded and superseded traditional approaches to international relations that focus on relations among states. Moreover, the study of global governance and has included nonstate actors and their dynamics into a more intricate thematic agenda of global politics. However, global governance has become less a political space of deliberation and more of a managerial aspect of world politics because of some assumptions about reality, humanity, and the international community. It would appear that this is a result of the predominance of liberal thought in world politics after the end of the Cold War. Regardless of how diverse the approaches to global governance may appear, the ontological assumptions—that is, the beliefs about reality that are behind its definition, conceptualization, and implementation as political projects—are not neutral nor are they universal. These assumptions respond to specific appreciations of reality and are inherited from Western modernity. The problem with this is that claims to contemplate the interests of humanity as a whole abound in global governance institutions and arrangements, whereas in fact global governance is constructed by neglecting other possible realities about the world. The consequences of this conceptualization are important in the sense that global governance becomes a tool of exclusion. Only by taking into consideration the ontological difference through which global governance can reflect the complexities of a diverse world can one explore the importance of alternative governances as a way to consider how global orders can be approached. Such alternative global governances draw from ontological pluralism and conceive political global orders as based on the coexistence and negotiation of different realities.

2021 ◽  

Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance.


Federalism-E ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-76
Author(s):  
Ajnesh Prasad

“The international community is at a crossroads” (Held, 1995a: 96). Since the conclusion of the Cold War and with the elimination of the bipolar world thereafter, many scholars have attempted to theorize, if only to evaluate, the transformations that have taken place within the realm of world politics in the last decade and a half. From Francis Fukuyama’s argument, the “End of History” (1992), to Samuel Huntington’s thesisclaim, the “Clash of Civilizations” (1993), there have been categorizing, and ultimately limiting, understandings of international affairs in the postcommunist period. Consequently, discursive and explicit interstices of antagonistic tension continue to prevail and manifest into graphic demonstrations of hegemonic aggression and parochial actions of daily resistance. The international interstices of antagonistic tension continue to threaten immeasurable tragedy at the most globalized landscape. Remnants of these present tensions go so far as to predicate the aggressive and resistant temperament of events like the aircraft attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. [...]


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Oates

AbstractScholars of international organisation commonly differentiate among three dimensions when studying the legitimacy of international institutions: input, throughput, and output legitimacy. I argue that the study of global governance needs to consider a fourth ‘face’ of legitimacy: constitutional legitimacy. This dimension addresses the normative and practical questions related to the constitutive justification for an institutional order – such as in whose name it is founded, whose interests it should serve, and how authority should be distributed within that institutional order. These questions are distinct from the procedural features of institutions emphasised by other dimensions and concern the constituent power that should ground the authority of governance institutions. In this article, I develop this fourth dimension of legitimacy, explore its varied expressions in world politics, and show how it has implications for the constitutional structure of global governance arrangements. I argue that different representations of constituent power shape the legitimacy of different authority relations within international institutions and illustrate these claims with an analysis of the politics of legitimacy in three cases: the ongoing effort to reform the UN Security Council, the negotiations over the founding of the International Criminal Court, and the debates over the Responsibility to Protect at the UN.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 518-544
Author(s):  
Terry Macdonald ◽  
Kate Macdonald

This article addresses the question of how we should understand the normative grounds of legitimacy in global governance institutions, given the social and organizational pluralism of the contemporary global political order. We argue that established normative accounts of legitimacy, underpinning both internationalist and cosmopolitan institutional models, are incompatible with real-world global social and organizational pluralism, insofar as they are articulated within the parameters of a ‘statist’ world order imaginary: this sees legitimacy as grounded in rational forms of political agency, exercised within ‘closed’ communities constituted by settled common interests and identities. To advance beyond these statist ideational constraints, we elaborate an alternative ‘pluralist’ world order imaginary: this sees legitimacy as partially grounded in creative forms of political agency, exercised in the constitution and ongoing transformation of a plurality of ‘open’ communities, with diverse and fluid interests and identities. Drawing on a case study analysis of political controversies surrounding the global governance of business and human rights, we argue that the pluralist imaginary illuminates how normative legitimacy in world politics can be strengthened by opening institutional mandates to contestation by multiple distinct collectives, even though doing so is incompatible with achieving a fully rationalized global institutional scheme.


1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 201-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM WALLACE

The changing structure of European order poses, for any student of international relations, some fundamental questions about the evolution of world politics. Concepts of European order and of the European state system are, after all, central to accepted ideas of international relations. Out of the series of conflicts and negotiations—religious wars, coalitions to resist first the Hapsburg and then the Bourbon attempt at European hegemony—developed ideas and practices which still structure the contemporary global state system: the equality of states; international law as regulating relations among sovereign and equal states; domestic sovereignty as exclusive, without external oversight of the rules of domestic order. The ‘modern’ state system, modern scholars now agree, did not spring fully-clothed from the Treaty of Westphalia at the close of the Thirty Years' War; it evolved through a succession of treaties and conferences, from 1555 to 1714. It remains acceptable, nevertheless, to describe the European state order as built around the Westphalian system.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-266
Author(s):  
Öner Buçukcu

The United Nations is grounded on the Westphalian state system. Throughout the de-colonizationperiod, the Organization ceased to be peculiar to the West only, and soon became the prevalent model in theentire globe. The Cold War also solidified and institutionalized the Westphalian State as the fundamentalprinciple in international relations. The end of the Cold War, however, along with the collapse of theEastern bloc, the challenges of peace and security in Africa, and the failure of the states in coping withhumanitarian crises increasingly made the three fundamental principles of Westphalian state, namely the“non-interventionism”, “sovereign-equality” and “territoriality” disputable among political scientists. Newapproaches and arguments on the end of the Classical Westphalian state and the emergence of a so-called“New Medieval Age” have widely been circulated. This paper alternatively suggests that, since the end of thecold war, the world politics has gradually and decisively been evolving into a system of states that could becalled Neo-Westphalian.


2016 ◽  
pp. 234-248
Author(s):  
Volodymyr Rozumyuk

It is researched a theoretical model of a multipolar system of international relations at the article. Interest to this themes is caused by needs of Ukrainian political science and diplomacy in schemes of understanding and mechanisms of an adaptation to demands of the modern system of international relations. The aim of the article is to determine factors of a stability and conflicts of a multipolar model of a system of international relations. It is studied basic approaches of designing multipolar model, defined the main factors of its stability and conflicts, highlighted an interdependence of the world politics and knowledge about it. Because of an availability of opposing viewpoints from leading scholars about the stability and conflicts in unipolar, bipolar and multipolar systems, the author concludes that these indicators are important parameters of the real historical system of international relations, but not its abstract model. It is alleged that researchers, which emphasized at more stability of a multipolar system, their theoretical arguments had selected under the direct influence of acute bipolar confrontation during the “Cold War” from the mid-40s to mid-60s of the twentieth century (the Berlin Crisis, the Korean War, the Caribbean Crisis), opposing the “nuclear madness” of a constraint an idealized picture of European “concert of nations” at the first half of the nineteenth century. Instead, cooperation between East and West during the Brezhnev’s «discharging» and Gorbachev’s «new 248 thinking» gave serious reasons for a perception and appraisal by politologists of a bipolar system as stable and without conflicts. Accordingly, the number of poles of a theoretical model of the international system says about its stability not more than a form a glass about a quality of a poured wine.


2021 ◽  
pp. 137-169
Author(s):  
Georg Sørensen ◽  
Jørgen Møller ◽  
Robert Jackson

This chapter examines the International Society tradition of international relations (IR). International Society, also known as the ‘English School’, is an approach to world politics that places emphasis on international history, ideas, structures, institutions, and values. After providing an overview of International Society’s basic assumptions and claims, the chapter considers the three traditions associated with the leading ideas of the most outstanding classical theorists of IR such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Immanuel Kant: realism, rationalism, and revolutionism. It then explores International Society’s views regarding order and justice, world society, statecraft and responsibility, and humanitarian responsibility and war; as well as how International Society scholars have used a historical approach to understand earlier international systems and the development of international society. It also discusses several major criticisms against the International Society approach to IR and concludes with an overview of the research agenda of International Society after the Cold War.


Author(s):  
Yoram Z. Haftel ◽  
Tobias Lenz

AbstractOver the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a more comprehensive understanding of global governance complexity across space and time. In taking a first step in this direction, we make two contributions in the article. First, we propose new quantitative measures that gauge the extent of complexity in global governance, which we conceptualize as the degree to which global governance institutions overlap. Dyadic, weighted, directed-dyadic, and monadic measures enable a multifaceted understanding of this important development in world politics. Second, we illustrate these measures by applying them to an updated version of the most comprehensive data set on the design of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): the Measure of International Authority (MIA). This allows us to identify cross-sectional and temporal patterns in the extent to which important IGOs, which tend to form the core of sprawling regime complexes in many issue areas, overlap. We conclude by outlining notable implications for, and potential applications of, our measures for research on institutional design and evolution, legitimacy, and legitimation, as well as effectiveness and performance. This discussion underscores the utility of the proposed measures, as both dependent and independent variables, to researchers examining the sources and consequences of institutional overlap in global governance and beyond.


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