The global governance theories assessment is among the poorly studied problems in Russian political science, though its topicality in the modern age of civilizational confrontation is beyond dispute. Primarily, the necessity to study the key global governance concepts is determined by the need for establishing effective relations with the Western and the Eastern countries. The purpose of the article is to analyze and estimate the main foreig global governance concepts, and it is achieved by solving the following tasks: 1) to consider the main definitions of global governance; 2) to detect the problem of legitimacy in international relations; 3) to consider the legitimacy of global governance. The authors give special attention to the underestimated source of global governance legitimacy - the liberal legal principles. As a political program, global governance is understood as a political and legal aspect of globalization. In recent decades, global governance theories have been adopted as a research program in the field of social sciences. Within the (neo)liberal institutionalism tradition, particularly, the interdependence theories, global governance approaches consider the consolidation of international cooperation and the transformation of the global system in which the anarchical system of sovereign national states is considered as a multilayer system including nongovernmental subjects. The researchers try to model power as “governance” without subjects which are formally justified and entitled with the use of force monopoly. The future of global governance is connected with effective international law able to timely settle the arising disputes and deter possible aggression which, in the age of civilizational confrontation, can lead to the last war in human history. The effectiveness of global governance depends on what globalization direction the leading civilizations will choose: the force-based American way, or the way taking into account the interests of most peoples of the world.
The global governance problem in the modern Western academic literature: the main approaches and concepts
