Embedded Bordering

Best practices are increasingly used to govern a range of global issues. Yet, the rise of global governance through best practices has received scant attention in the International Relations literature. How do best practices differ from other modes of governance? How are they constructed? And to what end? We offer a novel conceptualisation of best practices as a unique mode of global governance principally distinguished by basing claims of political authority on existing practices. Belying their apolitical terminology, best practices in global governance are purposively constructed by political actors to steer targeted actors toward desired ends. We illustrate the characteristics of governance through best practices with reference to state and non-state global governance initiatives in a wide range of issue areas, ranging from finance and development to human rights and the environment, and through an in-depth case study of the ISEAL Alliance, a disseminator of best practices for transnational sustainability standard-setters. We find that governance through best practices has both positive and negative consequences. While it offers a pragmatic approach to global governance under conditions of fragmentation and polycentricity, it can also mask underlying power dynamics and political agendas and therefore requires ongoing critical scrutiny.

ABSTRACTIn Libya's context of fragmented state authority, what does it mean for sub‐Saharan migrants to be legible to state and criminal actors through their bodies rather than through the law? How do they experience and navigate precarity? Examining informal bordering practices in Libya reveals a mode of migration governance that is based less on legally restricting mobility and more on allowing uncertainty to proliferate and on exploiting migrants’ lives. In this system, certain bodies become targets for policing according to their skin color, documents, and blood tests, which can lead migrants to be extorted for money and detained. Migrants cope with such informal borderwork through affective labor. This plays a vital role in shaping their mobility decisions. By linking informal bordering practices with affect and mobilities, we can recast formal, state‐centered ideas about migration governance. [mobility, migration, bordering practices, affect, Libya]

This paper examines the paradoxical relationship between neoliberalism and state sovereignty in the contemporary international system. While neoliberalism, with its emphasis on free markets, deregulation, and limited government intervention, has ostensibly championed the autonomy of states, it has simultaneously facilitated the rise of powerful transnational actors and institutions that challenge traditional notions of state sovereignty. The paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of how international organizations, notably the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with multinational corporations, have become key players in shaping global economic governance. It argues that these actors, driven by neoliberal principles, often impose constraints on the ability of states, particularly those in the Global South, to pursue independent economic policies and development strategies. By exploring in-depth case studies of specific trade agreements and investment treaties, the paper provides concrete evidence of how neoliberal policies have led to a significant transfer of power from states to transnational actors. This transfer of power raises crucial questions about democratic accountability, the efficacy of national regulations, and the future of state sovereignty in an increasingly globalized world. Furthermore, the paper examines the implications of this shift in power for developing countries, arguing that the constraints imposed by neoliberal institutions and agreements can perpetuate economic dependency and exacerbate existing inequalities. It also explores the potential for resistance and alternative development models that prioritize social justice and environmental sustainability over the dictates of the global market. Keywords: Neoliberalism, State Sovereignty, Transnational Governance, Globalization, International Organizations, Global South.

The bundling of political authority into mutually exclusive territorial boundaries - territoriality - is a fundamental principle of modern political organization. Indeed, it provides the foundation for other cherished institutions - national sovereignty, citizenship, the modern welfare state, and democracy. Are globalization, internationalization, and Europeanization conspiring to unbundle territoriality? If so, are sovereignty, citizenship, the welfare state, and democracy unravelling as well? Is a new post-national, non-territorial form of political organization, heralded by the European Union, being born? With a focus on Europe, this volume explores these issues from various substantive and theoretical perspectives. The authors find evidence of the diffusion of authority both within and beyond the state, producing novel institutional arrangements and new modes of governance. But the United States may provide more useful insights into the new dispensation than the idea of a post-national, non-territorial politics. Interest in contemporary challenges to democracy run throughout this volume.

Morris Cohen’s classic essay, Property and Sovereignty, correctly discerned that political sovereignty and private property are alternative forms of government. Where it failed was in suggesting that the choice between these modes of governance is a matter of dialing one up and the other down. The relationship between political sovereignty and property is complex, and varies depending on the audience of property we have in view. With respect to some audiences — strangers and transactors — those who favor a strong system of property will want to enlist a generous measure of assistance from the political sovereign. With respect to other audiences — neighbors and sharers — those who want a robust property system are more likely to want the powers of the political sovereign to be held in check. Cohen was thus right that the political order and private property are both forms of power over people. But the exact mix of these two regimes is anything but simple or unidimensional.

Modernity is a large concept that can be found in many disciplines, such as philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, political economy, and International Relations (IR). One of many significant infrastructures of modernity is the concept of nation-states, the definition of which can also be found in the aforesaid disciplines. This article will elaborate on the concept of modernity concerning relations between nation-states and non-nation-states such as native local communities in which rooted in those multi-disciplined courses. This article argues that imagined nation-states of the Westphalian system impose, imprison, and marginalize native communities from within. The birth of nation-states in the European Western discourse has created marginalization of native communities around the world. Using some examples of Indonesian natives, this article shows that modernity is political. The politics of modernity either instrumentalized or marginalized and forced the Indonesian natives to obey the standardization of the Indonesian Westphalian system. As a result, since the Dutch colonialization up to now, the Indonesian natives have not yet embraced full citizenship rights because they are marginalized, subjugated, and discriminated against politically, economically, and socially.

This article argues that existent critique against the discourse and practice of governance by networks fails to consider the more substantial political challenges that such a style of governance generates. By not addressing the depoliticization claims present in the discourse of governance by networks there is a continuation of the seemingly attractive solution and possibility for states to perform metagovernance of networks. Such suggestions have, however, overlooked the instability of networks and the politics of politics that this form of organization entails. By making use of a retheorization of sovereign power and its double relationship to public political space, it is argued that new insights can be gained with regards to the role of networks in contemporary politics. This retheorization suggests that sovereign power is present when decisions are made both on the political nature of issues and on whether accountability to the wider public should apply. Thus, contrary to the claim that sovereign power is declining as networks get involved in public affairs, it is argued here that such power is even more present due to an increased uncertainty of political boundaries that arise in the implementation and maintenance of new governing structures.

Payment for environmental services (PES) schemes are increasingly being introduced in developed and developing countries for the ecological conservation of forests also. Such payment schemes resemble a new mode of forest governance labelled political modernization, in which centralized and state-based command-and-control policies make room for market dynamics, non-state actors, and decentralization. In entering the new Millennium, China has massively started using payment schemes to conserve its forests. An analysis of the implementation of the Forest Ecological Benefit Compensation Fund Programme in Liaoning Province is used to investigate whether China's PES schemes resemble notions of political modernization. It is concluded that Liaoning Province introduced market dynamics and farmer participation in the implementation of its PES scheme, but in a way different from that theorized by political modernization scholars. Hence, it should rather be seen as a ‘Chinese style’ political modernization process.

Payment for environmental services (PES) schemes are increasingly being introduced in developed and developing countries for the ecological conservation of forests also. Such payment schemes resemble a new mode of forest governance labelled political modernization, in which centralized and state-based command-and-control policies make room for market dynamics, non-state actors, and decentralization. In entering the new Millennium, China has massively started using payment schemes to conserve its forests. An analysis of the implementation of the Forest Ecological Benefit Compensation Fund Programme in Liaoning Province is used to investigate whether China's PES schemes resemble notions of political modernization. It is concluded that Liaoning Province introduced market dynamics and farmer participation in the implementation of its PES scheme, but in a way different from that theorized by political modernization scholars. Hence, it should rather be seen as a ‘Chinese style’ political modernization process.

Indigenous worlding: Kichwa women pluralizing sovereignty

Borders are often understood as 'tools' of sovereign power and as establishing the very possibility for authority in the international system of sovereign states (Salter, 2012). This paper seeks to problematise this perspective by looking at the case of the Unist'ot'en Action Camp in northern British Columbia, which has engaged bordering practices including having established a checkpoint on the roadway into the Unist'ot'en territory and actively policing helicopter traffic into the territory. Looking at the Camp, this paper argues that such bordering practices draw upon traditional Indigenous ways of being in order to contest and undo settler sovereign authority, in contrast to the traditional understanding of borders as working to organise settler authority. Understood this way, the paper argues that when inscribed with Indigenous knowledge and when relying on Indigenous authorities, borders and bordering practices can be read as gateways to 'meaningful decolonisation.'

This chapter reviews the security politics of borders and mobility. Borders and bordering practices—such as surveillance, ID technology, and the virtual border—are presented as essential to security. Conversely, forms of mobility are framed as threats, and in the process mobile actors are regularly rendered precarious and dehumanized. How should we understand borders as spaces of contestation? To what extent are borders and mobility about the production and negotiation of belonging and precarity, sometimes violently, along hierarchies of class, gender, race, sexuality, indigeneity, and territoriality? The chapter focuses on territorial sovereign borders and demonstrates the extent to which borders, bordering practices, and boundary making are framed as ‘belonging’ and mobility well beyond territoriality.

Written from a vantage point in between Security Studies, Political Theory, and Governance Studies, this article attempts to theorize the current mobilization of civil society for the purposes of “national security,” “risk precaution,” or “homeland resilience” as the emergence of a neo-republican form of security governance—a mode of governance more reliant on organicist means of social construction than on economic or individualist instruments of social control. We argue that if the discipline of International Relations (IR) wishes to understand the nature of this emerging security order, it needs to assume a more cross-disciplinary approach and to develop a much richer idea of republicanism as not only a political philosophy but also a practice of governance.

The former frontiers of the European empires,* and the British Empire in particular, pose significant challenges for the study of the nation-state. I argue that countries such as Sudan and Somalia are not simply struggling to be states (the `failed state' thesis), but are struggling with the very concept of statehood as understoodin the contemporary world. This concept views the state as a hermetically sealed geographic container in which sovereign power is exercised by an extensive central government. Stable administration and sustainable development in frontier regions — generally agreed to be a precondition for improved global security as well as desirable on humanitarian grounds — may require moving beyond this view and rethinking the preconditionsfor successful state-building. Ideas of radical decentralisation, confederation and porous borders may provide an opportunity for exploring not just new modes of governance on the frontier but the applicability of such thinking to the state system more broadly.

With increasing numbers of environmental conflicts in recent years, Chinese local governments are changing their modes of governance with the aim of addressing these conflicts satisfactorily. Through a case study, we identified shifts in modes of governance from hierarchical to network and from market to hybrid (characterized by a combination of market and hierarchical) in three arenas. Our findings confirm that initiating actors, stakeholder involvement types, rules of interaction, and implementation strategies are useful indicators of shifts in governance modes. Media, protests and policy entrepreneurs in different arenas are important factors in the shift from hierarchical to network governance, while policy entrepreneurs and higher‐level government intervention are crucial factors in the shift from market to a hybrid governance mode. Policy entrepreneurs play an important role in all three arenas. As for theoretical contribution, our research has provided the evidence for non‐hierarchical governance practices in the NIMBY in China. In the future, local governments in China may learn to consider proper governance mode shifts to deal with the NIMBY conflicts in infrastructure planning and construction.