Global Governance as International Organization

Abstract

Many readers are perhaps under the mistaken impression that ‘international organization’ and ‘global governance’ are synonyms. However, whereas the former concentrates on formal structures, the latter describes a range of formal and informal processes that reflect globalization and a growing recognition of problems that defy solutions by a single state. For many analysts, global governance overlaps with the rise of international organizations, which according to Craig Murphy’s masterful history of global governance beginning in the nineteenth century are customarily seen as ‘what world government we actually have’.1 However, global governance clearly is not world government — indeed, it is better viewed as the sum of governance processes operating in the absence of world government. At the same time, both international organizations (IOs) in general and the United Nations (UN) in particular — the only universal membership and general-purpose international organization — are essential to understanding contemporary global governance.