Power and the Politics of Global Governance

Abstract

Power in Global Governance. Edited by Michael Barnett, Raymond Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 390 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-84024-4), $29.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-54952-3). The end of the Cold War elicited a variety of responses within the field of international relations. Whereas some scholars suggested that we would soon be nostalgic for the stability of the Cold War (Mearsheimer 1990), others (Hewson and Sinclair 1999) pointed to the importance of global governance (that is, the management of global political and economic space in the absence of a global state) as an increasingly important object of inquiry. What the latter scholars in particular have largely avoided, according to Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, is an explicit theorization of power. The failure to adequately conceptualize power, moreover, has had important consequences for our understanding of global governance. It is precisely this gap that Barnett and Duvall's Power in Global Governance seeks to fill. In the introductory chapter to Power in Global Governance , Barnett and Duvall assert that the lack of attention to power is principally the result of the field's reliance on realism's conceptualization of power. Arguing that Robert Dahl's (1957) idea of “power over” (in which A compels B to do what B would not otherwise have done) is only one form of power, Barnett and Duvall offer a taxonomy that opens up what has to date been an impoverished analytics of power. They suggest that, in addition to Dahl's familiar “compulsory power,” three other types of power warrant the attention of scholars: institutional, structural, and productive power. Institutional power is demonstrated when states design institutions of global governance to their benefit. Structural power can be identified in structural relationships such as capital and labor (think Marx). Productive power is concerned with the production of subjectivities (think Foucault). Even though Barnett and Duvall's sophisticated and quite complex taxonomy of power makes it clear why …