Ungoverned Spaces. Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Edited by Anne L.Clunan and Harold A.Trinkunas. Stanford Security Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 310 pp., $23.00 paperback (ISBN 078-0-8047-7013

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Ungoverned Spaces. Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Edited by Anne L. Clunan, Harold A. Trinkunas . Stanford Security Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 310 pp., $23.00 paperback (ISBN 078-0-8047-7013-2). Governance Without a State? Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood. Edited by Thomas Risse . New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011. 297 pp., $40.54 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-231-15120-7). Studies of governance arrangements beyond the state have opened new vistas to theory building, substantive research, and policy relevance. Governance in the European Union (EU), the first to be labeled multilevel governance, has generated key findings. These findings have challenged traditional notions of state sovereignty and state impermeability; they have tackled a broad range of substantive issues from agriculture and foreign policy to subregional development and cultural affairs; and they have policy implications for the new generation of EU decision makers. The proliferating global governance literature has studied various arrangements, encompassing such actors as international governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, MNCs, foundations, and more recently networks and multistakeholder actors. The findings of much of this research are that, indeed, there are a multitude of governance arrangements out there, even though they may be hierarchical arrangements. States and governmental bureaucracies may be key participants, but they act in coordination with public and private “others” to provide alternative authority relationships. Even when the state is absent, nonexistent, or failed, governance occurs—governance without the state. These two edited books contribute to this broader literature by focusing on ungoverned spaces (Clunan and Trinkunas volume) and on areas of limited statehood (Risse volume). Both volumes suggest that the paradigm of an international system with state sovereignty is a fiction, misleading to scholars and decision makers alike. In actuality, state sovereignty has softened; the state is joined by numerous other actors, some benign and others malign, which provide different forms of organization (Clunan, p. 6). In many areas, there is limited statehood, where governance occurs through steering via cooperative networks of public and private actors and rule making (Risse, p. 9). Thus, the goal in each volume is to explore theoretically and empirically these spaces and examine the alternative authority and governance structures that have arisen. Both …