Understanding Of Global Governance Research Articles

Soft power in complicated and complex education systems: Gender, education and global governance in organisational responses to SDG 4

This article examines how the distinction between complicated and complex education systems contributes to our understanding of global governance and how “soft power” concerned with gender is used in international development organisations’ responses to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, the global goal for education. Four global governance approaches which shape these organisations are distinguished: partnership building, gender mainstreaming, gender activism and contestation by global feminist movements. These strands of soft power have implications for how meanings of gender, education, power and accountability are interpreted. The work of three organisations – the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the Gender at the Centre Initiative (GCI) and the Malala Fund – are reviewed to exemplify these global governance approaches. The analysis draws on a close reading of the organisations’ published documents to build a history of how the gender concerns of SDG 4 came to be interpreted, negotiated, contested or ignored. The activities of the three organisations show considerable interplay between concepts of complicated and complex education systems. The discussion raises questions regarding what kind of work soft power in gender and education does in a context of huge and growing global inequalities and insecurities. In addition, the question is posed why there is still no institutional base to articulate a global feminist politics which confronts and seeks to dismantle unjust structures of power.

Anticipatory Global Governance: International Organisations and the Politics of the Future

ABSTRACT This special issue introduction develops the concept of anticipatory global governance by focusing on the practices through which international organisations (IOs) imagine and establish “present futures” across diverse transnational issue areas. Rather than following a conventional chronological stance, the contributors adopt a constructivist perspective on time to detail the logics and effects of anticipatory practices. In this introductory article, we suggest that the analysis of IOs’ anticipatory practices and the resulting present futures can broaden our understanding of global governance in two ways. First, we highlight the implications of how IOs problematise and govern yet-uncertain future transnational issues. Second, we reveal how in this process IOs perform, rather than simply wield, authority by sanctioning a wide range of visions. The special issue develops a general conceptual vocabulary for the study of anticipatory global governance, and provides empirical evidence on how IOs govern by anticipation.

FREEZING IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE?

The general purpose of this paper is to analyze how global governance works, who are its actors and how the Security Council fits in this description. The methodology consisted of a non extensive bibliographical review about the understanding of global governance, how it works and who does it; followed by the normative roles of the Security Council and of the United Nations found in the own UN Charter, and a brief analysis of the Council’s and Russia’s actions in two cases studies: The Libyan intervention and the subsequent war on Syria. A change in the dynamics and operation of the Security Council could be seen as a result.

From meditation to action – a research agenda for studying informal global rule-making: remarks on ‘Cosmopolitanism, publicity, and the emergence of a “global administrative law”’

AbstractFriedrich Kratochwil engages critically with the emergence of a global administrative law and its consequences for the democratic legitimacy of global governance. While he makes important contributions to our understanding of global governance, he does not sufficiently discuss the differences in the institutional design of new forms of global law-making and their consequences for the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance. I elaborate on these limitations and outline a comparative research agenda on the emergence, design, and effectiveness of the diverse arrangements that constitute the complex institutional architecture of contemporary global governance.

Cultural Understanding of Global Governance<br/>—A Perspective of Religious Culture

Culture is complex and diverse. Religious culture is the core of the structure of human culture. People of different religious and cultural backgrounds often have different behavioral orientations and action logics in the era of economic globalization. It will undoubtedly increase the cultural understanding and communication problems of global governance. This paper attempts to explore the relationship between religious culture and global governance in the core of human culture from the perspective of religious culture, especially the exchange of Chinese religions and other religions. The authors hold when religious beliefs deep in people’s minds are intertwined with actual political and economic interests, the political and economic interest appeals of nations are usually manifested in the form of contradictions or conflicts between different religions. The solution is to firmly establish different cultural concepts, promote religious dialogue and religious reconciliation through multicultural coexistence, and promote good governance and good governance in global public affairs in mutual respect and cultural consultation.

The Future of Education for All as a Global Regime of Educational Governance

The article considers the future of Education for All (EFA) understood as a global regime of educational governance. The article sets out an understanding of global governance, world order, power, and legitimacy within which EFA is embedded. It explains what is meant by EFA as a regime of global governance and as part of a “regime complex” along with other regimes that affect education and development. The article traces the genealogy of EFA, focusing on key tensions and contradictions. The emphasis is on understanding the effects of different kinds of power linked to broader global interests within a changing world order. The article concludes by considering the future of EFA. It is suggested that EFA since the Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action is giving way to a new global regime of educational governance in which education and in particular learning is linked to sustainable development, albeit in contradictory ways.

The Second Part of the Ideal Theory of John Rawls in The Law of Peoples Transplanted and Revisited

John Rawls in the second part of his Ideal Theory as it is developed in the Law of the Peoples, argues that both liberal and non-liberal but decent people can still be considered to be people in good standing in a reasonable society of people and proposes the toleration of non-liberal but decent societies by the liberal ones. Within this framework, the current proposal will focus on the relationship between the ‘West’ and the Russian Federation as it has evolved after the collapse of the Soviet regime through recent developments on human rights protection and the regulation of the use of force or the “law of peace” as Rawls claims. The aim of this endeavor is twofold. First, to provide a critical assessment of liberal theories such as cosmopolitan constitutionalism, which promote a particular liberal understanding of global governance based on common values and universal goals. Second, to examine the potential but also limits of the Rawlsian theory of toleration towards the development of a more pluralistic normative analysis of the global order which will be neither utopian nor apologetic but one that will contribute into the realization of a “realistic utopia” between pure liberal and non-pure liberal states.

The Global Governance Reflex of International Judicial Bodies

Globalization is mostly described as posing new challenges to international law and legal theory. These challenges are the question of soft law, global law, non-state actors’ role in international law, private mechanisms of law making at global level, judicial fragmentation of international law etc.As a response, international lawyers tended to their long-standing approaches and constitutionalism became international constitutionalism and legal pluralism became global legal pluralism. In other words, old approaches, old machines, old tools were to rescue international law from the diseases of globalization with their ill-adapted global versions. In addition, these old approaches could not work out how to approach to soft law and related soft challenges such as non-state actors, private mechanisms of law making, global governance legal regimes etc. because they only knew hard law. Therefore, they focused on hard challenges such as the fragmentation of international law and related questions of overlapping jurisdictions, conflicting interpretations, forum shopping etc. and ignored or undermined soft challenges of international law.In this regard, it seems to us that these hard and soft challenges of international law require a different approach and a global governance approach to international law might be a solution as it worked in the discipline of international relations. Our work will demonstrate that there is a “global governance reflex” among international judges and this reflex offers much better solutions to the fragmentation of international law than international constitutionalism or global legal pluralism. In the light of the above, this paper will first sketch a distinctive understanding of global governance. Secondly it will treat the fragmentation of international law as a hard challenge of international law. In other words, it will demonstrate that the anxieties about the fragmentation issue are a bit exaggerated and things are not as dramatic as described. It will exemplify this point by analyzing the jurisprudence of main international judicial bodies in order to better grasp feasibility, frequency and risks of overlapping jurisdictions, conflicting interpretations etc. This will show how far the idea of a global governance approach to international judicial bodies is feasible. In the literature, a good number of scholars already mentioned and produced ideas such as comity, judicial community, dialogue of courts etc. This work will attempt to take these propositions to the next step. A rethinking of these proposals within the concept of global governance will be proposed. And it will be concluded that there is a “global governance reflex” among international judges and a global governance approach to international judicial bodies is the cure to the fragmentation of international law and it actually might be a path towards the idea of global law.

“Confusion is a fundamental state of mind”—On the peculiar intellectual career of global governance in international relations

AbstractMore than 20 years after global governance was introduced to the discipline of International Relations (IR), confusion about its conceptual status remains. In fact, how to even speak and think global governance—whether as a description of world politics, as a theoretical perspective to explain it, or as a normative notion to be realized through global policy—remains debated. This state of confusion affects debates within the Political Science subfield of IR as well as dialogue between different disciplines beyond IR. More specifically, the article argues that the current state of confusion exists not because of a lack of debate but rather because of different understandings of global governance that were attached to the concept during its emergence and which are still advanced and reproduced within debates today. These different understandings have their origin in certain real-world and disciplinary dynamics and constitute global governance in present discourse as a “condensation symbol” of different meanings. It is argued that precisely because of this status, global governance has obtained its “celebrity status”, within and beyond IR. By structuring different understandings of global governance and by reconstructing real-world and disciplinary contexts of emergence, the article goes beyond stating the obvious and provides a discussion of various sources and consequences of the confusion surrounding global governance. On the basis of this state-of-the-art overview, it is argued that to realize the full potential of global governance in IR and ensure interdisciplinary dialogue beyond it, one needs to engage with the concept and its immanent confusion in a reflective and cautious way by becoming aware of different meanings attached to it instead of arbitrarily reducing the concept to a single meaning to define its conceptual status. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on global governance.

The Changing Nature of Multilateralism and Brazilian Foreign Policy

An important characteristic of the current international setting is the crisis of the structure in existence, rather than the emergence of a new order. The rise of new interests and demands, as well as the speed of the transformation make the current understanding of global governance more complex. Brazil, like other medium powers, has an interest in institutionalised multilateralism as a means of increasing its bargaining capacity and hindering the unilateralism of major powers, without being antagonistic to them. It is attempting to increase its weight in traditional international bodies, which provide the grounding for international legitimacy, as well as in new informal arrangements. While this strategy could lead to the establishment of a new hierarchy that brings in countries of growing relative importance, it has put the weight of regional integration into another perspective in Brazilian foreign policy.

Consensus not Constitutionalism: Fundamental Rights in EU law after Kadi

John Rawls in the second part of his Ideal Theory as it is developed in the Law of the Peoples, argues that both liberal and non-liberal but decent people can still be considered to be people in good standing in a reasonable society of people and proposes the toleration of non-liberal but decent societies by the liberal ones. Within this framework, the current proposal will focus on the relationship between the ‘West’ and the Russian Federation as it has evolved after the collapse of the Soviet regime through recent developments on human rights protection and the regulation of the use of force or the “law of peace” as Rawls claims. The aim of this endeavor is twofold. First, to provide a critical assessment of liberal theories such as cosmopolitan constitutionalism, which promote a particular liberal understanding of global governance based on common values and universal goals. Second, to examine the potential but also limits of the Rawlsian theory of toleration towards the development of a more pluralistic normative analysis of the global order which will be neither utopian nor apologetic but one that will contribute into the realization of a “realistic utopia” between pure liberal and non-pure liberal states.

Education and world order

The impact on educational analysis of mainstream international relations (IR) theories is yet to realize its full potential. The problem of education in relation to the construction of world order is considered in relation to core developments in IR theory since the Second World War. In particular, the global architecture of education is seen as a complex web of ideas, networks of influence, policy frameworks and practices, financial arrangements and organizational structures—a system of global power relations that exerts a heavy, even determining, influence on how education is constructed around the world. The past decade has seen the rise of fresh understandings of global governance, an emerging theme in international relations that bears considerable potential for new forms of analysis in education, especially for clarifying the significance of the global architecture of education. Fresh understandings of education as a contributor to world order, viewed in the light of shifting global power relations and patterns of global governance, see education remaining relatively undeveloped as a builder of world order, despite decades of normatively‐inspired assertions to the contrary.

Power and the Politics of Global Governance

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 …

Power in global governance

This edited volume examines power in its different dimensions in global governance. Scholars tend to underestimate the importance of power in international relations because of a failure to see its multiple forms. To expand the conceptual aperture, this book presents and employs a taxonomy that alerts scholars to the different kinds of power that are present in world politics. A team of international scholars demonstrates how these different forms connect and intersect in global governance in a range of different issue areas. Bringing together a variety of theoretical perspectives, this volume invites scholars to reconsider their conceptualization of power inworld politics and how such amove can enliven and enrich their understanding of global governance.

Global Governance: Poorly done and Poorly Understood

A set of ethical issues—tensions between democratization and globalization, about some ways in which the global inequalities have increased, and about gross failures of contemporary international cooperation—provide reason to consider our understanding of global governance and the political forces organized to support or transform it. Many scholars agree on the existence of a global polity characterized by the dominance of neo-liberalism, the growing network of both public and private regimes that extend across the world's largest regions, the system of global intergovernmental organizations, and transnational organizations both carrying out some of the traditional service functions of global public agencies and working to create regimes and new systems of international integration. Scholars who emphasize the historically contingent social construction of human institutions and who focus on the transformative potential of transnational social movements have provided the greatest insight into what can be done to confront the ethical issues raised by contemporary global governance. Almost all analysts agree that the current great powers cannot be relied upon to facilitate progressive change, although that is only one reason why global governance is likely to remain inefficient and incapable of shifting resources from the world's rich to the poor, even though it may continue to play a role in promoting liberal democracy and the empowering of women.