Global Governance in the Interregnum

Together with my colleague Dr Michele Acuto at UCL, I have convened a special edition of the journal Millennium under the title Global Governance in the Interregnum. Contributors include: Madeline Carr (Aberystwyth University), Matthias Hofferberth (University of Texas), Maximilian Mayer (University of Bonn), Philipp Pattberg (VU Amsterdam), and Oscar Widerberg (VU Amsterdam). It has been very interesting drilling down on some of the core conceptual, theoretical and empirical questions surrounding global governance.  The resulting special edition is intended to contribute to a very live debate on the direction of travel in global governance scholarship. We are grateful to the editors of Millennium for the opportunity to table this debate. The special edition will be published in early 2015. In the meantime, you can find our co-authored introduction at my SSRN page. The abstract follows:

Global governance is in flux. Scholarship on the practice of global governance has reimagined it as a realm of disputes and confrontation, rather than one of interest-alignment within multilateral interstate forums. A profound sense of governance deficit is provoking critical reflection both within the corridors of power and among practitioners and scholars. a call within academic circles for renewed reflection on global governance as a practice-oriented scholarship has elicited varied responses from the international relation (IR) fraternity. In taking stock of the state of the art of ‘global governance theory’, a number of scholars have advocated for its revival to be grounded in the kind of critical reflection often absent from mainstream IR discussion. Others contest any meaningful demarcation between IR and global governance scholarship. This forum responds to a number of converging developments. Situating contributions broadly within the notion of an interregnum, it is a first cut towards a more innovative global governance research and practice-oriented agenda. We focus, in particular, on reframing the problematique of global governance from one dominated by multilateral interstate geopolitics, towards a critical reappraisal of both structure and political economy in light of the evident complexity of global governance systems.

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