Contemporary global governance institutions appear increasingly unsettled. They are contested by state and non-stake actors, thus raising fundamental questions about the sources of global authority, contestation and legitimation. While early global governance scholarship focused on states creating international institutions and how actors operate within them, recent research has rather focused on processes of global governance. A fresh materialist perspective on global governance can help capture both the many forms that global governance can take and their shifting nature.
Prof. Anna Leander, Professor of International Relations/Political Science at the Graduate Institute and Advisory Faculty member of the Global Governance Centre, demonstrates this in “Locating (new) materialist characters and processes in global governance” published in the journal International Theory. The piece is part of a symposium around Michael Zürn’s ambitious and influential book A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation (2018) investigating the state of global governance theory today.
Prof. Leander’s contribution probes A Theory of Global Governance from a materialist perspective, anchored in a discussion of global governance of cyber-security. It suggests rewriting the theory to make space at its core for three new materialist characters — market dispositives, minions, and mimes —and for the processes through which they do politics (relational entanglings, infrastructurings, and sensings). Leander argues that doing so is crucial to avoid misconstruing global governance and obfuscating power in it.
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