Reordering the Global: A History of Challenges to Governance

Parvathi Menon and Aoife O’Donoghue

Chapter 24 in Research Handbook on Global Governance, 2025, pp 537-550 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Histories of global governance often emphasise convergence, regularity and elite interconnection, overlooking moments of breakdown, informality and violence. These narratives obscure challenges to the field's linearity, failing to account for tensions that complicate its rise, fall and reproductions. This chapter highlights such challenges, exposing how the global has been shaped by efforts to contain competing forces and interests. The narrative of global governance, whether through better governance or institutionalisation, has consistently framed the global as a cohesive whole, masking its conflicts and exclusions. We divide our analysis into three parts. First, we examine how non-Western resistances and the decline of Western hegemony reshaped geopolitical narratives of governance. Second, we explore how public and private governance histories have been contested, with emancipatory movements challenging or exploiting the divide. Finally, we address methodological critiques, focusing on scepticism that exposes the contradictions in values like democracy, individual rights and dignity.

Keywords: International legal history; Linearity; Resistance; Community (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781789906325
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