Governing The World Without World Government

Humanity faces grave dangers that can be avoided only by international cooperation The world does not need a world government to govern itself. Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that there is an alternative: to build cooperation among countries to advance their shared interests. We urgently need to avert war between the United States and China, catastrophic climate change, and other global public harms. We must do so, however, in a world in which sovereign states remain in command. The opportunity for self-interested cooperation among nations is immense. Unger shows how different types of coalitions among states can seize on this opportunity and avoid the greatest dangers that we face. Unger offers a way of thinking about international relations as well as a transformative program: a realism with hope and a way to develop the international diversity that we want without the international anarchy that we fear. His ideas challenge the disillusionment and fatalism that threaten to overwhelm us.

A world government capable of controlling nation-states has never evolved, but governance does underlie order among states and gives direction to problems arising from global interdependence. This book examines the ideological bases and behavioural patterns of this governance without government.

"The world does not need a world government to govern itself. There is an alternative: to build cooperation among countries to advance their shared interests"--

A majestic narrative reckoning with the forces that have shaped the nature and destiny of the world’s governing institutions The story of global cooperation is a tale of dreamers goading us to find common cause in remedying humanity’s worst problems. But international institutions are also tools for the powers that be to advance their own interests. Mark Mazower’s Governing the World tells the epic, two-hundred-year story of that inevitable tension—the unstable and often surprising alchemy between ideas and power. From the rubble of the Napoleonic empire in the nineteenth century through the birth of the League of Nations and the United Nations in the twentieth century to the dominance of global finance at the turn of the millennium, Mazower masterfully explores the current era of international life as Western dominance wanes and a new global balance of powers emerges.

Problems posed by Syria s chemical weapons attacks, Egypt s ouster of an elected government, and myriad other global dilemmas beg the question of whether and how the world can be governed. The challenge is addressing what former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Problems without Passports environmental, economic, humanitarian, and political crises that threaten stability, prosperity, and even human survival. Everything is globalized everything "except" politics, which remain imprisoned behind national borders. The world has changed, but our basic way of managing it has not. We pursue fitful, tactical, short-term, and local responses for actual or looming threats that require sustained, strategic, longer-run, and global actions. With clarity and passion, Thomas G. Weiss argues for a diversity of organizational arrangements some centralized, some decentralized and a plurality of problem-solving strategies some worldwide, some local. He proposes a three-pronged strategy: the expansion of the formidable amount of practical global governance that already exists, the harnessing of political and economic possibilities opened by the communications revolution, and the recommitment by states to a fundamental revamping of the United Nations."

Friends and foes of international cooperation puzzle about how to explain order, stability, and predictability in a world without a central authority. How is the world governed in the absence of a world government? This probing yet accessible book examines "global governance" or the sum of the informal and formal values, norms, procedures, and institutions that help states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, and transnational corporations identify, understand, and address trans-boundary problems. The chasm between the magnitude of a growing number of global threats - climate change, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, financial instabilities, pandemics, to name a few - and the feeble contemporary political structures for international problem-solving provide compelling reasons to read this book. Fitful, tactical, and short-term local responses exist for a growing number of threats and challenges that require sustained, strategic, and longer-run global perspectives and action. Can the framework of global governance help us to better understand the reasons behind this fundamental disconnect as well as possible ways to attenuate its worst aspects? Thomas G. Weiss replies with a guardedly sanguine "yes".

Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.

"Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World" is the fourth unclassified report prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in recent years that takes a long-term view of the future. It offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next 15 years to influence world events. Our report is not meant to be an exercise in prediction or crystal ball-gazing. Mindful that there are many possible "futures," we offer a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss. (From the NIC website)

"World Rule is essential reading for scholars, managers, and policy makers interested in the rules that underpin the global economy. Koppell authoritatively and convincingly explains the origins of the dense network of global rules and elucidates their effects on both markets and practices; his theoretical insights into the politics of organizations are profound." Rawi Abdelal, Harvard Business School.

"George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg lead a talented cast in this harrowing special-effects adventure intercutting the plight of seafarers struggling to reach safe harbor with the heroics of air/sea rescue crews"--Container.