Michael Zürn joins the GLOBE Webinar Series to discuss his recent book "A Theory of Global Governance" (2018, Oxford University Press).

The GLOBE Webinar Series – The Future of Global Governance – presents the latest and most cutting-edge research in global governance and gives audience members the opportunity to directly engage with leading scholars in the field. Each webinar focuses on a significant new book that has potential to shape future thought on global governance, featuring a presentation by the author, an intervention from an expert discussant, and a Q&A session with the audience.

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About the book: This book offers a major new theory of global governance, explaining both its rise and what many see as its current crisis. The author suggests that world politics is now embedded in a normative and institutional structure dominated by hierarchies and power inequalities and therefore inherently creates contestation, resistance, and distributional struggles. Within an ambitious and systematic new conceptual framework, the theory makes four key contributions. Firstly, it reconstructs global governance as a political system which builds on normative principles and reflexive authorities. Second, it identifies the central legitimation problems of the global governance system with a constitutionalist setting in mind. Third, it explains the rise of state and societal contestation by identifying key endogenous dynamics and probing the causal mechanisms that produced them. Finally, it identifies the conditions under which struggles in the global governance system lead to decline or deepening.

About the author: Michael Zürn is Director of the Global Governance unit at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Professor of International Relations at the Free University of Berlin since 2004. He was founding Dean of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin (2004-2009). He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and the Academy of Europe. He is author of numerous monographs and anthologies, and has published various articles in International Organization, World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Global Policy, International Theory, Journal of Common Market Studies, West European Politics, Politics, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, and Leviathan, among others.

Discussant: Kolja Raube (KU Leuven)
Moderator: Kari Otteburn (Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies)