New release: Global Governance. Why? What? Whither? By Thomas G. Weiss
28. August 2013
Cambridge: Polity Press 2013
Reference
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.” (publisher)
Thomas G. Weiss is an expert on the politics of the United Nations. He is Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies New York, Presidential Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), and Research Professor at the University of London.
This book derived from his stay as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz in 2012 and 2013.