5 February 2020 - 15:00 - 16:00 CET

Michael Zürn joins the GLOBE Webinar Series to discuss his recent book "A Theory of Global Governance" (2018, Oxford University Press). After the presentation of the book, Kolja Raube, senior member and research manager at the Leuven Centre for Global Goverance Studies, will offer some reflections on the book to start off the ;A Q&A with webinar participants will follow.

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 (KU Leuven) 

Participation is free and the webinar can be joined from anywhere in the world.

ABOUT GLOBE:

Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program, the Project “Global Governance and the European Union: Future Trends and Scenarios” (GLOBE) addresses the strategic priorities identified in the EU Global Strategy such as – trade, development, security and climate change – as well as migration and global finance, in order to identify the major roadblocks to effective and coherent global governance by multiple stakeholders in a multipolar world. GLOBE seeks to provide policy makers, academics and the general public with an analytical grip on the state of play in global governance, by developing new theoretical and methodological approaches. It also hopes to equip national and European policy makers with tools to identify constraints and opportunities in a set of global governance scenarios for 2030 and 2050.