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Locating (new) materialist characters and processes in global governance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 December 2020

Anna Leander Open the ORCID record for Anna Leander [Opens in a new window]
Anna Leander*
Affiliation:
Department of International Relations and Political Science, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This contribution probes A Theory of Global Governance from a materialist perspective. I focus on three forms of materialisms that have played a significant role in social theory as well as International Relations theory: the materialisms of markets, of artefacts, and of embodied affects. Integrating these materialisms serves to unsettle the conceptualization of global governance and of the politics of authority, legitimacy, and contestation underpinning it. A materialist perspective moves the theory of global governance towards a focus on processes instead of institutions, allowing it to capture both the multiple forms of global governance and their increasingly rapidly shifting forms. The contribution is anchored in a discussion of the global governance of cyber-security.

Keywords

cybersecurityalgorithmmarket dispositifembodimentinfrastructureentanglement
Type
Symposium: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation in Global Governance: Edited by Orfeo Fioretos and Jonas Tallberg
Information
International Theory , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 157 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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