Courses

Global Governance

The world is at a crossroad. As the famed coherence of the nation-state loses some of its viability to govern real-world problems in the face of global economic, technological and environmental factors, the people of the world must confront the possibility of imagining new structures and systems of governance. While the planet already has several institutional structures designed to meet some of these concerns (e.g., the UN and the WTO), these models are, at a minimum, constrained by their open reliance on the nation-state system, and thus they may not have the requisite strength or popular appeal to push forward an agenda proper to anything that could be called “government.” The modern era has been marked by a battle between the universal and the particular, and any system of governance must attend to this prickly matter of defending hard-won ideals concerning the universal rights of individual humans vs. the particular rights of groups to maintain distinction and control over their future. With this ongoing contest constantly in mind, this course aims to introduce students to a broad array of topics that will open the horizon for a debate and a new imagination about global governance as it is currently emerging and what an alternative future of “global governance” could look like. We will be probing the history of concepts and practices that have become central to standard notions of modernist governance, and thereby questioning their potential as models for global governance, how they are being challenged and/or eroded today, and also how they might need to be modified, defended or abandoned as the world comes to know the effects of “globalization” more and more. The seminar is sponsored by the Committee on Global Thought and co-taught by its chair, Joseph Stiglitz (economics), and one of its founding members, Katharina Pistor (law). The subject areas, however, will go well beyond these two disciplines. The seminar will therefore turn to an international cohort of esteemed scholars. It will also draw upon the intimate setting of a graduate level seminar with students from a broad array of disciplines, including economics, political sciences, sociology, anthropology, history, law, business, and international affairs. Seminar sessions with outside speakers will be open to the public. All other sessions will be for students admitted to the class only.