Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Power in global governance
- 2 Power, institutions, and the production of inequality
- 3 Policing and global governance
- 4 Power, fairness, and the global economy
- 5 Power politics and the institutionalization of international relations
- 6 Power, governance, and the WTO: a comparative institutional approach
- 7 The power of liberal international organizations
- 8 The power of interpretive communities
- 9 Class powers and the politics of global governance
- 10 Global civil society and global governmentality: or, the search for politics and the state amidst the capillaries of social power
- 11 Securing the civilian: sex and gender in the laws of war
- 12 Colonial and postcolonial global governance
- 13 Knowledge in power: the epistemic construction of global governance
- References
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: 98
9 - Class powers and the politics of global governance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Power in global governance
- 2 Power, institutions, and the production of inequality
- 3 Policing and global governance
- 4 Power, fairness, and the global economy
- 5 Power politics and the institutionalization of international relations
- 6 Power, governance, and the WTO: a comparative institutional approach
- 7 The power of liberal international organizations
- 8 The power of interpretive communities
- 9 Class powers and the politics of global governance
- 10 Global civil society and global governmentality: or, the search for politics and the state amidst the capillaries of social power
- 11 Securing the civilian: sex and gender in the laws of war
- 12 Colonial and postcolonial global governance
- 13 Knowledge in power: the epistemic construction of global governance
- References
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: 98
Summary
Criticism of the vastly unequal powers entailed in neoliberal globalization is no longer the exclusive province of those stigmatized as economic ignoramuses, extremists, and malcontents – “flat-earth advocates,” “dupes,” and “knaves” as Thomas Friedman notoriously characterized them (1999). Indeed, the former chairman of the US president's Council of Economic Advisers, former chief economist at the World Bank, and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has penned one of the most widely noted critiques of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” and the institutional powers which have enacted it on a global scale (Stiglitz, 2002b). Taking Stiglitz's intervention as a jumping-off point, I will argue in this essay that his critique of the interactional (institutional and compulsory) powers underlying neoliberal globalization is valuable, but radically incomplete. More specifically, I claim that the interactional powers identified by Stiglitz presuppose constitutive, structural forms of power such as those identified by Marxian theory. Understanding the relations and processes of global governance entails analysis of class-based powers, the social relations of capitalism which make them possible, their historical instantiations both within and across nation-states, and the ways in which these powers have been, and continue to be produced, reproduced, and transformed by the struggles – at once material and ideological – of concretely situated social agents. But I will further suggest that classical Marxian categories are not by themselves sufficient to understand the dynamics of these world-order struggles, for class-based relations and identities are crosscut by others such as gender and race, and these latter are generated through more diffuse, productive forms of power.
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- Power in Global Governance , pp. 205 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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