International Relations scholarship has shown that persisting epistemic hierarchies rooted in colonial domination continue to exclude, silence, or sideline alternative knowledges in global governance, even as International Organizations increasingly open up to formally marginalized groups and attempt to pluralize their expertise. While building on such accounts, this article argues that epistemic hierarchies are deeply entangled with political-economic logics, which permeate global epistemic politics in multiple ways. These intersecting epistemic and political-economic logics produce complex forms of ‘political-epistemic disciplining’, which do not simply exclude alternative knowledges, but rearticulate them. I identify three intertwined modalities of this process: de-epistemization, whereby alternative knowledge claims are recoded as social or identity concerns rather than treated as competing epistemologies. This operation recognizes the subjects of the critique but not the epistemic critique itself. Conditional recognition occurs when prevailing criteria of validity regulate the acknowledgement of such claims. Finally, transposition constitutes or reformulates alternative knowledge claims through the lenses of dominant epistemic frameworks and categories. These processes rearticulate alternative knowledges and transform them a new into ‘globalized alternative knowledges’. The argument is developed through an in-depth analysis of engagements with Indigenous knowledges in Global Mental Health governance.

Over the past century, previously underrepresented international actors have increasingly enjoyed greater access to power, based partly on growing normative commitments to democratisation and egalitarianism. That these norms can take root even in an anarchic international system shows not only how deep these commitments have become but also provides a hard test for where their limits might be. Though previous literature has investigated drivers of increased participation in international organisations, comparatively little attention has been paid to its potential effects on other sources of global governance legitimacy. We root our investigation of the potential trade-off between the participation in and efficiency of the policy-making process on recent literature, which conceptualises each as important sources of international organisations’ perceived legitimacy. We argue that while increasing participation is associated with decreasing efficiency, it is conversely associated with increasing efficiency if it can encourage new coalition building. Empirically, we find support for these trade-offs using an original dataset we created documenting the Codex Alimentarius’s policy-making process for food safety standards (the default reference the World Trade Organization uses to settle relevant trade disputes). In total, we analyse more than 500 standards developed in almost 900 standard-setting meetings documented between 1963 and 2019.

This article introduces the heuristic of epistemic inertia to complicate narratives of radical rupture in global sites of expertise. In 2006, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), widely celebrated as a radical break from the medical model, which had long framed disability as an individual impairment to be treated by medical doctors. Through the heuristic of epistemic inertia, we examine how, despite adopting a more pluralised expert repertoire, the CRPD Committee retains some deep-seated (neo)liberal assumptions of the medical model. Through an analysis of General Comment No. 8, we identify three main manifestations of this persistence across both models: first, an understanding of dignity as tied to productivity and autonomy; second, the idea that individuals must ‘adapt’ to existing societal arrangements through merit; and third, the portrayal of market participation as the privileged moral horizon. What falls out of view are alternative imaginaries grounded in interdependence or collective forms of care, which exist outside prevailing economic logics. In this configuration, the figure of the rights-bearer is not a radical alternative to the medical patient, insofar as rights are still articulated through expectations of optimisation and self-reliance within prevailing market logics.

This paper adopts a sociosemiotic perspective to examine how normative consensus and legitimacy are constructed in global artificial intelligence (AI) governance discourse. Drawing on a corpus of forty-seven international normative documents, the study identifies an emerging cross-textual consensus around three core principles – Safety, Human-centric and Fairness – and analyses how these are semiotically encoded. The findings reveal tensions between state and non-state actors, and between semiotic agreement and practical implementation. For instance, ‘Safety’ is often framed through securitisation discourse, while ‘Human-centric’ is increasingly grounded in international human rights frameworks. The study further shows that discursive strategies such as nominalisation help establish surface-level consensus but introduce ambiguity that undermines enforceability. By conceptualising governance texts as dynamic semiotic systems, this research moves beyond the hard law–soft law dichotomy, revealing global AI regulation as a contested arena of meaning-making. It offers a theoretical basis for advancing more inclusive and operational governance models.

Growing attention is given in IR theory and diplomatic circles to the ambivalent role of religion in world politics. However, there is a need for more analytical clarity, identifying at least four different domains: religions and inter-state relations; religions and internationalism; religions and trans-nationalism; and religions and globalism. The most promising approach is the one that concentrates on the transnational projection of religions, connecting it to the way religions address global issues to influence international actors.

A rather unique feature of global climate negotiations is that most governments allow representatives of civil society organisations to be part of their national delegation. It remains unclear, however, why states grant such access in the first place. While there are likely to be benefits from formally including civil society, there are also substantial costs stemming from constraints on sovereignty. In light of this tradeoff, this article argues for a ‘contagion’ effect that explains this phenomenon besides domestic determinants. In particular, states, which are more central to the broader network of global governance, are more likely to be informed of and influenced by other states' actions and policies toward civil society. In turn, more central governments are likely to include civil society actors if other governments do so as well. This argument is tested with data on the participation of civil society organisations in national delegations to global climate negotiations between 1995 and 2005. To further uncover the underlying mechanisms, the article also provides an analysis of survey data collected at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Durban in 2011.

This paper explores, through a case study of the World Bank’s pursuit of universal basic education, the gulf between the Bank’s dialogue with international civil society elites and its treatment of grassroots civil society in its development practice. It argues that the World Bank is pursuing a conscious program to build a global elite governance system similar to Bank vice-president J. F. Rischard’s concept of global issues networks, in which experts from business, government, and civil society will set globally binding social and economic policies. There is a risk of co-optation of international NGOs into this autocratic global managerial system.

This paper explores the roles of transnational civil society organizations and networks in transnational social learning. It begins with an investigation into social learning within problem domains and into the ways in which such domain learning builds perspectives and capacities for effective action among domain organizations and institutions. It suggests that domain learning involves problem definition, direction setting, implementation of collective action, and performance monitoring. Transnational civil society actors appear to take five roles in domain learning: (1) identifying issues, (2) facilitating voice of marginalized stakeholders, (3) amplifying the importance of issues, (4) building bridges among diverse stakeholders, and (5) monitoring and assessing solutions. The paper then explores the circumstances in which transnational civil society actors can be expected to make special contributions in important problem domains in the future.

This paper considers three different conceptualizations – three politico-ideological perspectives within civil society – on global-scale economics and geopolitics. The standpoints can be termed “Global justice movements,” “Third World nationalism,” and the “Post-Washington Consensus.” These three perspectives stand in contrast to the fusion of neoliberal economics and neoconservative politics that dominates the contemporary world. The three approaches sometimes converge, but more often than not they are in conflict; as are the civil society institutions that cohere to the three different political ideologies. From the three different analyses flow different strategies, concrete campaigning tactics, and varying choices of allies. The World Social Forum provides hints of a potentially unifying approach within the global justice movements based upon the practical themes of “decommodification” and “deglobalization” (of capital). It is, however, only by facing up to the ideological divergences that the global justice movement can enhance its presence.

Any theoretically informed predictions about the future of international order and global governance must reckon with the power and intentions of the United States. We argue that fundamental changes in the nature of domestic audience constraint within many democracies, and the United States in particular, undermine both the willingness and the capability of the United States to continue its role as the underwriter of international order and global governance. A US government unbound by domestic constraint will have difficulty building broad coalitions to solve national and international problems because it will have reduced incentives to invest in public goods, including national defense, science and technology, and future economic prosperity; reduced barriers to corruption that undermines the quality of and trust in US capabilities; and reduced state capacity, including the capacity to finance wars and other long-term international commitments. We argue that three trends were especially relevant in reshaping domestic audience constraint: information fragmentation, extreme polarization, and a global threat environment that facilitated executive power concentration. Together they reduce the costs and risks for leaders to escape domestic audience constraints, weakening the institutional and accountability mechanisms that give democracies advantages in the international system. Though these trends affect many democracies, the undermining of US domestic constraint is particularly consequential because the United States shaped and buttressed the current system. An unconstrained United States likely means a less cooperative and less predictable global order, irrevocably altering the post-1945 system.

Many global norms are currently facing substantial contestation by various actors. While contestation is a regular practice in norm dynamics, it can potentially result in the destabilisation of norms. At the same time, international city networks (ICNs) are increasingly positioning themselves in global governance. While research in International Relations has not analysed how ICNs respond to norm contestation and whether they stabilise existing norms and normative orders, this article demonstrates that ICNs are relevant actors in norm dynamics by focusing on their activities. To examine how ICNs stabilise norms, we employ a theoretical framework based on existing approaches in norm research, which assumes that norms must be as robust, resilient and legitimate as possible to maintain their functions in facilitating individual orientation and collective order. Empirically, we analyse the stabilising activities of three ICNs – Mayors for Peace, Rainbow Cities Network and Fast-Track Cities Initiative – as contributions to preventing norm decay in security, human rights and health. We show that these ICNs stabilise norms by supporting them in discourse and practice, by connecting norms in clusters, and by including affected stakeholders. In sum, we present ICNs as relevant actors in global governance due to their stabilising activities and networked capacities.

The number of global environmental institutions has increased dramatically over the past decade. Yet environmental governance is widely seen as failing. Focusing on biodiversity politics, we argue that many key governance institutions, particularly those advancing market solutions, are themselves deeply implicated in this persistent failure. Drawing on the sociology of expertise, we show how two recently established institutions – the European Business and Nature Platform and the Network for Greening the Financial System – attempt to address the uncomfortable reality of biodiversity governance failures and the risks of their own future failures by creating a series of diversions to deflect attention and by displacing the focus of biodiversity governance from core issues to their own efforts to develop metrics. These dynamics render these institutions both ‘failure-proof’ and inherently ‘failure-prone’, ultimately reinforcing rather than resolving the problems they aim to address.

The political representation and agency of young people in international politics is still poorly understood, notwithstanding sustained interest in the pluralisation and diversification of transnational civil society and the ‘opening up’ of IOs in international relations (IR) scholarship. In this article, we put forward a theoretical framework for the study of youth representation in IR that is at once responsive to the specificities of youth and, at the same time, contributes to theory-building on political representation of newly recognised constituencies in international institutions overall. Theoretically, we build on constructivist and performative theories of representation, and we use our empirical insights to extend and qualify these theories. Empirically, we provide the first in-depth study of youth representation in global health governance. Based on an interpretive analysis of policy documents and qualitative interviews with youth participants at three major global health events, our study explores prevalent portrayals of youth as a constituency and problematises the legitimising effects of these portrayals. Moreover, we expose how multiple barriers and intersecting inequalities constrain young people’s encounters with exclusive spaces of global health policy-making and we point to the reflective and ambiguous ways in which young people embrace, enact, and question ‘youth’ as a political category.