Course Overview
Governance has always extended beyond the state, but the scope, density, and contested legitimacy of international institutions, norms, and regulatory frameworks have grown enormously since 1945. Today, global governance is both indispensable and deeply troubled. States cooperate through international organisations while simultaneously undermining them. Transnational corporations shape regulatory environments in ways that formal institutions struggle to match. Emerging powers contest the rules of an order they played little part in designing. Civil society actors claim to speak for humanity while representing particular constituencies. And the grand liberal project of building a rule-based international order faces its most serious challenge since the Cold War.
This course examines how governance is organised beyond the nation state in an increasingly interconnected, contested, and multipolar international system. Students explore how international organisations, regional institutions, states, corporations, non-governmental actors, and transnational networks collectively shape global order, manage crises, and compete over legitimacy, authority, and power. The course asks not only how global governance functions, but also whose interests it serves, where it succeeds, where it fails, and how it may evolve as the conditions that produced it continue to shift.
Rather than surveying institutions thematically, the course is structured around major analytical and strategic questions that students investigate through inquiry-based seminars, simulations, case studies, policy exercises, and critical debate.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Explain the principal theories, institutions, and actors that shape global and regional governance.
- Analyse how governance frameworks operate across major international issue areas.
- Critically assess the effectiveness, legitimacy, and political consequences of international governance arrangements.
- Evaluate the role of states, regional organisations, corporations, and non-state actors in shaping international order.
- Apply theoretical approaches from international relations and political economy to contemporary governance challenges.
- Conduct policy-oriented and evidence-based analysis using institutional documents, case studies, and scholarly literature.
- Develop informed written and oral arguments concerning the future of global governance in a fragmented international system.
Assessment
Seminar Participation and Engagement — 20%
Active, substantive participation is an intellectual and professional expectation, not an optional supplement to the written work. Students are assessed on the quality of their contributions across the semester: the rigour of their arguments, their engagement with theoretical frameworks, their willingness to challenge and build on the ideas of others, and the consistency of their preparation. Students who attend but do not contribute meaningfully will not score well on this component. Students who lead discussions, bring evidence from primary sources or institutional documents, or connect weekly debates to wider analytical frameworks will be recognised accordingly.
Governance Case Study Report — 20%
A structured analytical report of 1,500 to 2,000 words examining a specific international governance arrangement — an institution, a treaty regime, a regional framework, or a multilateral mechanism. Students select a case from a provided list and analyse its design, political dynamics, effectiveness, and legitimacy, drawing on relevant theoretical frameworks from the course. The report should demonstrate command of the literature, precision in the use of concepts, and clarity of argument. It is submitted at the end of Week 6.
Strategic Policy Brief — 20%
A policy brief of 1,000 to 1,500 words addressed to a specified decision-making audience (a government ministry, an international institution, a regional body, or a strategic advisory organisation). Students identify a current global governance challenge, assess its political and institutional dimensions, and recommend a course of action, with explicit attention to feasibility, risks, and the interests of key actors. The brief should combine analytical depth with policy clarity. It is submitted at the end of Week 9.
Simulation Exercise and Presentation — 10%
A structured role-play simulation held in Weeks 10 and 11, in which students represent states, international organisations, or non-state actors in a multilateral governance negotiation. Each student prepares a position paper (500 words) in advance and participates actively in the negotiation. Assessment focuses on preparation quality, strategic coherence during the simulation, and a brief reflective presentation (five minutes) delivered afterwards examining the gap between the actor’s stated interests and the collective outcome. Detailed instructions and role assignments are distributed at the end of Week 7.
Final Research Essay — 30%
An extended research essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words addressing a substantive question in global governance. Students may develop an argument arising from any area of the course, provided they situate it clearly within the relevant theoretical debate, engage with primary sources or institutional documents, and advance an original analytical claim. A one-page essay proposal is submitted at the end of Week 8 for feedback before the final deadline in Week 13.
Literature
- Edkins, J., Zehfuss, M., & Gregory, T. (2025). Global politics: A new introduction (4th ed.). Taylor & Francis Group.
- Karns, M. P., Johnson, T., & Mingst, K. A. (2024). International organizations: The politics and processes of global governance (4th ed.). Lynne Rienner Publishers.
- Kissinger, H. (2015). World order. Penguin Books.
- Mazower, M. (2013). Governing the world: The history of an idea, 1815 to the present. Penguin Press.
- Pease, K. K. S., & Belo, D. (2025). International organizations: Perspectives on global governance (7th ed.). Taylor & Francis Group.
- Weiss, T. G., & Wilkinson, R. (Eds.). (2023). International organization and global governance (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Students are expected to work across three categories of source material:
- Academic literature provides theoretical frameworks and empirical analysis.
- Policy documents — produced by governments, international organisations, regional institutions, treaty bodies, and think tanks — constitute the primary material through which global governance is articulated, negotiated, and implemented. These include United Nations resolutions, European Union strategies, WTO agreements, climate frameworks, development agendas, and institutional reform proposals.
- Strategic assessments, governance indicators, and institutional reports provide insight into the operational and political environments within which global governance functions. These materials illuminate contemporary challenges including systemic risk, governance fragmentation, technological transformation, environmental crisis, and geopolitical competition.
Learning to read across all three, and to identify the assumptions, interests, and limitations embedded in each, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.
Research articles do not appear in the bibliography above. This is intentional. Each week, students are expected to identify a peer-reviewed article relevant to that week’s topic, bring it to the seminar, and share it with the group. The lecturer contributes selections alongside the class. This practice develops independent literature-searching habits, exposes the seminar to a wider range of scholarly perspectives than any fixed reading list could provide, and keeps the course in sustained contact with current debates in the field.
Structure
Week 1: Why does the world need global governance?
Global governance did not emerge from a coherent design. It has accumulated across centuries of interstate diplomacy, crisis response, and institutional improvisation, leaving a layered architecture of overlapping institutions, competing authorities, and persistent gaps. This week introduces the foundational questions of the course: what governance beyond the state actually means, why sovereign states sometimes accept constraints on their autonomy, and why collective action problems at the international level are so difficult to resolve. The cases of pandemic governance and climate coordination failures offer two contemporary illustrations of the gap between the scale of global challenges and the capacity of existing institutions to meet them.
Key Themes
- Governance beyond the state: concepts, origins, and scope
- Interdependence and collective action problems in international politics
- Sovereignty as both a foundation of and a constraint on international cooperation
- Globalisation and the demand for governance at multiple levels
Case Studies
- Pandemic governance: institutional fragmentation and the limits of WHO authority
- Climate coordination failures: the gap between scientific consensus and political action
Seminar Exercise
- Institutional mapping exercise: students identify and map the range of institutions, actors, and mechanisms involved in governing a specified global issue (climate, migration, or financial stability), and discuss what the complexity of that map reveals about how global governance actually works.
Analytical Focus
- Conceptual analysis; distinguishing governance from government; identifying the actors, levels, and mechanisms of global governance
Week 2: Which theories best explain global governance?
Theory is not an abstraction removed from practice; it structures what analysts see, what they count as significant, and what questions they think are worth asking. This week examines the main theoretical traditions through which students of global governance understand international institutions, cooperation, and order. Liberalism identifies the gains from cooperation and the stabilising role of international institutions. Realism treats institutions as instruments of state interest and doubts their capacity to constrain powerful actors. Social constructivism attends to how norms, identities, and shared understandings shape what states and other actors regard as legitimate behaviour. Critical and postcolonial approaches ask whose interests international institutions actually serve and whose voices have historically been excluded from the design of global governance.
Key Themes
- Liberal institutionalism: cooperation, interdependence, and institutional design
- Realism: power, interest, and the limits of institutional constraint
- Social constructivism: norms, identity, and the politics of legitimacy
- Critical and postcolonial approaches: hierarchy, exclusion, and the politics of knowledge
Case Studies
- Competing theoretical interpretations of the United Nations system
- Postcolonial critiques of international institutional design
Seminar Exercise
- Theoretical debate workshop: students are assigned competing theoretical perspectives and argue how their framework explains a specific governance episode (an institutional failure, a successful multilateral agreement, or a case of norm diffusion), then critically evaluate the assumptions underlying each explanation.
Analytical Focus
- Applying theoretical frameworks to governance questions; identifying the assumptions and analytical limits of competing IR perspectives
Week 3: Can international organisations solve global problems?
International organisations are the institutional infrastructure of global governance, but they are also deeply political creations. Their design reflects the interests of their founders, their mandates are negotiated and contested, and their authority is always conditional on the support of powerful member states. This week examines the origins, design principles, and governance functions of international organisations, from the early experiments of the nineteenth century to the specialised agencies of the post-war order. The contrast between the ambitions of the League of Nations and the practical jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice illustrates how institutional design shapes both what organisations can accomplish and where they structurally fall short.
Key Themes
- The origins of international organisation: historical evolution from 1815 to the present
- Institutional design: mandate, membership, authority, and legitimacy
- Functional governance and the logic of specialisation
- International legal mechanisms and their political limits
Case Studies
- The League of Nations: institutional ambition and structural failure
- The International Court of Justice: authority, jurisdiction, and compliance
- Specialised agencies: the World Health Organisation, UNESCO, and the ILO
Seminar Exercise
- Institutional evaluation exercise: students assess a specified international organisation against criteria of effectiveness, legitimacy, and political accountability, drawing on its founding documents, mandate, and recent performance record.
Analytical Focus
- Institutional evaluation; reading and interpreting founding charters and mandate documents; connecting design features to governance outcomes
Week 4: Can the United Nations still maintain international order?
The United Nations was founded on a tension it has never resolved. It claims to represent humanity and to uphold universal values, but its most powerful organ — the Security Council — is structured around the interests of five permanent members, each of whom holds a veto over collective action. That tension has produced a record of partial successes, systematic failures, and ongoing debates about institutional reform that have so far yielded little structural change. This week examines the UN system as a governance architecture: how it was designed, how it actually operates, and whether it remains capable of managing the security challenges of a multipolar international system in which its founding assumptions no longer hold.
Key Themes
- The architecture of collective security: design, logic, and political constraints
- UN peacekeeping: mandates, limitations, and evolving practice
- Security Council politics: the veto, great power competition, and institutional deadlock
- Institutional reform debates: expanding the Council, strengthening the Secretariat, and the structural limits of change
Case Studies
- UN peace operations: from observer missions to complex multidimensional mandates
- Security Council veto disputes: Syria, Ukraine, and the paralysis of collective security
Seminar Exercise
- Policy and institutional analysis: students draft a short reform proposal for one aspect of the UN system, justify it with reference to the institutional record and theoretical arguments, and defend it against critique from peers representing alternative positions.
Analytical Focus
- Institutional analysis; evaluating effectiveness and legitimacy; navigating the gap between institutional design and political reality
Week 5: Why has regional governance become increasingly important?
Regionalism has been one of the most significant developments in international organisation since 1945. States that share geography, history, or strategic interests have constructed an increasingly dense network of regional institutions that supplement, compete with, or sometimes substitute for global-level governance. The European Union remains the most institutionally advanced experiment in regional integration, but it is neither the only model nor necessarily the most appropriate one for other contexts. This week examines regionalism as a governance phenomenon, comparing the institutional architecture, political logic, and practical effectiveness of regional organisations across Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Arctic.
Key Themes
- Regionalism and regional integration: theories, drivers, and typologies
- Security cooperation and economic coordination at the regional level
- Comparative regional governance: design and performance across political contexts
- Transregionalism and the relationship between regional and global governance
Case Studies
- The European Union: integration, crisis, and the limits of supranationalism
- ASEAN: the politics of non-interference and regional consensus
- The African Union: Pan-African ambitions and institutional constraints
- Arctic governance: managing competition in an emerging strategic space
Seminar Exercise
- Comparative regional analysis: students compare two regional organisations using a common analytical framework covering mandate, membership, decision-making procedures, enforcement capacity, and legitimacy, and identify what accounts for differences in their design and governance performance.
Analytical Focus
- Comparative analysis; evaluating institutional design across different political and historical contexts; connecting regional governance to global order
Week 6: Are non state actors reshaping global governance?
The standard account of international relations centres on states as the primary actors. Global governance has always been more complicated. Non-governmental organisations, multinational corporations, advocacy networks, epistemic communities, and private standard-setting bodies have long played significant roles in shaping international norms, influencing institutional agendas, and implementing governance functions that states cannot or will not perform. This week examines the growing influence of non-state actors in global governance, asking how they acquire authority, whose interests they represent, and whether their participation enhances or undermines the democratic legitimacy of international institutions.
Key Themes
- Non-governmental organisations: origins, functions, and political influence
- Multinational corporations: regulatory power, lobbying, and private governance
- Advocacy networks and transnational civil society
- The legitimacy question: who speaks for whom in global governance?
Case Studies
- Amnesty International and the politics of human rights advocacy
- Global technology corporations: platform power, private governance, and regulatory evasion
Seminar Exercise
- Actor mapping and influence analysis: students map the non-state actors involved in a specified governance domain (internet governance, pharmaceutical regulation, or climate finance), assess how each acquires and exercises influence, and evaluate the implications for democratic accountability.
Analytical Focus
- Actor mapping; analysing authority, legitimacy, and accountability beyond the state
Governance Case Study Report due at the end of this week.
Week 7: Can global governance maintain peace and security?
The management of armed conflict has been the most ambitious and most contested function of international governance since the founding of the League of Nations. The collective security system created in 1945 was designed to prevent another general war; it succeeded in that limited sense, but at the cost of producing a system incapable of acting decisively when the permanent members disagree. This week examines how peace and security governance operates in practice: the politics of sanctions, the evolution of peacekeeping mandates, the institutional fragmentation of counterterrorism governance, and the emergence of human security as a framework that challenges the state-centric logic of the UN system.
Key Themes
- Collective security in theory and practice: the gap between design and performance
- Peace operations: mandates, consent, impartiality, and the use of force
- Sanctions regimes: design, targeting, and effectiveness
- Counterterrorism governance: institutional multiplication and coordination failures
- Human security: broadening the concept and its institutional implications
Case Studies
- Somalia: state collapse, international intervention, and the limits of stabilisation
- UN peacekeeping missions: evolving mandates from Cyprus to the Central African Republic
- Counterterrorism frameworks: the Security Council, FATF, and the fragmentation of authority
Seminar Exercise
- Security governance analysis: students assess the governance response to a specified peace and security challenge, evaluating the roles of different institutional actors, the coherence of the mandate, and the gap between stated objectives and actual outcomes.
Analytical Focus
- Security governance analysis; evaluating institutional effectiveness under conditions of great power disagreement
Simulation role assignments and instructions distributed this week.
Week 8: Who governs the global economy and in whose interests?
Global economic governance is one of the most consequential and most contested domains of international politics. The institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944 — the IMF and the World Bank — were designed by a small group of advanced industrialised states to manage a world economy in which emerging markets and developing countries had little say. The WTO added a multilateral trade architecture built on liberal economic principles that have not delivered equitable outcomes for all participants. Meanwhile, multinational corporations have acquired the capacity to shape regulatory environments in ways that formal institutions struggle to constrain. This week examines who actually governs the global economy, through what mechanisms, and with what distributional consequences.
Key Themes
- Trade governance: the WTO, preferential trade agreements, and the politics of market access
- Financial governance: the IMF, conditionality, and the politics of adjustment
- Development and inequality: who benefits from global economic governance?
- Corporate influence and the political economy of global capitalism
Case Studies
- The World Trade Organization: dispute settlement, the Doha Round, and institutional crisis
- The International Monetary Fund: conditionality, austerity, and contested legitimacy
- Multinational corporations and regulatory arbitrage: tax, labour, and environmental standards
Seminar Exercise
- Political economy analysis: students evaluate the governance response to a specified global economic crisis or challenge (the 2008 financial crisis, sovereign debt restructuring, or digital economy regulation), identifying which actors shaped the response, whose interests were served, and what governance reforms followed.
Analytical Focus
- Political economy analysis; connecting institutional design to distributional outcomes; evaluating the interests embedded in global economic governance
Final essay proposal (one page) due at the end of this week.
Week 9: Are human rights universal or politically contested?
Human rights occupy a paradoxical position in global governance. They are enshrined in the most widely ratified international instruments in history, yet their implementation is patchy, their enforcement selective, and their claimed universality contested by states and scholars who argue that the dominant human rights framework reflects particular cultural and political traditions rather than genuinely universal values. This week examines human rights governance as a political as well as a normative domain: how human rights norms are produced, institutionalised, and contested; the politics of international justice; and the continuing tension between sovereignty and accountability that defines the relationship between the international human rights system and the states it seeks to constrain.
Key Themes
- Human rights norms: origins, evolution, and the politics of universality
- Humanitarian governance: the responsibility to protect and its contested application
- International justice: the ICC, universal jurisdiction, and the limits of accountability
- Sovereignty and accountability: the tension at the heart of the human rights system
Case Studies
- The International Criminal Court: mandate, politics, and the selectivity of prosecution
- Documentation of war crimes: evidence, advocacy, and the gap between accountability and justice
Seminar Exercise
- Normative and legal analysis: students examine a specified case in which human rights obligations and state sovereignty have come into direct conflict, assess the governance response, and evaluate whether the outcome reflects principled norm application or the priorities of powerful actors.
Analytical Focus
- Normative analysis; evaluating the relationship between legal frameworks and political reality; connecting human rights governance to broader questions of power and legitimacy
Strategic Policy Brief due at the end of this week.
Week 10: Can global governance prevent environmental collapse?
Environmental governance is perhaps the domain in which the gap between the scale of the challenge and the capacity of existing institutions is most acutely visible. Decades of multilateral negotiation have produced the Paris Agreement — a landmark political achievement and, simultaneously, a framework whose voluntary commitments remain structurally insufficient to meet its own targets. The deeper problem is that effective environmental governance requires collective action at a scale and speed that challenges the sovereignty of states, the interests of powerful economic actors, and the asymmetries of a world in which those most responsible for environmental degradation are often least affected by its consequences. This week examines how environmental governance has evolved, why it has struggled, and what the politics of climate justice reveal about the limits of liberal multilateralism.
Key Themes
- Climate governance: the evolution from Stockholm to Paris and beyond
- Biodiversity, sustainability, and the governance of global commons
- Environmental diplomacy: negotiation dynamics and the politics of commitment
- Compliance and implementation: the gap between signature and action
Case Studies
- The Paris Agreement: design, politics, and the question of adequate ambition
- Climate justice movements: civil society, advocacy, and the politics of the Global South
Seminar Exercise
- Multilateral negotiation simulation (Part One): students represent assigned state and non-state actors in a structured environmental governance negotiation, advancing position papers and engaging with competing proposals on emissions commitments, climate finance, and technology transfer.
Analytical Focus
- Environmental policy analysis; multilateral negotiation dynamics; evaluating the relationship between institutional design and compliance
Week 11: Can global governance protect human security?
Human security shifts the referent object of governance from the state to the individual, asking whether people are protected not only from armed violence but from disease, hunger, displacement, and the systematic failure of institutions to meet basic needs. This week examines three domains in which human security governance has been most severely tested in recent decades: global public health, food security, and the governance of migration and displacement. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed both the essential role of international health governance and its structural fragilities. The global refugee crisis has strained the 1951 Refugee Convention and the institutions built around it. Together, these cases ask whether governance frameworks designed in the mid-twentieth century remain adequate to the human security challenges of the twenty-first.
Key Themes
- Public health governance: the WHO, the International Health Regulations, and pandemic preparedness
- Food security: institutional frameworks, agricultural politics, and the right to food
- Migration and refugee governance: the Refugee Convention, UNHCR, and the politics of protection
- Humanitarian protection: principles, politics, and the militarisation of aid
Case Studies
- COVID-19 governance: institutional performance, vaccine equity, and reform debates
- Global refugee crises: Syria, Myanmar, and the limits of the international protection system
Seminar Exercise
- Multilateral negotiation simulation (Part Two) and reflective presentation: students continue the environmental governance simulation from Week 10, work towards or fail to reach a negotiated outcome, then deliver individual five-minute reflective presentations examining the relationship between their actor’s stated interests, negotiating behaviour, and the collective outcome.
Analytical Focus
- Human security assessment; evaluating institutional performance against normative frameworks; connecting governance design to distributional outcomes across populations
Week 12: Is global governance entering a post liberal era?
The liberal international order, characterised by multilateral institutions, open markets, universal human rights norms, and American strategic primacy, is under pressure from several directions simultaneously. Rising powers contest both the substance of its rules and the legitimacy of an architecture they did not design. Democratic states are retreating from multilateral commitments. Technological change is creating new governance domains (artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, cyber operations) in which institutions remain rudimentary and great power competition is already intense. This final week synthesises the course’s analytical threads and asks the central strategic question: is global governance adapting to a post-liberal world, fragmenting into competing regional or ideological blocs, or finding new forms of legitimacy adequate to the complexity of the twenty-first century international system?
Key Themes
- Multipolarity and the fragmentation of global governance
- Digital sovereignty, cybersecurity, and the governance of emerging technologies
- Institutional decline, adaptation, and the search for new sources of legitimacy
- Competing visions of global order: liberal, pluralist, and post-Western
Case Studies
- Competing governance initiatives: G7 versus G20, BRICS, and the multiplication of forums
- Artificial intelligence governance: emerging frameworks, national strategies, and the race to regulate
Seminar Exercise
- Strategic forecasting and scenario workshop: students work in teams to construct and present two contrasting scenarios for the future of global governance in 2050, specifying the structural drivers, critical junctures, and institutional implications of each, and assessing what each would mean for the governance challenges examined across the course.
Analytical Focus
- Strategic forecasting; scenario construction; synthesising the analytical frameworks developed across the course
Final Research Essay due in Week 13.
*** This course is designed to be adaptable. The weekly structure, assessment components, and reading load can be adjusted to suit the requirements of a particular higher education institution or the context of individual tutoring, and can be scaled to meet the demands of bachelor’s and master’s degree students alike. The analytical framework and intellectual ambitions of the course remain constant; the format is a starting point, not a constraint.