Complex global and regional governance includes both the informality of governance institutions and informality around those institutions. National governments are only one category of actor, though an important one, among a more heterogeneous group of governors. The dynamics and evolution of globalization over time explain the emergence of complex governance in recent decades, an explanation that is complementary to those based on functionalism or domestic politics. Globalization alters actor incentive structures and reduces border effects, allowing nonstate and subnational actors to collaborate and reducing costs of participation in governance. Globalization has empowered actors: Emerging economies, INGOs, and MNCs. Globalization's future will continue to shape the prospects of complex governance.

Intergovernmental organizations and their member states enjoyed a transitory monopoly in global governance during a particular historical moment, when state hierarchies asserted their control over markets, internally and internationally. This Bretton Woods moment, in the decades after 1945, was an extension of the domestic regulatory state. Both before and after those decades, alternative forms of global governance emerged. During the interwar decades, networks and markets were embedded in private and hybrid modes of governing international monetary and financial affairs, cartels, and commercial arbitration. As liberalization encouraged by the Bretton Woods institutions expanded during the 1970s and 1980s, markets and networks resumed their earlier prominence in public and private governance. Economic globalization was a primary driver of this evolution in global governance, creating demand for governance as well as shaping supply.

Both critics and supporters of the existing international order equate American power and liberal norms with that order. This perspective inevitably awards a central role to the United States and its strategies in the creation and maintenance of a liberal global order. In some versions, the United States is the “indispensable nation”; any retrenchment of American power could fatally undermine the liberal international order. From this US-centric vantage point, rising powers, such as China, are often portrayed as free riding on American contributions that sustain the liberal order or, in more alarmist views, undermining that order through competing strategies, institutions or norms.

The assumption that US power and a liberal world order are closely linked also frames the maintenance of order as a supply-side problem: how can the architecture of global governance be maintained if US dominance declines and incentives for free riding grow? Rather than asking conventional questions about the supply of liberal governance in the absence of US power, however, the following analysis asks whether and where the demand for global liberal order originates in contemporary world politics. The argument proceeds in four parts, questioning the conventional equation of American power and a liberal world order at each step. First, liberal norms and principles are defined independently of US official preferences and policies. Second, the link between “indispensable” American power and liberal norms is questioned in three respects: Other societies played a role in creating and sustaining the post-1945 liberal order that is often ignored; some elements in that order were far from unalloyed embodiments of liberal norms; and the American variant of liberalism often failed to represent the spectrum of international liberal norms. The next section presents the emerging economies as embodiments of varieties of liberalism, an ideological spectrum that was substantially wider in the immediate post-1945 decades and now may widen again. The policies and normative allegiances of rising powers may redefine liberalism rather than challenging the liberal foundations of contemporary institutions. Finally, China represents a rising power that has accepted many existing global rules of the game without strong domestic normative anchors for supporting a liberal order. Whether a liberal international order can survive on the basis of Chinese interests rather than its normative alignment is a final, central question for the future of global institutions.

The world of the early twenty-first century displays both persistent attachments to territory and violent conflict over those territorial stakes. Even as interstate conflict has declined, many costly internal conflicts have taken on a territorial dimension. The persistence of territoriality and the conflict that it inspires run counter to one popular view of the consequences of growing globalization: capital, goods, and populations display increased mobility, and their detachment from territory should reduce the importance of conventional territorial boundaries. Globalization has produced changes in territoriality and the functions of borders, but it has eliminated neither. We do not live in a “borderless world” or one that has seen the “end of geography” (Ohmae 1990; O'Brien 1992). Conflict over territory continues in an increasingly integrated world.

Spanning the social sciences, the authors in this volume present converging investigations into the complex causal relations among territoriality, conflict, and globalization. The study of globalization and the persistence of ethnic conflict have stimulated an interest in borders of all kinds, questioning their permanence and defining the consequences when social and cultural identities do not coincide with political boundaries and territorial claims. The contributors display skepticism toward both an unreconstructed view of the sovereign territorial state and the competing claim that globalization has completely transformed the existing territorial regime. The modern territorial state is seen as one historically bounded exemplar of territoriality, rather than the defining expression of territorial rule.