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The global politics paradigm: guide to the future or only the recent past?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 December 2020

Robert O. Keohane
Robert O. Keohane*
Affiliation:
School of International and Public Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: rkeohane@princeton.edu
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Abstract

Michael Zürn's A Theory of Global Governance is a major theoretical statement. The first section of this essay summarizes Zürn's argument, pointing out that his Global Politics Paradigm views contestation as generated endogenously from the dilemmas and contradictions of reflexive authority relationships. Authoritative international institutions, he maintains, have difficulty maintaining their legitimacy in a world suffused with democratic values. The second section systematically compares Zürn's Global Politics Paradigm with both Realism and Cooperation Theory, arguing that the three paradigms have different scope conditions and are therefore as much complementary as competitive. The third section questions the relevance of Zürn's argument to contemporary reality. Great power conflict and authoritarian populism in formerly democratic countries generate existential threats to multilateralism and global institutions that are more serious than Zürn's legitimacy deficits.

Keywords

global governanceinternational institutionsConstructivismRealismcooperation theorymultilateralism
Type
Symposium: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation in Global Governance: Edited by Orfeo Fioretos and Jonas Tallberg
Information
International Theory , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 112 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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