In his chapter “New Thinking About Global Governance in an Intermestic World,” author Professor W. Andy Knight looks at the failings of the past in order to prescribe solutions for more effective global governance in the future. He points out that the state of the world since the cold war has become more globalized and disordered. These forces have led to increasing wealth disparity, competition over resources, and social conflict.
International governing organizations were designed after WWII to address issues like these, problems that are too big for any one nation to solve, yet Knight points out that they have been ineffective. Knight links this failure to the very nature of the institutions. They have not evolved with the times and are stuck in the past, operating under a model that doesn’t apply to our current context. The chapter looks at history since WWII and notes how quickly many things have changed.
“In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been approximately 93 conflicts around the world in which over 5.5 million people were killed—75% of them being civilians (Keating and Knight 2004, pp. 1–4).5 Almost all of these conflicts were intra-state, thus explaining the disproportionate number of civilian casualties” (Knight, 2022, p. 50)
WWII itself and the Cold War had a huge impact on the globe. Beyond this, the last 76 years have seemed to represent a sort of shrinkage of time and space. The distance between places is shortened as travel becomes faster, safer, and more accessible. Likewise, the time between major events and innovations has become shorter and shorter. In such a dynamic world, how could a static model of global governance succeed? There have been enormous ideological, socio-political, economic, and technological changes, yet the model for global governance has not evolved.
To conceptualize global governance for contemporary times, Knight proposes a shift away from problem-solving, and towards a critical theory approach. He suggests that it is necessary to move away from the idea of a simple hierarchy and one central authority and look toward a multifaceted, multicentric model of governance.
Complex questions of sovereignty, nation status, and societal and cultural context would be able to be addressed more effectively in a newer model. Knight emphasized the tight link between foreign policy and domestic policy, and how decisions made abroad can affect aspects of life like the domestic economy. The interwoven web of geopolitical machinations is both complex and delicate. It requires a similarly dynamic system to govern it.