1st Edition
Constructing Global Challenges in World Politics
This interdisciplinary book investigates the problematization of global challenges in world politics by analyzing what they are and how they come to be.
Offering a conceptual framework, including four modes of construction—universalizing, bundling, upscaling, and creating urgency—this book provides a heuristic method for understanding how the process of rendering an issue a “global challenge” unfolds. It examines the role of the global challenges discourse, which may either reinforce or challenge the dominant orders of world politics, such as the capitalist market-based system and the liberal international order. As a consequence, the global challenges discourse facilitates the emergence of new actors and policy fields.
The book will be of interest to students, academics, and practitioners of global governance, international organizations, and, more broadly, international political economy and international relations.
Part 1: Introduction
1. Global Challenges in World Politics and Their Modes of Construction
Alina Isakova, Malte Neuwinger, Robin Schulze Waltrup, and Oday Uraiqat
Part 2: Global Challenges avant la lettre: Historical Accounts
2. “Unequal Treaties”: Challenging International Order in the 1920s
Simon Hecke and James Stafford
3. “Japan” and the Global Challenge of Modernity. Constellations of Social-Scientific Discourses on Modernity in the Twentieth Century
Frank Meyhöfer and Benjamin Schiffl
Part 3: Global Challenges in the Discursive Arena
4. Practices of Global Challenging: A Historical Perspective and Preliminary Typology
Tobias Werron
5. Talking the Challenges Talk: Understanding the Global Challenges Discourse’s Multiple Meanings, or Lack Thereof
Malte Neuwinger
Part 4: Global Challenges, Nation-States and Multilevel Governance
6. States’ Framing of Mass Atrocity Crimes: From Introducing to Preserving the Responsibility to Protect
Jonas Fritzler
7. Constructing the Challenge of Governance in the Arctic: Colonial, Alliance, and Global Concerns across Time
Kathryn C. Lavelle
8. Upscaling climate change—Glocalizing governance
Tatiana Saraseko
Part 5: Global Challenges and International Organizations
9. Securitization, Expansion, Integration: Tracing Shifts in the UN’s Governance of Terrorism and Violent Extremism as a “Global Challenge”
Ann-Kathrin Rothermel
10. International Organizations and the Construction of Complex Global Security Challenges
Alina Isakova, Katerina Volkov, and Martin Koch
11. The OECD, Global Challenges, and Contestation of the Economic Growth Paradigm
Robin Schulze Waltrup
12. Global Challenges and Opportunities? Active Aging, Intergenerational Solidarity, and the Informal Care Nexus
Cansu Erdoğan
Part 6: Conclusion
13. Global Challenges, Global Contestations, and the Reproduction of Global Orders
Alina Isakova, Malte Neuwinger, Robin Schulze Waltrup, and Oday Uraiqat
Biography
Alina Isakova is a doctoral researcher with the Research Training Group “World Politics” at Bielefeld University, Germany.
Malte Neuwinger is a doctoral researcher with the Research Training Group “World Politics” at Bielefeld University, Germany.
Robin Schulze Waltrup is a postdoctoral researcher with the Research Training Group “World Politics” at Bielefeld University, Germany.
Oday Uraiqat is a doctoral researcher with the Research Training Group “World Politics” at Bielefeld University, Germany.
“In a world in which talk of global challenges abounds, inquiring into how these are constructed is necessary to understand how global authority structures are legitimized. The many rich contributions to this volume show how the notion of ‘global challenges’ represents a new mode of constructing objectivity by blending a sense of urgency and claims to universality together in areas where ongoing struggles for power and meaning in world politics intersect. Innovative and sophisticated, this volume should appeal to anyone interested in the hidden dynamics of power in world politics and global governance.”
Jens Bartelson, Lund University, Sweden
“German conceptual historian Reinhard Koselleck tells us that our future horizon is now filled by emergent crises rather than by hope of progress. Constructing Global Challenges in World Politics provides a thorough discussion of how stuff goes from being taken for granted to being global challenges, to being crises if left unsolved. Some will find it useful as an empirical exposure of hype, others as an abject lesson in how social construction actually works.”
Iver B. Neumann, author of Governing the Global Polity
“This engaging interdisciplinary volume breaks new ground by revealing how a multiplicity of actors engage in processes of universalizing, bundling, upscaling and creating urgency to achieve the improbable: the construction of a global challenge.”
Sigrid Quack, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and co-editor of Imagining Pathways for Global Cooperation
