How do actors claim political agency and under which circumstances are these claims likely to be recognized? These are the questions that Matthias Hofferberth and I tackle in a paper that has now been published in Historical Social Research. It is part of a Special Issue edited by Thomas Gehring and Johannes Marx on „The Emergence and Effects of Non-hierarchical Collective Agency„. I’ve written about the genesis of the paper here so this is just an update post. The full citation of the paper is: Hofferberth, Matthias; Lambach, Daniel (2023): Claims and Recognition: A Relational Approach to Agency in World…
Schlagwort: Agency
I’ll be at the 2023 Conference of the International Relations Section of the German Association for Political Research which is held this week in scenic Friedrichshafen, barring any Deutsche Bahn shenanigans. My schedule has become quite the thing: On Wednesday I’m a discussant on Panel A4 „Transnational Infrastructures and Global Order“, commenting on papers by Alke Jenss and Benjamin Schuetze, Jana Hönke, Marieluna Frank, as well as Joscha Abels and Leo Bieling. After that, I’ll be on Panel B2 „High Tech Politics: Technologie zwischen Global Governance und Großmachtkonkurrenz“, which I have co-organized alongside Maximilian Mayer. Kai Oppermann and I will…
Why do we have the kinds of actors in global politics that we have? States, international organizations, transnational corporations, civil society organizations, experts – all of these are well accepted without question. Just open a textbook or ask a political scientist and these entities will be mentioned. But why do we have these „global governors“ and not others? In the past, nobility had a similar kind of international agency and nobles were frequently called upon to mediate in inter-state disputes. Not any longer. Clearly, global political agency is something contingent and evolving. Matthias Hofferberth and I had started to think about…
In 2010, Deborah Avant, Martha Finnemore and Susan Sell coined the term „global governor“ to refer to „authorities who exercise power across borders for purposes of affecting policy“ (Who Governs the Globe?, p. 2). I’m not sure the term „authorities“ is the best one (I’d prefer „actors“) but the remainder of their book makes it clear that they are looking for authority in the legal sense but in the more practical one – a „global governor“ is an actor who gets a seat at the tables of global policy-making. The History and Future of Global Governors Who are the global…
As we are watching the results of the US midterm elections trickle in on our livefeeds (FiveThirtyEight for me; first impression: it’s looking better for the Democrats than expected), I am again reminded how Elon Musk urged his fans to vote Republican. Yesterday, I could only address this in parentheses and called it „ridiculous“ but I want to explain this a little more. My main point is not that Musk is a maverick daredevil who plays by own rules – from a historical perspective, Musk is not atypical for a particular class of businessmen that are gaining prominence again in…