Archive: Events of the Global Horizons Fellowship Programme

2024

5 December. GLOBAL HORIZONS CONVERSATION
Grounding Global Governance: Spaces, Scales, and Implications of Asymmetry
Seyram Avle, Christiaan De Beukelaer, Emrah Yıldız
This is an event of the Global Horizons Fellowship Programme.
By invitation only.
ABSTRACT:
Global governance is often predicated on the applicability of universal ideals, rules and regulations.
The production, implementation and contestation of specific policies and technologies that engender
the ‘global order,’ however, remain unevenly distributed and spatially bound–emblematized in the
taken for granted spatial division between a Global North and a Global South. To explore these
asymmetries and ground global governance, we offer a provocation: 'does global governance exist'?
We present some of the inevitable tensions that arise once we interrogate the promise of universal
ideals in global governance against their asymmetrical implementations across three areas of policy
design and social praxis: economic sanctions, maritime trade, and digital connectivity. Please join the
2024-2025 Global Horizons Fellows as they use these problem spaces to explore the tensions inherent
to the spatial and scalar asymmetries of global governance, and draw out the implications of such thinking
for our contemporary political predicament.

2 May, 10:15 a.m. PANEL DISCUSSION
Contested Temporalities of Governance: A Panel Discussion
Desiree Fields, Christina Garsten, Ulrik Jennische, Jennifer Mack, Dieter Plehwe, Michael J Watts
ABSTRACT:
The politics of global governance, regulation, and norm-setting are historical in two senses. First, they
emerge, are embedded and operate at particular historical moments or eras. Over the last several decades
this historical frame has been characterized variously as neoliberal and/or populist-authoritarian. The
questions of development theory and practice in the Global South, the ‘good governance’ agenda that
emerged in the 1990s and 2000s has been shaped by these historical forces.  The same can be said of
urban governance, green transitions, climate change, or immigration across the North Atlantic economies. 
Temporality is an important dimension of attempts at governing. Second, governance regimes, modalities
and instruments speak to different time horizons or temporalities: the electoral cycle, human lifetimes,
inter-generational, long-term sustainability or survival. These temporalities are often simply expressed in
terms of short, middle or long-term futures.  However, the intricacies of time and temporality in gover-
nance processes are too often taken for granted. Despite the apparent constancy and rigidity of time, the
pliability of time and temporality is integral to the politics of global norm-making, implementation and
resistance. To bring time and temporality more integrally into the understanding of contemporary forms
of governance, attention to perspectives on time amongst different agents, actors and constituencies: the
temporal thinking and practices of social categories of people and professionals – and to how these may
clash, collide, or complement each other – represents interesting and important avenues for research.
What temporalities may be observed amongst policy-makers, climate scientists, corporate leaders,
investors, architects, and local populations, and other groups of people that influence or are influence by
governance initiatives?  What can attention to time and temporalities bring to the study of governance?
What sorts of temporalities are at work among various forms of actually existing neoliberalism?  How
have the so-called crises of democracy associated with deepening authoritarianism and the weakening of
democratic guard-rails, shape and be shaped by, these different temporal logics? In this panel, we invite
discussions around these topics based on ongoing research.

This is an event of the Global Horizons Programme.
Please note that the event will be held in the Green Room/Library on the fourth floor of Linneanum.


2021

27 May, 2:15 p.m. WORKSHOP - WEB EVENT
Considering Governance: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Karin Bäckstrand, David Ciepley, Karsten Paerregaard, and Gyanendra Pandey
The workshop is organized as part of the Global Horizons Fellowship Programme.
About the workshop >>
Programme >>