Constructing ‘Global Governance’: Approaches to the Technologies, Networks, Processes, and Sites of Transnational Law and Politics. AAA Annual Meeting 20-24 Nov, 2013, Chicago.
For submission to the Association of Legal and Political Anthropology (APLA), AAA Annual Meeting 20-24 Nov, 2013, Chicago Send abstracts as soon as possible (and before April 15th, 2013) to Alexander Orona (orona@un.org) and Matthew Canfield (matt.canfield@nyu.edu).
A panel is being organized for the AAA conferences which interrogates anthropological issues related to transnational legal and political processes, often referred to as ‘global governance’ by some scholars. We invite interested scholars to send an abstract and a brief note explaining their interest.
WORKING ABSTRACT
Over the last several decades, new forms of regulation and governance have emerged within international and domestic institutions in response to the political and economic changes wrought by globalization. These political and legal innovations—which include, the use of numerical indicators, the creation of “soft law” based on best practices, multi-stakeholder consultations, and voluntary industry standards—seek to develop norms that span across geographic scales and ‘private’ and ‘public’ domains. Facilitated by contemporary digital technologies, these innovations have engendered a reorganization of global political space. Political scientists have termed these disparate technologies and practices “global governance.” This panel examines how these new processes are constitutive of new social and political economic formations. Drawing on recent research on “global assemblages” (Collier and Ong 2005), this panel asks: what does global governance mean as an object of anthropological study? How do these new technologies engender new transnational legal cultures and social relations?
