Global Governance in a Multiplex World

Abstract

Despite paying attention to a growing number of actors and agents, the literature on global governance remain remarkably traditional and Western-centric. Much of it still revolves around the existing multilateral system created under U.S. hegemony after World War II. In this paper, I propose a new understanding of studying global governance that reflects recent and ongoing global economic and political shifts. To this end, in the place of the traditional conception of a liberal world order within which the mainstream literature on global governance has been anchored, this paper employs the idea of a “Multiplex World”. Unlike the former, the idea of a Multiplex World envisions a more pluralistic and diversified architecture of global governance shaped by a proliferation of transnational challenges, diffusion of new ideas, and expansion of actors and processes that lie at the center of global governance. A Multiplex World better captures the ongoing fragmentation of global governance, which in turn reflects a growing demand for new principles and approaches that cannot be accommodated by a simple extension of the existing but fading international order dominated by the US or the multilateral institutions it created. The concept of global governance, argues this paper, must come to terms with an emerging realities of the Multiplex World.