New special issue on global ungovernance
Mon 7 December 2020
Dr Deval Desai and Prof Andrew Lang have edited a new special edition of ‘Transnational Legal Theory,’ in which the articles develop, draw on, and are informed by the concept of ‘global ungovernance.’
Desai and Lang describe ungovernance as a novel set of practices that operate in the context of certain transnational institution-building projects. These projects – like building “markets”, or “the rule of law” - pursue big visions with claims to universality, and at the same time offer no adequate institutional prescriptions. Operating within this gap, ungovernance practices simultaneously pursue “closure” – or try to match institutional structures with these big visions – and embrace its impossibility. They argue that these practices can thus be distinguished from others which try to arrange closure and its impossibility – for example, those which learn from failures in institution-building projects to develop new and better practices. Ungovernance practices instead function to facilitate collective action by diverse groups of stakeholders within these particular and contentious institution-building projects.
The participants in the special issue use global ungovernance as a launching point to explore several different topics, including climate governance, legal reform, peacebuilding, and transitional justice.
The special issue includes several articles from Edinburgh Law School-affiliated academics:
- Introduction: global ungovernance (Deval Desai and Andrew Lang)
- ‘A new normative architecture’ – risk and resilience as routines of un-governance (Dimitri Van Den Meerssche and Geoff Gordon)
- ‘It’s law Jim, but not as we know it’: the public law techniques of ungovernance (Christine Bell)
- The ungovernance of peace: transitional processes in contemporary conflictscapes (Jan Pospisil)
- States of failure? Ungovernance and the project of state-building in Palestine under the Oslo regime (Michelle Burgis-Kasthala)
The special issue was developed as part of the Global Ungovernance Workshop, which was held at Edinburgh Law School in May 2019, where scholars from around the globe came together to explore contemporary modes and spaces of ungovernance.