NEW YORK, NY - The United Nations
Global governance may sound like a something out of a conspiracy theorists handbook, or some kind of new world order or global government solution geared up by global elitists to handle today’s growing international conflicts, but it’s not. Global governance deals with the interaction, action and inaction of international political actors and non-governmental institutions, like the United Nations. These institutions have goals that are aimed at regulating behaviors and actions within sovereign nation states and regions when those behaviors and actions have a direct impact on more than one state or region, especially when there is no power of enforcing compliance or regulation. Global governance or world governance is a response to the acceleration of globalization and the interdependencies that the world has. Global governance defines the elaboration and collaboration between nation states and regions of regulations within the same global scale.
Our current form of global governance, mainly organized by the institutions like the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the World Trade Organization and other various international non-governmental actors, are used as affective tools in many regions with regard to the economy, peace, security and conflict resolution. However they are equally ineffective in other regions for the same reasons. This is mainly due to the instability and weak structure of our growing and changing global world. True global governance is only possible when all states within a region abide by the same international laws or regulations that the institution has set. Today we have several rogue nations with extremist regimes at the helm, like Iran and North Korea for example, that cannot be expected or trusted to follow the laws and regulations that have been set by the international community. In fact many of our world conflicts have started because those rouge states have not abided by many of those regulations due to the political ambitions or objectives of that nation’s regime.
World conflicts have changed drastically in form and intensity since the boom of globalization. The main parties within the United Nations who have the right of veto are more or less responsible for most of arms sales throughout the world. Proposals for governance of peace, security and conflict resolution should really begin by addressing ways to prevent the causes of these conflicts, whether they are economic, social, religious, political or territorial. Instead of a reactive approach to world conflicts, these global governing bodies should start to take a more proactive approach to world issues.
In the past our system of global governance has had its main challenges with the actions or in-actions of nation states in regards to territorial boundaries or land disputes, the world economy, globalization, human rights, war, etc. Today the institutions of global governance have new challenges to face such as terrorism and the increase of weapons of mass destruction within rouge nation states. These issues are much more complex to deal with because they often are not associated with sovereign nation states that can be sanctioned or regulated. Many of these threats are orchestrated by non-governmental organizations or groups of extremist non-political actors like theTaliban, al-Qa’ida, Hezbollah, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and so on (International Summit on Democracy).
Sovereign nations, like the United States may be able to make a great impact in the world today, but as the world continues to experience an increase in the evolution of the human society and globalization, only the strengths achieved through the international collaboration of several nation states and non-political institutions will be able to handle the new global crisis and developing threats.