Rightful Rules: Authority, Order, and the Foundations of Global Governance

TLDR

Global governance is a growing field, yet current research is overly state‑centric and relies on a formal‑legal conception of authority that limits enforcement to violence. The paper proposes a relational‑authority framework, grounded in social contract theory, to unify global governance across state, supranational, and private forms and outlines a research agenda. The relational‑authority concept is illustrated through three cases: U.S. hierarchy over Caribbean states, WTO authority over member states, and credit rating agencies over corporations and sovereign borrowers.

Abstract

Global governance is an important and increasingly popular topic of inquiry. Nonetheless, existing research remains too statist, privileging states and limiting other forms of governance to the interstices of state power. Drawing on social contract theory, I offer an alternative approach that begins with the central role of authority in political life and develops a synthetic understanding of governance that applies equally to its myriad forms. I argue that we have, as a discipline, relied on a formal-legal conception of authority that is inappropriate to an international setting and has unduly limited enforcement to violence. I propose that global governance and its many forms can be understood and unified by a concept of relational authority, which treats authority as a social contract in which a governor provides a political order of value to a community in exchange for compliance by the governed with the rules necessary to produce that order. This conception of relational authority is followed by three illustrations of its central logic in (i) state-to-state hierarchy by the United States over Caribbean states, (ii) supranational authority by the World Trade Organization over member states, and (iii) private authority by credit rating agencies over corporations and sovereign borrowers. The conclusion outlines the research agenda that follows from this approach.