James Brassett

The politics of legitimate global governance

ABSTRACT Legitimacy is an important question to ask of the theory and practice of global governance. In this introduction, we make two propositions that are used to push thinking about these issues forward. Firstly, in analytical terms we outline a spectrum between legitimacy and legitimization which is aimed to capture the diverse set of approaches to this subject and to develop an engaged and reformist attitude that refuses the either-or distinction in favour of a methodologically pluralist logic of ‘both and’. Secondly, in political terms, we argue that discussions of legitimate global governance in both policy and academic circles can carry a ‘Trojan horse’ quality whereby the ambiguity of the term might allow a point of intervention for more ambitious ethical objectives.

Introduction: An Agenda for Resilience Research in Politics and International Relations

During the fallout from the Boston bombings in April 2013, the city’s mayor highlighted the resilience shown by the people of Boston. He celebrated the fact that Boston was a ‘resilient city’ that would bounce back (Menino, 2013). Numerous media commentaries, blog posts and online memorials picked up this theme of resilience to articulate a range of positive attributes that individuals/Boston/America had exhibited. They had been brave, quick thinking, a strong community and yet, at the same time, calm and able to follow instructions from the security forces that amassed and co-operated. Resilience, it seems, carried both popular appeal and policy relevance in a manner that allowed security objectives to shift, adapt, and – according to media narrative – move quickly in relation to the event, the perpetrators and the political challenges that were arising.

Security and the performative politics of resilience: Critical infrastructure protection and humanitarian emergency preparedness

This article critically examines the performative politics of resilience in the context of the current UK Civil Contingencies (UKCC) agenda. It places resilience within a wider politics of (in)security that seeks to govern risk by folding uncertainty into everyday practices that plan for, pre-empt, and imagine extreme events. Moving beyond existing diagnoses of resilience based either on ecological adaptation or neoliberal governmentality, we develop a performative approach that highlights the instability, contingency, and ambiguity within attempts to govern uncertainties. This performative politics of resilience is investigated via two case studies that explore 1) critical national infrastructure protection and 2) humanitarian emergency preparedness. By drawing attention to the particularities of how resilient knowledge is performed and what it does in diverse contexts, we repoliticize resilience as an ongoing, incomplete, and potentially self-undermining discourse.

The political economy of the subprime crisis: the economics, politics and ethics of response

Media and policy discourses on the subprime crisis and the ensuing credit crunch have been dominated by historical analogies, whereby a sense of how bad things have been since the autumn of 2007 arises from comparing the situation directly to other notable moments of financial meltdown. Typical of this approach is the measured insistence of the Chair of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, that the spiral of illiquidity which engulfed the banking sector in September 2008 provided the most serious threat of systematic bank collapses since the Great Depression. Such constructions are clearly not without justification. Commercial banks have been nationalised at a rate unprecedented in recent memory; the once seemingly omnipresent giant US investment banks have failed to survive in their extant form; the UK has witnessed its first genuine run-on-the-bank dynamics since the middle of the nineteenth century; the interest rate spread between inter-bank lending and government bonds has reached record highs almost worldwide; and the drying up of mortgage lending has led to record annual falls in house prices in many countries. However, as an explanatory device, inference by historical analogy alone places unnecessary and unhelpful restrictions on attempts to understand how events surrounding the sub-prime crisis and its associated credit crunch have unfolded.

Deliberation and global civil society: agency, arena, affect

The article provides a critical analysis of the role and function of global civil society within deliberative approaches to global governance. It critiques a common view that global civil society can/should act as an agent for democratising global governance and seeks to explore the importance of global civil society as an arena of deliberation. This more reconstructive aim is supplemented by an empirically focused discussion of the affective dimensions of global civil society, in general, and the increasingly important use of film, in particular. Ultimately, this then yields an image of the deliberative politics of global civil society that is more reflective of the differences, ambiguities and contests that pervade its discourses about global governance. This is presented as a quality that debates about deliberative global governance might learn from as well as speak to.

Building the normative dimension(s) of a global polity

Globalisation is not what it used to be. Earlier debates over how to read the indicators of economic liberalisation and the impact of technological expansion have now been joined by the increasingly pressing need to explore the social, environmental and political aspects of global change. Earlier discussions emphasised a number of dichotomies within the international political economy – open/closed, state/market and so on. These have proved limited in their ability to inform explanations of change under conditions of globalisation. To these we must now add what we might call the ‘governance from above’, ‘resistance from below’ dichotomy as a popular metaphor for understanding order and change in international relations under conditions of globalisation. But this new binary axis is in many ways as unsatisfactory as those that went before. It too can obscure as much as it reveals in terms of understanding the normative possibilities of reforming globalisation. In this article we wish to suggest that there is perhaps a more useful way of thinking about politics and the changing contours of political life in the contemporary global order. This approach blurs the distinction between governance and resistance by emphasising an ethical take on globalisation.

Private experiments in global governance: primary commodity roundtables and the politics of deliberation

Emerging scholarship on global governance offers ever-more detailed analyses of private regulatory regimes. These regimes aim to regulate some area of social activity without a mandate from, or participation of, states or international organizations. While there are numerous empirical studies of these regimes, the normative theoretical literature has arguably struggled to keep pace with such developments. This is unfortunate, as the proliferation of private regulatory regimes raises important issues about legitimacy in global governance. The aim of this paper is to address some of these issues by elaborating a theoretical framework that can orientate normative investigation of these schemes. It does this through turning to the idea of experimentalist governance. It is argued that experimentalism can provide an important and provocative set of insights about the processes and logics of emerging governance schemes. The critical purchase of this theory is illustrated through an application to the case of primary commodities roundtables, part of ongoing attempts by NGOs, producers, and buyers to set sustainability criteria for commodity production across a range of sectors. The idea of experimentalist governance, we argue, can lend much needed theoretical structure to debates about the normative legitimacy of private regulatory regimes.

A Pragmatic Approach to the Tobin Tax Campaign: The Politics of Sentimental Education

The article provides a critical analysis of the campaign for a Tobin Tax. A popular view that global civil society can act as an agent for ethics is interrogated by appeal to the dilemmas and political contests which pervade the campaign. Problems with financial and institutional universalism undermine any unambiguous ethical appeal in the Tobin Tax by imposing a set of limits on thinkable avenues of reform. However, and drawing on the philosophical pragmatism of Richard Rorty, it is argued that the campaign can be celebrated for its role in ongoing practices of ‘sentimental education’. By illustrating the harm that financial markets cause, the Tobin Tax involves larger, more diverse, audiences in a conversation about global finance; technical and sentimental discourses blur. Moreover, those very contests that pervade the campaign can act to interrupt the totalizing aspects of the proposal, thus making alternatives thinkable. Engaging the ‘politics of sentimental education’, in this way, allows a contingent celebration of what is ethically useful in the Tobin Tax, while leaving an area of contest that is potentially antithetical. Rather than plump for an either/ or position, the difficult, but ethical, challenge is to do both-and. The article concludes by suggesting how this ‘politics of sentimental education’ might bear upon existing knowledge about the theory and practice of global civil society.

Crisis is Governance: Sub-prime, the Traumatic Event, and Bare Life

This article provides a critical analysis of how discourses of trauma and the traumatic event constituted the ethico-political possibilities and limits of the sub-prime crisis. Metaphors of a “financial tsunami” and pervasive media focus on emotional “responses” such as fear, anger and blame constituted the sub-prime crisis as a singular, traumatic “event” demanding particular (humanitarian) responses. Drawing upon the work of Giorgio Agamben, we render this constituted logic of event and response in terms of the securing of sovereign power and the concomitant production of bare life; the savers and homeowners who became “helpless victims” in need of rescue. Using Agambens recent arguments about “the apparatus” and processes of subjectification and de-subjectification, we illustrate this theoretical approach by addressing the position of the British economy, bankers and homeowners. On this view, it was the movement between subject positions—from safe to vulnerable, from entrepreneurial to greedy, from victim to survivor—that marked out the effective manner of governance during the sub-prime crisis. In the process sovereign categories of financial citizenship, asset-based welfare and securitisation (which many would posit as the very problem) were confirmed as central to our future “survival”. In short, (the way that the) crisis (was constituted) is governance.

The Politics of Resilience from a Practitioner's Perspective: An Interview with Helen Braithwaite OBE

Helen Braithwaite was appointed to the Resilience and Emergencies Division of the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) in February 2011. She is responsible for the Central area which covers 15 Local Resilience Forums. Prior to this Helen was the Head of the West Midlands Regional Resilience team. Helen has also worked for West Mercia Police in specialist operations and in the emergency planning departments of Hereford and Worcester County Council and Worcestershire County Council. In 2000 Helen was seconded to the Home Office and then Cabinet Office to lead the consultation process on new civil contingencies legislation, which resulted in the Civil Contingencies Act. Helen was awarded an OBE in June 2011.