This week we’re looking at global governance. What is it? Why does it matter? And what are its prospects in the word today?
Our world faces a growing set of challenges that transcend national borders - from climate change and pandemic threats to the governance of emerging technologies and the protection of public goods. Yet political authority and decision making remain overwhelmingly rooted in sovereign states. How, then, can global challenges be tackled effectively?
In this special episode, we turn to the concept of global governance - the institutions, norms, and practices through which collective action is coordinated beyond the nation state. Joining us is Professor Tom Pegram, Director of the UCL Global Governance Institute and Programme Director of the MSc in Global Governance and Ethics in the UCL Department of Political Science.
Tom recently delivered his inaugural lecture as Professor of Global Politics at UCL, titled “Crisis? What Crisis? Rethinking Global Governance Through the Lens of Crisis.” Drawing on that lecture and his wider body of work, this conversation ranges across his academic career and explores how moments of crisis, from financial shocks and pandemics to democratic backsliding and climate emergencies, both expose the limits of existing governance arrangements and create opportunities for innovation and reform.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:05] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're looking at global governance. What is it? Why does it matter? And what are its prospects in the world today?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Our world faces numerous challenges that transcend national borders: climate change, threats of pandemics, ensuring that new technologies serve the public good and many others. Yet government takes place very largely within sovereign states of which there are today approaching 200. So how can global challenges be tackled effectively? Well, an obvious answer is that global challenges require a global response. That takes us into the realm of what's often called global governance and researching global governance is the core remission of one of my esteemed colleagues here in the UCL Department of Political Science, Tom Pegram.
Tom is director of the UCL Global Governance Institute and Program Director for our MSc in Global Governance and Ethics. He has just given his inaugural lecture as Professor of Global Politics here at UCL on the topic of Rethinking Global Governance Through the Lens of Crisis. And I'm delighted that he joins me now for one of our occasional special episodes where we don't just look at one recent research publication but rather we explore across our guest's whole career.
So Tom, welcome back to UCL Uncovering Politics. Really great to see you and congratulations on your very fine inaugural lecture. So let's begin with the central concept for our conversation today. What is global governance?
[00:02:11] Tom Pegram: Well, thank you Alan, and a pleasure to be with you.
I mean, essentially global governance initially set itself up in opposition to international relations. In a way, it is what international relations doesn't cover. So at its broadest scale. James Rosenau, one of the pioneers of global governance in the 1990s, he really understood it as a sociology of global life, which is very broad scope, of course, but it does speak to something important in that global governance names the ways we organise collective life beyond the states.
But I mean, it has a, a rich heritage that goes far back, you know, back to at least the 1930s and maybe the 19th century. It, global governance speaks to a project which is not world government. It is not a, kind of a, a singular authority. It speaks to the messy ensemble of different institutions and rules and networks and norms which we might today associate with the United Nations of course, but back in the 1850s we might associate it with the International Postal Union and indeed colleagues like Craig Murphy, you know, they've spent some of their careers working on global governance in earlier eras.
But I suppose the important point to make is that global governance really has always fused a sort of analytical, functional, uh, element and a normative one, an aspirational, uh, project. So, I mean, the functional element is of course, as we've mentioned, that many would agree that there is a functional need for coordination when problems are transboundary. And climate change, perhaps it's the obvious example, we, but we could we could also speak about financial contagion, we could speak about pandemics. And so, you know, global governance, we could call it planetary governance, we could call it transnational coordination.
We can call it whatever we you want. But global governance is sort of the term that many of us have coalesced around to explore that functional question of how to coordinate, how to cooperate above the nation state on those sorts of problems. But then we also have the normativity and the normative aspect of global governance is this aspiration that we might be able to order the world in ways that better promote human and global non-human welfare. So, you know, in the context of ecological degradation, in the context of the potential for atomic warfare, those sorts of questions became very urgent, ethically urgent, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, and that legacy is still with us today.
So global governance is a curious puzzle because, of course, there is no coherent global architecture. As I said in the lecture, in a way, global governance is defined by a core conundrum, which is that we do not have institutions that match the planetary scale of the problems that we now encounter. And for many, the idea that we would be able to establish such an architecture seems implausible. But nevertheless, the imperative, is also always present in that those transboundary problems have a cause and effect, which no single nation state can actually grapple with.
It's a curious blend of the functional, the normative, and even perhaps the, the, the sort of, the mythical, you know, it opens up this question, an exciting question about what possible futures might look like, right? I mean, nation states have been with us since 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, they look very different today than they did in 1648. And who knows what the infrastructures or international affairs, diplomacy, global coordination will be in 2268.
[00:06:15] Alan Renwick: Great. Thank you. I'm intrigued to get more into those questions that you're pointing towards there, but just before we do so, you said right at the start there that this term was originally used in distinction to international relations.
Just, can you just clarify what is the difference there? So what I, I mean I, I guess listening to you, a lot of what you're describing under global governance there, I guess I would've thought of as being at least one aspect of international relations when international relations is taking place at a global scale. But what, what's the difference that we should observe?
[00:06:50] Tom Pegram: Yeah. So this is an ongoing debate within the discipline. Of course, you know, it's what think global governance really calls out something distinctive within the broader scope of the subject. Nation states remain predominant in terms of their capacity and their influence on global affairs. I think where global governance comes in is to highlight the fact that often these other actors, so international organisations, is an obvious place to look, but also transgovernmental regulatory networks, you know, these professional networks of judges and bureaucrats and many other actors that coordinate across national boundaries, to what extent do they exercise independent authority from government. And so trying to understand what are the sources and capacities of authority that exist within nation states, but also, sort of, beyond or around or working underneath nation states is one research agenda within that space.
But there are also localities within the global political arena where nation states are quite absent actually. You know, if you speak to colleagues who work on, say, private finance networks or who work on supply chain dynamics and productions. And, or scholars who work on say, the dark underbelly of global politics. So say, illegal trafficking in animals or drug trafficking. You begin to open up these other worlds. Those might be sort of more covert worlds, but these worlds that may be highly technical meta worlds where essentially infrastructures, politics are being conducted through complex exchanges among private actors with important implications for us, for those who are in a sense subject to the power of the global today, the globally governed, if you will.
So there is some contention as to where to, to sort of demarcate the boundaries between global governance and international relations. That is a productive tension. And I think it served a certain purpose in the 1990s when James Rosenau and others came into this space and said, look, we're really missing a trick here that there's a lot more activity occurring, uh, at beyond the purview of the nation state. And we need to be paying attention to that, particularly when it comes to, say, epistemic power, uh, the introduction of sort of new knowledge authorities, which it anything has become more personal today in the context of, the rise of big tech and artificial intelligence and so on.
Um, but you know, ultimately, I suppose it's not about suggesting that we study the nation state in international relations and then we isolate that from global governance, it's more trying to understand how these two domains actually coalesce how they come together. And that's particularly pertinent today where the state is often actually using these global networks, global private authorities to project state power through new mechanisms, new apparatuses, infrastructure. So there's some very interesting questions about how state authority is adapting, being transformed through the rise of these private global governors and actors.
[00:10:13] Alan Renwick: You've highlighted many, many questions in those answers that we can be exploring, uh, when we are looking at global governance. What for you are the kind of key animating questions that drive your own research and that you think we ought to be focusing on in research relating to global governance?
[00:10:31] Tom Pegram: Yeah. Well, perhaps just to pick up on that last thread there, I mean, one important question is to really try and understand how global governance is being reconfigured as in a way foundational global order itself is changing.
So when we think about ships in global order, we often think about distribution of power among major states in the system. And you know, there's a very big debate underway now on what is happening around the so-called liberal international order. Is there now a decline in US power? Is that decline secular?
So there are questions around how do we observe those tectonic shifts in major power, uh, distribution and global governance is part of that larger frame. You know, it basically, global governance itself is responsive to evolving with shifts in material power, shifts in ideological claims. So, you know, if we were having this conversation in the 1990s, few would've suggested that the liberal normativity that we associate with much of the structures of, of international governance were under threat. But today, many would suggest that the liberal order itself in terms of legitimation claims, so in terms of who gets to decide who actually whose, whose rules actually determine how, who, who participates, we have lots of sort of much more fundamental contestation occurring and that is happening within the structures and institutions that we might associate with global governance.
But I mean, there are deeper questions here around, um, reconfiguration, and here's where I might bring in, say, the work of Susan Strange, one of the foremost scholars of global economic governance through the 20th century, and her idea of structural power, this distinction between security, finance, production, and knowledge.
It's very interesting to look at how international order is shifting across those different domains in the context of geopolitical rivalry in the context of very powerful market actors who are engaged in restructuring dynamics. Those operating out of the Eastern markets, those operating out of the Western markets.
And of course also technological infrastructures that are often quite opaque and sort of invisible. But if we think about, say the internet, for example, you know, political geographers have been making this case for decades, for a very long time. But the materiality of politics as well, right? The submarine cables that ensure the interoperability of the worldwide web, I mean this, these are now highly political contested domains.
So that's, I suppose one, one question is how global governance interfaces with shifting international order projects, ordering projects, how is it actually, how are, how are global governance frameworks, understandings being deployed by very powerful social forces to pursue their own world ordering projects, to put it in, in those terms.
The other question, of course is, is, well, what happens then to global public goods questions, right? So how do we actually, within a concept of geopolitical rivalry, address questions of say, pandemic preparedness or climate action or international regulation of artificial intelligence and biotechnology. And again, you know, these are very complex questions and I suppose the fault lines at the moment are between those who would argue that we can only really aspire to a very minimalist kind of global governance 2.0 and these are conversations I've had with Michael Barnett, for example.
Versus those who argue that there are other world ordering projects now in view. So Adam Tooze has some very interesting work on China and what he's called, um, project power. I think China's approach to global governance is anything but minimalist. At least that's what we might extrapolate from how they're deploying project power domestically and also regionally through the Belt and Road Initiative and other platforms.
So there is a question of, you know, as we move towards mid twenty-first century and some of these trans boundary problems become more acute, how is this sort of inserted geopolitical rivalry going to address the gap between what some would regard as the necessity of global governance, some form of cooperation on those on those problems. And, you know, whether that is implausible or actually whether it's inevitable, which brings the normativity into view as well.
And I suppose the final question, just to, to nail that one down is, you know, are our governing assumptions, those assumptions that really in many ways encode global governance as a theoretical project, as a a functional project, as a normative project? Are they adequate to our world of planetary interdependence, you know, much of the global governance apparatus is informed by 20th century assumptions, whether that's rational choice, games theory, utilitarianism, there are, or, or even at the grander scale liberalism and modernity and questions of progress and linear linearity, causal linearity and, uh, assumptions around control and command and control dynamics.
So there's some very exciting scope there to, uh, I think begin to fertilise a conversation and to try and really grapple with, well, what is novel here and how do we actually respond to novelty from this place of, well, inheriting a legacy, a legacy project.
[00:16:33] Alan Renwick: Those final comments are really interesting because I was wondering, as I was listening to you there, how do we answer these questions? You know, they're such big questions, complex questions, questions to some extent about the future, which famously is hard to observe, um, questions that mix the empirical and the normative. But it's interesting though that you use words about having conversation about grappling rather than necessarily words about answering and reaching conclusions, is it that these are simply matters that we need to be constantly exploring rather than expecting that somehow we can get definitive final answers that, uh, that settle matters?
[00:17:13] Tom Pegram: Well, yes, I think global governance somewhat defies the quest for definitive answers. But I suppose my response would be, in light of many conversations that I have with colleagues across UCL, beyond, colleagues who work in international relations. But, you know, I've had a lot of great productive collaborations with colleagues working in health engineering architecture, many other domains.
Uh, I suppose on, in one response is to move to a more micro level and say, can we actually identify concrete interventions that, are viable that we can then begin to formalise using some of these legacy apparatuses and repertoires that were familiar to us. So I'm thinking, for example, in the climate change space, the work of my colleague, our colleague Lisa Vanhala on loss and damage, and that's a very concrete, um, pillar within the UN framework, convention on climate change.
There's an awful lot of activity occurring around that. It raises very important questions, uh, in terms of both the here and now. There are countries suffering immediate impacts of climate change. But of course it also does speak to, well, what are the future prospects here for corporation coordination looking out 40-50 years when climate impacts are likely to be much more severe, and the question of perhaps loss and damage becomes much more pressing.
Uh, at the moment, a lot of focus remains on mitigation of emissions, rightly so, but you know, one would imagine that loss and damage will begin to become much more in the foreground when it comes to climate response within the UN apparatus. And indeed it will become a major concern for the nation states.
Um, so we can work within those more demarcated domains and we can set certain parameters and there are functional questions that are very alive there. There are also obviously normative questions around justice, reparations, which are very alive there, and inequality and access to financing and so on. You know, these are, I think, very fertile spaces for empirical research, for analytical framing and so on. And then there are, there's the much bigger scope, which excites me, and it's something that I think students also really enjoy exploring.
Um, it's out, out of fashion, I would suggest now, in some ways to, to address questions of international order or global order even, or world order. But I think it's coming back in. I mean, in fact, I actually recently had a conversation with Thomas Biersteker at the Geneva Graduate Institute on this topic, and, you know, it was very much alive in the seventies, sixties, seventies, people like Robert Cox, people like Richard Falk, and I have a personal interest in excavating some of those projects because I think an awful lot of very valuable, rich exploratory work has already been done, actually.
You know, and some of it is, is definitely pushing boundaries In terms of essentially going back to first principles, what would a, what would, what would a, a world ordering project based upon deep pluralism of ethical political commitments actually look like? Can we engage in cross-cultural dialogue with colleagues in India, in, uh, you know, Southeast Asia and Africa, to arrive at some sorts of convergence at that common denominator position?
Um, I, I think these are very important questions that are still alive, but of course, also in some respects, as I said in the lecture, the, the value frames have shifted as well in the context of, of postmodernism and many of those very important debates, uh, which we also have to take into account. And also, of course, you know, the legacy of, um, colonialism, historical injustice and how that is playing out in these different theaters and, and whether we can really aspire to a world order project. But I would put the emphasis on, on pluralism and in deep pluralism, and whether that provides a productive entry point to, uh, a conversation along those lines.
[00:21:26] Alan Renwick: Yeah, no, I totally agree. We need to, we need the kind of specific concrete work, but we also need the big, the big picture, and we need to be asking these fundamental questions. Even if they're hard to answer, they're, they're, they're, they're vital questions to be pondering.
Yeah. Um, and I should mention that, um, listeners who want to hear more about Lisa Vanhala's work, uh, will be able to find an episode from just a couple of weeks ago when we explored her work on the governance of climate loss and damage.
Um, Tom, let's explore more about your own career, uh, in, in this area. You are asking these really vital questions today. How, how did you get into this area of research? Where did you start off and how did you, how did you get here?
[00:22:10] Tom Pegram: Well, yes. So I am a bit of a, an odd bird perhaps within, within the discipline. You know, I have a, I have eclectic interest and I always have, uh, my academic career began actually working on Latin America, working with human rights politics in Peru, um, and working particularly on the, on the role of human rights ombudsmen in that context. And that proved just an incredible stroke of luck to, to, to, to, uh, as, as an entry point into beginning this ascent to the heady altitudes of global governance.
Uh, I, I quickly discovered that these human rights ombudsmen were actually a global phenomenon, uh, one of the most prolific human rights institutions during this huge, incredible wave of human rights innovation in the 1990s. Uh, so I graduated to a, to a PhD or DPhil in comparative politics, again, looking at these human rights ombudsmen across Latin America. Now, I think the important thing perhaps to note there is that I was really, there was an awful lot of field work involved. I spent a lot of time actually, in a sense, embedded within these organisations, working very closely, um, observing these practitioners, going out to the field on missions.
Uh, so I, I got a real, I got a real sense of, of human rights work, uh, you know, on the coalface, so to speak. And I think it also was a very important political education for me because, you know, however wonderful our blueprints, our human rights principles, the UN UN declarations, you know, and, and goodness, there's an awful lot of value in all of that legal codification. Ultimately, what what matters is what happens when, you know, you go back home when you're on the ground in these sorts of contexts.
And so there's an, there's a, there's a fascinating process of translation occurring, which was very much part of my comparative work, looking at how human rights, international human rights norms, are translated into local settings. Why some norms gained traction in Peru, uh, and others do not, or why, you know, why human rights in say, Bolivia, become defined as popular rights. You know, so they have a more collectivist, uh, um, contextualisation in those settings.
But what really, what really, um, I think shifted my path was, I, I was just incredibly lucky. I, I, I, I was able to go to Harvard Law School as their first, and I believe only National Human Rights Institution fellow. So in 2008, I found myself, uh, at the law school in their human rights program, and I began working on UN procedures. And I, I was specifically looking at the work of these networks, human rights institutions within UN forums, which again, was absolutely fascinating because, I mean, the UN human rights machinery is, is a very sophisticated machinery. Uh, it is also one of the most intrusive, uh, international legal frameworks anywhere, uh, in terms of the ability of human rights mechanisms and actors to, in a sense, self authorise, uh, their ability to monitor and supervise, uh, state compliance with international human rights norms. So without going into great detail, that opened up a whole new horizon.
I, you know, I met an awful lot of UN officials, uh, working within this human rights space. I, I, I was involved in multi-level research projects around, say, the Convention Against Torture, which was both engaging at the UN level, but also actually drawing upon my resources and contacts in Latin America. Uh, and at the end of, um, of that fellowship, which also led to a couple of years at New York University, I really was much more within an international relations, human rights, global politics space, uh, and enjoying it very much, actually.
I did my undergraduate at Aberystwyth University in International Relations with Law a very long time ago. So it was kind of delightful to be back in on that terrain and also to be reading all of these wonderful professors, some of whom had taught me at Aberystwyth, Ken Booth, Andrew Linklater, some fantastic professors over there during the late nineties. So, um, yeah, so international relations. Uh, my first lectureship at Trinity College, Dublin, and then, I'm very fortunate to, to, to move to UCL two, three years later as a, a lecturer in global governance.
I suppose what I would say around that trajectory is, you know, global governance has never been an abstract affair for me. I've always been keen to try and concretise it, to bring it back to something real. And I think my human rights work, which continues, is a very important domain. Not only in terms of thinking through the, the functional question and the normative question of how do we actually implement, uh, human rights norms within political systems, how do, how do local actors, how can, how can local actors be enabled, empowered to mobilise around international human rights frameworks, but also, of course, human rights speaks to the much larger ethical questions which we've already begun to broach our questions around, well, can we aspire to some kind of intersubjective, ethical, shared, pragmatic framework, which can underpin cooperation, coordination across security, across finance, across health. So human rights in many ways becomes a sort of a normative anchor point for conversations occurring across different domains of global governments.
[00:28:18] Alan Renwick: And talking about normative anchor points, uh, in your inaugural lecture, your respondent talked about how you and he are, are both Buddhist and he suggested that, uh, this has been important in the shaping of your, uh, your research path and research career. How would you define that influence?
[00:28:39] Tom Pegram: Yes. I mean, it was a real pleasure to meet Craig Murphy and we were, we were, uh, introduced through a mutual friend as the only Buddhist that he knew, you know, in the international relations space. We've had many wonderful conversations. I would say that I'm, you know, I am, I, I, I approach Buddhism as an ethical and maybe analytical resource. I wouldn't necessarily say that it's an identity, uh, but it certainly has been an incredibly important, um, reservoir of insight for me. And there are many ways into that question.
I think the first point of departure would be just their approach to our relationship with the natural world. Uh, you know, I, I think that within the, the, the Buddhist understanding the notion of separation, which is very much as embedded in liberal modernity in, in the Western understanding, that, that that is just, that that is not part their ethical understanding. So if we think about the very famous Vietnamese Buddhist Thích Nhất Hạnh and his, his concept of inter being, it is this idea that we are absolutely entangled, enmeshed part of the natural world, and that we need to essentially find ways to, to, to, to live, to, to work with the world as we find it, as opposed to try and control it, to try and resist it.
And at a deeper level and at a sort of more ethical, personal level, I suppose, you know, the first Buddhist precept is essentially about dropping reactivity. You know, it, uh, it's about, it's about taming the, what they call the monkey mind. It's about not moving to action immediately, you know, perhaps pausing, taking a breath, not not being, um, subject to our habitual reactions because, well, we do need to, we do need to find new ways to, uh, I, I think through these problems, that the ways that we are thinking may actually be complicit in some of the trouble that we now encounter in the world.
So, you know, trying to, trying to drop the reactivity, trying to have some individual sovereignty in the face of challenge, I think is important. And not only that, from that place of, of, of responsiveness and responsibility. The Buddhists also talk about the noble eightfold path. You know, then the idea of right speech, right action, right efforts. These are very simple ethical frames that obviously have resonance in other traditions too, we can think about the Beatitudes in, uh, in, in, in Christianity, you know, so in some respects these just speak to deeply held, pragmatic shared frameworks or how we can actually rub along together peaceably one would hope.
Um, but yes, I mean, ultimately Buddhism is a fundamentally ethical argument, at least in the doctrine. Obviously Buddhism itself has spawn many, uh, political projects and so on and, and the, and, um, those have not always, um, observed the, the, the, the precepts. But this notion of do not kill, do not harm the living world, it's not bad, a bad norm for, uh, thinking about planetary governance in within the Anthropocene. I think Buddhism does feel very relevant today actually. Um, it, it, it speaks to these deep ethical imperatives.
And I suppose the other point I would make, and this, this, this is related to the, to, to the inaugural lecture, and so the closing remarks on my, I work with the students on, on the podcast global Governance Futures is, I think in many ways Buddhism does orientate us towards really reflecting on the quality of our relationships. What is the integrity of my relationship to my, to the people around me, to the natural world? I think this is a very important question and one which is worth reflecting on throughout our lives.
[00:33:05] Alan Renwick: Mm, fascinating. Thank you, Tom. It's, um, we don't often talk about, uh, the relationship between religion and faith and, uh, our academic endeavours, but it can be really fundamental and, uh, very important. So thank you. Um, let's talk about the state of global governance in the world today. Um, it doesn't feel very healthy. Is that fair?
[00:33:35] Tom Pegram: I think that is fair. You know, uh, it, it, it seems to me that the starting point for that conversation has to be a, a sober reckoning with the fact that the geopolitical landscape is, is unfavourable today. And that many of the assumptions, and again, I think we need to be careful here in terms locating some of some of those assumptions, perhaps, uh, you know, to liberal Western capitals. But many of those assumptions around what we might call the liberal script, uh, are difficult to sustain.
And I've already mentioned Susan Strange and her notion of structural power, but yes, I mean, if we think about the drivers of that instability, you know, we have this shift in material power that is clearly occurring, right? And if we looked at the economic domain, particularly China is running very large surpluses. That stands in contrast to most of the economies in the West today.
We have fragmentation in ideology and we might think about that in terms of actual world ordering projects, so if we talk about the liberal international order we might contrast that with other ordering projects, whether they be, say, status. So we might associate that with Russia and, the entrenchment of national sovereignty and claims to national prerogative, sovereign prerogative.
We might think about civilisational projects, which might be more associated with the terminology of, um, a Chinese officialdom, you know, the Chinese government is quite comfortable using more civilisational language. What are the implications there for geopolitics, for ordering projects for global governance? Very interesting questions. And that speaks to a project I'm currently engaged on with colleagues at Chinese universities and very interesting questions around how states are engaged in strategic use of legitimation and delegitimation practices.
And within a realist frame, so people like Daniel Drezner and others would probably frame that as a question of revisionist strategies. So how do counter hegemonic actors, so those say, non aligned with, I guess, the United States, how would they contest American power through knowledge claims, through normative, ethical, contestation, um, act.
[00:36:19] Alan Renwick: Can you make that just a little bit more concrete, Tom? I'm just, uh, I'm conscious that some listeners will find it a little bit difficult to grasp some of the concepts here when you're talking about these kinds of legitimation claims. Can, can you give us a kind of concrete example of the sort sort of thing that's at stake there?
[00:36:35] Tom Pegram: Sure. Yeah. So I think a very good place to look is the United Nations, right? So we have a US discourse now, which is really actually foregrounded in kind of an America first rhetoric. Which, which plays well with some other governments as well of course, right? So sovereigntism first. So legitimacy, in that context, we might associate with the autonomy of national governments from international constraints.
Now, interestingly, and again, this is where questions of strategy come in, China in recently, uh, indeed, very recently launched its global governance initiative in September of this year, 2025, and one could read that as a direct contestation of the American position in that, while China certainly subscribes to the sovereignty forward, I think that's the language I've, I've heard, approach, they also very much, um, privileged the United Nations as the platform for international coordination and cooperation. They, they regard the United Nations as absolutely vital. At least that is the rhetoric within many different initiatives that the Chinese government is unrolling at the international level.
So legitimacy there is much more informed by notions, I suppose, of, um, sovereign equality, very important, um, particularly in the Global South, uh, questions of development first. Um, uh, you know, so they would, they would really privilege development as, as a, as, as kind of the, the key hinge of cooperation as opposed to security, for example.
Um, and so we have this interesting divergence convergence, and of course these are not monolithic either within the, what we might call the Western block, obviously there are important distinctions to be drawn between say, the European Union and the United States in this context. And indeed within the eastern, so-called Eastern block, again, very important distinctions to be drawn between, say the Japanese position, the Chinese position, and so on. All of those tensions are very productive for my research of legitimation and de legitimation practices. Is that helpful?
[00:39:11] Alan Renwick: Yeah, no, that's really helpful. Thank you. And, uh, alas, we're coming close to the end of our time, uh, but, but uh, before we do, so it would be really interesting to hear a little bit more about what you were just going onto there in terms of your own current research agenda. So what are the questions that you're asking now and, and what research are you doing on those?
[00:39:31] Tom Pegram: Yeah, so as you might have gathered, I have a lot of projects on the go. You know, everything is fascinating. I do have a book project that I am keen to advance. And, uh, you know, the book really asks a, a deceptively simple question, but one which I think has large consequences for, for the global governance debate, which is what, what comes after global governance?
Um, is it helpful to even speak in terms of after global governance? And my premise is that global governance is not disappearing. Uh, you know, perhaps a certain form of global governance is, is on the wane, uh, what we might regard as a neoliberal global governance project, one that we might associate with US unipolarity and that very unusual historical conjuncture, that moment of the 1990s, which I think in retrospect will be seen as historically very, um, idiosyncratic.
Um, but global governance itself will persist. Um, quite the, the, the, the, the politics of ordering the functional necessity of, say, trade, the normativity of dealing with questions of vulnerability and justice, they're not going anywhere. So there is a, there's a very, you know, I think it's a very, um, generative, uh, question there to, to think through how global governance is going to be reshaped, remolded through new grammars of order, if you will. So new logics of ordering for a world that is coming into view and a world which is going to have to deal with very old problems like geopolitical rivalry among nation states, which you know, are very old logics of anarchy and rivalry with, with very powerful, destructive potential. So those, those are vital concerns for a global governance project in a world of nuclear weapons, in a world of automated artificial intelligence weapons systems.
But of course, we also have these new products like AI, like biotech, uh, which are interfacing and weaving in with the old problem in all sorts of curious ways. And again, you know, the implication there then for scholars such as myself, is how is global governance being reconfigured? And it may not be being reconfigured by the usual suspects. It may also be that we need to bring into view, you know, the, the engineers, the, those individuals who are engaged in world order projects, but would not necessarily identify themselves as engaged in a political practice. So, you know, I, I think the obvious examples are those working on, say back, the back of the engine room of algorithm design within big, the big tech industry. You know, how are they themselves, uh, implicated in new global governance, global ordering projects.
And I suppose the, uh, the other project, which is very much on my mind at the moment, the collaboration with Professor Simon Dalby, is this notion of planetary governance.
[00:42:50] Alan Renwick: Hmm.
[00:42:52] Tom Pegram: Some would argue that in some ways global governance, the conceptual frame should be retired. That it's just, it's very tired and it's been tarnished by the, the sort of the neoliberal gloss, if you will, of the 1990s. Um, I'm not so convinced by that actually, but I do think planetary governance, uh, as a framework for thinking about politics within what we might regard as, as actual concrete crises that we are confronting when it comes to ecological degradation, when it comes to exponential pollution, when it comes to, um, you know, rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans and so on. Um, I, I think planetary governance does speak to the very real limits of some of our inherited government governance models, uh, as we confront the, the finite limits of the Earth's systems.
Now again, this is, this is, this is all contestable, uh, and it's a very exciting debate at the moment and one which can get very theoretical as well. Some very exciting work on questions of entanglements in international relations. Questions of complexity. How do we actually understand causality in, in a context of our systems, uh, where there are so many variables, right?
To think about, say, chaos theory and the butterfly effect. So very exciting, more esoteric spaces to explore. But on a very concrete level, you know, it, it foregrounds these questions that are absolutely front and center at UN negotiations, which are, well, how are the material infrastructures of industrial civilisation, energy finance, digital systems are very large data centers and so on, how are they functioning in a way as de facto geoengineering sites themselves? And it's, it raises very important normative questions in terms of, well, whose order within a planetary context, whose authority, uh, defines that order and whose survival is prioritised?
[00:45:06] Alan Renwick: Gosh, Tom. I could happily keep talking about this with you all day. You, there's such big and important questions and you bring such insight and raise so many points that I wouldn't have thought of ever. Um, but sadly, we are out of time. So perhaps we can, uh, have you back onto the podcast, uh, to talk further about planetary governance, uh, as you take that project further forward. And there's definitely more for us to explore there.
But thank you Tom, so much for a really great conversation today.
[00:45:36] Tom Pegram: Well, thank you Alan. I've really enjoyed it.
[00:45:39] Alan Renwick: Great to have you on. The recording of Tom's inaugural lecture called Crisis? What Crisis? Rethinking Global Governance Through The Lens of Crisis is available now through the UCL Department of Political Science YouTube channel. And we'll make sure that the link is in the show notes for this episode.
Next week we will be looking at ideas for democratic reform in the UK and how likely it is that such changes will actually come about. To make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use, and while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.
I am Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.