AGORA III Statehood, Sovereignty, and Global Governance

The AGORA network organizes a workshop on “Statehood, Sovereignty, and Global Governance” in Oslo , Norway, August 31-September 1^st 2011.

Workshop Theme

The last two decades of research on globalization has produced important insights about how global flows of material and symbolic resources have made the world smaller and shaped national societies in significant ways. A central part of this research has concerned the emergence and institutionalization of global-level prescriptions – advanced by non-state actors – about how states should govern. In re-conceptualizing international politics as global politics, dominant ideas about states as always and necessarily dominant has been challenged, enabling a shift in focus from the problem of order to the problem of governance, and towards an exploration of authority beyond the state. There are merits in these claims, but they are poorly equipped to account for the role that state governments had in responding to the financial crisis of 2008-2009; how conceptions of statehood found in emerging economies such as China are impacting on the global south; how states fund and cooperate with non-state actors that can advance their interests; how purportedly non-statist global norms – such as human security – are defined in ways that make states their ultimate guarantor; and how state representatives are central to allegedly non-statist transnational regulatory and expert networks. Thus, the re-conceptualization from international politics to global politics and the empirical focus on non-state actors has come at a price.

This is in part, it seems, because political scientists tend to define the state through a set of distinctions that sets it apart from its environment, the three most important ones being state-market, state-society, and domestic-international (inside-outside). Claims about the strength, functioning, and autonomy of the state under conditions of globalization have thus been produced mainly through studies whose primary focus has not been on the state, but on its environment. The “bringing the state back in” literature from the 1980s certainly made an important contribution in terms of highlighting the centrality of the state, but it seems necessary to refine theoretical tools and to re-assess empirical claims under conditions of globalization

The motivation for this workshop is that without conceptual tools that can grasp how the state is perceived as distinct from other entities yet inherently shaped by and implicated in them, empirical analyses of statehood and globalization will overlook how the state is central to global governance yet significantly transformed by it. The workshop invites papers that span different disciplines (political science, sociology, anthropology, law). Papers that address the following issues are of particular interest:

- Conceptual and theoretical discussion of the state and state sovereignty under conditions of globalization

- Empirical studies that deal directly with boundaries between the state and other actors, and the state and other spheres (i.e. market, society), including how conceptions of governance (effectiveness etc) are at stake in these processes.

- Empirical studies of the anatomy and operations of transnational regulatory network comprising both state and non-state actors (revolving door phenomenon between domestic-international, for example)

Organization

The third AGORA workshop is hosted by the Centre for Global Governance at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and will be held in Oslo , Norway, on August 31-Sept 1, 2011. The workshop is limited to a maximum of 10 presenters and is intended to be an interactive and friendly environment in which participants will receive constructive feedback on their work in progress.

We especially encourage proposals that are related to article-length or book-length scholarly research projects. We encourage applications from early career scholars. The workshop will dedicate one hour to each participant's work: 5 minutes for presentation, 10 minutes of critical analysis by an assigned discussant, and 45 minutes for open discussion. The entire workshop will be two days in length.

About AGORA

AGORA is a worldwide network of scholarly institutes dedicated to the development of policy-relevant work on pressing global governance issues. It is co-sponsored by Griffith University ( Brisbane , Australia), the Copenhagen Business School ( Copenhagen , Denmark) the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs ( Oslo , Norway), the Watson Institute at Brown University ( Providence , Rhode Island , USA) and the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security & Law at the University of Texas ( Austin , Texas , USA).

Application process

Proposals should be no more than two pages in length and are due by June 1.^st Please include a brief CV attached to your 2-page proposal. Decisions will be made by June 10^th and applicants will be notified by email. Please send applications to Ole Jacob Sending (ojs@nupi.no) and Leonard Seabrooke (ls.dbp@cbs.dk).

Funding for travel/accomodation

Participants’ airfare (economy fare) and accommodation plus a workshop dinner will be covered by AGORA.

In 2009 the Centre for the Study for Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR) at the University of Warwick held its first Warwick Manuscript Development (WMD) workshop with first-time authors, discussants with single-authored book experience, and publishers. In the sessions the discussants provided their thoughts on a book proposal and introductory chapter from the authors, acting as a reviewer for an established academic press and raising questions of the audience for the book, its market, and what could obviously be improved. 

WMD III returns to CSGR this April 7th and 8th 2011.

CSGR is covering the dinner and accommodation costs for participants for the Thursday night. All costs will be covered for the discussants. The authors pay their own travel and any additional costs that may be necessary. The event in the last two last years has been a stimulating ego-free zone that provided first-time authors with a lot of feedback and also provided more senior colleagues with a lot of insight into the business of academic publishing. WMD III promises a repeat of these positive experiences.

The WMD sessions are open to all authors in the fields of International Relations and International Political Economy. Interested first-time authors should write to Professor Leonard Seabrooke: ls.dbp@cbs.dk