ABSTRACT
While describing patterns of economic globalisation is relatively easy, coming to grips with its consequences is far more difficult. There is a broadly shared consensus that globalisation can be referred to as the proliferation of cross-border economic transactions including the distribution and exchange of tangible and intangible goods.1 In contrast to this widely accepted description of economic globalisation, often ambivalent conclusions are drawn about the effects of globalisation on governance capacities, that is the capacity to set, monitor, and enforce rules in internationalised environments. As stated in the introduction of the volume, premature obituaries for the state are at odds with empirical observations that see states maintaining or recapturing the capacity to guard their internal and external sovereignty. As a consequence, controversial statements in both observation and interpretation mirror this ambivalence in coping with the effects of internationalised patterns of exchange.
