ABSTRACT

This chapter highlights the increasing use of language of equality and inclusion in the United States and across global governance, with the attendant increasing recognition that gender, race, nationality, sexuality, religion, class, dis/ability, and a host of other factors matter in who governs, how governance works, and what constitutes the subject of governance. The chapter engages with key scholarly publications to show that, like their predecessors, contemporary instantiations of Western, liberal, democratic (“domestic” and “international”) governance rely heavily on both the violent othering of those “outside” and on rehearsed and repeated narratives of its superiority “inside.” It scrutinizes the seeming contradiction between the first two points: how is an era of increasing recognition of the “rights” of “diverse” people in government also an era of increasing violence towards them? It concludes by reflecting on what re-thinking democracy, government, and its subjects along this line means for the question of who is governed, and who does the governing in global politics, including the impossibility of global governance futures.