ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces and critically analyzes three significant post-structural approaches that can inform the theory and practice of global governance: deconstruction, governmentality, and performativity. It draws out key themes that emerge from the critiques of global governance as a discourse that promotes a particular, sometimes exclusionary, vision of what politics "is". Discourses of global governance can be so fully reflective of a modernist, Western conception of politics that even in its most cosmopolitan manifestation, the agenda can resemble a re-production of the very hierarchies and problematics that global governance seeks to mitigate. A more direct critical focus of post-structural approaches has been to diagnose the linkages between global governance and a wider set of changes in advanced liberal societies associated with neoliberal government. The chapter argues that a focus on performance and performativity in global governance can provide an important and reflective space for engaging—and resisting—the contingent politics of global governance.
