ABSTRACT
In an era marked by shifting boundaries, relocated authorities, weakened states, and proliferating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) at local, provincial, national, transnational, international, and global levels of community, the time has come to confront the insufficiency of our ways of thinking, talking, and writing about government. And this imperative is all the greater because the dynamics of change, the shrinking of social, economic, and political distances, and the focus on the inherent weaknesses of the United Nations – to mention only the more conspicuous sources – have led to a surge of concern for a still amorphous entity called “global governance.” Welcome as this new focus is, however, it suffers from a reliance on artifacts of the very past beyond which it seeks to move. While myriad books, journals, and study commissions have debated what such an entity involves and whether there are any prospects for its realization,2 such inquiries are plagued by a lack of conceptual tools appropriate to the task of sorting out the underpinnings of political processes sustained by altered borders, redirected legitimacy sentiments, impaired or paralyzed governments, and new identities.
