ABSTRACT
Nowadays, severe problems of mankind are often referred to as ‘global challenges’. The framing of a certain problem as a global challenge takes powerful and resourceful discourse (or norm) entrepreneurs with organizational platforms. This chapter argues that these discourse entrepreneurs have risen disproportionally since the early 1970s, in response to a critical juncture of globalization during which the dominant spatialization of global entanglements was called into question and started to be renegotiated. The range of global environmental challenges seems ever expanding. The most obvious topic is climate change, that is dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system causing an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn leads to increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level. Today’s violent conflicts are mainly, but not exclusively, located in large parts of Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, and Southeast Asia.
