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AGORA III in Oslo
AGORA III Statehood, Sovereignty, and Global Governance
The AGORA network organizes a workshop on “Statehood, Sovereignty, and Global Governance” in
Workshop Theme
The last two decades of research on globalization has produced important insights about how global flows of material and symbolic resources have made the world smaller and shaped national societies in significant ways. A central part of this research has concerned the emergence and institutionalization of global-level prescriptions – advanced by non-state actors – about how states should govern. In re-conceptualizing international politics as global politics, dominant ideas about states as always and necessarily dominant has been challenged, enabling a shift in focus from the problem of order to the problem of governance, and towards an exploration of authority beyond the state. There are merits in these claims, but they are poorly equipped to account for the role that state governments had in responding to the financial crisis of 2008-2009; how conceptions of statehood found in emerging economies such as China are impacting on the global south; how states fund and cooperate with non-state actors that can advance their interests; how purportedly non-statist global norms – such as human security – are defined in ways that make states their ultimate guarantor; and how state representatives are central to allegedly non-statist transnational regulatory and expert networks. Thus, the re-conceptualization from international politics to global politics and the empirical focus on non-state actors has come at a price.
This is in part, it seems, because political scientists tend to define the state through a set of distinctions that sets it apart from its environment, the three most important ones being state-market, state-society, and domestic-international (inside-outside). Claims about the strength, functioning, and autonomy of the state under conditions of globalization have thus been produced mainly through studies whose primary focus has not been on the state, but on its environment. The “bringing the state back in” literature from the 1980s certainly made an important contribution in terms of highlighting the centrality of the state, but it seems necessary to refine theoretical tools and to re-assess empirical claims under conditions of globalization
The motivation for this workshop is that without conceptual tools that can grasp how the state is perceived as distinct from other entities yet inherently shaped by and implicated in them, empirical analyses of statehood and globalization will overlook how the state is central to global governance yet significantly transformed by it. The workshop invites papers that span different disciplines (political science, sociology, anthropology, law). Papers that address the following issues are of particular interest:
- Conceptual and theoretical discussion of the state and state sovereignty under conditions of globalization
- Empirical studies that deal directly with boundaries between the state and other actors, and the state and other spheres (i.e. market, society), including how conceptions of governance (effectiveness etc) are at stake in these processes.
- Empirical studies of the anatomy and operations of transnational regulatory network comprising both state and non-state actors (revolving door phenomenon between domestic-international, for example)
Organization
The third AGORA workshop is hosted by the Centre for Global Governance at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and will be held in
We especially encourage proposals that are related to article-length or book-length scholarly research projects. We encourage applications from early career scholars. The workshop will dedicate one hour to each participant's work: 5 minutes for presentation, 10 minutes of critical analysis by an assigned discussant, and 45 minutes for open discussion. The entire workshop will be two days in length.
About AGORA
AGORA is a worldwide network of scholarly institutes dedicated to the development of policy-relevant work on pressing global governance issues. It is co-sponsored by
Application process
Proposals should be no more than two pages in length and are due by June 1.st Please include a brief CV attached to your 2-page proposal. Decisions will be made by June 10th and applicants will be notified by email. Please send applications to
Funding for travel/accomodation
Participants’ airfare (economy fare) and accommodation plus a workshop dinner will be covered by AGORA.