Governing the World Addressing 'Problems Without Passports' [Paperback]

Problems posed by Syria s chemical weapons attacks, Egypt s ouster of an elected government, and myriad other global dilemmas beg the question of whether and how the world can be governed. The challenge is addressing what former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Problems without Passports environmental, economic, humanitarian, and political crises that threaten stability, prosperity, and even human survival. Everything is globalized everything except politics, which remain imprisoned behind national borders. The world has changed, but our basic way of managing it has not. We pursue fitful, tactical, short-term, and local responses for actual or looming threats that require sustained, strategic, longer-run, and global actions. With clarity and passion, Thomas G. Weiss argues for a diversity of organizational arrangements some centralized, some decentralized and a plurality of problem-solving strategies some worldwide, some local. He proposes a three-pronged strategy: the expansion of the formidable amount of practical global governance that already exists, the harnessing of political and economic possibilities opened by the communications revolution, and the recommitment by states to a fundamental revamping of the United Nations. Tom Weiss's book is published in the International Studies Intensives (ISI) series which is addressed at students and intended to offer an intensive introduction to subjects often left out of the curriculum. [I]t achieves this objective, and more, by providing an introduction to the state of the field of International Relations (IR) studies and helpful bibliographic leads for more intensive reading. As a survey book, Governing the World? amply illustrates the ever increasing chasm between pressing global problems and the woefully inadequate institutions charged with resolving them.
ACUNS Review


Governing the World? is a sure-footed guide to the perplexities of governing globalization. When problems comelL