Mapping the Emerging Hybrid World Order: How Global Governance Networks and Regimes Interact with Shifting Inter-State Hierarchies in Shaping Global Policies

Anne-Marie Slaughter (2004) convincingly argued that we live in a 'New World Order'. Our world is no longer governed exclusively by relations that unitary nation states entertain. Transnational networks of a plurality of actors from disaggregated states have become a central element of global governance. As a result, those actors' domestic and international decisions are to a considerable degree affected by influences that are conveyed by membership in transnational networks – outside of international and national hierarchies. While this has been recognized as an increasingly important phenomenon for some time, recent studies demonstrate the increasing pervasiveness of these relations and structures in world politics. Complex regime structures that connect nation-states transnationally are central in a wide variety of policy areas. Yet, while we have substantial empirical information about many networks and regimes, what is lacking is a systematic understanding or model of processes and dynamics. Moreover, these developments take place within the enduring inter-state hierarchies and the ongoing global redistribution of power. How the increasing multipolarity and shifting international balance-of-power overlap, interact with or contradict the increasingly dense global/transnational networks is also not thoroughly understood. Therefore, our workshop focuses on two closely related questions: First, how mechanisms of dynamic political interaction between and within the governance of domestic politics and transnational networks systematically affect policy outcomes. Furthermore, it is directed to the second question, how increasing multipolarity and transnational networks interact in shaping global politics.