Complex Rule in Global Governance: Open Institutions, Fragmented Social Movements

In International Relations (IR), the idea that international organizations (IOs) are “opening-up” is almost uncontested: NGOs and transnational advocacy networks (TANs) currently have greater access to IOs than ever before. Despite these growing opportunities, the TANs born out of the Global Justice Movement bemoan their fragmentation, and remain too disoriented to organize another mass movement, even if they perceive their adversaries like the World Bank Group (WBG) with the same contempt as in earlier years. In this article I reconstruct how the massive and strategic transnational social movement against the WBG disintegrated after its peak in the 1990s, and morphed into a small, professionalized TAN that has been incorporated into the institutional operations of the IO it once battled. However, this development can neither be explained by prominent theories of global governance nor by the literature focused on social movements. Drawing from Boltanski’s work, I argue that the “opening-up” of global governance can be attributed to a constellation of “complex rule”— namely, an institutionalized structure of super- and subordination that produces forms of fragmentation of resistance. In turn, I propose operationalizing Boltanski’s abstract theoretical concepts in order to better grasp the concrete mechanisms of complex rule in empirically observable practices and, in this way, to reconfigure contemporary approaches to the study of “global governance”.