Globalization is moving fast, impacting on the life of all nations with accelerating force. In this new study Ronnie Lipschutz shows how it is being handled by specific groups seeking positive outcomes for the people and causes they represent. Globalization, Governmentality and Global Politics details how the widespread failure of states and corporations to regulate the impact of increased globalization has given rise to non-governmental organizations and movements, aiming to influence corporations regarding social responsibilities and address key issues such as human rights, environmental destruction, unhealthy working conditions and child labour. Assessing the effectiveness of these efforts, it examines both the new movements and the issues they are tackling. With three key case studies on the clothing industry, sustainable forestry and corporate social responsibility, it explores the tensions between politics and management, examining the theoretical implications of regulation for politics, citizenship and the state. Finally, it takes a fresh look at what is to be done, calling for a return to politics centred on the direct participation of the individual in the social choices that affect quality of life, working conditions and the global future.

This book examines global governance through Foucaultian notions of governmentality and security, as well as the complex intersections between the two. The volume explores how Foucault's understanding of the general economy of power in modern society allows us to consider the connection of two broad possible dynamics: the global governmentalization of security and the securitization of global governance. If Foucault's work on governmentality and security has found resonance in IR scholarship in recent years it is in large part due to his understanding of how these forms of power must necessarily take into account the management of circulation that, in seeking to maximize ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ circulatory flows, brings into play and problematizes the 'inside'/'outside' upon which domestic and international spaces have been traditionally understood. Indeed, Foucault introduces a set of conceptual tools that can inform our analyses of globalization, global governance and security in ways that have been left largely unexplored in the discipline of IR. Miguel de Larrinaga is Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa where he has been teaching since 2002. Marc G. Doucet is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Saint Mary’s University.

Lipschutz evaluates the widespread failure of states and corporations to regulate the worrying impacts of increased globalisation and the influence and role of social activists and movements.

Global Governmentality extends Foucault's political thought towards international studies, exploring the governance of the global, the international, the regional and many other extra-domestic spaces.

In 'Globalization Under Construction' the authors attempt to discern in the disparateness of contemporary events an emerging pattern of governmentality, techniques of governance & assemblages of intersecting arguments about the history of the present & the nature of the future that our present portends.

For many commentators, global civil society is revolutionising our approach to global politics, as new non-state-based and border-free expressions of political community challenge territorial sovereignty as the exclusive basis for political community and identity. This challenge 'from below' to the nation-state system is increasingly seen as promising nothing less than a reconstruction, or a re-imagination, of world politics itself. Whether in terms of the democratisation of the institutions of global governance, the spread of human rights across the world, or the emergence of a global citizenry in a worldwide public sphere, global civil society is understood by many to provide the agency necessary for these hoped-for transformations. Global Civil Society asks whether this idea is such a qualitatively new phenomenon after all; whether the transformation of the nation-state system is actually within its reach; and what some of the drawbacks might be.

Globalization is part of the fabric of our everyday lives. And yet we often view it as a threat to our identities, or even our very survival. This study offers a radically new vision of this phenomenon, one which goes completely against the way it is interpreted by neo-liberals or the anti-globalization movement.