Research project
Re-imagining Impartiality in Global Governance beyond (Liberal) Hegemony
The project interrogates the relationship between impartiality and power and asks whether impartiality as a cornerstone of global governance can – and ought to – be re-envisioned in the context of changing global governance power relations.
- Duration
- 2024 - 2030
- Contact
- Andrea Warnecke
- Funding
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Starting Grant NWO
- Partners
Impartiality, or to be precise, the successful performance of impartiality is one of the necessary preconditions for collaborative action in global crisis governance. Criticisms of the impartiality claims of actors such as the UN, regional, and nongovernmental organizations are neither new, nor is scepticism concerning the integrity of the impartiality claims of global governors unjustified. What distinguishes contemporary critiques from those of previous periods, however, is the degree to which they are shared by actors previously associated with the core of the global liberal order and underpinned by a reconfiguration of global power relationships. The present project thus interrogates whether impartiality as a cornerstone of global governance can – and ought to – be re-envisioned independently of liberal hegemony in the context of changing global power relations.
- Understand and situate the impartiality claims of actors in global governance in the context of debates on liberal world order and power challenges within it.
- Analyse the impartiality claims of select organizations at the centre and periphery of liberal hegemony to trace their changing normative content and social performance.
- Explore new theoretical avenues for thinking through impartiality, international organizations, global governance, and contemporary challenges to liberal order in conversation with decolonial and critical literatures.
- Develop new policy responses in conversation with intergovernmental, non-governmental, and government actors in the context of changing liberal order and the recalibration of international organizations.
The study treats impartiality as a contingent concept that is suffused with power and subject to reinterpretations. It analyses the changing performances of impartiality and their contestation in up to four organizations whose context conditions differ at least in part from the distribution of social, political, and economic capital prevalent among central institutions of global governance (Council of Europe, African Peace and Security Mechanism, OSCE, and ASEAN’s Conflict Management Framework). The project utilizes a mix of historical process tracing, archival research, and qualitative interviews to scrutinize the evolving normative content and social performance of impartiality and their re-negotiation and contestation in particular instances of crisis.