Global Governance Futures: Imperfect Utopias or Bust

About Global Governance Futures: Imperfect Utopias or Bust

Do our global governance systems have the capacity to effectively address the challenges we face as a civilization? What are the viable pathways towards a fairer, more sustainable and viable future? "Imperfect Utopias or Bust? Global Governance Futures" aims to present a space where these questions, and many more, can be addressed in a spirit of dialogue and exploration.

Publisher

Global Governance Futures

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 Sept 2020

Latest episode

26 Feb 2026

Latest episodes

55 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 Feb 2026

   Kathryn Sikkink - Human Rights, Evidence and Global Governance

   In this episode, we welcome Professor Kathryn Sikkink, one of the most influential scholars of human rights, transnational advocacy and global accountability. The conversation opens with her early encounters with dictatorship in Uruguay and a sustained challenge to familiar origin stories that locate human rights primarily in the 1970s. For Sikkink, Latin America is not a peripheral or late adopter but a formative site of treaty-making, institutional design and early litigation that helped constitute the international human rights project within global governance. We then trace the movement from advocacy to scholarship. Sikkink reflects on the sharp disjuncture she encountered within political science, where NGOs, civil society and human rights were largely absent from mainstream international relations teaching. This experience shaped Activists Beyond Borders and her enduring concern with how transnational advocacy networks operate across states, institutions and social movements. From there, the discussion turns to transitional justice and the Global Accountability research programme, including why early prosecutions prioritised certain crimes, how gender attentiveness emerged only belatedly and why attention to violence against women can generate spillover effects rather than crowding out other harms. A central theme is epistemic humility in an age of expanding data. Sikkink explains the “information paradox”, why improved reporting can make human rights performance appear worse and what this means for evaluating China and other contexts where information is actively suppressed. The episode closes with a defence of comparative realisation as an ethical stance, a rejection of end-times narratives and a grounded account of hope as an empirically informed practice within global governance rather than an act of optimism alone. Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Kathryn Sikkink’s profile can be found here: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/kathryn-sikkink We discussed: • Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century. Princeton University Press, 2017. • The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011. • The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance (with Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp). Cambridge University Press, 2013. • Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (with Margaret Keck). Cornell University Press, 1998.

2. 

   26 Feb 2026

   Andrew Lang - Power, Law and the Global Economy

   In this episode, we welcome Professor Andrew Lang (University of Edinburgh), a leading critical voice in international economic law and global political economy. Andrew’s work poses a deceptively simple but analytically demanding question: how do law and expertise make global markets possible, and what forms of power and inequality are sedimented within everyday technical decisions? Drawing on his influential scholarship on “global ungovernance” (co-authored with Deval Desai), the conversation examines how contemporary global governance operates through a conjunction of institution-building and managed instability. This is a mode of rule that incorporates critique, problematises its own foundations and keeps central objectives such as the “rule of law” or “sustainability” structurally open to revision. The discussion begins with Andrew’s formative engagement with the global justice movements of the early 2000s, and the enduring normative orientation they provided for his scholarship. We then turn to a core intervention in his work: the most consequential forms of expertise are often those that present themselves as technical and apolitical. These modes shape problem definitions, delineate what can be known or measured and determine whose knowledge carries authority within global governance. Joined by student questions, the conversation moves from the “impossibility of closure” to the implications of accountability, agency and ethical responsibility. We explore crisis as a governing strategy, alongside contemporary invocations of “polycrisis” and resilience. Particular attention is paid to technical domains, from carbon accounting standards to supply-chain sustainability metrics, which emerge not as peripheral details but as constitutive elements of the global political economy. The episode closes with a reflection on an unsettled moment in global order, one in which inherited assumptions have eroded, ethical questions can no longer be deferred and a new generation of scholars and practitioners must reconsider what it means to exercise international expertise. Andrew Lang is Professor of International Law and Global Governance at the University of Edinburgh. His research spans international economic law, global political economy and the politics of expertise, with particular emphasis on how legal and technical practices constitute markets and organise global economic life. Andrew Lang’s profile can be found here: https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/people/professor-andrew-lang We discussed: ‘Global disordering: Practices of reflexivity in global economic governance,’ European Journal of International Law. 2024. 35, 1, p. 1-47. ‘Introduction: Global Un-Governance,’ (with D. Desai), Transnational Legal Theory. 2020. 11, 3, p. 219-407.

3. 

   29 Jun 2025

   Simon Dalby - Fire, Planetary Crisis, and the Politics of Survival

   Professor Simon Dalby examines the combustible politics of the climate crisis, anthropogenic fire, and the urgent need to reimagine governance in the face of Earth system disruption in this interview.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

4.9 / 5

16 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 42 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

71

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.