Global Ordering: Institutions and Autonomy in a Changing World

Despite myriad global forces influencing the lives of individuals, societies, and polities, people continue to value their personal and communal independence. They insist on shaping the conditions of their existence to the fullest extent possible. This path-breaking book examines the institutions and organizations that mediate today’s increasingly complex relationship between globalization and autonomy.Many formal and informal institutions - from the World Trade Organization to transnational legal and financial regimes to new governance arrangements for aboriginal communities in environmentally sensitive regions - are evolving, adapting to meet new challenges, or failing to adjust rapidly enough. The globalization-autonomy metric helps to interpret such developments and to clarify their implications. Global Ordering convenes an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to re-imagine the circumstances under which integrative systemic forces may be aligned with irreducible commitments to individual and collective autonomy. Collectively, the authors of this innovative work map the new frontier of globalization studies.