For several decades after International Relations (IR) became a fully-fledged field of study at British and American universities, it worked with a relatively simple conceptualisation of ‘politics’ as such. In the international context, ‘politics’ involved an ongoing struggle for power among sovereign states, with war the worst-case outcome of this struggle. Power itself was defined essentially in terms of military and economic ‘capabilities’. The fundamental structural condition of international anarchy meant that, in the absence of the kinds of constraints upon conflict that operate within states, only such crude mechanisms as a balance of power, or fragile institutions such as diplomacy or international law, served to impose some degree of order upon the system as a whole. While the Cold War brought an additional, ideological dimension to this struggle for power, in other respects it also simplified it by making it bipolar. Hence although much more was seen to be at stake in this contest than, for example, the nineteenth-century struggle for power in Europe, which gave the Cold War confrontation a zero-sum quality, the nature of the political processes at work was conceptualised in relatively straightforward terms. The ‘high politics’ of the global strategic contest between the superpowers not only transcended the ‘low politics’ of issues such as trade, they subsumed and gave a particular shape to numerous lesser conflicts in the Third World, which were frequently characterised as Cold War ‘proxies’.

Globalisation is not what it used to be. Earlier debates over how to read the indicators of economic liberalisation and the impact of technological expansion have now been joined by the increasingly pressing need to explore the social, environmental and political aspects of global change. Earlier discussions emphasised a number of dichotomies within the international political economy – open/closed, state/market and so on. These have proved limited in their ability to inform explanations of change under conditions of globalisation. To these we must now add what we might call the ‘governance from above’, ‘resistance from below’ dichotomy as a popular metaphor for understanding order and change in international relations under conditions of globalisation. But this new binary axis is in many ways as unsatisfactory as those that went before. It too can obscure as much as it reveals in terms of understanding the normative possibilities of reforming globalisation. In this article we wish to suggest that there is perhaps a more useful way of thinking about politics and the changing contours of political life in the contemporary global order. This approach blurs the distinction between governance and resistance by emphasising an ethical take on globalisation.

If we assume that the state has no ontological status apart from the many and varied practices that bring it into being, then the state is an artefact of a continual process of reproduction that performatively constitutes its identity. The inscription of boundaries, the articulation of coherence, and the identification of threats to its sense of self can be located in and driven by the official discourses of government. But they can equally be located in and driven by the cultural discourses of the community, and represented in sites as ‘unofficial’ as art, film and literature. While such cultural locations are often taken to be the sites of resistance to practices of government, their oppositional character is neither intrinsic nor guaranteed. Indeed, states have often engaged in or benefited from practices of cultural governance. As Michael Shapiro argues, cultural governance involves support for diverse genres of expression to constitute and legitimise practices of sovereignty, while restricting or preventing those representations that challenge sovereignty. In this sense, cultural governance is a set of historical practices of representation – involving the state but never fully controlled by the state – in which the struggle for the state's identity is located.

This is a study of legitimacy in a global order, not legitimacy of the global order. It explores the challenging issue of what legitimacy might mean within such a context, and on what basis that order could develop its own principles of legitimacy. Its purpose is to garner further insights into the nature of contemporary global governance, and resistance to it, inasmuch as the latter is widely deemed to be symptomatic of the legitimacy crisis at its heart. A multitude of writers, working from quite different perspectives, is in agreement that it is this lack of legitimacy that threatens the very fabric of the order. Indeed, it is common to regard the emergence of concerns about the declining legitimacy of any system as itself indicative of some kind of failure within it: the concept tends to be associated with the ‘politics of crisis’. Accordingly, we are most likely to ask questions about the legitimacy of a system only when things appear to be going wrong. If this is so, legitimacy provides a vital key to understanding the tensions within the contemporary global order.

The notion of democracy has been invoked in the past decade by both opponents and proponents of global governance. Many in the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement have underlined the inherently unaccountable, opaque and unrepresentative nature of global governance, whilst those more sympathetic to the pluralising dynamics of the phenomenon have emphasised the potentially democratic aspects of this new form of rule, especially with reference to the incorporation of a putative ‘global civil society’ into the structures of global governance and the accompanying diversification of sources of international political authority. Yet both critics and advocates also tend to agree that there are two basic challenges to (on some accounts, causes of) global governance: the global capitalist market and the concomitant system of sovereign states. The disjunctures generated by the operation of these two structures of power, so both liberal defenders of global governance and their radical, anti-capitalist contenders argue, have created the conditions for decentralised, multilateral mechanisms of socioeconomic and political management of world affairs, that is, ‘global governance’. It therefore seems that the question on both sides of this divide, is not so much whether to do away with transnational, multilateral forms of political authority altogether (although that is certainly one aim in some quarters of the anti-globalisation movement) but rather, how to render these democratic, that is, how to democratise global governance.

This article highlights two of the most influential normative perspectives upon the ethical character of global civil society in Anglo-American political thought. These are considered under the headings of liberal cosmopolitanism and subalternist radicalism. Within international political theory, the main alternative to cosmopolitan arguments is usually regarded as provided by moral theories that invoke the continuing significance of national boundaries in relation to political community. The rivalry between cosmopolitan convictions and nationalist ethics is deeply entrenched within Anglo-American thinking. As a result, international political theory seems to throw up a fundamentally antinomian choice: either we possess overriding duties and obligations to others, irrespective of our nationhood; or the borders of a settled nation-state substantially define our sense of political identity and justify a marked ethical partiality towards our fellow nationals. Such is the hold of this antinomy upon the Western political imagination, it seems, that alternative conceptions of the relationship between territory, community and ethicality have been neglected or dismissed as unduly heterodox. Given the continuing purchase of this dualistic approach on international political ethics, the recovery and normative evaluation of various alternatives is a task of some intellectual importance.

‘Given the success of Naomi Klein with her book No Logo and Noreena Hertz's The Silent Takeover, can we infer from this that feminists are finding themselves in the limelight of the anti-globalisation movement?’ With this question a reporter of the Dutch magazine Op Gelijke Voet approached me about two years ago.

Talk of human rights is, currently, nearly as ubiquitous as talk of globalisation. While globalisation has been described as ‘the most over used and under specified term in the international policy sciences since the end of the Cold War’, the same could reasonably be said of ‘human rights’. Human rights are a product of the immediate aftermath of World War II, and thus they developed, in their contemporary form, in the context of the Cold War. The philosophical and political roots of human rights, of course, date back at least to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and some would say even further, to the Stoics of Ancient Greece. Globalisation, too, has unfolded mainly in the late twentieth-century and has reached a position of prominence in the post-Cold War context; at this juncture, and according to popular perception, the spread of market capitalism, Western culture and modern technology fit comfortably with the death of socialism and the ‘end of history’. But globalisation too has roots that date back much earlier – as early as, it has been argued, the fourteenth century.

The impoverishment of mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially as it is practised in the bastions of academic power and respectability in the United States, can be registered in terms of its wilful and continuing conceptual blindness to mutually constitutive relations of governance/resistance at work in the production of global politics. This has been underscored in recent years by the rise of powerful transnational social movements seeking to reform or transform global capitalism, a coalition of coalitions recently reincarnated in the form of a global peace movement opposing the blatantly neo-imperial turn in US foreign policy. As the essays in this Special Issue attest, critical scholars of world politics have developed conceptual vocabularies with which to (re-)construct, from various analytical-political perspectives, aspects of these governance/resistance relations. My task in this article is to argue that – under historical circumstances of capitalist modernity – a dialectical understanding of class-based powers is necessary, if by no means sufficient, for understanding social powers more generally, and issues of global governance and resistance which implicate those powers. Although it is not without its tensions and limitations, I have found re-envisionings of Marxian political theory inspired by Western Marxism – and in particular by interpretations of Antonio Gramsci – to be enabling for such a project. Marxian theory provides critical leverage for understanding the structures and dynamics of capitalism, its integral if complex relationship to the modern form of state, the class-based powers it enables and the resistances these engender; and Gramsci's rich if eternally inchoate legacy suggests a conceptual vocabulary for a transformative politics in which a variety of anti-capitalist movements might coalesce in order to produce any number of future possible worlds whose very possibility is occluded by capitalism. In the present context of globalising capitalism and neo-imperialism, such resistance has taken the form of a transnational confluence of movements for global justice and peace.

We find ourselves amidst an explosion of literature about how our worlds are being fundamentally changed (or not) through processes that have come to be clumped under the vague title of ‘globalisation’. As we wander our way through this literature, we might find ourselves – with others – feeling perplexed and anxious about the loss of a clear sense of what politics is, where it happens, what it is about, and what we need to know to understand and engage in it. This in turn leads many of us to contribute to a slightly smaller literature, such as this Special Issue, seeking to theorise how the space and character of politics might be changing, and how we might adapt our research strategies to accommodate these changes and maintain the confidence that we, and the disciplines we contribute to, still have relevant things to say about international politics. While this is not a difficult thing to claim, and it is not difficult to find others to reassure us that it is true, I want to suggest here that it is worth lingering a little longer in our anxiety than might be comfortable. I suggest this because it seems to me that there is, or at least should be, more on the table than we're yet grappling with. In particular, I argue here that any attempt to theorise the political today needs to take into account not only that the character and space of politics are changing, but that the way we study or theorise it – not only the subjects of our study but the very kind of knowledge we produce, and for whom – may need to change as well. As many others have argued, the project of progressive politics these days is not especially clear. It no longer seems safe to assume, for example, that the capture of the state or the establishment of benign forms of global governance should be our primary object. However, just as the project of progressive politics is in question, so is the role of knowledge, and knowledge production, under contemporary circumstances. I think there are possibilities embedded in explicitly engaging these questions together that are far from realisation. There are also serious dangers in trying to separate them, or assume the one while engaging the other, however ‘obvious’ the answers to one or the other may appear to be. Simultaneous with theorising the political ‘out there’ in the international must be an engagement with the politics of theorising ‘in here,’ in academic contexts. My project here is to explore how this challenge might be taken up in the contemporary study of politics, particularly in relation to emerging forms of political practice, such as those developed by activists in a variety of contexts. My argument is for an approach to theorising the political that shifts the disciplinary assumptions about for what purpose and for whom we should we produce knowledge in contemporary times, through an emphasis on the strategic knowledges produced through political practice. Such an approach would potentially provide us with understandings of contemporary political institutions and practices that are both more incisive and more enabling than can be produced through more familiarly disciplined approaches.