CANCELLED - Global Governance on the Ground

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This book launch is organised by the International Relations Working Group and the Robert Schuman Centre's project 'Europe in the World'.

How do international organizations govern new or crisis-ridden global issues? In her book, Nele Kortendiek argues that international organizations (IOs) not only govern through rules, standards, and numbers but also through practice on the ground. Through a close look at the case of migration and asylum, the book reconstruct how IOs govern global challenges in the spaces where they become acute. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the European external border, interviews at the headquarters of seven organizations—the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), and three humanitarian NGOs—as well as an extensive document analysis, the book demonstrates that field staff improvise to organise collective action on under-regulated issues. Headquarter staff consolidate and diffuse their improvised solutions across operations. Field and headquarter staff, who organize across organisational boundaries and levels, thereby exert considerable influence on the life choices of individual governance addressees and define how global issues are treated in practice. Against the background of the crisis of the multilateral order, the book offers new insights into how IOs informally govern global problems. It also offers important findings on the global governance of mixed migration.

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