Locating (New) Materialist Characters and Processes in Global Governance

This contribution probes A Theory of Global Governance from a materialist perspective. I focus on three forms of materialisms that have played a significant role in social theory as well as International Relations theory: the materialisms of markets, of artefacts, and of embodied affects. Integrating these materialisms serves to unsettle the conceptualization of global governance and of the politics of authority, legitimacy, and contestation underpinning it. A materialist perspective moves the theory of global governance towards a focus on processes instead of institutions, allowing it to capture both the multiple forms of global governance and their increasingly rapidly shifting forms. The contribution is anchored in a discussion of the global governance of cyber-security.