Philip G. Cerny
Philip G. Cerny is Professor Emeritus of Politics and Global Affairs at the University of Manchester and Rutgers University-Newark. He was educated at Kenyon College, Sciences Po (Paris) and the University of Manchester, where he received his Ph.D. in 1976. He has also taught at the Universities of York and Leeds, and has been a visiting scholar or professor at Harvard University, Sciences Po (Paris), Dartmouth College, New York University and the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Politics of Grandeur: Ideological Aspects of de Gaulle’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press 1980; French translation 1984), The Changing Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency and the Future of the State (Sage 1990) and Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (Oxford Univeristy Press 2010), and he has been editor or co-editor of several books on French politics, international political economy, global finance and international political theory, most recently Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (2010). His most recent book chapter is "The Limits of Global Global Governance" in Raffaele Marchetti, ed., Partnerships in the European Union and Global Policymaking (2014), and his most recent articles are "The New Anarchy: Globalisation and Fragmentation in World Politics" (with Alex Prichard), in the Journal of International Political Theory (2017), "In the Shadow of Ordolliberalism: The Paradox of Neoliberalism in the 21st Century", in the European Review of International Studies (2016), “Rethinking Global Environmental Policy: From Global Governance to Transnational Neopluralism” (with Gabriela Kütting), in Public Administration (2015) and "Reframing the International", in ERIS (2014). He received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the I.P.E. Section of the International Studies Association in 2011 and until recently chaired Research Committee No. 36 (Political Power) of the International Political Science Association.
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In the 21st century, world politics is becoming increasingly multi-nodal and characterized by "heterarchy" – the coexistence and conflict between differently structured micro- and meso quasi-hierarchies that compete and overlap not only across borders but also across economic-financial sectors and social groupings. Thinking about international order in terms of heterarchy is a paradigm shift away from the mainstream "competing paradigms" of realism, liberalism, and constructivism. This book explores how, since the mid-20th century, the dialectic of globalization and fragmentation has caught states and the interstate system in the complex evolutionary process toward heterarchy. These heterarchical institutions and processes are characterized by increasing autonomy and special interest capture. The process of heterarchy empowers strategically situated agents — especially agents with substantial autonomous resources, and in particular economic resources — in multi-nodal competing institutions with overlapping jurisdictions. The result is the decreasing capacity of macro-states to control both domestic and transnational political/economic processes. In this book, the authors demonstrate that this is not a simple breakdown of states and the states system; it is in fact the early stages of a structural evolution of world politics.
This book will interest students, scholars and researchers of international relations theory. It will also have significant appeal in the fields of world politics, security studies, war studies, peace studies, global governance studies, political science, political economy, political power studies, and the social sciences more generally.
Today the dialectic of globalisation and fragmentation is unevenly undermining proactive “state capacity” and leading to an increasingly heterarchical world. However, the depth and breadth of this transformation has not eliminated the role of the state. Rather it is increasingly leading to a multi-level, multi-nodal, complex and uneven restructuration process. Bureaucracies are being decentralised and quasi-privatised, leading to private interest regulatory capture, regulatory arbitrage and the predominance of profitability over the public interest, both domestically and transnationally. Borders are becoming more and more fragile as local as transnational processes cut across them – from ethnicities, the new tribalism, global cities, devolution and the like. Economic change, from financialisation to the Third and/or Fourth Industrial Revoltion(s) and technological change, is more and more multi-level, above, below and cutting across states. And ideological shifts, from neoliberalism and libertarianism on the one hand to the new quasi-dictatorial populism on the other – both dividing the right and undermining the centre-left – are challenging the “public interest” state and traditional liberal democracy.
The “Reactive State” is not only being whipsawed and undermined, but is at the same time under growing pressure to deal – however ineffectively – with these challenges. What Rosenau called “Turbulence” and postmodernism constitute the new way of the world and “state capacity” is less and less effective and often counterproductive.
and how states are still the main independent variables in what has been called International Relations or whether and how far they are increasingly dependent variables in a changing World Politics. These books all make interesting and useful contributions to this question..