A New World Order

In this major new statement about modern global governance, Slaughter, dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, argues that governments are increasingly working together through transnational networks to respond to the challenges of interdependence. On issues ranging from organized crime and terrorism to human rights, the environment, finance, and trade, officials are exchanging information, coordinating policies, enforcing laws, and regulating markets through increasingly elaborate informal intergovernmental channels. In the traditional view, global governance results from states pursuing national interests. In Slaughter's view, however, global governance is manifest in the decentralized (and less visible) activity of judges, regulators, and legislators working with foreign counterparts and nongovernmental organizations on specific issues. Much of A New World Order is a mapping of these networks. Particularly revealing is Slaughter's remarkable account of the cooperation between national judicial authorities and international and regional courts, which is serving to globalize jurisprudence. The larger purpose of the book, however, is to suggest how such networks should be strengthened to improve governance. The challenge, as Slaughter sees it, is to make these networks accountable without ceding authority to potentially coercive centralized multinational organizations. She argues that transparency and norms of inclusiveness can help make them responsive to the public will.