Global Governance in Peril? | Figure for Article 7

Governing the World outside the United Nations

A Global Research Network on MSIs

Despite the proliferation of MSIs over the past two decades, understanding of their internal and external political dynamics, operations, and impacts remains limited and fragmented. To date, academic efforts to research MSIs have been ad hoc and small-scale, largely conducted by individual academics within disciplinary silos. The political function and dynamics of MSIs also remain under-researched, even as many of these initiatives have become significant sites of contention between civil society, governments, and the private sector. In addition, research on MSI functioning has yet to concretely integrate perspectives on MSI functioning from the communities and individuals whose rights and well-being MSIs are intended to address. This fragmentation inhibits the capacity for MSIs to develop as robust and effective global accountability initiatives.

To close this knowledge gap, MSI Integrity has partnered with the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, and the John Parke Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy at Occidental College to launch a Global Research Network on MSIs. The Research Network brings together academics, applied researchers, and MSI practitioners to deepen academic engagement with multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as governance mechanisms for the private sector. The network facilitates collaboration over research agendas, convenes conferences, and supports robust empirical research on the politics, impacts, and evolution of MSIs.

Source: MSI Integrity, “Global Research Network”.

Other Issues

Issue no. 3 | March 2018

Globalization 4.0:
Evolution or Revolution?

Global Challenges

Issue no. 3 | March 2018

Globalization 4.0: Evolution or Revolution?

Has globalisation reached its apex after centuries of growth as suggested by the latest figures of the WTO? In the affirmative, does this imply that we are ushering into a new era of degrowth? Or are we witnessing the reorganisation of the very architecture of globalisation, which remains based on the twin logic of the acceleration and continuous increase of the volume of exchanges, as well as the steady densification of geographic connectedness. Are global exchanges restructuring concomitantly to the fourth technological revolution and the expansion of the digital economy? The present Dossier proposes to approach this question by observing the nature and the evolution of the principal flows that characterize globalisation.

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Issue no. 5 | April 2019

New Grammars of War:
Conflict and Violence in the 21st Century

Global Challenges

Issue no. 5 | April 2019

New Grammars of War: Conflict and Violence in the 21st Century

The Dossier aims to explore new trends and expressions of violence in armed conflict in the 21st century. Taking as a starting point the changing paradigm of armed conflict – from conventional wars with clear contours towards more non-linear, fragmented and protracted types of civil and international conflict — it adopts a broad approach to portray changing forms of violence across different types of armed conflicts (including terrorism, international/civil wars or urban warfare). In the context of a fragmenting international order, with increasingly blurred lines between state and non-state, combatant and civilian, domestic and international, the number of actors involved in conflicts and concurrent strategies of violence have multiplied. In face of the ubiquity of violent conflict — despite an overall decline in interstate conflict and global number of casualties — the Dossier aims to shed light on new or changing forms of violence, their contexts, actors and victims. It explores the novelty, heterogeneity, scales and vectors of violent practices in contemporary conflicts by investigating the impact of a series of factors such as new military technologies (drones, robots), new communication tools (social media), gender, migration, or the subcontracting of security to private actors.

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Issue no. 11 | March 2022

The Uncertain Future of Human Rights

Global Challenges

Issue no. 11 | March 2022

The Uncertain Future of Human Rights

After 70 years of existence, human rights are facing criticism from many sides, some even claiming their fundamental inadequacy for the 21st century or imminent end. The human rights regime, based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and several subsequent covenants, is variously being accused of being elitist, Eurocentric and/or imperialistic in its universal claims and remaining blind to local customs and cultural specificities; of being implemented too tamely, inconsistently or even counterproductively by International organisations that are frequently co-opted by powerful state interests; and of being unable to address fundamental societal issues and transformations such as inequality, digital transformations and climate change.

Further critiques castigate human rights’ unmet promises, framing them as a neoliberal smokescreen, or admonishing their anthropocentrism, overlooking the rights of animals, plants or other non-human entities such as robots. In such a state of flux and uncertainty, human rights have also become, to some extent, victims of their own success, being articulated not only by an increasing armada of human rights actors and activists but also by atavistic forces referring to them more cynically. Such inflationary use of human rights, increasingly following a logic of transversality as reflected in the ever-expanding UN human rights issues or the flourishing of corporate CSR strategies and codes, ultimately risks eroding their operability and epistemic traction.

However, as shifting geostrategic constellations, the rise of populism, identitarian politics, authoritarian governments and the current epidemic are all contributing to further fragilising human rights, they remain more crucial to the world’s future than ever. The current Dossier therefore asks how the human rights regime will likely evolve faced by such challenges. Can it reinvent itself and, if so, how? Can we imagine human rights without the pretension to universalism and beyond the decline of the liberal paradigm? Are we moving towards human rights that are more collective in nature or of variable geometry? New perspectives and insights are needed from the legal, social and human sciences to answer these pivotal questions.

This dossier was produced by the Graduate Institute’s Research Office in collaboration with the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

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A Global Research Network on MSIs

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