Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership

Description

This groundbreaking collection on global leadership features innovative and critical perspectives by scholars from international relations, political economy, medicine, law and philosophy, from North and South. The book's novel theorization of global leadership is situated historically within the classics of modern political theory and sociology, relating it to the crisis of global capitalism today. Contributors reflect on the multiple political, economic, social, ecological and ethical crises that constitute our current global predicament. The book suggests that there is an overarching condition of global organic crisis, which shapes the political and organizational responses of the dominant global leadership and of various subaltern forces. Contributors argue that to meaningfully address the challenges of the global crisis will require far more effective, inclusive and legitimate forms of global leadership and global governance than have characterized the neoliberal era.

Stephen Gill is Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science, York University, Toronto and a former Distinguished Scholar in International Political Economy of the International Studies Association. His publications include The Global Political Economy (with David Law, 1988), American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (as editor, Cambridge University Press, 1993), Power, Production and Social Reproduction (with Isabella Bakker, 2003) and Power and Resistance in the New World Order (2003, and second edition 2008).

'This book provides an insightful Gramscian analysis of the forms of privately-baded expert leadership that characterizes the current global order. The authors explore the weak material foundation of this leadership - made evident by climate change, water shortages, and the end of cheap oil - and they point to the emergence of new potential sources of global leadership in professions (such as medicine) and a new global network of courts committed to a broad interpretation of human rights, in global social movements, and in the transformation-oriented traditions of a politically energized Islam.' Craig Murphy, University of Massachusetts, Boston 'In this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary volume, radical political economist Stephen Gill and his collaborators trace the economic, political, social and ecological crisis-tendencies within contemporary global capitalism and trace their ramifications for emergent forms of political agency and leadership both in the global North and the global South. This book is an essential contribution to our understanding of global neoliberalism - and to the ongoing work of envisioning, and forging, alternatives to it.' Neil Brenner, Harvard University,Massachusetts 'However ambitious it is, this book's intention to contribute not only to theory-making, but also to the transformation of reality, is much welcome in the political science literature, which has long neglected its potential to inspire change ... Overall, neo-Gramscians approaches are not new to international relations, but this volume strengthens their added value.' Manoela Assayag, Swiss Political Science Review