Redesigning Global Governance from Below: A Call to Action for IR Scholars

Saghar Shahidi-Birjandian and Yatana Yamahata

patrick.daxenbichler/Depositphotos

The myth of a rights-based international system capable of protecting civilians has been shattered, as citizens across the globe endure the weight of state-sponsored atrocities and violence on a scale unprecedented in modern history. From Iran to Gaza, Sudan to Ukraine, and Myanmar to the United States, people have become acutely aware of the failures of global order to halt state-sponsored violence, particularly when governments turn on their own citizens. No longer confined to the corridors of diplomats and scholars, awareness of the ineffectiveness of global governance, especially the UN’s inability to protect civilians, has become widespread. This crisis is not just one of institutions, but of political imagination and participation. While global governance is all-encompassing — embedded in trade regimes, financial systems, security architectures, borders, and technology — it remains undemocratic and distant for most. This moment demands scholars to meet communities where they are, listen and engage, and make visible how global order shapes local governance and everyday life. Our task is not simply to analyze from afar, but to foster dialogue by asking: what do people want from global governance? How can their experiences and visions shape the future of global order, or more radically, a global government?

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IR scholars are uniquely positioned to contribute to the long-term work of reimagining global order, not as architects of a new system, but as educators who demystify global governance, facilitators who create spaces for dialogue, and archivists who document community visions of how the global should relate to the local. By exchanging this knowledge across contexts, they can advance a participatory design of global government built for and by the diverse peoples united in a shared desire for peaceful co-existence. Centering these participatory global political imaginaries enables IR to repurpose itself as an industry and interdisciplinary field that helps reimagine global order from the ground up toward a more democratic, accountable, and just future. Doing so, however, requires persuading a critical mass within IR to coordinate in pursuit of this agenda.

We are governed globally; just not democratically

While global governance is often discussed as an aspirational and unrealized project, in practice it is already deeply embedded in everyday life. International trade regimes shape domestic labor conditions and access to resources; global financial systems constrain national budgets and social policy; security architectures and arms markets determine whose lives are protected and whose are rendered disposable; and border regimes regulate mobility, belonging, and exclusion. These systems do not merely influence local governance; they actively structure it.

Despite their pervasive effects, these international systems operate largely beyond democratic accountability (Keohane 2015). Most people subject to global governance have no meaningful say in its design or oversight, and political influence rarely travels upward from local communities to the global level — even as decisions made globally shape local realities in profound ways. This asymmetry reveals a structural democratic deficit rather than temporary institutional failures.

Crucially, this deficit is not accidental. It reflects a global order historically rooted in colonial hierarchy, elite bargaining, state-centric authority, and hyper-militarization — one constructed to privilege certain actors, including powerful states, multinational corporations, and transnational elites, while marginalizing others (Gleckman 2016; Kauppi and Madsen 2014; Thakur 2020). As a result, global governance is experienced as distant, technocratic, and immutable, even when it perpetuates inequality and violence.

Moving beyond the United Nations

The UN is often presented as the closest existing approximation of global governance, yet its institutional design exemplifies the democratic limits of the current international order.   While the General Assembly is formally inclusive, it possesses no legally binding authority. Substantive power is concentrated in the Security Council, where the veto rights of the five permanent members institutionalize geopolitical hierarchy and insulate them from accountability. This structure limits the UN’s legitimacy as a democratic global institution: ordinary people do not choose their representatives to the UN, nor do they have mechanisms to influence its decision-making processes; even states are subject to unequal power relations that undermine sovereign equality (Novosad and Werker 2019). The UN was designed to manage relations among states, not to represent humanity as a political collective.

Yet the persistence of state-sponsored violence — the very condition the UN was established to address — becomes the basis for its continued expansion. A useful way to understand the steady expansion of international organizations is through classic theories of governance scaling. From Adolph Wagner’s observation that public expenditure grows with social complexity (Wagner 1883), to Mancur Olson’s argument that larger populations generate collective action problems requiring centralized coordination (Olson 1965), to William A. Niskanen’s insight that bureaucracies tend to expand once established (Niskanen 1971), a consistent pattern emerges: as governance challenges scale in size and complexity, so too do the scope and resources of the institutions tasked with managing them (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Westerwinter 2022). This helps explain the growth of the UN system and large operational agencies such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which have expanded in response to rising displacement, protracted conflict, and increasingly complex humanitarian crises.

However, the state-centric approach to centralizing coordination and expanding institutional design sits in tension with how the UN justifies its own authority, self-preservation, and hypocrisy. Preambles, while not operational provisions, serve as authoritative statements of purpose, intent, moral authorship, and interpretive context. The Charter of the United Nations (1945) declares the UN’s aim “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) acknowledges the “outraged conscience of mankind” in response to barbarous acts. The Statute of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (1950) and the Geneva Conventions (1949) similarly emphasize international protection of victims. Furthermore, from the UN Charter’s invocation of “We the peoples,” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ grounding in inherent human dignity, the Genocide Convention’s appeal to humanity, the Rome Statute’s centering of victims of mass atrocities, and later frameworks such as the Responsibility to Protect and Protection of Civilians resolutions, the UN repeatedly frames its fundamental purpose as safeguarding civilian populations from violence, repression, and atrocity. Taken together, they articulate a coherent claim that the state-centricity within the UN derives its legitimacy from the protection of people rather than the prerogatives of states alone. The consequences of this embedded hypocrisy are increasingly visible. Its repeated inability and — arguably unwillingness — to prevent mass atrocities or meaningfully constrain powerful actors has eroded public confidence in its authority.

If the expansion of the UN and other global institutions can be explained as a structural response to increasing need and complexity, it does not follow that further expansion is the most effective or just path forward. A growing body of evidence suggests that directing resources toward locally grounded, transnational networks of communities may be a more effective way to address the underlying drivers of instability. Research finds that locally led peacebuilding initiatives such as community mediation, inclusive dialogue, and early-warning systems have a significant and sustained impact on reducing violence and strengthening social cohesion (Peace Direct & Alliance for Peacebuilding 2019). 

Rather than routing public funds through large, centralized bureaucracies, where significant portions are absorbed by administrative overhead, international staffing structures, and delayed delivery mechanisms, reallocation toward local governance systems could enable earlier, more context-sensitive interventions (Peace Direct & Alliance for Peacebuilding 2019). Supporting communities to invest in their own social infrastructure can build resilience to atrocity-risk factors — such as discrimination, institutional weakness, and intergroup tensions — before crises escalate, rather than relying on post hoc responses from agencies with incentives to sustain their own existence (United Nations 2014). This is not an argument against international cooperation, but for rethinking its scale and form: shifting from centralized intervention toward models that trust and resource people meaningfully working to serve their communities, where needs and knowledge are most immediate. In effect, this democratizes transnational solidarity and support.

But what about regional bodies?

The tension between people-centered norms and state-mediated power is not confined to the UN; it is replicated across regional governance bodies that are often presented as more context-sensitive. Institutions such as the European Union, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, African Union, Economic Community of West African States, East African Community, and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region have all developed frameworks for promoting peace, security, and the protection of civilians. In Latin America, regional mechanisms such as the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alongside North American networks operating through trade, security, and migration regimes, similarly articulate commitments to human rights and civilian protection. Yet, despite these normative frameworks, enforcement and intervention remain contingent on the political will of member states, regional power asymmetries, and concerns over sovereignty. For example, while the ASEAN Charter affirms commitments to human rights protection, in practice ASEAN continues to prioritize state sovereignty over human lives (Jones 2010). Although the Arab League adopted a statute establishing an Arab Court of Human Rights in 2014, the court has never become operational because the statute has not received the seven ratifications required for entry into force (Almutawa 2021).

While some regional bodies, notably the African Union, have formalized principles such as non-indifference in the face of mass atrocities, their capacity to act consistently remains constrained (Sharpe 2017). Like the UN, these institutions derive legitimacy in part from claims to protect people, yet their operational logic prioritizes state consent and stability, often limiting timely or effective responses to civilian harm. The result is a broader pattern across governance levels; even where institutions are geographically or culturally closer to at-risk and affected populations, the gap between normative commitments and protective outcomes persists.

Turning to the local when the global, regional, and national fail

Communities are increasingly turning to local and transnational networks to meet urgent needs, where accountability is more immediate and leadership is perceived as more closely aligned with their values. This shift is not necessarily driven by ideological rejection of global governance, but by pragmatic recognition of institutional failure to provide protection, resources, and solidarity.

For example, members of Iranian diaspora communities have mobilized for regime change by organizing at neighborhood and city levels — holding rallies, building advocacy networks, and engaging with local governments to amplify calls for accountability and political transformation in Iran (Rahimieh 2023). Local communities in cities throughout the United States have mobilized to support migrants targeted by immigration control measures through information-sharing, neighborhood patrols, and mutual aid networks. Suppression of anti-corruption demonstrations in Indonesia prompted coordinated grassroots action across Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, where individuals used online delivery platforms to distribute food and supplies to protesters. In Sudan, community-led Emergency Response Rooms have provided healthcare, distributed food, and protected civilians. Transnational mobilization to aid Palestinians has ranged from mass protests to the BDS movement and flotillas attempting to deliver humanitarian aid. At the municipal and mayoral levels, cities like Vancouver have passed resolutions and bylaws facilitating public expressions of solidarity with Palestine. These practices reveal a growing realization that existing global systems are often incapable of protecting the masses, leaving local communities to fill the gap.

Importantly, these responses are not purely local. They are transnational in scope, coordinated across borders, and oriented toward halting and preventing atrocity violence. They constitute alternative forms of global politics that operate outside formal institutions while directly engaging global, regional, and national power structures. In doing so, they generate transnational networks and platforms that mobilize everyday citizens across the world to reimagine the political units that constitute global order.

Decolonization and the reimagining of political units

IR has traditionally treated the Westphalian nation-state as both the starting point and the primary unit of analysis, taking states as pre-existing entities within and between which relations occur (Acharya 2023; Jackson and Nexon 1999). This state-centric ontology has not merely described world politics; it has determined the terms through which political agency is recognized and international legitimacy is conferred. For example, while the Sámi exercise political agency through Sámi parliaments in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, they are constrained by the sovereignty of the states in which they operate (Stępień et al. 2015). Despite representing the democratic mandate of the Myanmar people, the National Unity Government has yet to gain UN recognition, while the UN continues to engage the military junta as Myanmar’s official state representative. Taken together, these examples illustrate how a dominant, singular ontological framework can produce epistemic violence by marginalizing alternative forms of governance and silencing other worldviews.

The turn toward local and transnational action coincides with Indigenous Resurgence and decolonization movements that have for decades challenged imposed and inherited political forms (Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2017). For many, the nation-state is experienced not as a protector but as a colonial or coercive structure that fails to uphold inherent Indigenous rights, and actively works to eradicate governance systems rooted in diverse and distinct Indigenous cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies that shape how sovereignty, nationhood, governance, culture, spirituality, and relations with others are understood and pursued (Cherry 2021; Constantinou et al. 2025; Coulthard 2007; Daigle 2016; Moreton-Robinson 2020; Simpson 2017).

Correspondingly, IR scholars have called for ontological pluralism which acknowledges the existence of “different modes, ways, or kinds of being” (Turner 2010, 5) and, more specifically, for pluralistic universalism, which holds that diverse knowledge traditions and practices can coexist and find points of convergence. This approach underpins Global IR, which views IR as “a large, overarching canopy with multiple foundations” (Acharya 2014, 649-650). Ontological agility, in turn, requires flexible engagement across multiple ontological frameworks without privileging one over others (Trownsell 2021). Together, they offer an alternative to IR’s state-centric ontology by recognizing diverse forms of governance and enabling people to engage with political systems that are meaningful and legitimate across different understandings of reality and knowledge.

Indigenous sovereignty, regional autonomy, and alternative economic and political arrangements pre-date and are (re)emerging alongside — and in some cases beyond — the nation-state. In Canada, Indigenous First Nations have similarly asserted governance systems grounded in each Nation’s or community’s respective Indigenous Laws and relational accountability rather than delegated state authority. The Haida Nation enforces comprehensive systems of land and marine governance grounded in Haida Law, including co-management arrangements that reflect Haida legal and political authority rather than state delegation (Borrows 2017; Jones et al. 2010). In Uganda, the Buganda Kingdom in the south-central part of the country, provides various services and development opportunities to Baganda citizens through the Buganda Parliament, cabinet ministers, and contracted service providers. In the Kurdish regions of northern Syria, governance structures associated with Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria — often described through the framework of democratic confederalism — have established decentralized systems of political authority grounded in local councils, gender parity, and community-based decision-making, operating in parallel to, and at times in defiance of, the Syrian state (Hendessi 2024; Wimmer 2024).

In post-coup Myanmar, multiple forms of governance operate outside military control: long-standing ethnic armed organization governance, Indigenous community-level governance, and emergent area-based civilian administrations and local resistance administrations aligned with the National Unity Government (Thawnghmung and South 2025). Across these cases, governance structures organize national territory, security, justice, and social services through locally embedded structures that emphasize pluralism and participation, particularly under conditions of conflict and state fragmentation. They illustrate that political legitimacy is not in practice monopolized by the nation-state, and that governance rooted in Indigenous Law, social relations, and collective stewardship can operate as a parallel — and sometimes competing — source of authority.

While the concept of inter-nationalization originally addresses “relations and interactions between nation-states and national societies” (Pries and Seeliger 2012, 229), Indigenous Resurgence and decolonial discourse invite us to rethink the “inter” as relations between distinct polities with inherent rights to self-determination and governance, both predating and persisting despite colonial state formation (Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Simpson 2017). Rather than viewing sovereignty as confined within the boundaries of the settler state, Indigenous Peoples have historically engaged in nation-to-nation relationships, challenging the legitimacy and exclusivity of the modern nation-state system (Borrows 2017; Coulthard 2014). Decolonial scholarship emphasizes that the project of Indigenous Resurgence is not simply about reclaiming territory or recognition within existing political structures, but about further strengthening and revitalizing the full scope of diplomatic, legal, and social practices that reflect Indigenous worldviews and transnational solidarities (Tully 2008; Simpson 2017). This inter-nationalization is evident in contemporary Indigenous-led activism, where alliances are forged across state borders and legal frameworks, disrupting colonial boundaries, and advancing forms of political community grounded in mutual respect for diverse ways of being (Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Simpson 2017).

In this light, freeing the political imagination of everyday people across the world — by teaching them about the undemocratic constraints of the global order affecting their lives and inviting them to imagine systems, institutions, and structures that would better meet their needs — does not imply the immediate disappearance of the state. Rather, it unsettles its assumed centrality in global order and helps normalize and archive diverse models to be explored through a grassroots-driven, transnational design of a new global order. As political units are reimagined, so too must the global governance structures that connect them. Decolonization, in this sense, is not only about addressing past injustice, but about expanding the range of possibilities for the future, based on diverse ontological, cosmological, and epistemological beliefs (Montgomery and Pezzarossi 2026; Sium et al. 2012).

An opening, a duty, and a call to IR for a participatory global political imaginary

Taken together, these dynamics reveal a global order in transition. We are governed globally without democracy, connected locally without sufficient power to protect, and increasingly aware of the limitations of inherited and imposed political structures. The failure of existing institutions, the resurgence of community-based global politics, and the reimagining of political units create an opening for thinking differently about global governance.

This moment demands analytical clarity rather than institutional nostalgia. Accordingly, we must move beyond primarily reforming existing structures and instead invite reflection on how global order might be collectively reimagined from the ground up — shaped by the aspirations, experiences, and knowledge of those most negatively affected by it. A more democratic global order will not be authored by elites in moments of crisis but shaped over generations by the people who live under militarized global governance every day. This temporal dimension introduces a transgenerational duty: to document, preserve, and transmit how communities understand global power, what forms of governance they desire, and how they imagine the relationship between the global and the local.

IR scholars are uniquely positioned to contribute to this work, yet doing so requires a deliberate reorientation of the field’s priorities, methods, and self-understanding. Knowledge production in IR, as in all fields, is not neutral; it shapes what is seen as possible, legitimate, and worth protecting. Claims to scholarly detachment have too often functioned to reproduce existing power hierarchies, privileging state-centric perspectives while marginalizing lived experience and nonstate political imaginaries. IR scholars must therefore be prepared to ask communities what questions should be asked in the first place, recognizing that political imagination itself is shaped by lived experience.

This call asks IR scholars to acknowledge their positionality, take responsibility for the normative implications of their work, and lean into forms of academic activism that seek not only to analyze world politics, but also to contribute to more just and humane political futures — treating scholarship as a tool for advancing human dignity rather than merely observing its erosion. This entails moving beyond questions of how global governance functions, fails, or thrives at the institutional level, and instead engaging communities as epistemic agents in their own right. It requires asking questions long excluded from the discipline: how do people experience global governance in their everyday lives? What do communities want global governance to do or not do? How should global systems interact with diverse local political units, including those that do not conform to the nation-state model? And what forms of authority, accountability, and representation are considered legitimate from below?

Putting this call into practice requires concrete changes within the field. First, IR scholars can treat public engagement as core scholarly work rather than outreach. Teaching IR in community spaces, schools, local organizations, faith institutions, townhalls, and online forums, creates opportunities for dialogue in which global politics is demystified and reframed through local realities. Second, the field can mobilize its existing academic infrastructure to systematically archive community perspectives on global and local governance. Long-term, open-access repositories, oral history projects, and collaborative research platforms could document political aspirations across contexts and generations, creating a living record of participatory global political imagination. These findings must be made publicly available in ways that remain accessible, iterative, responsive, and secured using existing publishing infrastructure and decentralized databases with duplicate records. Rather than static publications alone, IR scholars can experiment with digital archives, interactive maps, publicly curated datasets, and ongoing reports that evolve over time.

Conclusion

Inter-nationalizing IR from the ground up, requires rethinking the “inter” as the space between diverse political imaginaries rather than solely among nation-states. This is not simply an analytical proposition; it is a necessary response to a failing global order. The crisis of democratic global governance has revealed both the limits of existing institutions and the presence of alternative political imaginaries. Yet realizing these alternatives is no simple task: existing global governance structures are well organized and deeply institutionalized, and without comparable coordination across institutions and regions, efforts to democratize global governance design will remain fragmented.

As authors, we commit to putting into practice the very steps we call on our colleagues to undertake: engaging communities as epistemic agents, teaching IR beyond elite spaces, and documenting how people understand and imagine global–local governance across diverse contexts. This work will be conducted over time, in collaboration with communities, and with the explicit intention of reporting back — making our findings publicly available, cumulative, and open to contestation. The field of IR now faces a choice. If IR is to remain relevant in a world increasingly shaped by inter-national, and grassroots transnational relations, it must evolve in terms of coordinated knowledge production, public engagement, and accountability to the futures it helps imagine. This moment presents a rare opportunity to reposition IR as a collective, transgenerational, contribution to humanity’s design of a new global order – for the people, and crucially, by the people.

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Saghar Shahidi-Birjandian, PhD is the Founder at Collaborative Structural Change, Founding Partner of Mediated Solutions Inc., and a Research Associate, at SOAS, University of London.

Yatana Yamahata, PhD is a Founding Member at Collaborative Structural Change, and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.