Rethinking Global Governance

<p>This book argues that long-ignored non-western political systems from the distant and more recent past can provide critical insights into improving global governance.</p><p>These societies show how successful collection action can occur by dividing sovereignty consensus building power from below and other mechanisms. For a better tomorrow we need to free ourselves of the colonial constraints on our political imagination. A pandemic war in Europe and another year of climatic anomalies are among the many indications of the limits of global governance today. To meet these challenges we must look far beyond the status quo to the thousands of successful mechanisms for collective action that have been cast aside <i>a priori </i>because they do not fit into Western traditions of how people should be organized. Coming from long past or still enduring societies often dismissed as “savages” and “primitives” until well into the twentieth century the political systems in this book were often seen as too acephalous compartmentalized heterarchical or anarchic to be of use. Yet as globalization makes international relations more chaotic long-ignored governance alternatives may be better suited to today’s changing realities. Understanding how the Zulu Trypillian Alur and other collectives worked might be humanity’s best hope for survival.</p><p>This book will be of interest both to those seeking to apply archaeological and ethnographic data to issues of broad contemporary concern and to academics politicians policy makers students and the general public seeking possible alternatives to conventional thinking in global governance.</p>