Beyond Actor Recognition

Extant understandings of how global governance emerges are heavily agentic in character. In this article, we first draw on studies of actor recognition to study how peace and reconciliation diplomacy emerged in Norway and beyond. With the emergence of the League of Nations, space opened up both for societal peace activity and for third-party diplomatic agency and the interstice between them grew denser. As the Cold War waned, it grew even denser. We then go beyond the question of actor recognition by ontically privileging not actors, but relations. This allows us to discuss the emergence of global governance as increasingly dense relations between actors that added up to more than the sum of its parts—resulting in the establishment of peace and reconciliation diplomacy as a new field of global governance

Agency (philosophy · Cold war · Diplomacy · Global governance · International relations · League · Public international law · Global Security and Public Health · Globalization and political ideologies · Peacebuilding and International Security