1.

3 Non-state actors

L TA
Along with the authority of nations and states, non-state actors, from

Research skills

the United Nations to smaller organizations, are playing a larger role

on the world stage. We can refer to these types of actors as civil society, Pick one of the NGOs

or the portion of society that acts as an alternative to coercive state (non-governmental

power. In simple terms, non-state actors are those that operate outside organizations) mentioned

the sphere of governmental control. Unit 3 has many good examples here. Research two ways in

of non-state actors and their contributions to social movements and to which the organization has

politics. Some good examples of these types of actors are Human Rights inuenced international

Watch, Amnesty International, the United Way and academic discipline relations in recent years.

associations such as the American Anthropological Association. These

organizations often take positions on the debates around the local,

regional, international and global actions and policies of the day, and

are often more useful in the struggle to change long-held positions than

states themselves.

Another type of non-state actor that has gained much attention

are the interrelated state organizations or IGOs (intergovernmental

organizations), the most prominent being the United Nations. We

will refer more to the United Nations below, and Unit 2 also uses the

United Nations as a focal point for the discussion of human rights.

Other IGOs that have gained prominence are the trade unions that

exist on almost every continent, such as the African Union, and more

government-related organizations such as the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund. The Union of International Organizations

(UIO) lists 68,000 international organizations, adding somewhere in

the area of 1,200 per year. Not all of these organizations are active (the

UIO estimates that about half are active and half are not), and these
The logo of the African Union

include both NGOs and IGOs. Other prominent organizations that play

a large role in global politics are multi-national (sometimes referred

to as transnational) corporations (MNCs), such as General Electric,

Westinghouse, BP, Exxon Mobil and, more recently, Facebook and

Twitter. As these companies operate in many different countries and

interact with their governments, they can exert strong inuences on

every level of global politics. The Economist reported that in 2012, for

example, General Electric held more assets than any other nancial rm

in the world (10 June 2012). As they report:

Of the 100 companies with the most foreign assets, 17 hold over 90% of their

assets abroad, includingArcelorMittal, Nestlé, Anheuser-Busch InBev and

Vodafone. Their share of foreign sales is also substantially larger than GE’s.

More than half of GE’s 300,000-strong workforce is based outside America;

Toyota, which has slightly more employees, only has 38% of its 326,000

workers abroad. (2012; accessed 16 June 2016)

These new realities, created in the midst of globalization, have their

clearest effect on the local level. This is demonstrated by empty streets

where stores and factories used to be, abandoned houses that people

have forsaken in their quest to nd work in other areas where, they The logo of General Electric

25
1 POWER, S O V E R E IGN T Y AND I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L AT I O N S

hope, production has not yet moved outside the country, a drastic dip

in the population that affects the ability of families to maintain ties

as generations split apart in the movement of peoples, and the rise

of poverty generated by a lack of jobs and the entitlements such as

healthcare and retirement benets that jobs provide.

For example, in Kirsch’s 1988 ethnography, In the Wake of the Giant, he

shows how a healthy, family-dominated town in the north-east of the

United States became torn apart as parts of its major employer, General

Electric, went overseas or closed down. Pittseld, Massachusetts, USA,

where this ethnography was carried out, was part of a deindustrialization

that blanketed much of the north-east and Midwest of the United States

in the 1970s and 1980s, splitting generations as younger members of

the community moved away in search of work, and creating crises as

sources of pollution from the General Electric plant resulted in health

crises that the company would not take responsibility for. The irony

in this particular case is that the head of General Electric at that time,

Jack Welsh, was born and raised in Pittseld, and his direct orders to

close down most of the plant not only destroyed the strong ties between

corporation and community that has existed for the previous 100 years,

but left a community that had, for the most part, been designed and run

by the corporation so they lacked the knowledge of how to organize

themselves or attract other industry when General Electric ed the

scene.

Also operating on global levels are large media corporations, 96 per

cent of which are owned by four multi-national companies. Social

How has technology changed

movements and resistance movements are now more visible on an

the way in which knowledge is

international scale, sometimes as a result of Internet access or because of

produced? What role does the

actions by organizations such as Amnesty International. The legitimacy

media play in shaping people’s

and sometimes even the survival of states are tied into these multi-

views of issues in global politics?

national organizations and forums, as the following units will show.

The United Nations

The United Nations and its members and activities are referenced

throughout the course and throughout this Companion. It is an

organization of interrelated states that was created shortly after the

Second World War as a way to generate cooperation among the world’s

states and, some would argue, as a direct reaction to the horrors of the

Holocaust (more of this will be discussed in the next unit on human

rights). Before the United Nations there was the League of Nations,

established after the First World War by the Treaty of Versailles. It was,

like the United Nations, created to maintain peace and security among

nations, but was designated a failure when the Second World War

started.

The term “United Nations” was coined by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942.

The United Nations emerged as a pledge by 26 nations to band together

and prevent major conicts, especially with what were called the “Axis

Powers”, which consisted of Germany, Italy and Japan. They were

joined by 24 other countries directly after the Second World War ended,

meeting in San Francisco to draft the UN Charter, which was initially

signed by 51 countries. The remaining assets of the League of Nations

26
 1 . 3 : N O N - S T A T E A C T O R S

were turned over to the United

Nations, as the League formally

dissolved.

Today, most of the countries

of the world are members of

the United Nations, and its

organization is a monolith that

reaches out in all directions,

touching almost every citizen on

the planet. With agencies and

research organizations as part of

its outreach, the United Nations

holds a potential power that no

individual country could possibly

assemble. Its major constituent

parts are the General Assembly,

the Security Council, the Economic

and Social Council, the Trusteeship

Council, the International Court

of Justice, and the Secretariat.

Its 193 member countries agree

The Security Council chamber at the UN headquar ters in New York

in principle to abide by the UN

Charter and to obey the rulings of the Security Council, which often

deals with major conicts and disasters around the world. As an

intergovernmental organization it provides universal ideals for nations

to follow, sometimes intervening in conicts. The range of its power is a

subject of ongoing debate, as are the constitution of the Security Council

and the prosecution of individuals and nations through the International

Criminal Court.

The essence of the debates about the United Nations centre on its ability

to challenge the sovereignty of the nation state, and if any of its treaties

and covenants are enforceable at all. There have been many objections

to the rule of the Security Council and its effect on smaller and less-

developed nations. A developed, industrialized country has never been

brought before the International Criminal Court, and in particular the

United States, Russia, China, India and Israel, as members of the Security

Council, are almost never challenged on their actions in their own

countries or globally. Interestingly, these countries are often the major

nations that do not sign agreements on issues such as the environment,

the abuse of women and children, and human rights.

Many, then, bring into question the place of the United Nations in

world politics and as an example of good global governance. The next

unit on human rights discusses these issues in more detail as Franklin

D. Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, initiated and founded the commission that

drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The debates around

this declaration and the inability to enforce human right precepts are

ongoing problems that attract attention from every part of the globe.

Importantly, the United Nations operates by assembling nations together,

while the daily realities of local and global politics takes place on levels

far below the chambers of the United Nations in New York.

27
 1.4 Communities

In the introduction the community was dened as a geographic level on

which we work and analyse the global arena. Both NGOs and IGOs are

most active on community – or, perhaps more precisely, local – levels.

However, given the inuence of outside forces such as IGOs, MNCs and

the United Nations, the viability of communities has come into question.

The existence and denition of communities have become increasingly

a subject of debate in the academic and the public sectors, and a further

discussion of its present use and the surrounding debates can be helpful

in dening our basic units of study.

The basic question is whether we can dene communities outside the

Class discussion

constraints of territory, or taken a step further, without place. Those

Has the Internet created promoting the primacy of cyberspace would seem to suggest that the

equality among citizens? community in space and time has become a relic of the past. The often

referenced “virtual community” assumes something post-community,

or at least a reformulation of community. Andrew Sullivan, in a story

for the New York Times Magazine (2000, Section 6: 30–34), makes a claim

that the Internet has generated an equality among citizens that Marx

could have only dreamed of. If we are to accept his premise, “virtual

communities” promise eqalitarian interaction, requiring only a computer

and a modem. What is forgotten, of course, is who has access to a

computer and a modem and who does not.

Cyberspace communities are based on technology, and in the words of

Gillespie and Robins (1989),

In considering the extent to which the new communications technologies

challenge or reinforce existing monopolies of information, and the associated

spatial hierarchies and interdependencies, we need to ascertain in whose

interests they are developed and whose interests they serve. (1989: 11)

They conclude that the

“distance-shrinking” characteristics of the new communications technologies,

far from overcoming and rendering insignicant the geographic expressions of

centralized economic and political power, in fact constitute new and enhanced

forms of inequality and uneven development. (1989: 7)

The new denitions of community emphasize space over physical place

and are more pronounced in the capital-intensive countries, in which

the role of technology has been more decisive in everyday life. Even

within these countries, however, in Bourdieu’s (1982) terms, the effect

has been uneven, as those with the resources to access and to own

technology have been more willing to redene themselves as novel and

distinct from those who are forced to rely on more traditional means of

communication and identication.

The Internet has proved to be an enormous asset to those, with certain

means, who are isolated and unable to communicate freely with their

would-be peers. What has occurred with the rise of the Internet and

other communications technologies is the ease at which, for some

28