Societal multiplicity for international relations: Engaging societal interaction in building global governance from below
| Author | Antje Wiener |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00108367221098497 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367221098497
Cooperation and Conflict
2022, Vol. 57(3) 348 –366
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367221098497
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Societal multiplicity for
international relations:
Engaging societal interaction
in building global governance
from below
Antje Wiener
Abstract
This article discusses the societal multiplicity proposition as a welcome conceptual proposition for
IR. First, it argues that against the background of the discipline’s trajectory and especially Adler’s
call for a turn towards ‘the social’ in the 1990s, Rosenberg’s proposition offers a nudge towards
scrutinising concepts for a more concise and systematic appreciation of societal multiplicity as a
source of knowledge production in a globalised world. Second, this is illustrated with reference
to the challenge of building global governance from below as the international liberal order stands
contested and alliances are re-negotiated. Third, it demonstrates why during this period of global
change it is key to diversify sources of meaning-making and the conceptual categories to reflect
this diversification. And fourth, it turns to practices of contestation as drivers of inter-societal
negotiations that target both established fundamental norms of global governance (e.g. the rule of
law, human rights, and democracy) and more recently, negotiated fundamental norms (e.g. climate
justice, gender justice, or intergenerational justice). The article concludes that a conceptual shift
from the agency of states and their representatives as carriers of knowledge and mediators of
normative change towards engaging societal agency represents a welcome contribution.
Keywords
contestation, global governance, norms, practice, social contract, societal multiplicity
Introduction
As this special issue’s editors contend, ‘IR’s object must be the multiplicity of social
entities, and in the first instance the relations between and through them rather than
purely within them’ (Introduction, p. 5, this special issue emphasis in original text).
Corresponding author:
Antje Wiener, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Business and Social Sciences, University of
Hamburg, Max-Brauer-Allee 60, Hamburg 22767, Germany.
Email: antje.wiener@uni-hamburg.de
1098497CAC0010.1177/00108367221098497Cooperation and ConflictWiener
research-article2022
Article
Wiener 349
While the point may seem obvious to some, overdue to others, or somewhat opaque to
yet another group pending on one’s epistemological standpoint, the proposition deserves
being addressed by International Relations (IR) for it proposes a welcome conceptual
shift from state to societal agency. Following Emanuel Adler’s earlier programmatic call
for a turn towards ‘the social’ in the 1990s, this proposition represents a nudge towards
scrutinising IR’s conceptual tools with a view to a more concise and systematic apprecia-
tion of societal multiplicity as a source of knowledge production and a driver of knowl-
edge diffusion. To illustrate this value, this article focuses on the challenge of building
sustainable global governance from below at a time when the international liberal order
and international law stand contested and global alliances are re-negotiated (Krieger and
Liese, 2019; Lake et al., 2021). It is argued that this period of global change highlights
the need for IR scholarship to diversify and broaden the sources of meaning-making and
the relevant conceptual categories to reflect this diversification in applied research. The
following illustrates this point with reference to practices of contestation that target both
established fundamental norms of global governance (such as, for example, the rule of
law, human rights, and democracy) and more recently negotiated fundamental norms
(such as, for example, climate justice, gender justice, or intergenerational justice). Here,
a shift from relying predominantly on the agency of states and their representatives as
carriers of knowledge and mediators of normative change towards engaging societal
agency conceived as ‘societal multiplicity’ represents a welcome contribution. The point
will be detailed with reference to contestations of global governance norms.
In a nutshell, this article argues that the particularly welcome contribution of this
invitation to explore the potential of societal multiplicity consists in highlighting a gap
that is constituted by an over-emphasis on regulatory policy and an under-appreciation of
bottom-up dynamics of building global governance from below. The argument will be
illustrated with reference to norms research as a central off-spring of the Constructivist
turn. Here, the societal multiplicity proposition carries especially potential for novel
research on inter-societal (re)negotiations of the social contract as a core norm of sustain-
able global governance. This perspective on societal multiplicity puts less emphasis on
Justin Rosenberg’s motivation to establish IR ‘as a field in its own right’ (Rosenberg,
2016: 128, emphasis in original text).1 Instead, it dedicates the attention to the invitation
to further develop the concept of ‘societal multiplicity’ as a ‘singular ontological prem-
ise’ for IR (Rosenberg, 2019: 111).2 It argues that when viewed as a follow-up from the
Constructivist move towards embracing the social more consistently, Rosenberg’s argu-
ment which this article calls the societal multiplicity proposition is more consistent with
an epistemological than an ontological move.
The argument draws on norms research as a subfield that is particularly suitable to
probe the societal multiplicity proposition, given the socially constructed quality of the
field’s main object. Since norms are relational categories, the field centres on the inher-
ent attention to interaction within a social environment as a sine qua non condition for
the existence of norms. Due to this attention to the social environment, this subfield is
particularly suitable to probe the societal multiplicity proposition. This perspective pre-
sents the proposition against the backdrop of previous propositions for IR theory-build-
ing such as, for example, Emanuel Adler’s concept of intersubjectivity. Both are perceived
here as related moves which sustain the demand for more concise bottom-up theorising
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