Reconceptualisation: Explaining European Security Governance

Since the 1990s, ‘global governance’ has become one of the most prominent or even fashionable concepts in the vocabulary of International Relations. While utilising this concept widely to account for the changing nature of world politics, scholars, for the most part, also agree that ‘global governance’ has little explanatory value. This chapter argues that the lack of causal theory does not prevent ‘global governance’ from helping to explain the changing patterns of international cooperation. By incorporating the constitutive theory of explanation, this chapter makes epistemological propositions about the explanatory qualities of ‘global governance’. Subsequently, these qualities are demonstrated on the example of international security cooperation in two areas: the preventing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union and global policy against Somali piracy.