Imagining Pathways for Global Cooperation

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Imagining Pathways for Global Cooperation

9781802205800 Edward Elgar Publishing
Edited by Katja Freistein, Research Group Leader, Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, Bettina Mahlert, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Sigrid Quack, Professor of Sociology and Managing Director and Christine Unrau, Research Group Leader, Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Publication Date: 2022 ISBN: 978 1 80220 580 0 Extent: 274 pp
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-SA 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com.

This book examines the role of imagination in initiating, contesting, and changing the pathways of global cooperation. Building on carefully contextualized empirical cases from diverse policy fields, regions, and historical periods, it highlights the agency of a wide range of actors in reflecting on past and present experiences and imagining future ways of collective problem solving.

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Critical Acclaim
Contributors
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This book examines the role of imagination in initiating, contesting, and changing the pathways of global cooperation. Building on carefully contextualized empirical cases from diverse policy fields, regions, and historical periods, it highlights the agency of a wide range of actors in reflecting on past and present experiences and imagining future ways of collective problem solving.

Chapters analyse the mobilizing, identity, cognitive, emotional, and normative effects through which imaginations shape pathways for global cooperation. Expert contributors consider the ways in which actors combine multiple layers of meaning-making through practices of staging the past and present as well as in their circulation. Exploring the contingency and open-endedness of processes of global cooperation, the book challenges more systemic and output-oriented perspectives of global governance. Its synthesis of ways in which imaginations inform processes of creating, contesting, and changing pathways for global cooperation provides a novel conceptual approach to the study of global cooperation.

Interdisciplinary in approach, this authoritative book offers new ways of thinking about global cooperation to scholars and students of international relations, development studies, law and politics, international theory, global sociology, and global history as well as practitioners and policy-makers across various policy fields.
Critical Acclaim
‘This excellent volume courageously recasts the study of global cooperation. Instead of looking to the past to make sense of where the world finds itself today, it boldly inquires how the future is imagined in the present. Instead of looking at the state of global cooperation through the lofty ideals of philosophers, it offers a rich perspective through the eyes of practitioners, academics, and activists. And instead of treading customary ground in international relations theory, it melds a rich interdisciplinary tableau to capture the practice, emotion, and aspirational elements that move global governance day-to-day. In short, this book richly rewards readers with new ways to imagine the future of global cooperation.’
– Orfeo Fioretos, Temple University, US

‘This exciting collection combines sharp theoretical analysis with a rich array of illuminating case studies to show the powerful role played by creative human imagination in shaping transformative processes of global cooperation. In departure from established understandings of global change as rigidly constrained by deterministic historical structures or rationalized institutional procedures, it makes a compelling case that processes of collective imagining – drawing together symbolic representations, emotions, and normative beliefs – can forge new cooperative pathways in confronting the challenges of twenty-first century world politics.’
– Terry Macdonald, University of Melbourne, Australia

‘This superb volume offers an innovative and inspired perspective on global cooperation that centres the work of the imagination as an essential driver of the processes through which unscripted cooperation pathways emerge and open up new trajectories of collective action. In doing so, it delineates a more hopeful vision for a future that is not determined by the patterns and outcomes of the past, but driven by the converging aspirations of those willing to invent it.’
– Inanna Hamati-Ataya, University of Cambridge, UK
Contributors
Contributors: Amya Agarwal, Silke Beck, Joanildo Burity, Maryam Z. Deloffre, Katja Freistein, Wolfram Kaiser, Stefania Maffeis, Bettina Mahlert, Jeroen Oomen, Christine Overdevest, Sigrid Quack, Christine Unrau, Wouter Werner
Contents
Contents:

Preface xii
1 Imagining pathways for global cooperation: an introduction 1
Katja Freistein, Bettina Mahlert, Sigrid Quack and Christine Unrau

PART I INITIATING COOPERATION
2 Imagining, visualizing, and narrating peace through trade:
free trade networks, world exhibitions, and pathways of
global cooperation 30
Wolfram Kaiser
3 The ‘true utopia’? Riace, Wim Wenders’ Il Volo, and the
prefigurative politics of migration 52
Christine Unrau
4 Migration as a human right: pathways of global solidarity
at the borders of Europe 70
Stefania Maffeis

PART II CONTESTING COOPERATION
5 Pathways of immunity, customary law, and the creation of
an authoritative past 92
Katja Freistein and Wouter Werner
6 Entangled imaginaries and bonds of shared pain: the case
of Kashmiri and Palestinian resistance 108
Amya Agarwal
7 Pathways and the politics of anticipation: imagining the
corridor for international climate cooperation 126
Jeroen Oomen and Silke Beck

PART III CHANGING COOPERATION
8 The Sphere Project: imagining better humanitarian action
through reflective accountability institutions and practices 147
Maryam Z. Deloffre
9 Imagining credible standards: what’s driving the ISEAL alliance? 170
Christine Overdevest
10 From per capita income to the Human Development Index:
a pathway for imagining development through numbers 188
Bettina Mahlert
11 Envisioning the oikoumene: interfaith networks of social
activism between Europe and Latin America 209
Joanildo Burity
12 Creating, challenging, and changing pathways for
cooperation through imagination 230
Katja Freistein, Bettina Mahlert, Sigrid Quack and
Christine Unrau

Index
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