What does global governance look like from the vantage point of a border?Nele Kortendiek's Global Governance on the Ground (2024) offers an ambitious attempt to answer that question by moving away from treaties, institutions, and formal authority to examine how global norms of migration and asylum are enacted through everyday organizational practice.Her stated aim is to examine mixed migration through practice on the ground, to "see like a border" rather than like a government, and to reconceptualize global governance as a spatial and practice-based mode of rule that unfolds in concrete places rather than abstract levels of authority.This shift from the macro to the micro is both the book's analytical strength and a political blind spot.The monograph is an impressive and meticulously researched ethnography of governance as lived experience, one that greatly enriches our understanding of how international norms operate in practice.Yet, in foregrounding organizational dynamics and implementation processes, it inevitably leaves the state somewhat in the background-present as structure, but less visible as strategist.From the perspective of migration diplomacy, this remains a crucial analytical gap, for global governance cannot be fully understood apart from the state strategies and geopolitical hierarchies within which these field practices unfold.Kortendiek builds her argument on the premise that international organizations do not merely implement policy but govern on the ground.Drawing on the 2015-2016 European migration crisis, she shows how international organization (IO) fieldworkers stationed at Europe's borders improvised collective action in conditions of uncertainty, incomplete information, and political ambiguity.Their work proceeds through five iterative steps: improvising, negotiating competence, and routinizing practice in the field, followed by consolidation and diffusion through headquarters.Through this process, provisional practices of governance are developed, stabilized, and circulated across sites, often preceding or substituting formal policy.Based on extensive multi-sited ethnography across Lampedusa, Melilla, Calais, and Lesvos, the book traces how international norms are rendered operational through professional judgment, interorganizational networks, and on-the-job learning.In doing so, Global Governance on the Ground depicts how IOs improvise, codify, and eventually institutionalize the practices that come to define migration and asylum governance in Europe's borderlands.Kortendiek formalizes these insights into a "loop model" of governing on the ground, arguing that
Gerasimos Tsourapas (Sun,) studied this question.