Governing the Global World Order: Looking Through Realist and Liberal Paradigms

Unlike national societies and systems, it is generally assumed that international society of nations lack formal institutional framework of governance comparable to notion of state sovereignty. To a large extent, this assumption is quite plausible as exact replication of state sovereignty has not been achieved in international system. Thus, there is no supra sovereign governing the nation states constituting the international community. But on the contrary, there is myriad of international institutions, organizations, conventions, protocols which are able to establish a set of rule-settings for state actions greatly eclipsing the classical idea and exercise of state sovereignty. This is an undeniable fact that at no point of time of human civilization, people and communities spread across the globe in concrete national and state identities have been so close due to epic revolution in the fields of information and communication technology. As a resultant factor, there is a definite paradigm of global world order. Globe has shrunk to the extent that interaction among these national communities has achieved greater speed and volume. Every activity of these national communities are getting governed and regulated by a framework of rules commonly agreed by the majority of them. From seas to space, war to peace, trade to commence, postal to aviation, one can imagine any possible areas of those international interactions among the states, one finds a voluminous amount of international treaties, conventions, protocols, organizations, international non- governmental organizations, mass and digital media, global public opinion which restrict the unbridled exercise of state sovereignty and bound it to the global rules of governance in a profound manner. The notion of the global world order has gained wide currency and has received extensive academic acceptability as a viable theoretical construct to make sense of the type of the world we are placed in at the moment. If there is a global world order then in what ways this order has been achieved? It has been achieved through definite, conscious and historic growth towards global governance both in its theoretical and institutional forms. Within various theoretical attempts to grasp this phenomenon of global governance, Realist and Liberal paradigms provide two broad prisms to understand the theoretical viability and institutional infrastructure of global governance. This research paper is a humble attempt to explain the main concerns of the theoretical stands of realist and liberal paradigms and various sub-streams emerging with them.