Abstract Global governance is undergirded by what Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth call “universals”: global templates for how to regulate, develop, and measure. Research in international political sociology often, explicitly or implicitly, investigates how universals circulate across spaces, how they guide interaction, and which actors can carry them. Here we discuss three conceptual and methodological identification problems for tracing universals and their likely effects. The first is to locate how regular and intense relations are within a social space, constructing a field. The second is to assess how actors interact, and how they create insider/outsider boundaries and what rituals affirm universals. The third is to locate mobility among those involved, identifying what attributes allow them to carry universals across global governance. We highlight the importance of space, interaction, and mobility through two examples that show how universals for measurement and law emerged and are repurposed. The first is on environmental accountability, the second on sovereign debt. We suggest that tracing universals can tell us a great deal about contemporary global governance, including when initiatives to project power become dominant and when they face demise.
Dugué et al. (2026) studied this question.