Rethinking Global Governance

This book explores long-ignored, non-western political systems from to offer critical insights into improving global governance. Delves into these societies to show how successful collection action can occur by dividing sovereignty, consensus building, power from below, and other mechanisms. For a better tomorrow, we need to free ourselves of the colonial constraints on our political imagination. Argues that we must look far beyond the status quo to the thousands of successful mechanisms for collective action that have been cast aside a priori because they do not fit into Western traditions of how people should be organized. Looks into the political systems which were often seen as too acephalous, compartmentalized, heterarchical, or anarchic to be of use, as they came from long past or still enduring societies often dismissed as "savages" and "primitives" until well into the twentieth century. Yet as globalization makes international relations more chaotic, long-ignored governance alternatives may be better suited to today's changing realities. Understanding how the Zulu, Trypillian, Alur, and other collectives worked might be humanity's best hope for survival. will be of interest both to those seeking to apply archaeological and ethnographic data to issues of broad contemporary concern as well as to academics, politicians, policy makers, students, and the general public seeking possible alternatives to conventional thinking in global governance.