The Crisis of the Existing Global Paradigm of Governance and Political Economy

• Main Author: Winston P. Nagan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Risk Institute, Trieste- Geneva 2014-05-01
• Series: Cadmus
• Online Access: http://www.cadmusjournal.org/article/volume-2/issue-2-part-1/crisis-existing-global-paradigm-governance-and-political-economy

This article seeks to underline the central challenges to world order that are outcomes of our current system of global, social, power and constitutional processes. The article outlines these major problems which it is suggested represent a crisis for the future trajectory of human survival and well-being. The paper then uses the problem of the emergence of transnational criminal activity in order to underline the limits of the current global paradigm of governance. In effect, in the criminal law context the jurisdiction of sovereign states to attack the problem of transnational crime is hedged with severe limitations. The most important of these limitations is the fact that the jurisdiction over crimes by sovereigns is limited by the territorial character of the definition of sovereignty. Thus a sovereign has a limited capacity to control and police criminal activity whose main locus of operation is generated outside of the territorial reach of the sovereign state. This essentially means that the element of global governance generates a juridical vacuum which permits organized crime to flourish outside of the boundaries of the state but at the same time, having the capacity to penetrate and corrupt the social, political and juridical processes of the sovereign state. The article explores the effort of the UN to provide some form of response to this crisis in the form of an international agreement.