The myth of a rights-based international system capable of protecting civilians has been shattered, as citizens across the globe endure the weight of state-sponsored atrocities and violence on a scale unprecedented in modern history. From Iran to Gaza, Sudan to Ukraine, and Myanmar to the United States, people have become acutely aware of the failures of global order to halt state-sponsored violence, particularly when governments turn on their own citizens. No longer confined to the corridors of diplomats and scholars, awareness of the ineffectiveness of global governance, especially the UN’s inability to protect civilians, has become widespread. This crisis is not just one of institutions, but of political imagination and participation. While global governance is all-encompassing — embedded in trade regimes, financial systems, security architectures, borders, and technology — it remains undemocratic and distant for most. This moment demands scholars to meet communities where they are, listen and engage, and make visible how global order shapes local governance and everyday life. Our task is not simply to analyze from afar, but to foster dialogue by asking: what do people want from global governance? How can their experiences and visions shape the future of global order, or more radically, a global government?

IR scholars are uniquely positioned to contribute to the long-term work of reimagining global order, not as architects of a new system, but as educators who demystify global governance, facilitators who create spaces for dialogue, and archivists who document community visions of how the global should relate to the local. By exchanging this knowledge across contexts, they can advance a participatory design of global government built for and by the diverse peoples united in a shared desire for peaceful co-existence. Centering these participatory global political imaginaries enables IR to repurpose itself as an industry and interdisciplinary field that helps reimagine global order from the ground up toward a more democratic, accountable, and just future. Doing so, however, requires persuading a critical mass within IR to coordinate in pursuit of this agenda.

We are governed globally; just not democratically

While global governance is often discussed as an aspirational and unrealized project, in practice it is already deeply embedded in everyday life. International trade regimes shape domestic labor conditions and access to resources; global financial systems constrain national budgets and social policy; security architectures and arms markets determine whose lives are protected and whose are rendered disposable; and border regimes regulate mobility, belonging, and exclusion. These systems do not merely influence local governance; they actively structure it.

Despite their pervasive effects, these international systems operate largely beyond democratic accountability (Keohane 2015). Most people subject to global governance have no meaningful say in its design or oversight, and political influence rarely travels upward from local communities to the global level — even as decisions made globally shape local realities in profound ways. This asymmetry reveals a structural democratic deficit rather than temporary institutional failures.

Crucially, this deficit is not accidental. It reflects a global order historically rooted in colonial hierarchy, elite bargaining, state-centric authority, and hyper-militarization — one constructed to privilege certain actors, including powerful states, multinational corporations, and transnational elites, while marginalizing others (Gleckman 2016; Kauppi and Madsen 2014; Thakur 2020). As a result, global governance is experienced as distant, technocratic, and immutable, even when it perpetuates inequality and violence.

Moving beyond the United Nations

The UN is often presented as the closest existing approximation of global governance, yet its institutional design exemplifies the democratic limits of the current international order.   While the General Assembly is formally inclusive, it possesses no legally binding authority. Substantive power is concentrated in the Security Council, where the veto rights of the five permanent members institutionalize geopolitical hierarchy and insulate them from accountability. This structure limits the UN’s legitimacy as a democratic global institution: ordinary people do not choose their representatives to the UN, nor do they have mechanisms to influence its decision-making processes; even states are subject to unequal power relations that undermine sovereign equality (Novosad and Werker 2019). The UN was designed to manage relations among states, not to represent humanity as a political collective.

Yet the persistence of state-sponsored violence — the very condition the UN was established to address — becomes the basis for its continued expansion. A useful way to understand the steady expansion of international organizations is through classic theories of governance scaling. From Adolph Wagner’s observation that public expenditure grows with social complexity (Wagner 1883), to Mancur Olson’s argument that larger populations generate collective action problems requiring centralized coordination (Olson 1965), to William A. Niskanen’s insight that bureaucracies tend to expand once established (Niskanen 1971), a consistent pattern emerges: as governance challenges scale in size and complexity, so too do the scope and resources of the institutions tasked with managing them (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Westerwinter 2022). This helps explain the growth of the UN system and large operational agencies such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which have expanded in response to rising displacement, protracted conflict, and increasingly complex humanitarian crises.

However, the state-centric approach to centralizing coordination and expanding institutional design sits in tension with how the UN justifies its own authority, self-preservation, and hypocrisy. Preambles, while not operational provisions, serve as authoritative statements of purpose, intent, moral authorship, and interpretive context. The Charter of the United Nations (1945) declares the UN’s aim “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) acknowledges the “outraged conscience of mankind” in response to barbarous acts. The Statute of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (1950) and the Geneva Conventions (1949) similarly emphasize international protection of victims. Furthermore, from the UN Charter’s invocation of “We the peoples,” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ grounding in inherent human dignity, the Genocide Convention’s appeal to humanity, the Rome Statute’s centering of victims of mass atrocities, and later frameworks such as the Responsibility to Protect and Protection of Civilians resolutions, the UN repeatedly frames its fundamental purpose as safeguarding civilian populations from violence, repression, and atrocity. Taken together, they articulate a coherent claim that the state-centricity within the UN derives its legitimacy from the protection of people rather than the prerogatives of states alone. The consequences of this embedded hypocrisy are increasingly visible. Its repeated inability and — arguably unwillingness — to prevent mass atrocities or meaningfully constrain powerful actors has eroded public confidence in its authority.

If the expansion of the UN and other global institutions can be explained as a structural response to increasing need and complexity, it does not follow that further expansion is the most effective or just path forward. A growing body of evidence suggests that directing resources toward locally grounded, transnational networks of communities may be a more effective way to address the underlying drivers of instability. Research finds that locally led peacebuilding initiatives such as community mediation, inclusive dialogue, and early-warning systems have a significant and sustained impact on reducing violence and strengthening social cohesion (Peace Direct & Alliance for Peacebuilding 2019). 

Rather than routing public funds through large, centralized bureaucracies, where significant portions are absorbed by administrative overhead, international staffing structures, and delayed delivery mechanisms, reallocation toward local governance systems could enable earlier, more context-sensitive interventions (Peace Direct & Alliance for Peacebuilding 2019). Supporting communities to invest in their own social infrastructure can build resilience to atrocity-risk factors — such as discrimination, institutional weakness, and intergroup tensions — before crises escalate, rather than relying on post hoc responses from agencies with incentives to sustain their own existence (United Nations 2014). This is not an argument against international cooperation, but for rethinking its scale and form: shifting from centralized intervention toward models that trust and resource people meaningfully working to serve their communities, where needs and knowledge are most immediate. In effect, this democratizes transnational solidarity and support.

But what about regional bodies?

The tension between people-centered norms and state-mediated power is not confined to the UN; it is replicated across regional governance bodies that are often presented as more........

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