Activists, officials, and academics alike have often linked observations about an emerging global civil society to an incipient democratization of world politics. Global civil society is assumed to bring public scrutiny and “bottom‐up” politics to international decision making “from outside” formal political institutions. Based on an analysis of uses of the concept of global civil society in 1990s global governance discourse (especially related to the major UN world conferences), this paper argues that the presumed democratization of world politics is better understood in terms of a double movement: on the one hand, “global civil society” depoliticizes global governance through the promotion of “human security” and “social development”; on the other hand, the emerging international public sphere (in the UN context) operates as a subsystem of world politics rather than opposing the system from outside. Practices of depoliticization are thus part of the political logic of (neo‐)liberal global governance. The argument draws on Luhmann’s systems theory and Foucault’s analysis of governmentality.

Commentary on the United Nations (UN) reform efforts of 2004-05 has broadly followed two different trajectories. International lawyers and political theorists have focused on the implications of reform for sovereignty as a fundamental principle of international law and international relations. International Relations (IR) scholars have discussed reform focusing on state power and the UN's institutional authority. Against the background of these debates and drawing on Foucault's political theory and related IR scholarship, this article argues that UN reform discourse indicates a biopolitical 'reprogramming' of contemporary sovereignty and global governance. The analysis 'displaces' the concerns with sovereignty, state power, and institutional authority by demonstrating that UN reform (also) constitutes the UN as a project of managing and regulating the global population through a variety of securitizing, economizing, and normalizing rationalities and techniques. The article illustrates this by pointing to the biopolitical rationales of reform conceptions of human security and collective security, and to (neo)liberal governmentalities of risk and responsibility, contractualism, benchmarking, and networks. It thereby challenges the conceptual and normative priority accorded to juridical sovereignty in international law, and to state-and institution-centric accounts in IR theorizations of UN-relayed global governance.

While `world opinion' is a staple in political discourse, the concept has received little attention in IR. Locating it along the `realist—idealist' divide, existing studies have conceptualized `world opinion' empirically, as an aggregative or intersubjective phenomenon, annexed or opposed to state sovereignty, and embodying a normative standard. Drawing on Luhmann's conception of public opinion and Foucault's governmentality approach, this article reconceptualizes `world opinion' discursively (functionally and semantically), as a medium of communication that enables post-sovereign forms of international governance irrespective of an inherent normativity. The alternative conception of `world opinion' is illustrated in the discourse of the emerging United Nations in the early 1940s. In this context, `world opinion' addressed problems concerning the failure of the League of Nations, total war, and threats to `civilization'. With public opinion research as a technical backdrop, `world opinion' underwrote governmentalities of international policing, welfare and rights liberalism, post-colonial pastoralism, and pedagogical panopticism in response to these problems.

Qualifying a realist interpretation, this essay argues that the dialectical involvement of the state as an individual with its external relations exposes international politics as a matter of both anarchy and war, and mutual recognition and practical morality among states in Hegel's theory of international relations. With the absolute distinction between internal community and external anarchy removed, Hegel's account of civil society becomes relevant to his theory of international relations. Both as an analogy and concretely, it provides indications for a partial transcendence of sovereign statehood and international anarchy by institutionalised co-operation and political (self-)regulation in a transnationalising civil society.

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