Governance is everywhere, shaping how states manage their bureaucracies, militaries, and central banks; how intergovernmental bodies negotiate trade, security, and the environment; and how authority is constructed, contested, and reproduced across the full range of human institutions. Yet the frameworks most commonly used to study governance have been derived largely from Western experiences, treating coherent hierarchies and tightly bounded institutions as the norm, and rendering arrangements that deviate from this template as weak, deficient, or incomplete.

Rethinking Governance starts from a different premise. Governance arrangements across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America are not imperfect imitations of a Western ideal but distinctive political orders in their own right, shaped by specific historical trajectories, social compacts, and repertoires of authority. This series takes those arrangements seriously, not as objects of remediation, but as sites for conceptual innovation and comparative theory-building.

Drawing on political science, law, anthropology, history, sociology, economics, and international relations, the series publishes empirically rich, theoretically ambitious scholarship that moves beyond linear models of state strength and weakness. It foregrounds heterogeneity in kind: the varied ways in which authority is mediated, legitimacy is constructed, and capacity is deployed across diverse institutional and regional contexts. Rather than importing categories wholesale from Western scholarship, contributors are encouraged to draw on vernacular and locally rooted understandings of authority, accountability, and institutional life.

The series brings together monographs and edited volumes engaging with governance across these regions, alongside comparative work that speaks to and from Western and Northern European contexts. By breaking regional silos and fostering dialogue across disciplines and geographies, it seeks not only to unsettle conventional models but to enrich them, building governance theory from the empirical realities of the world as it actually is.

Rethinking Governance is essential reading for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in political science, international relations, law, anthropology, history, and development studies, as well as for researchers and practitioners in policy institutes, NGOs, and international organizations engaged with questions of governance reform.