What does global governance look like from the vantage point of a border? Nele Kortendiek’s Global Governance on the Ground (2024) offers an ambitious attempt to answer that question by moving away from treaties, institutions, and formal authority to examine how global norms of migration and asylum are enacted through everyday organizational practice. Her stated aim is to examine mixed migration through practice on the ground, to “see like a border” rather than like a government, and to reconceptualize global governance as a spatial and practice-based mode of rule that unfolds in concrete places rather than abstract levels of authority. This shift from the macro to the micro is both the book’s analytical strength and a political blind spot. The monograph is an impressive and meticulously researched ethnography of governance as lived experience, one that greatly enriches our understanding of how international norms operate in practice. Yet, in foregrounding organizational dynamics and implementation processes, it inevitably leaves the state somewhat in the background—present as structure, but less visible as strategist. From the perspective of migration diplomacy, this remains a crucial analytical gap, for global governance cannot be fully understood apart from the state strategies and geopolitical hierarchies within which these field practices unfold.

Kortendiek builds her argument on the premise that international organizations do not merely implement policy but govern on the ground. Drawing on the 2015–2016 European migration crisis, she shows how international organization (IO) fieldworkers stationed at Europe’s borders improvised collective action in conditions of uncertainty, incomplete information, and political ambiguity. Their work proceeds through five iterative steps: improvising, negotiating competence, and routinizing practice in the field, followed by consolidation and diffusion through headquarters. Through this process, provisional practices of governance are developed, stabilized, and circulated across sites, often preceding or substituting formal policy. Based on extensive multi-sited ethnography across Lampedusa, Melilla, Calais, and Lesvos, the book traces how international norms are rendered operational through professional judgment, interorganizational networks, and on-the-job learning. In doing so, Global Governance on the Ground depicts how IOs improvise, codify, and eventually institutionalize the practices that come to define migration and asylum governance in Europe’s borderlands. Kortendiek formalizes these insights into a “loop model” of governing on the ground, arguing that practice constitutes a distinct mode of global governance operating at low institutional thresholds and tied to specific places rather than levels of decision-making.

The book’s methodological achievement is formidable. Few scholars sustain multicountry fieldwork across politically sensitive border zones with such rigor and empathy. Kortendiek’s ethnography offers rare visibility into the field-level agents who translate global scripts into action: the NGO case worker, the Frontex liaison, the municipal official negotiating jurisdictional gray zones. This recalibration of agency, away from ministers and toward implementers, provides a valuable corrective to top-down accounts of international cooperation. Conceptually, Global Governance on the Ground moves the study of norms beyond binaries of success and failure. By emphasizing friction and translation, it shows how normative order emerges through ambiguity. The tone remains measured and reflexive, neither celebratory nor condemnatory. Most importantly, the monograph demonstrates that implementation is constitutive of global rulemaking. Governance, in Kortendiek’s telling, is identified in the very process through which global order is sustained, rather the afterlife of political decision-making.

Yet, the very move that grants the analysis its empirical intimacy, namely the decentering of the state, also renders its account of power strangely weightless. Global governance here unfolds in a vacuum of intentionality. States hover in the background as legal frameworks, funders, or signatories, but not as strategic actors shaping the field. This omission limits the explanatory reach of the analysis. In this sense, the concept of global governance remains descriptive rather than analytical. Governance “on the ground” still operates within the architecture of state authority, law, and coercion; sovereignty remains the silent grammar of every scene. Relatedly, the relative autonomy of IOs and NGOs is often overstated. These organizations act within delegation frameworks carefully engineered by states seeking to outsource control. Their discretion to admit, classify, or assist frequently reflects ambiguity designed by governments to diffuse accountability. What Kortendiek reads as norm translation may, thus, also be read as migration diplomacy by proxy, the tactical deployment of humanitarian actors to project compliance while maintaining deterrence. Kortendiek is not unaware of these tensions and concedes in her conclusion that field governance is embedded in structural and spatial constraints. She calls for further research on how IOs relate to local authorities and the agency of the governed. These acknowledgements remain largely programmatic without being integrated into the book’s explanatory core.

As a result, the book is curiously detached from geopolitics. The strategic logic behind externalization, or how Italy, Greece, or Spain leverage humanitarian crises to gain bargaining power within the EU, remains unexplored. By ethnographizing governance from below, the analysis risks mistaking tactical adaptation for structural transformation. More broadly, the scope of the empirical material limits the claim to the “global.” All case studies lie within the European Union; absent are the perspectives of sending or transit states like Turkey, Tunisia, Niger, where migration diplomacy is most overtly practiced. The book’s title therefore promises more than its data deliver. This is a rich ethnography of European border governance, not a study of global migration governance in relational terms. Finally, Global Governance on the Ground maintains little dialogue with literatures on sovereignty performance, symbolic politics, or the diplomatic management of mobility. Its focus on bureaucratic practice elides how bordering is also performative; a migration-diplomacy reading would insist that these acts are not neutral acts of adaptation, but strategic performances aimed at international audiences.

Global Governance on the Ground is a landmark in ethnographic political science: empirically rich, theoretically careful, and written with precision. Its central insight, that global norms are lived, negotiated, and re-created through everyday practice, deepens our understanding of how governance operates beyond the formal sphere. Yet, by refusing to theorize the state as a purposive strategist, the book offers governance without governors. Power diffuses through organizations and routines, but its origins and direction remain uncharted. Future research can build on Kortendiek’s formidable foundation by reconnecting the microdynamics of implementation with the macrostrategies of statecraft to show how local discretion both reflects and reproduces geopolitical hierarchy. From a migration-diplomacy perspective, what happens in a detention center or coordination meeting is inseparable from the bargains, signaling games, and asymmetries that structure the international politics of mobility. Kortendiek has shown us how global governance of mixed migration is enacted; international relations must still explain why.