Review of Palaces of Hope The Anthropology of Global Organizations. Edited by Ronald Niezen and Maria Sapignoli

Abstract

Thanks to its meaningful and profound analysis of the mechanisms governing the functioning of international institutions, carried out in an innovative anthropological perspective, “Palaces of Hope” highlights the crucial importance of the human factor within the context of international organizations and provides the reader with a clear picture of how the behavior of functionaries and officials plays a role in every decisional process carried out at the supranational level. Approaching the studies of global governance through the techniques of ethnography, “Palaces of Hope” allows the reader to significantly merge within the context of international organs object of the analysis and to really understand the functioning of such entities as well as the existing human implications underlying their decisional processes, conceiving institutions as peculiar environments where human beings behave according to determined, both evident and implicit, social mechanisms.