Narratives of Global Governance: UN ideas that changed the world as policymaking approaches the United Nations (UN), a contemporary international organization, as a set of political practices. Its object of inquiry is a collection of UN-sanctioned accounts of ideas that changed the world in several issue areas (Security, Development, Human Rights) – the United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP). UNIHP presents the UN as a learning organization, able to innovate and to export its findings – in the process, producing international order for a variety of other social agents (global governance). Narratives of Global Governance puts this claim – UN ideas changed the world – under critical scrutiny. Informed by critical approaches to ideas and international relations, it unpacks contradictory narratives of governance running through UNIHP. Instead of a clear-cut conception of global governance, UNIHP is filled with conflicting uses of ideas. They are used to frame (some) social practices as problems to be solved, and to authorize (some) social agents as problem-solvers. UNIHP comprises a political cacophony. Despite unsettling, noise doesn t preclude ordering. Through ambivalent political disputes centered on ideas, a specific conception of the international is produced, with the UN as a pivotal element. It provides solutions to sovereign states problems, without partaking in side-effects. It also bridge civil society demands, from domestic settings to the international realm. In UNIHP-legitimated depiction of social reality, the UN, non-sovereign, whose practices are often contested, becomes quasi-omnipresent. It transcends space, in order to learn through time and forecast change. On the one hand, UNIHP legitimizes the institution of the UN (non-sovereign entities need extra justification). On the other hand, the UN as an institution is framed, legitimated, according to a grammar of risk, threat, crisis, tragedy. It is rendered a hyper-modern subject helping modern subjects (states, NGOs) live orderly. Governance follows. After its critical scrutiny, Narratives of Global Governance displays how UNIHP legitimizes the UN through a (deceptively) simplistic account of ideas as commodities. Across their metamorphoses, contradictory uses of ideas confer the UN coherence, as the world changes incessantly and the organization stands still. Knowing in advance what to do to avoid (others) problems, sovereign-deprived UN becomes the authoritative source of governance, bridging levels of social activity. Global stands for an ordered array of sovereigns and non-sovereigns, with the UN in-between – a territorialized, sovereign-informed account of a reformed international. Allegedly future-oriented UNIHP extracts its prophecies from the past, restating conceptual foundational myths. The context of UNIHP s production is relevant. After the Cold War, the UN was unsettled by sudden change, criticized for shortcomings and inadequacy. UNIHP provides a tentative answer to near-past criticisms, telling, retrospectively, how the UN changed the world ahead of the curve of the rest. Narratives of global governance: UN ideas as policymaking focuses how historical claims are made to work, disputing UNIHP s future-oriented perspective on grounds of how practices of making claims about History are worked in institutions. By adopting risk, threat, crisis and tragedy as referents, UNIHP departs Modernity as immanent critique, for the sake of colonizing the future.