Governance is today presented as a new paradigm of social regulation that has come to supplant the previously established paradigm based on social conflict and on the privileged role of the sovereign state to regulate this conflict through the power of control and coercion at its disposal. In this article, the author presents a radical critique of the new paradigm, conceiving it as a regulatory matrix of neoliberalism, seen as a new version of laissez faire capitalism. Centered on the question of governability, this regulatory matrix presupposes a politics of law and a politics of rights that tend to aggravate the crisis of legitimacy of the state. Some aspects of governance may be found in the global movement of resistance against neoliberal globalization which finds its best expression today in the World Social Forum. Unlike hegemonic governance, this movement is grounded on the idea of conflict and struggle against social exclusion, and this is evident in the conceptions and politics of law that it adopts.