You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Explains how actors control access to international resources, creating a stratified international system of political equals and unequals.
As global governance appears to become more inclusive and democratic, many scholars argue that international institutions act as motors of expansion and democratization. The Closure of the International System challenges this view, arguing that the history of the international system is a series of institutional closures, in which institutions such as diplomacy, international law, and international organizations make rules to legitimate the inclusion of some actors and the exclusion of others. While international institutions facilitate collective action and common goods, Viola's closure thesis demonstrates how these gains are achieved by limiting access to rights and resources, creating a stratified system of political equals and unequals. The coexistence of equality and hierarchy is a constitutive feature of the international system and its institutions. This tension is relevant today as multilateral institutions are challenged by disaffected citizens, non-Western powers, and established great powers discontent with the distribution of political rights and authority.
This book applies the analytical approach called Historical Institutionalism (HI)- so far mostly used within comparative politics-to the field of International Relations (IR). It provides an introduction to HI concepts and makes an argument for why it is particularly well-suited for understanding current developments within international institutions. In particular, it helps us to understand the combination of change and stability that together form the dynamics of institutional development over time. It is the first book to collect original, empirical research applying historical institutionalism to international institutions. The chapters cover a range of institutions important to IR, including the development of European Union competition policy, the global politics of financial reform after the 2008 crisis, the institutional development of the World Health Organization, membership reforms in the League of Nations and the United Nations Security Council, and civil society access to intergovernmental organizations. The concluding chapter discusses the relationship of HI to other institutionalist approaches and the role of HI in future IR research.
Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, provide greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power ...
This book provides an innovative analysis, using sociological theory to examine world politics as a differentiated social realm.
This book shows how international organizations achieve their governance goals, despite limited resources, by 'orchestrating' NGOs and other intermediaries.
This book challenges the traditional view that meaningful analogies cannot be drawn between domestic and international politics. Alexandru V. Grigorescu shows that there are important parallels to be drawn across these two realms, if political interactions among states over the past two centuries are compared to those within states going back about a thousand years. He focuses specifically on the evolution of institutions that restrain concentrated power, such as courts, assemblies, and bureaucracies. Restraining Power through Institutions begins by developing a set of theoretical arguments about the emergence, change, and consolidation of institutional restraints on power. These are primari...
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores the deep contestations of the liberal script in the contemporary United States from a variety of perspectives. US democracy today is in crisis because of a profound ideological and affective polarization. The chapters in this volume show that Donald Trump's grip on the Republican Party is a symptom and a catalyst, but not the cause, of the contemporary contestations of the liberal script in the US. To discern their major drivers from a longue durée perspectiv...
While the literature on “new institutionalism” explains the stability of institutional arrangements within countries and the divergence of paths of institutional development between countries, Federico Ferrara takes a “historical institutionalist” approach to theorize dynamic processes of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change in explaining the development of political institutions. Ferrara synthesizes “power-based” or “power-distributional” explanations and “ideas-based” “legitimation explanations.” He specifies the psychological “microfoundations” of processes of institutional development, drawing heavily from the findings of e...
‘Judge Knot’ explores the biggest and the most controversial success story in international law: investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS. Since 1990, investors have launched hundreds of claims against government regulation. This exclusive inside look explains what makes the system tick: its poorly understood centuries-old origins, why corporations demand investment law solutions to political problems, how arbitrators supply these solutions, and why the system lasts despite the many politicians and citizens unhappy with it. Building off of an unprecedented set of interviews with the arbitrators who actually decide the cases, ‘Judge Knot’ brings together the best of political science, law and development economics scholarship and offers a concrete alternative to ISDS that leverages what works about the system and discards what does not, so that international law can be more supportive of democracy and development goals.