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Amartya Sen's enlarged conception of freedom has augmented the scope of economic analysis but it also has had the surprising effect of being more supportive of the free market than conventional welfare economics. It is argued here that a comparison of Sen's position with that of the American institutionalist, J R Commons, highlights some problems with Sen's approach and points to possible ways in which they might be addressed.

This article addresses the effects of inequality on the globalisation process. It is argued that the recent financial and economic crisis is a manifestation of a tendency of the aggregate demand to fall relatively to aggregate supply, generated by an asymmetric income distribution, which in turn both increases, and is reinforced by, the mobility of goods, capital and labour, in a process of cumulative causation. This process has not become manifest earlier due to counteracting tendencies generated by the financial system, that were disrupted during the crisis. It is also argued that mainstream economics does not have the adequate framework for explaining the crisis, and actually contributed to the crisis through its theories and policies. Hence an alternative economic framework is suggested for addressing the crisis, drawing upon the contributions of several heterodox economic traditions, especially post-Keynesianism.

Although globalisation has been an increasingly important characteristic of United States higher education for over two decades, there has been little historical analysis of the process or its origins. This article argues that beginning in the early 1970s, institutional, national, and international events established a powerful context for the development of college and university goals that focus on globalisation. These goals are substantially different from the goals of improving the democracy and opportunities for full citizenship articulated in the report of the 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education and subsequently affirmed in other national reports as late as 1971.

Human rights and democracy have been regarded as a mutually reinforcing couple by many political theorists to date. The internationalisation of human rights post-1945 is often said to have severed those links, however. Accounting for the legitimacy of international human rights requires exploring how human rights and democracy, once they have been decoupled or disconnected, can be recoupled or reunited across governance levels (vertically) and maybe even at the same governance level (horizontally) albeit beyond the state

This article examines the impact of political opportunity structures (POS) on the activity choices of women's groups in the UK, France, and Germany in order to determine whether political opportunities, specifically elite alliances and changes in electoral cleavages, are gendered. We ask how/whether various institutional structures impact the activity choices of women's groups, gauging whether women react to opportunities in a similar manner as other social groups, namely environmental groups. We find that social democratic elite allies and electoral cleavages prompted by de-alignment influence activity choice among women's groups in a similar manner as among environmental groups, yet the data show that women's groups are disenfranchised from direct contact with policymaking elites through consultation, thus suggesting the presence of gendered POS.

The 'Responsibility to Protect' (RtoP) principle represents a commitment to prevent and halt mass atrocity crimes. However, in his 2009 report on implementing the RtoP, the UN Secretary-General noted that more work was needed to understand the measures that states might take to exercise their RtoP. Given that UN peace operations are now customarily mandated to 'protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence', it would seem prudent to ask how peace operations can contribute to operationalising the RtoP and how the RtoP might support peacekeeping. This article explores the potential for implementing the RtoP through peace operations. It argues that the RtoP and peace operations are mutually reinforcing. Notwithstanding systemic challenges, peace operations offer a legitimate vehicle for implementing RtoP, whereas RtoP provides a facilitating norm for harnessing political will and buttressing the legitimacy and credibility of contemporary peace operations.

As plentiful and productive as recent empirical work has been, we still know very little about globalisation's long-run impact on economic development. This is only partly because of data limitations. At least as important, this article suggests, have been theoretical limitations: economists and political scientists have yet to resolve a number of key conceptual points. This article brings these remaining theoretical puzzles to the surface, starting with the link between openness and growth. It then turns to the relationship between trade and inequality. Both links-the one from trade to growth, the other from trade to inequality-have been subjects of heated debate among development economists. By contrast, the main focus of this article is the relationship between these two strands of research. How growth and equity interact is a theoretical puzzle which, though no less basic than the others, has to date received far less attention. The article concludes by laying out a back-to-basics research agenda for future-oriented globalisation research in which this growth/equity trade-off is restored to its rightful place at the theoretical centre of the wider development literature.

Why and how do issues expire? This paper applies the concept of path dependency to issue-life cycle and argues that the manner in which an issue dies is closely associated with how it comes to life. This paper argues that, on the Access to Medicines issue, the first actors (1) to have called attention to a legal problem, (2) to have capitalised on the HIV/AIDs crisis, and (3) to have used the example of Africa, were also the first to have felt constrained by their own frame in their attempt to (1) look for economical rather than legal solutions, (2) expand the list of medicines covered beyond anti-AIDs drugs, and (3) allow large emerging economies to benefit from a scheme designed by countries without manufacturing capacities. In order to escape an issue in which they felt entrapped, issue-entrepreneurs worked strategically to close the debate in order to better reframe it in other forums.

There is a politics to the West/non-West distinction that is bound up with predominant models for dialogue in IR; rethinking these models of dialogue implies a new politics, and therefore also, I will suggest, a move away from the West/non-West binary as a way of characterising the participants in dialogic exchange oriented towards the expansive transformation of disciplinary imaginaries.

However ruthless monopoly forces may be in limiting freedoms, the Democracy Manifesto challenges us to consider if the unruly power of the market isn't also a home of democratic freedom.

Why does the willingness of interest groups to join forces with their peers abroad vary across issues? The present article points to cross-issue variation in the "constrain-thy-neighbor" effects of transnational law. Interest groups consider not only whether they are worse off if they themselves are subjected to a transnational law. They also consider how it affects them if the same law applies abroad. Depending on the issue, they derive advantages or disadvantages from seeing their neighbors constrained, and this affects their willingness to fight transnational legislation on that issue. To illustrate the argument, the article compares cohesion within the Union of Industrial and Employers' Confederations of Europe (UNICE), the European peak employer federation, on two aspects of EU company law. UNICE members were divided over EU takeover directives while uniting against EU worker participation directives. Statements released by German and British UNICE members show that the divergent constrain-thy-neighbor effect associated with these issues contributed to variation in cohesion.

For decades, China has maintained State import monopoly in cultural products. The opaque State trading operations ensure a maximum level of flexibility and efficacy in the government censorship of imports. The WTO judiciary held in the China-Publications case that this practice is inconsistent with China's trading rights commitments under its Accession Protocol and cannot be justified by the public morals exception of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. To comply with the WTO ruling, China must restructure its censorship regime, which it apparently is not prepared to do. This article analyses the implications of the WTO decision and provides a critical assessment of the new WTO jurisprudence regarding trading rights and the China Accession Protocol.

For decades, scholars of political culture have held that mass political attitudes have a profound impact on the process of democratization. In studying this impact, an increasing number of political scientists have recently theorized that the level of democratization a political system reaches depends on the extent to which its political institutions meet citizen demand for democracy. In testing such theoretical models of democratic demand and supply, however, many political scientists have mistakenly equated democratic demand with citizen preference for democracy over its alternatives. In this study, we first argue that popular demand for democracy is not the same thing as democratic regime preference or support. Instead, demand for democracy arises from dissatisfaction with democracy-in-practice. By analyzing the fourth wave of the World Values Survey, we then demonstrate that the critical orientations of democrats promote democratic development more powerfully than do the two attitudes - democratic regime support and self-expression values - that prior public opinion research has identified as the forces driving democratization.

"A large body of European Union (EU) law - EU administrative law - is not made by the EU's democratically elected bodies, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament (EP). Instead, most administrative laws are made by the unelected European Commission. That, of itself, does not mean that the EU is insufficiently democratic: most democracies delegate the power to make administrative laws to unelected regulators. In those democracies, however, elected legislatures can at least change administrative laws after they are promulgated. This article contends that the EU is different: the Council and EP are effectively unable to change administrative laws. This article identifies 'design flaws' in the EU's lawmaking processes that are responsible for this democratic shortcoming. It then surveys relevant provisions of the new Lisbon Treaty in order to determine whether Lisbon will remedy that shortcoming: whether it will empower the Council and EP - or citizens directly - to change administrative laws."

"Legitimation of power through institutions is not new in world politics. Yet, the dynamics of the conferment or withdrawal of legitimacy through the work of international administrations in the context of contemporary statebuilding policies remains - to date - insufficiently explored. This article aims to narrow such a gap by analysing attainment of legitimacy and its deficit through the work of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo following the ending of hostilities in 1999. Emphasising the political complexities involved in domestic-international exchanges, the analysis shows that the international administration and the local elite have pursued alternative views with conflicting implications for the local society. The resulting disaccord related to priorities and expectations of the international administration and those of domestic actors has hindered the local population's acceptance of the international mission and benefited claims for self-governance. The dynamics of domestic-international interactions in the context of Kosovo resonate with those in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and East Timor. Given that domestic circumstances have had a key impact on the evolving relationship between the international and local actors, paying more attention to the domestic setting is likely to save more time, energy, and resources in achieving sought goals."

African countries should initiate dialogue between government, student leaders, and university managers and professionals on student development as a pathway to democratic citizenship-building on the continent, new research has proposed. There should be in-depth investigations into democratic best practice regarding student development, and especially student leadership development, with the findings presented in handbooks for use by student development professionals in African universities.

Slum dweller federations, like many other social movements, cater for the youth in their constituencies. This is critical to their relevance as agents of change and contributes to the sustainability of the movements. However, the youth formations are not merely scaled-down versions of the movements and often grapple with a set of dynamics unique to that transitory period in life. This story is a case study of the youth federation that is aligned to Kenya's slum dwellers federation.

When faced with speculative pressure on their currencies, policymakers often delay devaluations by spending billions of dollars in defense of a given exchange rate peg, only to succumb and devalue their currency later on. Using a political economy approach we argue that the interaction of distributional concerns, cognitive limitations, time-consistency problems, and institutional structures can keep governments from implementing the economically optimal policy response. We argue that distributional concerns often lead to a 'bias' in favor of currency defense as long as market pressures are mild. The political incentives to initially delay devaluations can be exacerbated by institutions that either increase the size of interest groups vulnerable to depreciation or give policymakers incentives to adopt a short time-horizon. Once market pressure becomes strong, however, the politically salient alternative to not depreciating becomes raising interest rates rather than just running down reserves. This acts as a wake-up call that changes perceptions of the underlying distributional considerations and hence the political trade-off between the costs and benefits of an exchange rate defense. As the coalition of devaluation-proponents grows, the likelihood of a devaluation increases. We illustrate our argument by discussing the salient distributional issues and their interaction with domestic institutions in four brief case studies.

"The purpose of this article is to critically review the work of Andre Gunder Frank. This is no easy task given the prolific and controversial nature of his life work. His main distinction is as a paradigm breaker and a paradigm maker. Frank is one of the founders of contemporary world system theory. He coined some memorable expressions such as the 'development of underdevelopment' and 'Re-Orient'. Indeed, these two concepts highlight two distinct phases in his work. His first phase is characterised by his writings on dependency theory and his initial understanding of world system theory broadly in line with Amin, Arrighi and Wallerstein. His second phase is distinguished by what he considers to be the 'Eurocentric' interpretation of world system theory of Wallerstein and others as well as by his critique of his own earlier work. While some of Frank's analyses and assertions proved to be wrong, he provided much inspiration to a new generation of scholars and activists, some of whom provided the necessary empirical evidence and theoretical rigour lacking in parts of Frank's work. But he excelled in his mission of providing the big picture, asking the unimaginable questions and exploring hitherto inconceivable interrelationships."