"International law is currently undergoing a major transformation that has provoked a 'legal turn' in the field of International Relations. At the heart of this transformation are the juridification of international politics and subsequently the judicialisation of international law. This contribution argues that scholars of critical International Political Economy have not yet paid enough attention to this process. What is needed is a theory of international law that is able to grasp the societal implications of this transformation. In a first step some accounts drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Evgeny Pashukanis are presented, with a view to making their theory fruitful for analysing international law. Against the background of an empirical study that compares the global regulation of trade in goods with the trade in services, delivered notably through natural persons, some major shortcomings of these accounts are outlined. The last part of the contribution presents some ideas on how to further develop a critical theory of international (trade) law that introduces a communicative dimension into the legal turn with a view to distinguishing between different extra-economic dynamics."

"This article examines the role of the new media in the 'Arab Spring' in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that although the new media is one of the factors in the social revolution among others such as social and political factors in the region, it nevertheless played a critical role especially in light of the absence of an open media and a civil society. The significance of the globalization of the new media is highlighted as it presents an interesting case of horizontal connectivity in social mobilization as well signaling a new trend in the intersection of new media and conventional media such as television, radio, and mobile phone. One of the contradictions of the present phase of globalization is that the state in many contexts facilitated the promotion of new media due to economic compulsion, inadvertently facing the social and political consequences of the new media."

"The idea that democracy is contagious, that democracy diffuses across the world map, is now well established among policy makers and political scientists alike. The few theoretical explanations of this phenomenon focus exclusively on political elites. This article presents a theoretical model and accompanying computer simulation that explains the diffusion of democracy based on the dynamics of public opinion and mass revolutions. On the basis of the literature on preference falsification, cascading revolutions, and the social judgment theory, an agent-based simulation is developed and analyzed. The results demonstrate that the diffusion of attitudes, in combination with a cascading model of revolutions, is indeed a possible theoretical explanation of the spatial clustering of democracy."

"Dual/multiple citizenship has become a widespread phenomenon in many parts of the world. This acceptance or tolerance of overlapping memberships in political communities represents an important element in the ongoing readjustment of the relationship between citizens and political communities in democratic systems. This article has two goals and parts. First, it evaluates dual citizenship from the perspective of five normative theories of democracy. Liberal and republican as well as multicultural and deliberative understandings of democracy deliver a broad spectrum of arguments in favour of dual citizenship. Only communitarians fear that dual citizenship endangers national democracies. Nevertheless, empirical evidence and national policies largely contradict these fears. The second part of the article reverses the perspective and shows that most theories of democracy do not only legitimate and facilitate the acceptance of dual citizenship - the phenomenon of multiple citizenships induces innovation in democratic theory in turn. A second look at the relationship between dual citizenship and theories of democracy reveals that dual citizenship stimulates refinements, expansions and reconceptualisations of these theories for a transnationalising world."

"The cyclical nature of capitalism reflected in the current economic crises encourages a review of the economic downturn of the 1970s and 1980s in Europe where workers engaged in sit-ins, work-ins and worker buyouts to save their jobs. Hundreds were successful and thousands of jobs were saved. Spain was at the forefront of this strategy and introduced legislation in 1986 to enshrine the worker self-managed company, Sociedades Laborales, as a policy for corporate restructuring. This article reports on the research in Spain conducted into company failure due to insolvency and the subsequent rescue by an employee-centred equity buyout. Seven firms in the metals industry are examined where workers rescued insolvent factories using the Sociedades Laborales democratic model. The research shows that sustainable democratic corporate governance was possible based on worker self-management and this was achieved by the workers making choices to overcome the conundrum of balancing democratic governance and market efficiency."

"European integration is interpreted in this paper as the route by which (West) Germany, profiting from close ties with the English-speaking West, was able to restore its full sovereignty and economic pre-eminence in Europe. Yet in shaping the actual integration process, it was France which played the key role. Most of the landmark steps towards the current EU were French proposals to pre-empt Anglophone-German collusion; creating European structures in which a resurgence of Germany (politically and economically) was made subject to permanent negotiation. German unification in 1991 removed the one reason why successive governments of the Federal Republic had gone along with this. Paradoxically, sovereign Germany today finds itself bound by the dense networks of consultation and decision-making which make the EU unique in the field of regional integration. The paper shows that between 1992 and 2005, German capital has moved to the centre of the network of corporate interlocks in the North Atlantic area. This helps to explain why in the post-1991, post-Soviet era of neoliberal, finance-driven globalisation, Germany is increasingly 'speaking for Europe', as its corporations have become nodal points in the communication structures through which the responses to the challenges facing the EU and the West at large are being shaped."

"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."

"A survey of the literature on the political economy of global financial liberalization shows how little has been written on the role of the OECD, and how the Principal-Agent (PA) theory, complemented by Constructivist tools, can be applied helpfully to analyse this process. We show that the OECD's Committee on Capital Movements and Invisible Transactions (CMIT) played an entrepreneurial role in encouraging the liberalization of capital flows. In particular, we argue that the CMIT slipped by acting beyond its core delegation roles and against the preferences of the OECD member states' governments. This was done by discussing and seeking to expand the list of issue areas on which controls should be lifted to include short-term capital movements and the right of establishment, to adopt an extended understanding of reciprocity, and to eliminate a range of additional discriminatory measures on capital flows. Acting as institutional entrepreneurs, the CMIT members took advantage of the overlap among the networks in which they were engaged to spread their ideas to the member states. The CMIT's work affected the member states' willingness to make irrevocable, multilateral commitments through a combination of peer pressure and vertical institutional interconnectedness. Through the work of the CMIT, the OECD was an important actor in capital liberalization, in addition to the role played by other international organizations."

"Extensive socio-ethnographic fieldwork among nongovernmental organizations, international donor agencies, and Church-related organizations in Chiapas, Mexico, suggests that global civil society-as an imagined terrain of transnational social action-can be viewed both as a site of expanded possibilities for social action and as a source of significant new constraints. It is a terrain where not all ideas and values are heard, promoted, or given legitimacy. There is, however, a transnationally resonant language into which Southern activists need to translate their issues and concerns if they wish to be heard."

"The military regimes of 1964-1989 in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil implemented a code of legitimacy that appealed to various secular beliefs rooted in civil society at the same time that they fostered a common myth of religious legitimation-that of defending "Western Christian civilization." It was under this umbrella that military groups and religious actors faced each other and/or established alliances. In this cultural politics, religious actors that had previously been excluded from the power game sought to support and/or be recognized by the state as allies in the construction of a belief in the legitimacy of the dictatorships."

"The paper revisits participation and decentralization in relation to local clientelism, arguing that they share the personalization of links between residents and the state and the local possibility to adapt state policies. The line between decentralization-participation on the one hand, and clientelism on the other, is therefore easily blurred. The paper then argues that clientelism is not per se anti-democratic, some forms allow for local and immediate accountability of politicians. However, in most cases, it contributes to fragment or sedate local organizations or social movements and it prevents contestation of existing policies and dominant power structures. The paper thus challenges the idea that the promotion of decentralization and participatory institutions intrinsically leads to more democratic forms of government."

"The development of a global form of citizenship stands in a rather tense relation with the realities of vast numbers of marginalised citizens across the globe, to the extent that marginality appears to be the hidden other of global citizenship. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a political economy of global citizenship by elaborating on some of these issues. The paper provides a critical discussion of the literature on global citizenship education using a theoretical approach that stems from political economy theories of globalisation. The notion of an emerging transnational class system will provide the starting point for understanding the processes and forces behind current forms of global structural marginalisation and their implications for the possibilities of a global citizenship."

"This paper seeks to challenge the view that Indonesia's geographical and population size account for its rising regional and global profile. Instead, it makes three inter-related arguments. First, the manifestations of Indonesia's foreign policy and global profile have always been based on its ability to harness the country's normative and moral voice. Second, while democratization since 1998 has allowed Indonesia to restore its reputation in world affairs and provided it with a new source of "soft power", it has also complicated foreign policy-making. Third, Indonesia's large geographical size and population have been a source of persistent internal security threats, and because the government has been unable to meet national defence requirements, the growth in its defence diplomacy activities reflect the country's continuing strategic weakness rather than its strength."

"The article overviews and elaborates the concept of polycentricity, defined as a structural feature of social systems of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules. The article starts by introducing the concept as it was advanced by Michael Polanyi and developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It continues introducing possible instances of polycentricity as well as related notions, as part of an attempt to further elaborate the concept through a concept design approach that systematically applies the logic of necessary and sufficient conditions. The article concludes by arguing that the polycentricity conceptual framework is not only a robust analytical structure for the study of complex social phenomena, but is also a challenging method of drawing non-ad hoc analogies between different types of self-organizing complex social systems."

"In this article we discuss the failure of social movement theories to adequately understand and theorize locally based, grassroots social movements like the landless workers movement in Brazil, 'livability movements' in third-world cities, and living wage movements in the USA. Movements such as these come to the attention of most social movement analysts only when the activists who participate in them come together in the streets of Seattle or international forums like the World Social Forum. To date, it is the transnational character of these protests that have excited the most attention. Building on scholarship that looks at the link between participatory democracy and social movements, this article takes a different tack. We show how some social movements have shifted their repertoire of practices from large mass events aimed at making demands on the national state to local-level capacity building. It is the local struggles, especially the ways in which they have created and used institutions in civil society through extending and deepening democracy, that may be the most significant aspect of recent social movements, both for our theories and for our societies. Yet these aspects have received less attention, we believe, because they are less well understood by dominant social movement theories, which tend to focus on high-profile protest events. We look at the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the Justice for Janitors Campaign in Los Angeles to illustrate the important terrain of civil society as well as the role of community organizing."

"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."

"In conclusion, the article proves that by engaging with transnational civil society actors, ASEAN is gradually moving from an "elite club" to a "people-centered" organization. However, given the predominance of neoliberal discourse, "alternative regionalism" has not had enough influence for this to be fully realized. Nevertheless, the growing number of transnational civil society actors is resulting in improved potential to transform the persistent sovereign state system."

This article reviews sociological research about economic globalization's impact on work and labor in developed and developing countries since the 1980s. We find that this period of neoliberal globalization influences work because of intensified activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), financialization of the global economy, and amplified prominence of international organizations, some of which diffuse neoliberal policy scripts while others mobilize a transnational civil society. Research we review generally points to liabilities of neoliberal globalization for workers. To understand these findings, we apply Karl Polanyi's concepts of fictitious commodities, the self-regulating market, and the double movement. We propose that, on the one hand, the activities of MNCs, international financial organizations, and many states exemplify pushes for institutional separation of economy and society in effort to institutionalize the idea of a self-regulating market at a global scale, which increases labor commodification and global inequalities. On the other hand, the activities of social movements, including unions and transnational actors that target globalization's impact on work, constitute the counter movement at national and global levels resisting marketization and pushing for labor decommodification. The aftermath of the ongoing economic crisis will tell to what extent this countermovement will be successful in generating an alternative to neoliberal globalization, and more protections for workers.

"Several scholars argue that systemic global trends are pulling individuals not only upward toward the global level, but also downward to the local level; the result is a potential loss of authority for the state ( Ferguson and Mansbach 2004 32. Ferguson , Yale H. and Richard , W. Mansbach . 2004 . Remapping Global Politics: History's Revenge and Future Shock , Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . [CrossRef] View all references ; Rosenau 1990 82. Rosenau , James N. 1990 . Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity , Princeton : Princeton University Press . View all references ). Their theory of "fragmegration" can provide a causal mechanism for why longstanding grievances may erupt into civil war at a particular time. While increased global exposure does provide both states and individual citizens with tremendous benefits, sudden "shocks" of globalization can overwhelm a state's capacity to offset the negative impacts of globalization, thus weakening a state's capacity to deal with rival polities for the allegiance of its citizens. The present study conducts a cross-sectional logistic regression with discrete duration analysis to test the impact of globalization shocks on the onset of civil wars between the years 1970-1999. The results demonstrate that increasingly dramatic changes in the level of global integration are associated with an increased risk of civil war onset."