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Tracing the effects of IO financing reformsBy Cecilia Cannon and Thomas Biersteker This paper questions whether a fundamental governance shift occurs when international organisations receive direct revenue and mandates from private actors. Interview with Cecilia Cannon ❯ |
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The UN Peacekeepers: Being Protected by Militarised MasculinitiesBy Vanessa Gauthier Vela Since the 1990s, media around the world have been reporting on various scandals that highlight sexual violence and exploitation perpetrated by UN peacekeepers and humanitarian staff. These accusations forced the UN to take action, but yet, official data shows that this phenomenon is still not decreasing. This paper underlines the gendered and racialised dynamics that can be observed in the data collected to date. |
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Antagonistic Recursivities and Successive Cover-Ups: The Case of Private Nuclear ProliferationBy Grégoire Mallard “Legal recursivity” is a concept introduced by socio-legal scholars to capture the progressive elaboration of transnational rules through policy linkages at the international and domestic levels, and the associated jurisdictional expansion of international institutions to new policy areas. This paper introduces the concept of “antagonistic recursivity” to capture a dual process of recursive legal innovation and antagonistic obstruction by the same policy actors. |
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Regional Security Initiatives and the UN: Multilateral Organisations in South AmericaBy Stephanie Hofmann and Kai Michael Kenkel Based on the observation that formal multilateral security structures are sometimes inadequate, slow to activate, outdated or simply “incomplete”, this paper examines how regional security organisations actually function as well as the specific roles that informal “dimensions” play in it. |
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Gender and Resistance to Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in CambodiaBy Saba Joshi This paper compares patterns of contestation in women-led movements in two Cambodian provinces to shed light on the role of gender as a resource for political resistance under authoritarianism. Interview ❯ |
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And What about the Effects of Wartime Sexual Violence for Survivors and Their Communities?
By Mia Schöb Based on an inductive research on Colombian wartime sexual violence (WSV), this paper shows that to fully understand the workings of WSV, we need to complement the dominant theoretical focus on purpose and perpetrators with an examination of social and cultural meanings of WSV performances and of their consequences for surviving individuals and communities. Contact author for access ❯ |
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The (Un)intended Consequences of Decision-Making Reforms in International OrganisationsBy Velibor Jakovleski Not all reforms of international organisations (IOs) have the intended effects. For example, the WTO's “reverse consensus”, which replaced the unit veto system and was to make its dispute settlement system more representative, strengthened the authority of the Appellate Body at the expense of the member states. Using the cases of GATT/WTO and the ILO, this paper studies the implications of changes in the supervisory decision-making rules of two IOs with different organisational structures. |
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The ILO’s Role in Global Governance: Limits and PotentialBy Velibor Jakovleski, Scott Jerbi and Thomas Biersteker Using the concept of institutional layering, this paper explores efforts by the ILO’s leadership to reassert the organisation’s role in broader global policy contexts since 1998. It concludes that new layers of soft law rules and flexible governance mechanisms can potentially augment the ILO’s global standing moving forward. But its lack of representativeness and its continuing engagement of new actors demand further formal changes to the ILO’s institutional apparatus to be effective. |
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Urban Topography and Mass ProtestBy Ravi Bhavnani, Leonardo Arriola, Karsten Donnay and Nils Lewis As the Arab Spring unfolded, large spaces like Tahrir and Rabaa Al Adawiya Squares in Egypt allowed thousands of people to assemble and demand an end to regimes in power. In marked contrast, ruptured urban landscapes and the absence of central places in cities like Alexandria resulted in more fragmented protest movements. This paper explores how the spatial configuration of cities shapes protest dynamics and outcomes across a sample of cases whilst accounting for within-case variation. |
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Workshop | Sustainable Commodity Governance and the Global SouthOrganised by Yixian Sun This workshop brings together scholars of sustainability governance working on different commodities and regions and employing different research approaches in order to assess the impacts of transnational governance on the Global South and home-grown governance developed by and for Southern actors. It thus aims to draw new trends on sustainable commodity governance to correct North-South imbalances in the existing literature and advance development of theories on global governance. |
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Sovereign Default Trajectories: A Computational Model Using Prospect TheoryBy Alessandra Romani Explanations of sovereign debt trajectories primarily rely on rational choice assumptions. Building on prospect theory, this paper argues that, depending on incumbents’ perceptions, different risk assessments lead to alternative sovereign debt trajectories. It outlines a method involving within-case analysis and agent-based modelling, which allows for exploring the conditions under which incumbents are more or less risk averse, as determined by their interactions with domestic and external factors. |
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State-Criminal Collusions and Violence in MexicoBy Claudia Pfeifer Cruz This paper analyses under what conditions collusion between criminal groups and state agents intensify, or conversely reduce violence in cities in Mexico. Interview ❯ |
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The Law behind Conflicting Claims: A Study on Persistent Maritime Boundary DisputesBy Umut Yüksel This paper argues that when law is uncertain, states are likely to make overlapping claims and enter into disputes that will persist as long as they can use competing legal rules and interpretations to back their claims. It proposes and tests a causal mechanism linking legal uncertainty to specific dispute outcomes, and finds that legal uncertainty is a strong predictor of both dispute onset and duration, unlike other plausible drivers of maritime disputes such as the existence of natural resources offshore. |
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Spreading like Wildfire: Gendered Rumors in Conflict CyclesBy Christelle Rigual, Joy Onyesoh and Wening Udasmoro Drawing upon interviews with conflict-affected communities in Indonesia and Nigeria, this paper argues that rumors acted as a key factor driving ethno-religious conflict through the activation of gendered social mechanisms triggering conflict escalation and retaliation. In turn, many communities acknowledged this role of rumors and demonstrated crucial skills in managing and controlling rumors to prevent further conflict escalation. Rumor control could thus play a crucial role in the prevention of conflict at the local level. |
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Control through Inter-Organisational Coordination Mechanisms: The Case of the UN Humanitarian ReformBy Clara Egger Since 2005 and the UN-led reform inter-organisational coordination between IGOs and NGOs has been strongly promoted in the humanitarian field. Although aid workers feel that this reform has profoundly affected the power relations between IGOs and NGOs, the existing literature considers it as a mere technical arrangement. Combining quantitative and qualitative data, this paper shows that states use inter-organisational coordination to promote the NGOs that are the more aligned with their own foreign policy agenda. |
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A Simmelian Model of Social Type TrajectoriesBy David Sylvan and Jean-Louis Arcand This paper argues that having the distant past and future count as much as the present in status valuations leads to certain careers or biographies being much more common than others. Interview with Professor Sylvan ❯ |
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Ignorance/Power and Global GovernanceBy Deval Desai This paper analyses the political economy of indicator production. Challenging the prevailing literature on indicators as a tool of global governance, which argues that indicators are overdetermined and depoliticised, the paper argues that rule of law indicators were structured by techniques of indeterminacy, or efforts by experts who, acknowledging the complexity of the world, made the indicator provisional – an object to be piloted, or adapted to local context. Thus the politics of indicators lie not in their global production, but in their ongoing implementation. |
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Regime Longevity and Arbitrary Governance in Uganda By Rebecca Tapscott This paper theorises uncertainty as a mode of illiberal rule in northern Uganda. It examines the relationship between the state security apparatus and informal security arrangements such as local vigilantes, civil militias and community police. It finds that in the area of security the central Ugandan state is ever-present in citizens’ imaginations. This is achieved through a strategy of rule that the author terms “institutionalised arbitrariness”, in which violence is institutionalised in the state’s governing system but remains unpredictable from the perspective of ordinary citizens. Access ❯ |
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An Historical Perspective on Ethical Review of the Social Sciences in Uganda and the Implications for 21st Century Knowledge ProductionBy Rebecca Tapscott Unlike biomedical research ethics committees (RECs), social sciences RECs in the Global South have as yet received little attention from researchers. This paper looks at the comparatively sophisticated and broad-reaching REC system in Uganda. It examines what economic, social, political, and cultural factors have been privileged and marginalised by the RECs since they were founded in 1990, and, as a result, what influence RECs exert on social sciences research, and the political implications of these findings. |
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Protection through Repression? Theorising Everyday Police Interactions with Geneva Sex WorkersBy Mira Fey Which role do police officers take in organising and managing transactional sexual exchanges in a regulatory setting as in Geneva, Switzerland? Interview ❯ |
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Institutional Protection Logics and the Power of Field Knowledge and CoordinationBy Hannah Dönges This paper shows how the differences between the international organisations (IOs) trying to protect civilians in South Sudan matter not only in terms of bureaucratic collaboration and competition, but may also be a matter of life and death for affected populations. Communication and inclusive leadership to transverse between UN and humanitarian organisations are crucial to protection outcomes and the overall reputation of the IOs. Theoretically, this paper offers a framework of IO agency applicable to research extending beyond the security domain. |
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The Power of Numbers? Interrogating the Role of Death Data in Global Security GovernanceBy Keith Krause This paper critically examines the ethical, conceptual and practical dilemmas associated with rendering visible the direct and indirect victims of violent deaths – conflict and non-conflict related. It challenges the standard narrative of the genesis, significance or impact of “numbers in global security” governance by highlighting their powerlessness and by illustrating their “numbing effect”: examining figures that are hotly debated but which seem to have no purchase on making change or enforcing accountability. |
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Criminalizing Resistance: The Cases of Balata and Jenin Refugee CampsBy Alaa Tartir
The Palestinian Authority (PA) adopted donor-driven security sector reform (SSR) as the linchpin of its post-2007 state-building project. This paper tackles the consequences of the PA’s security campaigns in Balata and Jenin refugee camps from the people’s perspective through a bottom-up ethnographic methodological approach. These voices from below problematise and examine the security campaigns, illustrating how and why resistance against Israel has been criminalized. Access ❯ |
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Effective? Locally Owned? Beyond the Technocratic Perspective on the European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian TerritoriesBy Alaa Tartir and Filip Ejdus The European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories was established in 2006 to contribute to the establishment of effective policing in support of an independent and democratic Palestinian state. This paper argues that the mission can be considered effective and locally owned only from a narrow technocratic perspective, which denies the political reality of continued occupation and absence of democracy. Access ❯ |
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Criminalizing Resistance: The Cases of Balata and Jenin Refugee CampsBy Alaa Tartir The Palestinian Authority (PA) adopted donor-driven security sector reform (SSR) as the linchpin of its post-2007 state-building project. This paper tackles the consequences of the PA’s security campaigns in Balata and Jenin refugee camps from the people’s perspective through a bottom-up ethnographic methodological approach. These voices from below problematise and examine the security campaigns, illustrating how and why resistance against Israel has been criminalized. Access ❯ |
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Effective? Locally Owned? Beyond the Technocratic Perspective on the European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian TerritoriesBy Alaa Tartir and Filip Ejdus The European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories was established in 2006 to contribute to the establishment of effective policing in support of an independent and democratic Palestinian state. This paper argues that the mission can be considered effective and locally owned only from a narrow technocratic perspective, which denies the political reality of continued occupation and absence of democracy. Access ❯ |
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A Judicial Innovation? From Positive Obligation to the Family of the Disappeared Persons to the “Right to the Truth”By Ezgi Yildiz This paper traces the evolution of the “right to truth” in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from the states’ positive obligation to inform the family of the disappeared persons down to the states’ duty to inform not only the close relatives but also the larger public. By examining the way a narrow obligation was transformed into an autonomous right, the paper sheds lights on the development of international legal principles and the role of courts in this regard. |
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Modeling the Subnational Risk of Acute Malnutrition in Conflict-Affected SettingsBy Ravi Bhavnani, David Backer and Karsten Donnay Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen are facing famine conditions – the first recorded instance of four countries experiencing such declared crises simultaneously. All have been prone to violent conflict and exhibit other characteristics that can contribute to greater vulnerability to famine. The gravity of these situations serves as inspiration for devising effective means of forecasting risks, to better anticipate crises and guide appropriate responses. This paper presents initial results of empirical analyses focusing on Nigeria and Somalia. |
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On and Off: A Tale of Human Rights in the Digital EraBy Roxana Radu and Ezgi Yildiz Built upon a pre-digitisation and pre-automation logic, human rights considerations in the international legal regime face limitations in addressing issues of privacy, labour rights, or equal opportunity rights. Exploring these three issue areas, this paper finds that the differentiation between civil and political rights and social and economic rights is less and less relevant due to digital transformations, and the logic of offline rights applying online is insufficient as it does not cover issues such as technology- and algorithm-driven ones. |
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Fertile Ground without Seeds: Re-visiting Limitations of Transnational Sustainability Governance in China’s Tea Sector By Yixian Sun Swimming in Their Own Direction: Explaining Domestic Variation in Homegrown Sustainability Governance for Aquaculture in Asia By Yixian Sun The Power of the Public Purse: Financing and Agenda Setting in Global Health Partnerships By Liliana Andonova, in the panel “Global Partnerships and Power”, organised by M. Faul and L. Andonova Roundtable | The Rise of Public-Private Partnerships and How They Are Changing International Governance A panel focusing on Liliana Andonova’s book Governance Entrepreneurs (CUP). The Politics of Diversity in Inclusive Peace and Political Transition Processes By Andreas Hirblinger and Dana M. Landau The Contested Role of Education on and Terrorism By Mariana Sandoval de Oliveira |
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Power Relations and Closed-Border Regime: The Cases of Chad and Darfur and of Namibia and Zambia By Mariana Sandoval de Oliveira What’s in an Approach? Gender Mainstreaming and the Role of International Organizations By Emily Alicia Wiseman A Field and Diverse Purposes: Science, Application, and Critique in the American Field of International Relations By Felix S. Grenier Deconstructing Internet Governance By Roxana Radu Regimes of Practice and the Governance of Conflict: A Conceptual Perspective By Andreas Hirblinger The State of the Sublime: Aesthe cally Conjuring Global Insecurity By Jonathan Luke Austin and Anna Leander Diplomatic/Epistemic Boundary Cultures in the Monitoring of UN Sanctions: A Comparative Study of Three International “Laboratories” of Political Knowledge Production By Aurel Niederberger |
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