The United Nations and its bodies have ‘opened up’ to a broad range of non-state actors over the last three decades, including for-profit actors and their representatives. The shift is reflected in the UN’s sustainable development goals and the Global Compact, emphasizing public-private partnerships; in greater participation of corporations at treaty conferences; in trade group roles as observers at organizations; and in multi-stakeholder projects. Yet international organizations have generally not developed robust responses to legitimacy concerns about businesses becoming closely involved in lawmaking and governance projects. These concerns focus on interest group capture, entrenchment of western economic elites, creeping privatization, and erasure of public deliberation. Indeed, the participation of for-profit actors and their representatives has largely been a ‘silent revolution’: under-heralded and under-examined. This chapter argues that responses to for-profit roles in the work of international organizations tend to express one of two logics, not yet reconciled. The logic of ‘representation’ values public authority, interest representation, transparency, and accountability. The logic of ‘expedience’ values pragmatic problem-solving, efficiency, knowledge, and progress. Each has different priorities and blind spots, encompasses an array of theoretical approaches, and would push the international system in a different direction.

This chapter examines how the Chinese Communist Party restructured the judicial bureaucracy to insulate the normative state from local prerogative interference. It analyzes two key institutional reforms: the recentralization of court personnel and budget authority at the provincial level, and the introduction of judicial accountability mechanisms that emphasized individual responsibility over hierarchical oversight. These reforms aimed to curtail local protectionism, rent-seeking, and extrajudicial intervention by strengthening vertical discipline and professionalizing frontline adjudication. While they marked a significant departure from the locally embedded judiciary of the pre-Xi era, their success was uneven across regions and constrained by enduring informal practices. The chapter argues that institutional design played an important role in carving out a more autonomous legal space within the authoritarian state, even if that space remained contingent and selectively realized in practice.

Decisions by international organizations typically neglect the interests of non-human animals. The chapter investigates whether and how animal interests can and should be brought to bear in the decision-making of IOs. It works through cognate concepts ranging from animal citizenship over animal representation to animal consideration and animal deliberation. The physical limits of human-animal communication foreclose responsiveness and accountability to the animals themselves. The chapter therefore prefers the term animal ‘consideration’ rather than animal ‘representation’. After this groundwork, the chapter briefly canvasses some proposals for bringing animal interests to bear in in democratic political processes. With due modifications, some schemes could be applied to the work of international organizations. These range from animal ombudspersons, strengthening the voice of pro-animal CSOs through compulsory notice-and-comment procedures and extended speaking rights in the organizations, mandatory animal welfare impact assessment, and more. All attempts for upstepping the existing rudimentary schemes in the direction of a better and stronger consideration of animal interests in human politics will require deep cultural and social change, to a large extent beyond the purview of the law.

This chapter examines how the Xi administration curtailed court-centered legal mobilization through a dual strategy of repression and co-optation. It traces the shift from the Hu-era tolerance of cause lawyering to a systematic effort under Xi to suppress and replace independent legal activism. Repressive measures included disbarment, arrest, and surveillance of rights lawyers and NGOs, especially those that leveraged judicial processes for political or social advocacy. At the same time, the party-state co-opted regime-aligned cause lawyers by granting them official recognition, resources, and selective legal access. This dual approach prevented the emergence of court–civil society synergy that could threaten Party authority, while allowing for a managed form of legal activism that channeled contentious claims into politically acceptable frames. The chapter argues that dejudicialization through activist suppression – rather than legal exclusion alone – was central to insulating the courts from becoming platforms of opposition, reinforcing the dual state's boundaries by preempting politicized litigation before it reached the judiciary.

This chapter synthesizes the book’s core findings and theorizes the political logic underpinning China’s dual state. It argues that expanded judicial autonomy in routine cases arises not despite autocratic consolidation, but because of it. By centralizing authority, disciplining local actors, and constraining unsanctioned interventions, the regime strengthened courts’ capacity to adjudicate according to legal norms in nonsensitive matters. Simultaneously, politically salient cases are systematically excluded from judicial channels – either through repression and co-optation or through diversion to nonjudicial mechanisms – thereby insulating the courts from political pressure. This fusion of vertical discipline and strategic dejudicialization sustains a revised dual state model: one that preserves a normative legal sphere through strong and calibrated authoritarian control.

Chapter 1 highlights the changing definitions of republicanism in light of the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, debates over slavery, and the admission of new states. The Twelfth Amendment elevated the voters to a central position in republican theory by creating an expectation that the President be the choice of a majority of those who wield political power on behalf of the state. This version of majoritarianism, filtered through the medium of political parties, also became a limit on the types of political systems that states could adopt in accordance with the Guarantee Clause. However, Congress’s power under the Clause was stunted because of a slaveocracy that consistently made federalism arguments to protect that institution, even when such arguments were contrary to newly redefined republican ideals.

Historically, democratic progress has been widely understood as correlated to the representative quality of institutions. Representativeness has been seen as essential for the social appropriation of institutions in societies analyzed as having a class structure. In the national political order, parties were intended to represent the different social interests, and in the particular context of labour, the recognition of trade unions played this role. It is in this spirit that the International Labour Organization (ILO) included trade unions in its various bodies when it was created a century ago, and, since then, the ILO has served as a reference point for representation at the international level.While this conception of representativeness remains relevant, the scope of its application has become more limited. A growing number of essential issues, such as the conservation of the environment or the protection of privacy, are, in fact, directly political: they structure our common world. In this context, authority and legitimacy carry weight in the public debate. Representativeness, by which we can ‘measure’ the social weight of a speaker, is only secondary. ‘Public voices’ have come to have greater relevance, due to their ability to resonate with, and thereby focus and shape, public opinion. These ‘public voices’ are expressed by expert groups with specific subject-area knowledge, or by individuals who have benefited from the haphazard nature of media coverage. As a result, their integration into international life can no longer be institutionalized in the ‘old fashioned’ way.

From the founding era to the turn of the twentieth century, Congress has at times asserted its power over elections robustly and creatively, even in periods of judicial obstruction, and its role in shaping the nation’s electoral landscape has always been pivotal – even when contested, uneven, or ineffective. This period invokes a rich and overlooked history that reveals a repository of federal authority over elections that was triggered (or ignored) less for reasons of federalism, and more so due to pragmatic, principled, or partisan considerations.

‘Democratic representation’ seems to have no explanatory power for the current structure and operation of universal IOs and a weak justificatory value for upcoming political reforms of these IOs. However, under the benefit of a renewed approach to universal IOs functions and deliberation, which is one of their meta-functions, the creation of new subsidiary bodies designed to accommodate delegates from Non-State Actors (NSAs) and enable, or even compel, intergovernmental bodies to take into account other interests and perspectives appears to be both necessary and feasible, without any reference to contentious criteria of representativeness based on a fragile principle of democratic legitimacy in IL. The alternative to ‘democratic representation’ consists in amplifying diffuse attempts to redesign the institutional architecture of universal IOs and harnessing the potential of international institutional law, implied powers and privileges and immunities regimes for the sake of a genuinely international, transnational and transgenerational deliberation. Concretely, people speaking for sub-state communities (e.g. from the Global South), future generations or natural entities for instance should be given an institutional role within consultative subsidiary bodies, in combination with state representatives or scientific experts, or not – depending on what is necessary for the fulfilment of the IOs functions. The current context of exacerbated competition between more democratic and less democratic states, some of them obviously being authoritarian, also pleads for a modest approach to IOs political reform leaving the concept of democracy unaltered.