Following democracy’s global advance in the late twentieth century, recent patterns of democratic “backsliding” have generated extensive scholarly debate. Since backsliding towards autocracy is often the work of elected leaders operating within democratic institutions, it challenges conventional thinking about democratic consolidation, the enforcement of institutional checks and balances, and the reproduction of democratic norms. Drawing insights from classic literature on democratic transitions and consolidation, this volume examines the nature of contemporary threats to democracy, recognizing that the central challenge is not always to induce the compliance of those who lose elections, but rather those who emerge victorious and turn the institutional leverage of incumbency into a source of ongoing competitive advantage. There is, then, both a “loser’s dilemma” and a “winner’s dilemma” embedded in the study of democratic resiliency. Patterns of backsliding have revealed the contingent and potentially contested underpinnings of democratic institutions in any political order, given the presence (whether latent or active) of authoritarian political and cultural currents. Democracy is, therefore, best understood not as a standardized regime template or a static endpoint of political development, but rather as a dialectical frontier that advances ‒ and sometimes recedes ‒ according to the dynamic interplay countervailing forces.

What does it take for international institutional law to break away from its problem-solving tendencies and fixed list of subjects and methods, and explore international organisations as sites of socio-political struggles over the shape of local and global life? This editorial introduction discusses ethos and epistemological boundaries of the mainstream international law scholarship, and the prospects of critical and interdisciplinary approaches for the study of international organisations in international law. It offers an overview of the objectives of the volume and its five sections, and argues that combining macro and micro critique, as reflected in the volume chapters, offers a promising pathway for mapping power, stability, and change in the world order.

This book is a study of non-alignment as it was conceptualised and developed in the context of modern India, particularly in the period immediately after independence. The main architect of India’s external affairs at this juncture was the first Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The book is restricted to events that took place during the time he held office, between the years 1947 and 1964. In particular, this study aims to study non-alignment as an approach to security and as an approach to politics. There are three themes along which the book proceeds. First, the book contends that non-alignment is understood vaguely and inaccurately, leading to protracted debates about its past relevance and continued significance; secondly, that non-alignment frames politics innovatively; and thirdly, that this is an immensely precarious wager that encounters many points of resistance, which are not adequately engaged with in a sustained theoretical manner in literature on non-alignment. Thus, the book will argue that there has yet to emerge a serious critique of the political nature of non-alignment.

Before the summer of 1914, there were seemingly few indicators that British colonies would be represented on the international stage as nominally separate entities, as they would be five years later. Chapter One charts the changing patterns of British rule that constituted the ‘Third British Empire’, and how new patterns of imperial governance were beginning to emerge in the newly formed Dominion of South Africa, that would put the Empire on a trajectory towards separating its international personality. This chapter will also examine how India, a colony with comparatively fewer of the self-governing institutions of the Dominions, would also accede to the Imperial Conference alongside the Dominions, a significant step towards membership of the embryonic League. Finally, this chapter will assess to what extent the participation of colonies at international organisations and conferences was normalised, and what precedents were employed to justify the presence of colonies after the War ended.

The question of how corrupt the United States is has no single answer. After all, we lack an accepted definition of corruption and cannot directly measure what is usually a clandestine or contested kind of activity. Some corruption is clearly illegal, but other activities widely seen as corrupt, or corrupting, are legal – in some cases, constitutionally protected. There are different categories of corruption – at a minimum, it is important to distinguish between illegal and legal corruption – and the country is comprised of fifty different states, each (as Daniel Elazar has argued) a civil society in its own right, and each with multiple institutions where corruption might take root. Finally, the causes and consequences of corruption can differ significantly from one policy area or economic sector to the next. In this chapter, we lay out our agenda for analyzing American corruption, with an emphasis on the diversity of the federal system and the importance of looking carefully at different aspects of policy and politics.

This chapter focuses on the "alternate endings" typology. Building on theories of political rhetoric, we can break norms down into norm frames (norm-based justifications) and behavioral claims (conclusions for actions) and identify four alternate endings of norm contestation: norm impasse, norm neglect, norm recognition and norm clarification. Whether states (dis)agree on frames, claims, or both affects the stability of these alternate endings and norm strength. As identifying frames and claims in actors’ interpretations of international law is the cornerstone of this book, this chapter first provides detailed guidance on different kinds of norm frame and claim disagreements. It then analyzes the relative stability of each "alternate ending" and shows that frame agreement is an internal source of stability. Norm strength is conceptualized as the extent of collective expectations related to applying a norm of international law in a certain way. Norms are stronger when these collective expectations are clearer (social norm strength), and are held by more (critical) actors and/or cover more situations (relative norm strength). The chapter shows that the "alternate endings" typology can anchor the assessment of how contestation affects collective expectations. This approach provides a more actor-centric assessment of norm strength, compared to other prominent approaches.

The introduction chapter critically reviews the existing literature and introduces a theory of mediated threat, which explains how perceived threats to civic freedoms and institutional autonomy can motivate the masses and reshape the relational structure of the democratic opposition. Our basic proposition is that threats do not instantaneously provoke protests; rather, they require perception and socialization among citizens to potentially trigger mobilization. Different groups of citizens may perceive the same threat in disparate ways, leading not only to varied mobilizational responses but also the formation of new organizations and groups. This alters the relational dynamics of the opposition through which new threats are assessed.

This chapter unpacks the complex relationship between international organizations and peaceful change in the international system through various perspectives on international relations. We identify three types of peaceful change associated with international organizations: institutional change within IOs, interactional change among IOs, and transitional change involving IOs and power dynamics in the international system. The latter has the potential to bring about a “maximalist peaceful change,” resulting in profound positive changes in international relations and human life. However, it also carries significant risks. As great power rivalry intensifies and challenges to the existing liberal international order grow, understanding the role of international organizations in promoting or hindering peaceful change becomes crucial. This chapter serves as an introduction to the volume, providing an overview of its content and summarizing the major findings of other chapters. The book not only diagnoses the ability of international organizations to facilitate order transitions but also offers suggestions to address their current shortcomings in promoting peaceful change.

Until 2017, Rohingyas – often dubbed the ‘most persecuted minority in the world’ – making the perilous trek across the border into Bangladesh were predominantly male, as they were not only denied citizenship and legal rights in Myanmar, but they also lacked economic opportunities within the country to support their families and communities (Kojima 2015; Albert 2017). On 25 August 2017, an escalation of violence in Rakhine State in Myanmar – where the Rohingyas largely resided – reached a tipping point, with horrific reports of murder and kidnapping of Rohingya men by Burmese soldiers, forced public nudity and humiliation, and sexual slavery and gang rape by military captivity directed against Rohingya women and girls. These attacks resulted in a humanitarian disaster that forced over 700,000 Rohingyas to flee their native land and seek refuge in the makeshift and overpopulated refugee camps outside of Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh – specifically the Kutupalong– Balukhali mega-camp (used interchangeably with ‘camp’ or ‘camps’ throughout this book) – making it the largest refugee crisis in the world. Compared with past waves of refugees, there was a drastic increase in the number of women and girls crossing the border into Bangladesh. The concentration of refugees in Bangladesh's refugee camps is amongst the densest in the world, with tarpaulin and bamboo shelters precariously built on sharply sloped hillsides. There are now an estimated over 1 million Rohingya refugees living in the overcrowded and squalid camps, as the influx continued steadily over the subsequent months, with the majority of the camp's residents being women and girls (Ellis-Petersen 2019).

Unlike most debates on forced migration which focus on the larger structural needs of refugees, this book focuses on the lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women. Discussions of power relations and the reproduction of power asymmetries are often neglected in the dominant literature on refugee women's everyday subjectivities. The narratives of Rohingya women's perception of their own lives and the ways in which they negotiate, navigate, contest, and adjust to their surroundings are vital for understanding how these women forge kinship networks and learn to make a life in their new surroundings.

This introductory chapter explains the book’s motivating puzzles and outlines its theoretical and empirical strategies. The book focuses on local-level peacekeeping operations designed explicitly to prevent communal violence. It argues that deploying UN peacekeepers to fragile settings fundamentally changes the structural incentives facing communities in conflict. Scholars typically pinpoint the UN’s success at the negotiating table: peacekeepers help armed group leaders make lasting agreements that stabilize conflict settings from the top down. Yet such negotiations seem unable to prevent communal violence in places as diverse as South Sudan in East Africa, Mali in West Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. This book shifts the analytical lens to the local level to investigate the conditions under which peacekeepers successfully build peace from the bottom up. The book’s main argument is that UN peacekeepers succeed when local populations perceive them to be relatively impartial enforcers who are unconnected to the country of deployment, the conflict, and the parties to the dispute. Impartial peacekeepers convince all parties that they will punish those who escalate communal disputes regardless of their identity, which increases communities’ willingness to cooperate without the fear of violence.

Chapter 1 introduces the argument, summarises the findings, and describes the conceptual framework applied throughout the book to analyse UN mediation as a gendered-colonial institution. It begins by noting the slow progress of the WPS Agenda in UN mediation, which the scholarly literature has not adequately addressed. It also stakes out the significance of WPS in UN mediation for the realisation of women's right to political participation, the advancement of gender equality in post-conflict contexts, and the diffusion of international approaches to gender-sensitive mediation from the UN to other organisations. The next section discusses how UN mediation can be analysed as an institution and identifies the key concepts and techniques used in parsing its gendered institutional logics. It also argues for using decolonial concepts of gender in studying the UN. Next, the chapter describes the interpretive research design and considers the ethical and practical implications of this approach. Last, the chapter concludes with an overview of each chapter.

This chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the book by disentangling the myriad discourses and interpretations of digital sovereignty from the perspective of the Global South and emerging power alliances. It argues that BRICS countries symbolize the “rise of the rest” in an increasingly multipolar world, their digital policies critical to the future shape of global internet, and digital governance. In this book, the idea of digital sovereignty itself is viewed as a site of power contestation and knowledge production. Specifically, the chapter identify seven major perspectives on digital sovereignty in a complex discursive field: state digital sovereignty, supranational digital sovereignty, network digital sovereignty, corporate digital sovereignty, personal digital sovereignty, postcolonial digital sovereignty, and commons digital sovereignty. The chapter highlights the affinities and overlaps as well as tensions and contradictions between these perspectives on digital sovereignty with brief illustrative examples from BRICS countries and beyond. While a state-centric perspective on digital sovereignty is traditionally more salient especially in BRICS contexts, increasing public concern over user privacy, state surveillance, corporate abuse, and digital colonialism has given ascendance to an array of alternative perspectives on digital sovereignty that emphasize individual autonomy, indigenous rights, community well-being, and sustainability.

This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

Despite ubiquitous references to ‘ethnicity’ in both academic and public discourse, the history and politics of this concept remain largely unexplored. By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, this book unearths the pivotal role that this concept played in the making of the international order. After critiquing existing accounts of the ‘expansion’ or ‘globalisation’ of international society, the chapter proposes to rethink the birth of the international order through a scrutiny of its major concepts. Fusing Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history with the philosophical writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida, the chapter theorises the emergence of the international order as a dialectical process that both negated and preserved existing imperial hierarchies. The concept of ethnicity is ejected by this dialectical process as a residual category – an indigestible kernel of difference and particularity – that cannot be internalised by the work of sublation.

The chapter identifies the types of crisis exploded in the 20210s and 2020s and the theories on EU decision-making.

This chapter describes the importance of studying wartime displacement, outlines several key questions that motivate the book, and summarizes the main arguments. It also briefly defines strategic wartime displacement and specifies the scope of the study, explaining why it confines the analysis to civil wars and why it focuses on displacement perpetuated by state combatants. It then describes what we know about displacement in war. This includes outlining existing explanations and discussing their limitations. It concludes by describing the methods and sources used in the book, summarizing its main findings, and outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

The introduction previews the argument that developing countries can use borrowing relationships to their advantage. It situates this argument about the financial statecraft of borrowers within the literature on sovereign debt, foreign aid, and African politics. It explains the specific focus on sub-Saharan Africa by outlining three dynamics that enabled African governments to diversify their portfolios of external finance in the early twenty-first century: debt relief, Chinese lending, and liquidity in international bond markets. The chapter describes the book's mixed-methods research design, combining statistical analysis of the terms of aid agreements with three case studies of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Ghana. Finally, the chapter highlights how the financial statecraft of borrowers contributes to debates on financial interdependence, multipolarity, and the agency of developing countries.

States interact with their national communities abroad in very different ways. In some cases, they actively support and protect them. In other cases, they co-opt and exploit their national communities abroad in that they reach out to them in order to tap into, thus benefitting domestically, from their economic and financial potentials or to garner political support. In still other cases, they repress or coerce their communities abroad, thus conceiving the latter not as an asset but as a possible challenge or threat that needs to be controlled. Against this background, the chapter first explores the general motivations and objectives as to why states interact with their national communities abroad, in the form of “support,” “co-optation,” and “repression.” Then, it discusses key practices that states employ in this interaction, along three substantive dimensions, namely: diplomacy and consular, economy and social, and security. Next, possible drivers that condition whether, how, and for what reason states interact with their communities abroad are presented. This is followed by a discussion on how the countries covered in this volume were selected. The concluding section presents the plan of the book and briefly summarizes the individual chapters.