Existing accounts of normative change in international politics place undue focus on powerful actors as norm entrepreneurs and the organizational platforms that facilitate their advocacy. This can obscure the ideational innovation that precedes advocacy, biasing analysis towards structural incentives, rather than agency. To rebalance such accounts, we offer an agentive model of ideational innovation that treats norm entrepreneurship as a process, rather than locating it in a single actor. By bridging IR and history of political thought, our model helps trace the origins of normative ideas, development, and influence forensically. We illustrate its benefits with multi-archival research (conducted in the US, UK, and Czechia) into Bohuslav Ečer, Czechoslovakia’s representative at the 1943–1948 UN War Crimes Commission. Employing process tracing methods on new evidence, we show how Ečer synthesized multiple influences into an innovative proposal for holding individuals criminally responsible for aggression. Using original archival documents, we show how his ideas swayed key US policymakers via unlikely channels and helped shape a pivotal international norm codified in the 1945 Nuremberg Charter. Appreciation of Ečer’s agency alongside other key innovators contributes to our understanding of a pivotal norm, helps remedy biases in knowledge production, and enriches our theoretical understanding of normative change.

This study investigated the collaboration between public and third-sector organisations (TSOs) in the framework of collaborative governance. We examined how TSOs portray their collaboration with public organisations and what kind of collaboration agency can be identified based on these descriptions. Using a discourse analytical approach, we identified three multifaceted, and somewhat paradoxical, types of collaboration agency discourse in third-sector organisations: situationalised, service system–oriented, and dependency-driven. We argue that collaborative governance both sets expectations and shapes the agency of TSOs. At the same time, TSOs strategically use these opportunities to their advantage, constantly reshaping their collaboration with public organisations.

The adoption of active learning pedagogy and, later, the institution of the employability agenda in Higher Education have resulted in a severe loss of agency for academics and students in the Social Sciences. In this article, we reflect on our experiences of applying active learning methods. We argue that we have been part of a change that has occasioned a loss of key skills development, especially those associated with traditional learning and academic thinking. An overly headlong rush to implement the “new” over the “old” saw the discarding of certain skills central to the active learning agenda. Further, the emphasis on student satisfaction, professionalisation and quality assurance pushed the academic to the sidelines, to the detriment of Higher Education. We, therefore, first critique the skills debate and identify shortcomings in the active learning application that emerged from that debate. We focus on the skills emphasised in practice, how they are portrayed in opposition (instead of complementarity) to academic skills, and how they undermine the agency academics and students really require. Next, we propose a reconsideration of necessary but undervalued skills like reading, listening and note-taking.

In the 20 years after its introduction, the principal-agent model has seen increasing use to study political processes in virtually all policy domains in which the EU is active. Relaxing the strict assumptions that guided the original economic applications has greatly widened the scope for potential applications. This very phenomenon has also created an existential challenge to the model’s contemporary use, which is combining the reductionist aims of the model (from which it derives its strength) with the complex empirical settings to which it is increasingly applied. To facilitate this balancing exercise, we propose a two-step approach to principal-agent analysis, in which the mapping of the principal-agent proof relation is separated from the effective analysis that examines the reasons, modalities and consequences of delegation and control in the EU. In doing so, we show how the principal-agent model can continue to provide new insights at the various stages of the research process.

If you examine the changing contexts in which the issue of ‘relevance’ has been posed in the profession, it becomes clear how earlier calls for relevance need to be reconfigured today. After reviewing arguments that show how explanatory/normative activity is intercoded, this essay explores how the accelerated pace of life, new densities of interdependence and a growing fragility of things supports the case for forging alliances between political science and recent developments in complexity theory in a number of allied fields.

In the ongoing debates on migration, the subjectivities of migrants are often relegated to the background. Although critical research in refugee studies and forced migration puts a great emphasis on the unheard voices of migrants. This article strays momentarily from the focus on migrants subjectivities to interrogate the background of these voices, that is, the space that surrounds their narratives. Based on field observations conducted in two initial reception centers for asylum seekers in Germany, this article draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s geographic philosophy to explore the spatiality and temporality of these facilities. This article argues that these reception centers capture asylum seekers’ journey narratives through their reterritorialization, and thereby deletes their agency all the while they provide safety.

This article adds a much needed microlevel perspective to the literature on interactions between civil society organizations and governments. I argue that a microlevel perspective assists in making connections between two dominant streams in the literature on government–CSO relations: an empirical–analytical stream and a critical stream. It aims to better understand the interactions and relations, by analysing the institutional work done by CSOs’ members. Adopting this approach puts CSO members in a more agentic position. Interactional processes are brought to the centre of analysis. The Dutch Community Sport Coach programme was used as a case to illustrate the usefulness of the approach. Through a one-year organizational ethnography, the article scrutinizes the way in which members of one CSO enact the organization’s service delivery relationship with a municipality. Through a multidimensional perspective on agency, the analysis shows how individual CSO members act as embedded agents that assimilate a public logic into the dominant community logic. It further shows the CSO’s members efforts and struggle to maintain their community logic. The article argues that an analysis of the microfoundations of government–civil society organization relations foregrounds the multivocality of the relationship as foundational.

Sentence and construction types generally have more than one pragmatic function. Impersonal deontic declaratives such as ‘it is necessary to X’ assert the existence of an obligation or necessity without tying it to any particular individual. This family of statements can accomplish a range of functions, including getting another person to act, explaining or justifying the speaker's own behavior as he or she undertakes to do something, or even justifying the speaker's behavior while simultaneously getting another person to help. How is an impersonal deontic declarative fit for these different functions? And how do people know which function it has in a given context? We address these questions using video recordings of everyday interactions among speakers of Italian and Polish. Our analysis results in two findings. The first is that the pragmatics of impersonal deontic declaratives is systematically shaped by (i) the relative responsibility of participants for the necessary task and (ii) the speaker's nonverbal conduct at the time of the statement. These two factors influence whether the task in question will be dealt with by another person or by the speaker, often giving the statement the force of a request or, alternatively, of an account of the speaker's behavior. The second finding is that, although these factors systematically influence their function, impersonal deontic declaratives maintain the potential to generate more complex interactions that go beyond a simple opposition between requests and accounts, where participation in the necessary task may be shared, negotiated, or avoided. This versatility of impersonal deontic declaratives derives from their grammatical makeup: by being deontic and impersonal, they can both mobilize or legitimize an act by different participants in the speech event, while their declarative form does not constrain how they should be responded to. These features make impersonal deontic declaratives a special tool for the management of social agency.

The paper explores the impact of microfinance on multidimensional constructs of empowerment and the catalysts thereof. The reference point for analysis in the paper is the women microfinance borrowers’ self perception about their life transmutation as well as that of household power configuration. Unlike other recent research papers on the topic that focus on women’s economic empowerment, this paper focuses on both economic and socio-cultural empowerment. The paper is based on both primary and secondary data. Qualitative primary data were collected from women beneficiaries of microfinance in Bangladesh. This paper argues that microfinance can be a useful empowerment tool that can transmute women’s economic position and power relationships, but only when combined with financial literacy. It concludes that financial literacy is more important than access to credit and should be the focus of all future microfinance programs.

Wood and Flinders posit that intentionality and motivation are critical sites of analysis when determining whether an act is, or should be made out to be, political or apolitical. I agree with this assertion—both the intention behind an actor’s act, for example, what motivates the action, must be taken into consideration before such classifications are made. Yet, intentionality and motivation are more complicated and problematic than the authors make them out to be—especially online.