Power is fundamental to co–management in numerous ways. In this chapter, key theoretical approaches to the concept of power are reviewed, drawing on conceptions of ‘power over’, ‘power to’ and similar. The chapter then investigates the concept of power in three ways: what power sharing means and how it is experienced, what dominant power relations are observed in co-management and what empowerment means in the context of co–management. In relation to power sharing, it is found that power is often unequally shared, with government having greater power than resource users, evidenced in control of resources and decision-making. Dominant power relations include elite capture, patron–client relations and gender relations. Constraints on the potential for co–management to be empowering for resource users are found to be related to power dynamics and unequal power sharing, encouraging a more technical approach to empowerment being taken rather than a more critical, political approach.

In this chapter, I consider whether Rorty’s political theory can make sense of the legitimate hopelessness/despair that might follow entrenched marginalisation or historically embedded forms of injustice. Since Rorty appears to present hope as a political attitude and theoretical disposition that we can embrace relatively straightforwardly, we might read his normative commitment to liberalism as an expression of privilege that is incapable of getting to grips with urgent political struggles. To determine Rorty’s response to this concern, I juxtapose his critique of Marxism to his interpretation of feminism, arguing that his reasons for rejecting the former (as held captive by scientism) relate to his affirmation of the latter (as the expression of political and philosophical hope). I then explore whether Rorty’s thought can make sense of the concept of power. Finally, I show how one of the most striking contemporary implications of Rorty’s world view is that commitment to political realism is hopeless.

This chapter evaluates the efficacy of Emulated Guardians, focusing on the EU’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) and Meta’s Oversight Board, using criteria adapted from Peter Cane’s administrative law framework: rules, authority, and culture. It argues that neither body currently functions as a truly effective adjudicatory overseer of corporate power due to weak mandates and structural limitations. These shortcomings reflect a broader challenge of emulative institutions: they replicate formal structures from public law but lack the enabling sociopolitical contexts—such as democratic rulemaking or judicial authority—that underpin their role models. However, the chapter also identifies the performative potential of these bodies. By leveraging adjudicative symbolism and public expectations, both ODSs and the Oversight Board can incrementally expand their normative authority. This process, while slow and fraught, mirrors historical adjudicative strategies seen in domestic and international courts. Moreover, early practices show potential for innovation, such as integrating large language models into decision-making. By analyzing rules, authority, and culture, the chapter highlights the ambivalence of Emulated Guardians: while they risk becoming ceremonial “accountability theater,” they may also lay the groundwork for meaningful control over powerful private organizations. These findings have implications far beyond content moderation, applying to emerging governance challenges in AI, biotechnology, and other globalized sectors.

How can we regulate private power in a globalized, digitized world where state-centered sovereignty, territorial boundaries, and traditional legal frameworks fall short? This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, its arguments, methodology, and contributions, addressing the urgent need for accountability mechanisms to tame the increasingly unilateral global governance by a handful of corporations. Focusing on content moderation, it examines two key case studies: the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Meta’s Oversight Board. Both exemplify “emulation,” where public law mechanisms, particularly constitutional and administrative, are adapted to private governance.

Analyzing these “Emulated Guardians”–institutions borrowing the legitimacy of courts while operating in private or hybrid contexts–this book highlights their reliance on performativity and public perception to assert authority. Through interdisciplinary analysis, empirical findings, and expert interviews, the book reveals the ambivalent outcomes of emulation: promising tools for accountability yet sometimes lacking practical efficacy. Ultimately, this work frames these mechanisms as harbingers of new accountability norms, arguing that governance in the digital age demands not only novel institutions but also robust public engagement. It situates these developments within broader debates about power, legitimacy, and the evolving role of public law ideals in globalized, networked environments.

This chapter explores the genesis, structure, and potential of the European Union’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs), a cornerstone of the Digital Services Act (DSA) aimed at regulating social media platforms. As a manifestation of Governance by Emulation, ODSs blend public law principles with private governance, emulating individual rights adjudication to hold platforms accountable. This chapter examines the political context behind their creation, tracing the EU’s regulatory evolution and the legislative battles that shaped Article 21 of the DSA. While hailed as innovative tools for ensuring accountability, ODSs face significant structural limitations, such as non-binding decisions, weak cost incentives, and a narrow enforcement focus. Nonetheless, they present a promising avenue for resolving disputes efficiently and experimenting with integrating large language models in decision-making. Early implementation highlights a mix of creativity and challenges, offering insights into the EU’s broader regulatory ambitions to administrify platform governance and set global standards. By analyzing ODSs’ hybrid institutional design and initial practices, this chapter illustrates their dual potential: advancing accountability while exposing the risks of emulating public law mechanisms in private contexts. It concludes by reflecting on ODSs’ role as Emulated Guardians and their implications for future governance of digital public spaces. European Union

Chapter 5 examines Swift’s major foreign policy writings, particularly the Conduct of the Allies and the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. It differentiates his neoclassical balance-of-power theory – which pointed toward the need to negotiate peace – from modern, nonnormative, militaristic, and pseudoscientific versions of the theory, which his contemporaries used to justify continuing the war. Swift condemned militarism even when exhibited by his own country. He opposed the attempted subjugation and domination of an enemy country as unwise policy that would lead to international power imbalances and unintended consequences, and thus threaten both domestic constitutionalism and international security. He adopted a mixed qualitative-quantitative method of argument and revealed the conceptual flaws of the quantitative or military-statistical approach adopted by the pro-war Whigs. While his arguments facilitated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), French delays in implementing the peace terms left Swift with little more than satire in his last Tory pamphlets.

Chapter 1 revives the traditional view that Sir William Temple had a profound influence on Swift against the recent tendency to underrate Temple. It does so by providing long overdue attention to the most neglected yet most substantial dimension of Temple’s career, literary work, and bequest to Swift: the international dimension. Temple’s teachings as diplomat and foreign policy essayist are primarily responsible for Swift’s heightened awareness of the intersection of domestic and international politics throughout his career. Hence also Swift’s recognition of the interdependence of domestic liberty and international security – the need to preserve liberty through not only constitutional balance but also international balance. This inextricable relationship is often overlooked by scholars focused on the domestic ideological binary of liberty versus authority. It reveals Temple’s and Swift’s shared opposition to domestic political polarization, even at the risk of being falsely accused of favoring absolutist, paternalistic, or arbitrary government.

Chapter 6 shifts the scene to Ireland, where Swift returned after his four years writing propaganda for the Tory government in London. It reasserts the allegorical reading of Part I of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a defense of the Peace of Utrecht, and more importantly the underlying principles. In light of Swift’s international politics and thought, the war between the fictional lands of Lilliput and Blefuscu can be seen as a tripolar model of international relations – not bipolar, as widely believed, since Gulliver acts as arbiter. This model centers on Swift’s neoclassical balance-of-power theory, which also underscores a defensive blue-water foreign policy that contrasts starkly with offensive policy, “reason of state,” imperialism, and colonialism.

Swift learned about foreign affairs from one of England’s greatest diplomats, Sir William Temple, friend of William III and champion of balance-of-power foreign policy. But he became chief apologist for the notorious foreign policy maneuver by which Britain abandoned William's Grand Alliance to negotiate a ceasefire with archenemy France. The Whig opposition accused Swift and the Tories of ushering in foreign hegemony and domestic absolutism – and most critics today insist Swift was an authoritarian political thinker and devotee of Thomas Hobbes. Yet Britain and France negotiated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), a milestone of international cooperation, the first major treaty to include “balance of power” in its provisions, and the inspiration of Enlightenment philosophical projects of “perpetual peace,” ultimately including the European Union. This paradox reveals the need to study Swift’s views on international politics in both theory and practice. The key lies in his universalist conception of balance of power.

Chapter 2 discusses Swift’s statement of political principles, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions (1701), and shows how international relations proved essential both to his fully developed, neoclassical balance-of-power theory as well as his practical political objectives in contemporary debates about the constitution and emerging War of Spanish Succession. Swift wrote against the Tory majority in the House of Commons and thus attacked the tyranny of the majority – but he also took a more realistic and permissive view of popular political participation than has been acknowledged. That view reflected his belief in the voice of the people and consensual government, including when discovering the national interest within the international context. The masses helped to rescue England from French imperialism, just as threats of French hegemony put the domestic political need for power-sharing into perspective. Swift defends executive action for the sake of national security but does not abandon constitutional constraints.

Chapter 7 examines Gulliver’s Travels Parts II and III, with particular focus on the role of ideology, namely religion and sectarianism, in the context of global politics and trade. Swift saw modern Europe as a once-unified constitutional and ideological system (Christendom) that fell into a state of decay – a process accelerated by ideologies and policies motivated by hubris and aggression, such as absolutism, militarism, colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. In doing so he illustrated essential dynamics of modernity, science, technology, and globalization and implied that their unrestrained development would lead to conflict rather than cooperation. He painted a picture of Asian governments, namely Japan, as foils to European governments: while they were despotic at home, they followed rational self-interest abroad, enabling cordial trade relations and a balance of power. By contrast, modern European colonial powers are satirized as being blinded by the pursuit of commercial monopolies and hence objects of foreign manipulation.

Chapter 5 argues that there is a distinctive activity and with it a particular problem, a particular kind of mischief, that is the central concern of the rule of law ideal. The activity is the exercise of power. The focus is not on the purpose of power’s exercise, for which we have other concepts, but the way it is exercised. The goal is to minimise arbitrary ways of exercising it. The chapter explicates the notions of power and arbitrariness. It argues that power itself is not an evil but a necessity for many good things. Nor for that matter is arbitrariness evil in itself. Rather, it is the combination of arbitrariness with power, when substantial, that is obnoxious. It suggests several reasons why it is both intrinsically immoral and likely to have bad consequences. The chapter concludes by arguing that hostility to arbitrary power is rarely the only game in town, but it is almost always justified. Power that is not arbitrary is not what we most want out of life, but it is a condition for many of the things we do want. Hostility to it is immanent in the rule of law ideal.

Chapter 2 takes an in-depth look into how area-studies scholarship has explained the wide empirical variation in levels of Eurasian natural gas interdependence across nations and over time. It then lays out the empirical design; it introduces the study’s dependent variable — natural gas interdependence in Eurasia — and discusses the definition, operationalization, and measurement of this dependent variable. Next, it introduced the study’s independent variable, a concept labeled new dominant narratives, and lays out the key independent variables contributing to the rise of new dominant narratives: domestic politics, leaders’ dispositions, and international economic and technological incentives. Finally, the chapter situates the book’s key analytical terms — interdependence, cooperation, gas security, and power in Eurasian gas relations — in the existing literature. It specifies that, in this book, these concepts are not treated as context-less or ultimately “real,” but are seen as historically contingent and understood contextually.

The Introduction sets out the question and the scope of this book, and its theoretical and methodological framework. Drawing on historical materialism, it explains the anti-fetishist understanding of information taken by this book, which treats information as embedded in and constitutive of social relations and implicated in the distribution of power and order-making. Based on this historical materialist understanding of information, the Introduction sets out the book’s critique on the liberal treatment of information and its main argument that human rights and free trade have jointly and dialectically formed a hegemonic conceptual framework for the governance of information under international law which obscures the crucial material dimension of information and its connection to power.

Chapter 3 reviews understandings of ideology and concludes with a discussion of Verschueren’s characterization of ideology and its manifestations in discourse. These theses, with the attributes of ideology identified by Eagleton, provide the bases for the arguments that Amnesty’s appeals and related documents are indeed elements of ideological discourse. According to Eagleton, ideologies are not necessarily instruments of false consciousness; they are constructed to promote the interests of a group, motivate its members to act in the group’s interest, legitimate those interests and actions by presenting them as natural, universal, normative and rational. The analysis shows that while the appeals are designed to persuade their addressees, they are also intended to motivate AI members. The chapter addresses Verschueren’s characterizations of ideology: rarely questioned and potentially hegemonic language use; a normative aspect of social reality manifested across multiple discourse genres; immune to experience and observation often represented implicitly and resistant to explicit expression. It frames, validates, explains and legitimates attitudes, states of affairs, and actions.

Social inequalities refer to the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, and privileges among social groups. Inequalities are characterized by systematic access disparities in various aspects of life, such as income, education, healthcare, and social status. When individuals attribute social disparities to a lack of individual effort, despite evidence of systemic biases, discriminatory attitudes can result in denying access to opportunities for certain segments of the population. Developmental scientists have studied the origins of conceptions about social inequalities in everyday contexts. We review research on children’s awareness of social inequalities, their responses to social disparities, and the role of peer and authority influences on children’s evaluations of social inequalities. Factors discussed include the sociopolitical system, children’s ethnic and racial background, and their own socioeconomic status. Finally, we describe intervention programs designed to reduce biases and promote positive intergroup attitudes and how identity influences one’s perspective about the broader societal landscape.