This article analyzes the privatization of Telecom Italia as part of a broader historical evaluation of public ownership in a high-technology strategic sector. Drawing on archival material from Italian state-owned enterprises as well as national and European institutions, it traces the reorganization of the telecommunications conglomerate in the 1980s and 1990s, the European regulatory framework in which it unfolded, and the company’s post-divestment trajectory, thereby questioning the inevitability of privatization. The evidence shows that, before privatization, Telecom Italia had already become a profitable, technologically advanced, and internationally competitive firm under public ownership. The decision to divest reflected domestic political and fiscal priorities, as the European liberalization of the telecommunications market reshaped the rules while leaving member states a margin of maneuver. By comparing the public and privatized phases of the company’s development, the article contributes to the historical reassessment of state-owned enterprises and challenges the assumption that ownership change was functional to securing efficiency and competitiveness in the late twentieth-century telecommunications industry.

The privatization of rights and obligations of states under the influence of international organizations (IOs) is a challenge for international law. The difficulty resides in the lack of a clear public status of those organizations. This article purports to identify an ‘international public law’ of both states and IOs. Only such a law could indeed institute international organizations as ‘public’ institutions of their member states’ peoples and thereby ‘reinstitute’ those peoples. The article’s first section presents an institutional-normative account of publicness. A second section presents how, even though an international law ‘of the public’ gradually developed after the nineteenth century, that public dimension was never very strong, not the least because of the role played by IOs. The third section explains indeed how, due to IOs’ construction as functional and apolitical organizations and the private law analogies that have dominated their organization, the international law of IOs quickly turned into a vector of public/private hybridization of both states and IOs. To address this challenge, the fourth section argues not only for a general and minimal common public status of IOs under international law, but also against quick analogies with states’ sovereign rights and obligations. To help consolidate the proposed distinct albeit continuous public status of IOs, the fifth section spells out what could be the common but differentiated public rights of states and IOs which may not be conferred to private persons, and their common but differentiated public obligations that could set limits on the private exercise of these rights.

Chile’s pension privatization represents one of the most radical neoliberal experiments in social security reform, reshaping welfare from a collective right into a market-driven, property-based entitlement. This Article examines how the constitutionalization of pension privatization entrenched inequalities, shielding the system from democratic contestation and embedding a logic of over-propertization, where private property rights supersede social rights. Drawing on a Law and Political Economy (LPE) approach, explicitly concerned with the distributional consequences of legal design, this study traces how, during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), Chile’s 1980 Constitution, and Decree Law 3500 institutionalized financialization and individual responsibility, transforming social security into an asset class managed by private pension fund administrators (AFPs). By legally structuring private capitalization accounts as financial assets with attributes such as ownership, transferability, and enforceability, these frameworks granted private actors control over investment management and risk distribution. The analysis highlights challenges to reversing this model, as judicial claims, pension fund withdrawals during COVID-19, and two failed constitution-making processes reveal legal and political constraints on reform. It examines legislative efforts, judicial interpretations, and collective mobilizations—such as the No+AFP campaign—seeking to restore solidarity. It also explores legitimation strategies, including the discourse of “popular capitalism” and the institutional entrenchment of AFPs within Chile’s political economy. By framing pension privatization as a constitutional and legal project rather than mere economic policy, this Article underscores the global consequences of over-propertization and the urgency of reimagining social rights. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of LPE scholarship that treats constitutions as terrains of economic power, exposing how legal frameworks both encode and contest neoliberal orders.

Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

Iceland's boom and bust replicate in miniature the causes, development and trajectory of the absolutely larger but proportionately smaller American boom and bust, except for Iceland's costly lack of a reserve currency and its banks’ preference not just for speculating in but also overpaying for shaky assets. In the aggregate, both the US and Icelandic economies sold short-term, passive, and liquid assets to the world, consumed part of that borrowing, and reinvested outward in fixed, long-term and active investments. The key differences between Icelandic and US banks are that Iceland's banks made their titanic gambles without the benefit of an international reserve currency. The United States survived its catastrophe and continues to have access to global credit markets without much penalty because the dollar is the international reserve currency. By contrast, Iceland has mortgaged its economy and economic independence for decades to bail out banks that had overpaid for dodgy assets.

Present day welfare societies rely on a complex mix of different providers ranging from the state, markets, family, and non-profit organizations to unions, grassroots organizations, and informal networks. At the same time changing welfare discourses have opened up space for new partnerships, divisions of labor, and responsibilities between these actors. For nonprofit organizations this means that they operate in complex institutional environments where different institutions and logics compete with each other. In this special issue we have collected a number of articles that analyze how organizations and organizational fields adjust to a new environment that is increasingly dominated by the logic of the market, and how in particular nonprofit organizations, as hybrids by definition, are able to cope with new demands, funding structures, and control mechanism.

Religion is now politically active in ways that until recently were unthinkable. Both in Europe and elsewhere in the world, there are numerous examples of how religion has left its previously assigned place in the private sphere, becoming in some cases an important contributor to various political issues, conflicts and competitions. To understand what has happened in this regard necessarily involves a remodelling and re-assumption of our understanding of the public roles of religious actors. Until the 1960s or 1970s, theories of secularization had long condemned religious actors in both Western and non-Western countries to social and political marginalization. Secularization theory maintained that as countries modernized, religion would lose its public centrality. But, as this did not happen, there is now a need to rethink the public role of religion. This article is concerned with this issue, with a focus on Europe, using democratization, democracy and civil liberties as key examples.

Social service contracting to nongovernmental organizations is popular form of privatization across the world. Although nonprofits are preferable social service providers for legal and normative reasons, governments in the United States increasingly rely on for-profit organizations to deliver social services. This trend warrants further exploration about whether nonprofits or for-profits perform according to theoretical expectations when they exist in the same market. This study employs qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to examine how sector-public, nonprofit, and for-profit-combines with structural variables to produce acceptable contract performance in juvenile justice programs. QCA is a discovery-oriented research tool that determines whether combinations of variables within cases produce a specific outcome and whether those combinations are consistent across cases. I find sector is not a necessary or sufficient predictor of acceptable performance on its own. Rather it combines with market factors to lead to acceptable contract performance. Combinations vary by sector, indicating that sectors behave differently in similar circumstances. The primary theoretical contribution of this paper is to provide a nuanced account of contract performance in mixed sector markets.

In Japan, a nonprofit organization system enacted in the late 1990s and the later introduction of privatization policies in human services were expected to overturn government dominance of nonprofit organization activities. By focusing on the long-term care insurance (LTCI) system, which privatized public human services for the first time in the country, this study empirically examines whether, and to what extent, nonprofit–government relationships in Japan have actually changed as a result of this new system. In addition, because LTCI newly allows for-profit organizations to provide services, the influence of such organizations were incorporated into the analysis. The outcomes of this study demonstrate that the government continues to extend its sphere of influence over nonprofit and for-profit organizations through LTCI. In addition, for-profit organizations appear to be more successful than nonprofit organizations, in that the former organizations have overcome their lack of experience as public service providers by taking over the roles that nonprofit organizations have traditionally occupied.