The European Council regularly intervenes in everyday law-making by expressing legislative priorities in summit conclusions. We theorise and analyse the impact of these priorities on the duration of the EU’s co-decision (or ordinary legislative) procedure. Theoretically, we argue that the European Council increases speed through leadership. Leadership translates, via political authority, into limited hierarchical relations between the national heads of state or government on the one hand and the co-legislators on the other. Drawing on scholarship on institutionalisation, crisis politics, and multi-level negotiation, we hypothesise that the European Council’s priorities can speed up co-legislation. ‘Speeding up’ should happen, in particular, from late 2009 onwards, when the European Council became a formal EU institution and in crisis-related laws, when leaders leverage their EU-level authority. We assess our argument by using a mixed-methods design. Our new dataset combines concluded legislation and pending proposals between 1999 and 2024 with the European Council’s legislative priorities. Event history analysis is bolstered with qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews. We find that leaders speed up law-making, but primarily early on in co-legislation, with a particularly pronounced effect since late 2009. Against our expectation, the European Council’s priorities do not accelerate legislation under crisis, but crisis-related laws themselves are concluded faster. Our paper provides new insights into how the European Council impacts everyday law-making and on the widely debated topic of leadership in the EU and in other multi-level systems.

Social scientists have long examined the relationship between war and state formation, especially in Europe and Latin America. However, work on non-European and colonial cases questioned the significance of war for state formation. Analyzing the Israeli case, I examine the relationship between war and state formation in a colonial context by focusing not on war itself but on the crises war may cause. I argue that war can shape state formation in a colonial context and suggest that theorizing crisis in political development reveals novel ways in which the relationship between war and state formation plays out. Empirically, I show that some of the main obstacles that hampered Zionist colonization and state formation in Palestine were the country’s health conditions, which seriously deteriorated during World War I. These health-related obstacles to colonization and state formation were removed by the work of American Jewish organizations after the war. Importantly, the critical work of these public health organizations stemmed from the local and global crises caused by the war. I also consider how responses to the postwar health crisis in the Jewish sector shaped the plight of Palestinian Arabs. Having noted the significance of crisis, I build on existing literature to theorize it as a potentially structurally transformative “event.” But unlike eventful analyses, I claim that transformative crises are not necessarily rifts or radical breaks from past patterns. Rather, preexisting patterns and conditions that precede eventful crises shape how transformation plays out.

Drawing on the case of the US Civil War, this article redefines crises of hegemony as crises of “articulation,” in which insurgent actors disrupt support for joining up the elements of the dominant social order under existing terms. The collapse of mass white consent just prior to the war entailed partisan struggle over imagined demographic futures. Breaking with the nativists of their former party, Illinois Whigs, turned Republicans, argued that the extension of slavery into Indigenous territory and northern Mexico would permit the planter class to monopolize the land, overrun it with the enslaved, and condemn white workers, many of them immigrants, to a life of endless toil in the factory. Having thus framed slavery as a demographic threat, northern Republicans held that the territorial claims of white settlers must supersede those of planters. Alabama Democrats, now Southern Rights secessionists, retained their erstwhile party’s expansionist politics but predicted that prohibiting the transport of human chattel to new territories would dam whites up with the enslaved, who, after overtaking the white population, could overthrow slavery and the white race itself. The article illuminates the role of population politics and partisan struggle in the re-organization of white supremacy and the advent of critical historical conjunctures. That white supremacy underpins even paradigmatic transitions to liberal democracy may also inform the work of mass movements, as they diagnose and challenge the ways in which supposedly democratic institutions consolidate, rather than protect against, elite power.

The global order is undergoing significant transformations with far-reaching implications for international criminal justice. These shifts pose an existential challenge to core crimes accountability while re-shaping its pursuit. As the liberal order recedes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) faces a crisis driven by absolute sovereignty’s reassertion, weakened multilateral governance and increasing political and coercive pressures from powerful states. Simultaneously, these developments promote decentralised accountability, fostering the emergence of a polycentric system of international criminal justice. Trends in re-nationalisation, hybridisation and regionalisation align accountability with a more pluralistic, fluid global order. In this context, the ICC is not obsolete but requires a redefined role. While no longer the apex of international criminal justice, its existence remains crucial to addressing the risks of decentralised accountability. The Court, particularly its Office of the Prosecutor, should reconfigure strategies around positive complementarity, repositioning itself as a co-ordinating hub within this polycentric system.

This article examines why policy ideas emerging during crises sometimes become institutionalised while in other cases they remain unimplemented. We argue that policy responsiveness is shaped by unequal instrumental and structural power across first-tier and second-tier citizens. In South Korea, this hierarchy reflected institutional legacies of developmental citizenship, which accorded privileged status to workers in conglomerates and manufacturing production networks. Using a comparative analysis of employment insurance reforms during the 1997 Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that policy expansion occurred when crises severely affected first-tier citizens, which include export-oriented conglomerates, their integrated subcontractors, and the workers employed therein. By contrast, proposals during COVID-19 largely remained unfulfilled, as the most impacted groups, including the self-employed and non-standard workers, occupied a marginal position. This unequal responsiveness can be interpreted through a three-gap mechanism – structural presence, representation, and political participation – underscoring that the institutionalisation of policy ideas is contingent on historically embedded power structures.

Centralization represents the historical response of political elites to overcome the difficulties of coordination when faced with an external threat. Yet, we know little about the demand side of authority distribution in the context of a crisis. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of the effect of crises and coordination inefficiencies on the territorial preferences of individuals. We predict that crisis-time uncoordinated responses will prompt a centralizing shift in preferences. We tested this argument using online survey experiments in a comparative sample of 13 countries in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The results show that exposure to unsuccessful intergovernmental coordination shifted individual preferences toward a more centralized power allocation in a majority of countries. This effect is moderated by contextual conditions, such as actual multilevel policy efforts and changes in the intensity of the pandemic. Individual-level territorial identity or partisan identification also intervenes as a significant moderator of our treatment.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing frequency of extreme natural events fueled by climate change have highlighted the pressing need for countries to develop effective strategies for mitigating and responding to current and future crises and disasters. While civil society organizations (CSOs) are gaining increasing recognition as key actors by governments worldwide, there remains a lack of comprehensive research on their roles across different types of crises and throughout the various stages of the disaster cycle. This systematic literature review aims to explore and analyze the current knowledge about the roles of CSOs across diverse crises and phases of crisis and disaster management. The findings reveal that CSOs primarily perform three key roles: protecting human life, facilitating societal and individual resilience and recovery, and advocating for affected communities and individuals. While these roles are present across diverse crises, their emphasis varies depending on the nature of the disaster and the geographical context. The review also highlights a lack of research on the contributions of CSOs in disaster risk reduction (DRR) beyond natural hazards and outside the Asian context. The article concludes by identifying key areas for further research, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of CSOs’ roles in different crisis contexts and geographical regions.

This paper examines patterns of volunteering during COVID-19 in different areas of civil society and demographic groups in Denmark. The aim is to understand how differences in the areas of civil society's political resources and organizational settings, and different barriers to volunteering of demographic groups, relate to variation in the levels of volunteering in periods of the pandemic with different lockdown measures. Using two cross-sectional surveys from spring 2020 (n = 3,497), and spring 2021 (n = 1,692), and a four-round panel dataset (n = 1,340), we measure changes in volunteer participation during the first year of the pandemic. We find significant drops in volunteering within most areas. While the level of lockdown correlates strongly with changes in volunteering, differences between areas of civil society point to the importance of variations in political resources and organizational settings for explaining which areas recovered fastest in the re-opening of society. Additionally, declines in volunteering did not differ significantly across demographic groups.

Experts step into global governance most prominently in times of crisis. But if crisis governance at international organizations (IOs) involves the construction of specific temporal horizons, how do these horizons affect the constitution of expert authority? This article argues that expertise produced under such conditions – to meet a demand for ‘timely’ knowledge – differs substantively from other kinds of expertise. Crisis governance thus contributes in notable ways to the pluralization of expertise. The article examines this phenomenon in the case of the relatively recent proliferation of rapid response mechanisms (RRMs). By examining the making and implementation of RRMs at two major IOs – the World Health Organization and the World Food Programme – the article offers a new understanding for how RRMs have become part of institutional repertoires of expertise. Based on this, it contends that RRM-based timeliness claims a shift in expert knowledge production from credentialed individuals to infrastructures and standardized procedures; second, they prioritize large homogenous datasets over consultation and contestation among different experts; and third, they streamline expert selection such that experts are recruited from existing intra-institutional pools rather than third parties. Jointly, these shifts speed up monitoring and reaction capabilities, but also risk eroding important checks on expert overconfidence.