The LIOn's share: How the Liberal International Order Contributes to its Own Legitimacy Crisis. Harvard CES Open Forum Series2019-2020

The liberal international order (LIO) is experiencing a legitimacy crisis in its Western heartland. What causes this crisis? Existing approaches focus on the LIO’s unequal allocation of wealth and values that produces losers and thus breeds dissatisfaction. Yet, why this dissatisfaction translates into a delegitimation of the order rather than a contestation over policies remains unaccounted for. Complementing the cultural and economic backlash hypotheses, this paper advances an institutionalist explanationfor the current crisis of the LIO, which accounts for the growing resistance to the LIO with a political backlash hypothesis. Our argument is that the institutional characteristics of the LIO’s political order trigger self-undermining processes by inciting opposition that cannot be politically accommodated and is thus bound to turn into polity contestation. In particular, we hold that IOs’ predominantly technocratic legitimation rationale on the one hand, and their increasing political authority with distributional effects on the other, create a democracy gap. It implies that avenues to absorb opposition through input channels are largely missing and thus incite the erosion of the LIO’s general acceptance. We illustrate the plausibility of this argument with evidence from the European Union (EU) as well as the international regimes on trade and human rights

Sustainable Settlement Criteria, Eco-cities and Prospects in Central and Eastern Europe

Eco-city movements constitute a special segment of the sustainable settlement aspirations. Using the classification devised by Mark Roseland, the paper established that the eco-city movement aims at achieving a new, consistent urban solution, while trying also to implement this solution in practice. The movement itself can be traced back to the 1970s in Berkeley, California. Since 1990, a series of international conferences has helped those following this approach to exchange experiences internationally. Eco-city models make efforts to create comprehensive solutions, so that their approach amalgamates the social (community, cultural), economic and ecological dimensions. Implementing solutions in practice requires a manageable, people-centred scale and participants who handle it as their own objective. These conditions make eco-city initiatives territorially limited sustainability experiments. The last decade and a half have brought huge and rapid social changes in the CEE transition countries, with post-industrial views and pressures combining with a learning process for collaboration in a new market economy. There were overestimates of the degree of environmental consciousness to be found in transition societies. These expectations were belied. The main trends have been along the Western path, with replication of all its mistakes. Under these circumstances social lifestyle experiments such as the eco-city movement enjoy relative narrow support: very few followers and relatively little public interest in such experiments. Sectoral division is frequent within environmental (and other) projects. Although there are several movements, they are on the scale of an eco-village, rather than an eco-city

Reforming the family code in Tunisia and Morocco - the struggle between religion, globalisation and democracy

There is no doubt that one of the most contentious terrains of contestation in the supposed clash of values between Islamism and western values is the role of women in society. Thus, the issue of women's rights has become the litmus test for Arab societies with respect to the current zeitgeist of human rights in the age of democracy and liberalism. There is today a stereotypical view of debates surrounding women's rights in the Arab world where two distinct camps are in conflict with each other. On the one hand there are 'globalised' liberal and secular actors that strive for women's rights and therefore democracy, while on the other are obscurantist movements that are anchored in religious tradition, resist globalisation and are therefore autocratic by assumption. This article challenges this view and through an empirical study of the changes to the Code of Personal Status in Tunisia and Morocco it demonstrates that the issue of women's rights is far more complex and, in particular, it finds that there is a very significant decoupling between women's rights and democracy in the region, despite a progressive liberal shift in the gender equality agenda

Top Heavy: Beyond the Global North & the Justification for Global Administrative Law

Global administrative law scholars have argued that global administrative law’s principles and normativity can bring about legitimacy to global governance institutions, and subsequently benefit the people of the Global South. I challenge these recent arguments that suggest global administrative law has managed to incorporate the concerns of the Third World. I caution international lawyers’ attempts to theorize global governance as administration to fill the democracy gap within the global space. My arguments are premised on the history of domestic administrative law and its uses to facilitate the settler colonial project in places like North America. I first examine the two animating claims within global administrative law and then focus, based on taxonomies available within the current literature, on procedural administrative law. The procedural argument has been developed by American legal scholars who want to deploy their common law based notions of administrative law within the global space. Based on this analysis, I develop and deploy a case study from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as illustration of judicial review within an international criminal institution set up by the UN Security Council. In the final section, I challenge global administrative lawyers’ arguments that global administrative law can be a tool of emancipation for the people of the Global South based on the ICTR case study

The evolution of national social dialogue in Europe under the single market, 1992-2006

This paper examines the evolution of national social dialogue (bipartite wage bargaining) across European countries. Several commentators in the 1990s expected the dismantling of national social dialogue institutions. Following the liberalisation of markets, intensification of competition, and declining union power, bargaining structures were supposed to converge to the Anglo-Saxon model of decentralised bargaining. The paper seeks to gauge the plausibility of the ‘decentralization thesis’ using novel indicators of collective bargaining centralization across the EU15. It is shown that despite the changes in product markets, flexible working, and declining union density, a generalized decentralization of bargaining did not occur. Instead, in many European cases there is a counter-trend of centralization, which casts doubt to the decentralization thesis

Russians Back Protests, Political Freedoms and Putin, Too

Presents survey findings about Russians' reaction to the December 2011 parliamentary and March 2012 presidential elections and subsequent protests, attitudes toward democracy, and views of leaders, nationalism, and Russia?s global image

Who is willing to deliberate, and how? Dissatisfied democrats, stealth democrats and populists in the UK: SEI Working Paper 131

This article draws on a new survey of British citizens to test the hypothesis that there are two quite distinctive types of attitude prevalent among those who are ‘disaffected’ with politics, the ‘dissatisfied democratic’ and ‘stealth democratic’ orientations, the former being more widespread in the UK. While neither manifests a high level of trust for the political elite, the dissatisfied democratic citizen is politically interested, efficacious and desires greater political participation, while the contrary is generally true of the stealth democrat. However, although stealth democrats are unwilling to engage in most forms of participation or deliberation, they are ambiguous about direct democracy, which can be attributed to the populist nature of stealth democratic attitudes

Standing In the Gap, Post COVID-19

Editorial for Fall 2022 issue