Taming Hegemony: Informal Institutions and the Challenge to Western Liberal Order

This article develops the argument that informal institutions-'G-x groupings', 'contact groups', 'core groups'-provide a vital space to renegotiate the terms and conditions of US hegemony. With the global balance of power shifting, US hegemony today is no longer seen as the exclusive framework to solve urgent collective action problems-major armed conflict, nuclear non-proliferation, climate change, global financial stability. These problems are of global significance and litmus tests for two key properties of US hegemonic power: the ability to maintain order and to provide public goods. As the global financial crisis of 2008 has demonstrated, emerging powers consider US hegemony as part of the problem rather than the framework through which to develop solutions. The substantial challenges for liberal institutions to adapt to major shifts in the global distribution of power and to act as effective problem-solvers has led to growing recourse to alternative mechanisms of collective action that operate in and around the liberal institutional architecture. However, they are not the convenient support structure for the renegotiation of Western liberal order on exclusive US terms. Informal institutions are platforms for contestation with an open outcome. Contestation includes the possibility of developing new patterns and understandings that may ultimately replace Western liberal order. The social contract between hegemonic leader and followers can be revoked. The contract will be up for termination if there is a widely shared belief that the hegemon fails to deliver sufficient public goods and proves to be incapable of performing its system maintenance functions

Policy networks in global environmental governance : connecting the blue amazon to Antarctica and the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agendas

Focusing on the domestic policy network around the Blue Amazon paradigm, this article challenges the frequently presented argument of Brazil as a key player in global environmental governance. In doing so, it applies a policy network approach to study the institutional framework that structures the country’s engagement in relation to the Antarctica and the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) negotiation agendas

Global Norm Diffusion in East Asia: How China and Japan Implement the Responsibility to Protect

This article addresses the problem of global norm diffusion in international relations with particular reference to the implementation of ‘the responsibility to protect’ (R2P) in East Asia. Exposing the limits of previous work on norm localization, we develop the framework of the norm diffusion loop. Rather than understanding norm diffusion as a linear top-down process, we demonstrate that the reception of R2P has evolved in a far more dynamic way that can best be described as a feedback loop. We first look into the processes and causal mechanisms that helped to construct R2P as an emerging transnational soft norm; then we analyse the challenges of diffusing R2P from the global to the regional and domestic levels; and, finally, we examine the variation of norm effects within the same region across states, investigating in particular how R2P has shaped Chinese and Japanese policy responses respectively.Jochen Prantl would like to acknowledge the generous support for his research by the British Academy (CSG-49402), the ESRC (RES-061-23-0126), and the Zvi Meitar/Vice Chancellor Oxford University Prize in the Social Science

Is the rotation of the femural head a potential initiation for cutting out? A theoretical and experimental approach

We conclude the center-center position in the head of femur of any kind of lag screw or blade is to be achieved to minimize rotation of the femoral head and to prevent further mechanical complications