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

A COMPARISON OF WILDFIRE ADAPTIVE TRAITS IN JUVENILE CONIFERS OF THE NORTHERN ROCKIES

Wildfire is an importance disturbance that continues to shape the ecosystems of the northern Rockies through varying patterns of frequency and intensity. Due to historical fire suppression and the hotter and drier conditions brought upon by anthropogenic climate change, wildfire frequency and intensity is increasing. These increases will alter vegetation structure and composition, but the degree to which is unknown. Individual plant traits can offer insight into how these vegetation communities will shift, especially the particular traits that reduce fire-related mortality. To survive wildfires, juvenile northern conifers employ two strategies: increasing their bark thickness and increasing their crown height. To determine which species use which strategies, I measured bark width and tree height for 100 juvenile western larch (Larix occidentalis), Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), and ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) that established following wildfires. These seedlings were destructively sampled across field sites in the northern Rockies including Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon from areas that burned 5-20 years ago. Using the computer program ImageJ, I measured bark width from images of cross sections at the root-shoot boundary to compare with height data collected in the field. The purpose of this study is to determine what adaptive strategies these species employ, and then identify which species has the highest likelihood of surviving wildfire at the juvenile stage. This study may provide insight into which species land management agencies replant following a fire, or help identify how the ranges of these three conifers will shift with more frequent fire

Political secrecy in Europe: crisis management and crisis exploitation

This article theorises the relationship of crisis and political secrecy in European public policy. Combining the literatures on crisis management and securitisation, it introduces two distinct types of crisis-related secrecy. (1) Reactive secrecy denotes the deliberate concealment of information from the public with the aim of reducing immediate negative crisis consequences. It presents itself as a functional necessity of crisis management. (2) Active secrecy is about substantive or procedural secrecy employed by authority-holders to implement their interests with fewer restraints. Here, secrecy is an instrument of crisis exploitation, reducing obstacles to extraordinary measures. This distinction is based on an understanding of authority-holders as simultaneous legitimacy- and discretion-seekers whose secrecy politics depend on the constraints and opportunities presented by crises. In order to illustrate active and reactive secrecy, the article uses examples from the euro crisis (Eurogroup summitry, ECB sovereign bond purchases) and the security crisis after 9/11 (terror lists)

Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen für die Vermarktung alter Getreidesorten

Alte Getreidesorten stellen wegen ihrer genetischen Vielfalt eine wichtige Ressource für die Ernährungssicherheit dar. In Deutschland können alte Sorten, die vom Bundessortenamt keine reguläre Sortenzulassung erhalten, als Erhaltungssorten zugelassen und so in den Verkehr gebracht werden.Derzeit sind jedoch nur 33 solche Erhaltungssorten registriert, was verglichen mit den insgesamt 2559 zugelassenen landwirtschaftlichen Sorten nur ein kleiner Bruchteil ist. Dies deutet darauf hin, dass es immer noch Hindernisse gibt, die die Registrierung alter Getreidesorten als Erhaltungssorten erschwerdent. Ziel der hier vorgestellten Masterarbeit ist es, für Landwirt*innen, Verarbeiter*innen und Naturschutzverbänden einen Leitfaden zu entwickeln, der beim Anbau, der Verarbeitung oder dem Verkauf alter Getreidesorten Anhaltspunkte bietet und somit zum Erhalt alter Getreidesorten beizutragen

Expanded Spectral Atlas of Sirius

Sirius is the brightest star in our night sky and is ideal for spectral analysis due to its slow rotation and lack of atmospheric convection. Its mass, radius, surface gravity, and effective temperature have all been constrained to better than 1%. In 1979 Kurucz and Furenlid published the Sample Spectral Atlas for Sirius, which identified most spectral absorption lines between the wavelengths 354 nm and 440 nm. However, there are prominent spectral lines from O, Na, Mg, Si, Ca, Cr, Fe, and Zn that lie outside of this range that are important for abundance analyses. To expand the wavelength range, we constructed an atlas using spectral data from the Very Large Telescope Ultraviolet Echelle Spectrograph (VLT/UVES) from 305 nm to 850 nm for comparison with a non-local thermal equilibrium (NLTE) stellar atmosphere model for Sirius. This poster presents sample pages from the atlas and an assessment of the quality of the match between the model spectrum and the VLT/UVES data. We identified 112 spectral lines from singly and/or doubly ionized species of the elements O, Mg, Si, V, Cr, Fe, Ni, La, Pr, and Lu, which are not well matched to the model. The data and model lines in some regions of our spectrum did not properly match up with each other, either being too weak or strong, or some absorption lines could be missing entirely. However, there are hundreds of other well-fitting spectral lines. We anticipate that our methods of spectral examination will be applicable for the construction of atlases for other stars

Varieties of contested multilateralism: positive and negative consequences for the constitutionalisation of multilateral institutions

This essay analyses the consequences of contested multilateralism (CM) for the level of constitutionalisation of specific multilateral institutions. We argue that CM has implications for institutions’ constitutional quality in particular if it is polity-driven and not (merely) policy-driven, that is, when actors’ employment of alternative institutions stems from their dissatisfaction with the political order of an institution rather than individual policies. Given the co-existence of constitutionalised and non-constitutionalised multilateral institutions in today’s international order, state and non-state actors can use alternative institutions to contest the constraining or discretionary character of an institution’s polity. We hold that CM is likely to have negative consequences for the constitutionalisation of multilateral institutions if it is employed ‘top-down’ by states to enhance their freedom to wield discretionary authority, but that it is likely to have positive consequence if it is employed ‘bottom-up’ by society actors to constrain the exercise of discretionary authority through multilateral institutions. We illustrate the empirical plausibility of our claims in two cases involving top-down contestation of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and bottom-up contestation of the World Health Organization (WHO)

After fragmentation: norm collisions, interface conflicts, and conflict management

Fragmentation, institutional overlaps, and norm collisions are often seen as fundamental problems for the global (legal) order. Supposedly, they incite conflict and disorder. However, some scholars have also emphasised functional and normative advantages of the resulting institutional pluralism. We argue that the consequences of the increasing international institutional density are conditional on whether and how different norms, institutions, and authorities are coordinated. In distinction from the fragmentation framework in international law and the regime complexity framework in international relations, this introduction outlines an interface conflict framework that enables important insights into this question and guides the contributions assembled in this issue. It zooms in on the micro-level of conflict between actors that justify incompatible positional differences with reference to different international norms. In particular, the concept of interface conflicts allows studying the conditions under which overlaps and norm collisions become activated in conflicts as well as the ways in which such conflicts are handled. Foreshadowing the main findings of the contributions to this Special Issue, we hold that interface conflicts are neither inevitable nor unmanageable. Most importantly, it seems that, more often than not, conflicts stimulate cooperative forms of management and contribute to the building of inter-institutional order

WHO decides on the exception? Securitization and emergency governance in global health

This article analyses the emergency governance of international organizations by combining securitization theory with legal theory on the state of exception. Our main argument is that where issues are securitized as global threats, exceptionalism can emerge at the level of supranational bodies, endowing them with the decisionist authority to define emergencies and guide political responses. We theorize the 'emergency trap', which is triggered when the emergency powers of international organizations reduce the obstacles to, and increase the incentives for, the securitization of further issues. Based on the idea that the emergency trap functions as an institutional driver of securitization, we also highlight the importance of the constitutional containment of emergency competencies as an alternative to discursive desecuritization strategies. We illustrate this security-emergency dynamic in a case study of the recent empowerment of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the governance of global health emergencies. The article shows how WHO's exceptional response to the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis paved the way for an institutionalization of emergency powers within the organization and contributed to securitizing the 2009 swine influenza outbreak as a global pandemic. However, WHO's crisis governance has also triggered internal and external processes of constitutional contention