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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > International institutions > General
This textbook, the first comprehensive comparative study ever undertaken, surveys and compares the world's ten largest diplomatic services: those of Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Chapters cover the distinctive histories and cultures of the services, their changing role in foreign policy making, and their preparations for the new challenges of the twenty-first century.
Why do international organizations (IOs) look so different, yet so similar? The possibilities are diverse. Some international organizations have just a few member states, while others span the globe. Some are targeted at a specific problem, while others have policy portfolios as broad as national states. Some are run almost entirely by their member states, while others have independent courts, secretariats, and parliaments. Variation among international organizations appears as wide as that among states. This book explains the design and development of international organization in the postwar period. It theorizes that the basic set up of an IO responds to two forces: the functional impetus to tackle problems that spill beyond national borders and a desire for self-rule that can dampen cooperation where transnational community is thin. The book reveals both the causal power of functionalist pressures and the extent to which nationalism constrains the willingness of member states to engage in incomplete contracting. The implications of postfunctionalist theory for an IO's membership, policy portfolio, contractual specificity, and authoritative competences are tested using annual data for 76 IOs for 1950-2010. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.
Why do international organizations (IOs) look so different, yet so similar? The possibilities are diverse. Some international organizations have just a few member states, while others span the globe. Some are targeted at a specific problem, while others have policy portfolios as broad as national states. Some are run almost entirely by their member states, while others have independent courts, secretariats, and parliaments. Variation among international organizations appears as wide as that among states. This book explains the design and development of international organization in the postwar period. It theorizes that the basic set up of an IO responds to two forces: the functional impetus to tackle problems that spill beyond national borders and a desire for self-rule that can dampen cooperation where transnational community is thin. The book reveals both the causal power of functionalist pressures and the extent to which nationalism constrains the willingness of member states to engage in incomplete contracting. The implications of postfunctionalist theory for an IO's membership, policy portfolio, contractual specificity, and authoritative competences are tested using annual data for 76 IOs for 1950-2010. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.
The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and its International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs), have acquired a central position in the practice and regulation of financial reporting around the world. As a unique instance of a private-sector body setting standards with legal force in many jurisdictions, the IASB's rise to prominence has been accompanied by vivid political debates about its governance and accountability. Similarly, the IASB's often innovative attempts to change the face of financial reporting have made it the centre of numerous controversies. This book traces the history of the IASB from its foundation as successor to the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), and discusses its operation, changing membership and leadership, the development of its standards, and their reception in jurisdictions around the world. The book gives particular attention to the IASB's relationships with the European Union, the United States, and Japan, as well as to the impact of the financial crisis on the IASB's work. By its in-depth coverage of the history of the IASB, the book provides essential background information that will enrich the perspective of everyone who has to deal with IFRSs or the IASB at a technical or policy-making level.
'It will change the way you remember the 20th century and read the news in the 21st' Steven Pinker 'A clarion call to preserve law and order across our planet' Philippe Sands 'A fascinating and important book ... given the state of the world, The Internationalists has come along at the right moment' Margaret MacMillan, Financial Times Since the end of the Second World War, we have moved from an international system in which war was legal, and accepted as the ultimate arbiter of disputes between nations, to one in which it was not. Nations that wage aggressive war have become outcasts and have almost always had to give up their territorial gains. How did this epochal transformation come about? This remarkable book, which combines political, legal, and intellectual history, traces the origins and course of one of the great shifts in the modern world. 'Sweeping and yet personable at the same time, The Internationalists explores the profound implications of the outlawry of war. Professors Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro enrich their analysis with vignettes of the many individuals (some unknown to most students of History) who played such important roles in this story. None have put it all together in the way that Hathaway and Shapiro have done in this book' Paul Kennedy
International organizations (IOs) matter. This book uncovers the regular working world of IOs, examining whether, to what extent, and how these 'global governing bodies' can act independently of the will of states. This book explores this issue by asking who or what shapes their decisions; how and when decisions are made; how players interact within an IO; and how the interactions vary across IOs. The Working World of International Organizations examines three working groups in the higher echelons of IOs - state representatives, as proxy of states, serving in the Executive Boards or General Councils, chief officers of IOs, and the staff of the permanent secretariat. The book demonstrates that none of them are unified; in each there are contested ideas about strategy and appropriate projects, and analyses their interactions to explain who is able to shape or influence decisions. Six representative IOs are studied to identify the relevant critical determinants that shape the behaviour of players. The volume explores how these players have an impact over three dilemmas that are common to all IOs: priority and agenda setting, financing, and the centralization or decentralization of operations.
From the rising significance of non-state actors to the increasing influence of regional powers, the nature and conduct of international politics has arguably changed dramatically since the height of the Cold War. Yet much of the literature on deterrence and compellence continues to draw (whether implicitly or explicitly) upon assumptions and precepts formulated in-and predicated upon-politics in a state-centric, bipolar world. Coercion moves beyond these somewhat hidebound premises and examines the critical issue of coercion in the 21st century, with a particular focus on new actors, strategies and objectives in this very old bargaining game. The chapters in this volume examine intra-state, inter-state, and transnational coercion and deterrence as well as both military and non-military instruments of persuasion, thus expanding our understanding of coercion for conflict in the 21st century. ? Scholars have analyzed the causes, dynamics, and effects of coercion for decades, but previous works have principally focused on a single state employing conventional military means to pressure another state to alter its behavior. In contrast, this volume captures fresh developments, both theoretical and policy relevant. This chapters in this volume focus on tools (terrorism, sanctions, drones, cyber warfare, intelligence, and forced migration), actors (insurgents, social movements, and NGOs) and mechanisms (trilateral coercion, diplomatic and economic isolation, foreign-imposed regime change, coercion of nuclear proliferators, and two-level games) that have become more prominent in recent years, but which have yet to be extensively or systematically addressed in either academic or policy literatures.
After the Second World War, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) promoted trade liberalization to help make the world prosperous and peaceful. Francine McKenzie uses case studies of the Cold War, the creation of the EEC and other regional trade agreements, development, and agriculture, to show that trade is a primary goal of foreign policy, a dominant (and divisive) aspect of international relations, and a vital component of global order. She unpacks the many ways in which trade was politicised, and the layers of meaning associated with trade; trade policies, as well as disputes about trade, communicated ideas, hopes and fears that were linked to larger questions of identity, sovereignty, and status. This study reveals how the economic and political dimensions of foreign policy and international engagement intersected, showing that trade was not only instrumentalised in the service of particular policies or relations but that it was also an essential aspect of international relations.
The World Trade Organization is a central player in international trade regulation. The rights and duties that form WTO law are not created in a vacuum, however, and there exists a complex network of domestic, regional and international influences on the development of WTO law that go beyond the disciplines found in the covered agreements or the interpretations given by panels and the Appellate Body. As such, understanding the development of WTO law in a wider institutional context is critical to comprehending WTO law in a new age of legal globalization. The Development of World Trade Organization Law: Examining Change in International Law examines the development of WTO law through an analysis of competing global actors, norms, and institutions. Taking a different approach to social-scientific or traditional legal models, this book argues that such globalized actors are the driving force behind the development of WTO law yet not in control of it. Identifying causal language as key to understanding this development, the volume examines three different causal influences: instrumental, systemic, and constitutive. It applies this causal methodology to three key areas of WTO law: safeguard measures, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, and subsidies. The volume provides detailed explanations of why the law has developed as it has and offers insights into the future functioning of the WTO system.
Why are there so many crises in the world? Is it true that the global system is today riskier and more dangerous than in past decades? Do we have any tools at our disposal to bring these problems under control, to reduce the global system's proneness to instability? These are the tantalizing questions addressed in this book. Using a variety of demographic, economic, financial, social, and political indicators, the book demonstrates that the global system has indeed become an 'architecture of collapse' subject to a variety of shocks. An analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and China, and the European sovereign debt crisis illustrates how the complexity and tight coupling of system components creates a situation of precarious stability and periodic disruption. This state of affairs can only be improved by enhancing the shock-absorbing components of the system, especially the capacity of states and governments to act, and by containing the shock-diffusing mechanisms. In particular, those related to phenomena such as trade imbalances, portfolio investment, cross-border banking, population ageing, and income and wealth inequality.
From 2001 to 2011, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and its International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs), acquired a central position in the practice and regulation of financial reporting around the world. As a unique instance of a private-sector body setting standards with legal force in many jurisdictions, the IASB's rise to prominence has been accompanied by vivid political debates about its governance and accountability. Similarly, the IASB's often innovative attempts to change the face of financial reporting have made it the centre of numerous controversies. This book traces the history of the IASB from its foundation as successor to the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), and discusses its operation, changing membership and leadership, the development of its standards, and their reception in jurisdictions around the world. The book gives particular attention to the IASB's relationships with the European Union, the United States, and Japan, as well as to the impact of the financial crisis on the IASB's work. By its in-depth coverage of the history of the IASB, the book provides essential background information that will enrich the perspective of everyone who has to deal with IFRSs or the IASB at a technical or policy-making level.
Fighting for Peace in Somalia provides the first comprehensive analysis of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), an operation deployed in 2007 to stabilize the country and defend its fledgling government from one of the world's deadliest militant organizations, Harakat al-Shabaab. The book's two parts provide a history of the mission from its genesis in an earlier, failed regional initiative in 2005 up to mid-2017, as well as an analysis of the mission's six most challenges, namely, logistics, security sector reform, civilian protection, strategic communications, stabilization, and developing a successful exit strategy. These issues are all central to the broader debates about how to design effective peace operations in Africa and beyond. AMISOM was remarkable in several respects: it would become the African Union's (AU) largest peace operation by a considerable margin deploying over 22,000 soldiers; it became the longest running mission under AU command and control, outlasting the nearest contender by over seven years; it also became the AU's most expensive operation, at its peak costing approximately US$1 billion per year; and, sadly, AMISOM became the AU's deadliest mission. Although often referred to as a peacekeeping operation, AMISOM's troops were given a range of daunting tasks that went well beyond the realm of peacekeeping, including VIP protection, war-fighting, counterinsurgency, stabilization, and state-building as well as supporting electoral processes and facilitating humanitarian assistance. Tana Forum Annual Book Launch 2019 Winner.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is often accused of, at best, not paying enough attention to human rights or, at worst, facilitating and perpetuating human rights abuses. This book weighs these criticisms and examines their validity, incorporating legal arguments as well as some economic and political science perspectives. After introducing the respective WTO and human rights regimes, and discussing their legal and normative relationship to each other, the book presents a detailed analysis of the main human rights concerns relating to the WTO. These include the alleged democratic deficit within the Organization and the impact of WTO rules on the right to health, labour rights, the right to food, and on questions of poverty and development. Given that some of the most important issues within the WTO concern its impact on poor people within developing States, the book asks whether rich States have an obligation to the people of poorer States to construct a fairer trading system that better facilitates the alleviation of poverty and development. Against this background, the book examines the current Doha round proposals as well as suggestions for reform of the WTO to make it more 'human rights-friendly'.
Seeking to open paths for reconsidering the trade and development relationship at the WTO, this book takes into account both the heritage of the trade regime and its present dynamics. It argues that the institutional processes for creating and implementing trade rules at the WTO and the actual regulatory outcomes are inseparable. A consideration of the WTO's development dimension must examine both jointly. It shows that the shortcomings of the Doha Development Round are in part due to a failure to assess trade rules as part of the legal processes and institutions that produced them. This book devotes significant analysis to the systemic impact of the WTO as an institution on developing and least developed members. From a pragmatic perspective, it provides a coherent and systematic analysis of the legal meaning, the implementation, and the adjudication of special and differential treatment rules for developing members. It then evaluates the different regulatory approaches to trade and development from a more theoretical perspective. The book finishes by presenting a range of proposals for a better balance between trade liberalization and the development needs of many WTO members.
Carolin Anthes investigates how and why the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) struggles with systematically integrating a right to food approach in its operations. She analyzes multi-dimensional institutional roadblocks that prevent human rights from being fully mainstreamed. These barriers are shaped by a powerful state of fragmentation and disconnection: a silo culture. The book also offers valuable insights which go beyond the FAO and suggests a fairly unconventional avenue for systemic organizational change in (international) public administrations.
Climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the threat of a global
pandemic have the potential to impact each of our lives. Preventing
these threats poses a serious global challenge, but ignoring them
could have disastrous consequences. How do we engineer institutions
to change incentives so that these global public goods are
provided?
This Handbook aims to provide practical guidance on good treaty practice. It presents a range of examples from the practice of several States and international organisations and explains the actions that need to be taken to create a new treaty, bring it into force, operate it, amend it and wind it up, on both the international and the domestic plane. It also explores what constitutes good treaty practice, and develops generic principles or criteria against which to evaluate these examples. It provides a useful analytical tool to enable each government and international organisation to identify and develop the best treaty practice for their circumstances, recognising that one size does not necessarily fit all. It will be of interest to those working with treaties and treaty procedures in governments, international organisations and legal practice, as well as legal academics and students wishing to gain insight into the realities of treaty practice.
East Asia is a powerhouse of automobile production. Yet, across the region, national automobile industries have had strikingly different patterns of development. Despite starting from equally low levels of performance and initially similar strategies, countries have experienced vastly different results. From Thailand's success as an assembly hub for foreign automakers and China's unexpected achievements in building its own car industry, to South Korea's impressive development of an integrated industry, to the Philippines' persistent weakness, these divergent paths offer a fascinating window into the determinants of economic growth. The Political Economy of Automotive Industrialization in East Asia provides a political explanation for why development strategies and performance have been so uneven within one of the world's most important regions. Utilizing interviews and original-language research from multiple nations, this book explains that factors such as market size and neoclassical economic policies alone cannot explain these patterns of development. Richard F. Doner, Gregory W. Noble, and John Ravenhill instead highlight the significance of two sets of factors: countries' very different capabilities for implementing policies and the political forces that help to explain the emergence of effective institutions. Through cross-national analyses of China, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, the book sets up a clear structure for understanding industrial development and how it enables or constrains the capabilities of domestic firms. Brief comparisons with Brazil, Mexico, and other developing countries confirm the utility of the analytic framework and demonstrate how it is superior both to accounts in mainstream economics and much of political science, which fail to give sufficient emphasis to the role of public and public-private institutions, or provide an explanation of the political bases of those institutions. In a world where auto assemblers and suppliers are facing new challenges in an ever-evolving industry-such as the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles-this book offers a crucial perspective on the centrality of institutional capacities and political economy. By tracing the divergent trajectories of seven nations, The Political Economy of Automotive Industrialization in East Asia offers lessons beyond the automobile industry that illustrate the broader importance of institutions to economic growth.
An innovative, interdisciplinary and far-reaching examination of the actual reality of international courts, International Court Authority challenges fundamental preconceptions about when, why, and how international courts become important and authoritative actors in national, regional, and international politics. A stellar group of scholars investigate the challenges that international courts face in transforming the formal legal authority conferred by states into an actual authority in fact that is respected by potential litigants, national actors, legal communities, and publics. Alter, Helfer, and Madsen provide a novel framework for conceptualizing international court authority that focuses on the reactions and practices of these key audiences. Eighteen scholars from the disciplines of law, political science and sociology apply this framework to study thirteen international courts operating in Africa, Latin America, and Europe, as well as on a global level. Together the contributors document and explore important and interesting variations in whether the audiences that interact with international courts around the world embrace or reject the rulings of these judicial institutions. Alter, Helfer, and Madsen's authority framework recognizes that international judges can and often do everything they 'should' do to ensure that their rulings possess the gravitas and stature that national courts enjoy. Yet even when imbued with these characteristics, the parties to the dispute, potential future litigants, and the broader set of actors that monitor and respond to the court's activities may fail to acknowledge the rulings as binding or take meaningful steps to modify their behaviour in response to them. For both specific judicial institutions, and more generally, the book documents and explains why most international courts possess de facto authority that is partial, variable, and highly dependent on a range of different audiences and contexts - and thus is highly fragile. An introduction situates the book's unique approach to conceptualizing international court authority within theoretical debates about the authority of global institutions. International Court Authority also includes critical reflections on the authority framework from legal theorists, international relations scholars, a philosopher, and an anthropologist. The book's conclusion questions a number of widely shared assumptions about how social and political contexts facilitate or undermine international courts in developing de facto authority and political power.
War has returned to Europe, and NATO stands at the forefront of the response to Russia's aggression in Ukraine. But how does NATO function? How do NATO member states perceive and act through the Atlantic Alliance? And ultimately how do states shape NATO's cohesion and relevance in the face of threats? The Nations of NATO explores national policies within the Atlantic Alliance. It examines the foreign policies of 16 allies, focusing on issues such as their strategic cultures, relationship with the United States, contributions to NATO operations, levels of defence spending, domestic challenges, and decision-making processes. The recent crisis in Ukraine has without doubt reinvigorated NATO as a military alliance, but over the last decade it has also been affected by a number of challenges, both endogenous and exogenous. Whether the Alliance is threatened from the outside (Russia, terrorism, China) or is being undermined from within (intra-Alliance politics, diverging threat perceptions) has become an increasingly debated issue. The degree to which the Alliance can adapt to evolving threats has also been at stake. At the heart of these debates are NATO allies' policies, preferences, threat perceptions, and level of commitment to the shared enterprise. By analysing the drivers, constraints, and specificities of relevant national policies, the volume offers an overview of NATO's contemporary functions and challenges, and constitutes an important source of data for future research and comparative analysis.
This volume brings together many of the leading international
figures in development studies, such as 2008 Nobel Prize in
Economics winner Paul Krugman, Jose Antonio Ocampo, Dani Rodrik,
Joseph Stiglitz, Daniel Cohen, Olivier Blanchard, Deepak Nayyer and
John Williamson to reconsider and propose alternative development
policies to the Washington Consensus. Covering a wide range of
issues from macro-stabilization to trade and the future of global
governance, this important volume makes a real contribution to this
important and ongoing debate.
Capital market liberalization has been a key battle in the debate
on globalization for much of the previous two decades. Many
developing countries, often at the behest of international
financial institutions such as the IMF, opened their capital
accounts and liberalized their domestic financial markets as part
of the wave of liberalization that characterized the 1980s and
1990s and in doing so exposed their economies to increased risk and
volatility. Now with even the IMF acknowledging the risks inherent
in capital market liberalization, the central intellectual battle
over the effects of capital market liberalization has for the most
part ended. Though this new understanding of the consequences of
capital market liberalization is reshaping many policy discussions
among academics and international institutions, ideological and
vested interests remain.
International trade and investment in services are an increasingly
important part of global commerce. Advances in information and
telecommunication technologies have expanded the scope of services
that can be traded cross-border. Many countries now allow foreign
investment in newly privatized and competitive markets for key
infrastructure services, such as energy, telecommunications, and
transport. More and more people are travelling abroad to consume
tourism, education, and medical services, and to supply services
ranging from construction to software development. In fact,
services are the fastest growing components of the global economy,
and trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) in services have
grown faster than in goods over the past decade and a half.
In conflict-affected regions, delays in international response can have life or death consequences. The speed with which international organizations react to crises affects the prospects for communities to re-establish peace. Why then do some international organizations take longer than others to answer calls for intervention? To answer this question and explore options for reform, Time to React builds on contemporary scholarship with original data on response rates and interview evidence from 50 ambassadors across four leading organizations (AU, EU, OAS and OSCE). The explanation for variation in speed ultimately lies in core differences in institutional cultures across organizations. Although wealth and capabilities can strengthen a peace operation, it is the unspoken rules and social networks of peace and security committees at these organizations that dictate the pace with which an operation is established. This book offers a first analysis of the critical importance of and conditions shaping timeliness of crisis response by international organizations. |
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