At a time when globalization has side-lined many of the traditional, state-based addressees of legal accountability, it is not clear yet how blame is allocated and contested in the new, highly differentiated, multi-actor governance arrangements of the global economy and world society. Moral Agency and the Politics of Responsibility investigates how actors in complex governance arrangements assign responsibilities to order the world and negotiate who is responsible for what and how. The book asks how moral duties can be defined beyond the territorial and legal confines of the nation-state; and how obligations and accountability mechanisms for a post-national world, in which responsibility remains vague, ambiguous and contested, can be established. Using an empirical as well as a theoretical perspective, the book explores ontological framings of complexity emphasizing emergence and non-linearity, which challenge classic liberal notions of responsibility and moral agency based on the autonomous subject. Moral Agency and the Politics of Responsibility is perfect for scholars from International Relations, Politics, Philosophy and Political Economy with an interest in the topical and increasingly popular topics of moral agency and complexity.

At a time when globalization has side-lined many of the traditional, state-based addressees of legal accountability, it is not clear yet how blame is allocated and contested in the new, highly differentiated, multi-actor governance arrangements of the global economy and world society. Moral Agency and the Politics of Responsibility investigates how actors in complex governance arrangements assign responsibilities to order the world and negotiate who is responsible for what and how. The book asks how moral duties can be defined beyond the territorial and legal confines of the nation-state; and how obligations and accountability mechanisms for a post-national world, in which responsibility remains vague, ambiguous and contested, can be established. Using an empirical as well as a theoretical perspective, the book explores ontological framings of complexity emphasizing emergence and non-linearity, which challenge classic liberal notions of responsibility and moral agency based on the autonomous subject. Moral Agency and the Politics of Responsibility is perfect for scholars from International Relations, Politics, Philosophy and Political Economy with an interest in the topical and increasingly popular topics of moral agency and complexity.

This book examines how neo-institutional statebuilding undercuts international policy agency. Post-Cold War interventions are marked by a peculiar paradox. From peace and statebuilding projects in war-shattered societies to World Bank development programmes in Africa, the scope of external regulation has grown consistently while international policymakers are finding it increasingly difficult to formulate a political project regarding the Global South. This book seeks to make sense of a contradictory situation in which international policymakers are doing more statebuilding than ever while knowing less about it. The study argues that the crisis of international agency is driven by the demise of reductionist liberal-universal knowledge. It critically explores neo-institutionalism as a dominant policy framework, bringing out how the failure of intervention paves the way for more comprehensive, context-sensitive and bottom-up engagement. As a precondition and side-effect of this expansive process, reductionist liberal-universal knowledge is deconstructed. Paradoxically, the more policymakers learn within a neo-institutional frame of reference, the less they positively know. Without this epistemic foundation, it becomes difficult to act purposively in the world and formulate instrumental policy. The study illustrates these conceptual insights with reference to the Merida Initiative, a U.S.-Mexican security agreement signed in 2007. Rethinking Neo-Institutional Statebuilding will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, international intervention, peace and conflict studies, Latin American politics and IR in general.