The contextual understanding of treatises of great legal thinkers has become an important focus in the historical study of international law. This article argues for an alternative approach going beyond classics of legal doctrine to study the interlinked broader global legal practices that constituted actual patterns of social order. Dead practitioners can, however, only be accessed through texts that remain under-conceptualized. I argue that literary theory provides the most helpful insights for developing a framework for studying legal texts.

Ideology studies no longer conform to the conventional trajectories of the past century. If one indicator is the range of subjects submitted to the Journal of Political Ideologies, the traditional topics addressing the macro-political ideologies are thinning out, though not quite disappearing. The thematic predictability level of articles covering conservatism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, feminism and even green political thought has declined markedly, though of course it still persists.

Events in Catalonia in October 2017 confronted the European Union with an attempt at unilateral secession by a region within an EU Member State. EU institutions and EU Member States have responded by affirming the illegality of the attempted secession and have refrained from attempting to mediate between the Spanish government and the Catalan authorities. This contrasts with the approach of the EU and its Member States in previous cases of unilateral secession occurring within the European space outside the Union, notably the former Yugoslav republics and Kosovo.

Modern retail banking creates a kind of panopticon for consumer behaviour, ultimately promising to implement a mechanism that binds all of the financial activities undertaken by an individual to a single, unitary identity. In the age of Big Data, consumers have legitimate reasons to resist such surveillance, particularly in cases wherein monitoring is carried out without their knowledge and judgments based upon such monitoring are used to disincentivise or punish legitimate activities.

Many norms develop in the absence of clear templates for how to implement them. I argue that, even under these conditions, individuals and organizations can still successfully push for new norms, along with attendant changes in state practices. They do so through a mode of action that I term communicative entrepreneurship. Unlike norm entrepreneurs, communicative entrepreneurs do not project normative or technocratic certainty. They use nudges and networking strategies to trigger debates that define the contours of emerging normative scripts.

Why study the Federal Reserve Bank? Political scientists analyzing US politics, with only a few notable exceptions, have largely ignored the question. The result is that we know precious little about the Fed even as it becomes an increasingly consequential feature of contemporary American politics amid rising economic inequality. This symposium is innovative in two respects. First, it treats the Fed as a political institution instead of adopting the common assumption among many of its observers that the central bank is a neutral technocracy.

The procurement of autonomous weapon systems is on the rise in Southeast Asia, where, as in other parts of the world, interest in the military applications of unmanned systems is outpacing fractured international regulation efforts.

This book explores the natures of recent stabilisation efforts and global upstream threats. As prevention is always cheaper than the crisis of state collapse or civil war, the future character of conflict will increasingly involve upstream stabilisation operations. However, the unpredictability and variability of state instability requires governments and militaries to adopt a diversity of approach, conceptualisation and vocabulary.

Are there long-term legacies of civil wars on the electoral geography of post-conflict democracies? We argue that parties derived from armed bands enjoy an organizational advantage in areas where they fought and won the war. Former combatants can create a strong local party organization that serves as a crucial mobilization tool for elections. Parties have strong incentives to institutionalize this organizational advantage and retain electoral strongholds over time. We test our theory on the case of Italy (1946-1968).