scholarly journals The World Bank’s Environmental and Social Safeguards and the evolution of global order

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-559
Author(s):  
Philipp Dann ◽  
Michael Riegner

AbstractThis article analyses the World Bank’s environmental and social Safeguards against the backdrop of changing paradigms of global legal order. In January 2017, a new ‘Environmental and Social Framework’ (ESF) entered into force and replaced older ‘Safeguard Policies’ that had incrementally emerged since the 1980s in response to harmful impacts of investment projects financed by the Bank. The Safeguards reform epitomizes the changing structures and geopolitical shifts that shape international law in the twenty-first century and provides a fascinating looking glass on the evolution of global order since the end of the cold war. In this perspective, we see the first generation of Safeguards, introduced since the late 1980s, as an element of incremental legalization in the emerging global governance regime, a regime characterized by unipolar multilateralism and geopolitical dominance of ‘the West’. The 2016 reform not only reflects the increased politicization of global governance by civil society but also the emergence of a more competitive multilateralism, characterized by counter-institutionalization on the part of emerging powers like China. A comparison of the old and new Safeguards thus allows us to analyse different forms of contestation and resulting normative evolution in the key area of global governance of development and finance.

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-202
Author(s):  
Alexander Cooley ◽  
Daniel Nexon

After two decades, American global hegemony is almost certainly reaching its expiration date. America will remain a great power, if the not greatest power. But, barring a major shock to emerging powers—and especially China—the world will fully transition to a new global order. This chapter sketches out some possible futures. These include a new bipolar system, perhaps with China and the United States locked in a new Cold War; a multipolar system that maintains the veneer of liberal global governance, but in the service of authoritarianism; and an international system characterized by globalized oligarchy and kleptocracy. There is still time to avoid the worst versions of these orders, and to push back against the full hijacking of liberal institutions in the service of worldwide corruption. But on these, and a number of other matters, American policymakers should assume the window of outsized American influence is fast closing.


Author(s):  
Fabrizio Coticchia

Since the end of the bipolar era, Italy has regularly undertaken military interventions around the world, with an average of 8,000 units employed abroad in the twenty-first century. Moreover, Italy is one of the principal contributors to the UN operations. The end of the cold war represented a turning point for Italian defence, allowing for greater military dynamism. Several reforms have been approved, while public opinion changed its view regarding the armed forces. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive perspective of the process of transformation that occurred in post-cold-war Italian defence, looking at the evolution of national strategies, military doctrines, and the structure of forces. After a brief literature review, the study highlights the process of transformation of Italian defeshnce policy since 1989. Through primary and secondary sources, the chapter illustrates the main changes that occurred, the never-ending cold-war legacies, and key challenges.


Poligrafi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (99/100) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Carool Kersten

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualty of a paradigm shift in the thinking about the global order from the political-ideological bi-polar worldview of the Cold War era to a multipolar world marred by the prospect of culture wars along civilisational fault lines shaped by religiously-informed identity politics. On the back of 9/11 and other atrocities perpetrated by violent extremists from Muslim backgrounds, in particular relations with Muslims and the Islamic world are coined in binary terms of us-versus-them. Drawing on earlier research on cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and liminality, this article examines counter narratives to such modes of dichotomous thinking. It also seeks to shift away from the abstractions of collective religious identity formations to an appreciation of individual interpretations of religion. For that purpose, the article interrogates the notions of cultural schizophrenia, double genealogy and west-eastern affinities developed by philosophers and creative writers, such as Daryush Shayegan, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Navid Kermani.


2019 ◽  
pp. 31-64
Author(s):  
Demetrios Argyriades ◽  
Pan Suk Kim

With the Great Recession receding, but crises still afflicting large swaths of the world and a climate of rampant distrust adversely affecting governance, it may be time to ask whether and, if so, how and where our field went wrong. Have we been willing victims of sleep-walkers using metaphors as models? This paper argues as much. Specifically, it contends that, foisted on the world as the one- size-fits-all prescription for good governance, nationally and internationally, it has ended turning governance and democracy on their heads, while also undermining the very foundations on which a global order, based on peaceful coexistence and constructive cooperation through the United Nations, was predicated. The prevalence of symptoms of hurt and discontent should lead us to conclude that the roots of our predicament and problems go much deeper, to a might counter- culture, which triumphed in the 1990s but still goes strong, in places.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hurrell

AbstractIn the early years of the twenty-first century the narrative of “emerging powers” and “rising powers” seemed to provide a clear and powerful picture of how international relations and global politics were changing. Yet dramatic changes in the global system have led many to conclude that the focus on the BRICS and the obsession with the idea of rising powers reflected a particular moment in time that has now passed. The story line is now about backlash at the core; and, with the exception of China, rising powers have returned to their role as secondary or supporting actors in the drama of global politics. Such a conclusion is profoundly mistaken for three sets of reasons: the continued reality of the post-Western global order; the need to understand nationalist backlash as a global phenomenon; and the imperative of locating and strengthening a new pluralist conception of global order.


Author(s):  
Andrei Andreevich Kovalev ◽  
Ekaterina Yur'evna Knyazeva

The global governance theories assessment is among the poorly studied problems in Russian political science, though its topicality in the modern age of civilizational confrontation is beyond dispute. Primarily, the necessity to study the key global governance concepts is determined by the need for establishing effective relations with the Western and the Eastern countries. The purpose of the article is to analyze and estimate the main foreig global governance concepts, and it is achieved by solving the following tasks: 1) to consider the main definitions of global governance; 2) to detect the problem of legitimacy in international relations; 3) to consider the legitimacy of global governance. The authors give special attention to the underestimated source of global governance legitimacy - the liberal legal principles. As a political program, global governance is understood as a political and legal aspect of globalization. In recent decades, global governance theories have been adopted as a research program in the field of social sciences. Within the (neo)liberal institutionalism tradition, particularly, the interdependence theories, global governance approaches consider the consolidation of international cooperation and the transformation of the global system in which the anarchical system of sovereign national states is considered as a multilayer system including nongovernmental subjects. The researchers try to model power as “governance” without subjects which  are formally justified and entitled with the use of force monopoly. The future of global governance is connected with effective international law able to timely settle the arising disputes and deter possible aggression which, in the age of civilizational confrontation, can lead to the last war in human history. The effectiveness of global governance depends on what globalization direction the leading civilizations will choose: the force-based American way, or the way taking into account the interests of most peoples of the world.   


The concluding chapter summarizes the four main findings of the volume. The first concerns a certain retreat from global governance despite the multilateral and unstable nature of the world order in the early twenty-first century. Second, contributions to this volume highlight the power but also the problems that a regional perspective yields in our efforts to decentralize and pluralize our understanding of global governance. Third, that our critical approach to global governance has to cultivate an element of self-reflexivity. Just as we question the western-centric domination in discussions on global governance, when adopting decentralized, regional views we need to keep this element of self-reflexivity and plurality alive. This is no simple enterprise. And fourth, that the agent of global governance remains elusive. Doing away with the state leaves us with a rather fuzzy constellation of different types of institutions with different levels of aspiration and capacity to govern transnationally.


Author(s):  
Jan Wouters

The chapter focuses on the impact of globalization on public international law in times of anti-globalism and populism, where globalization itself has increasingly become contested. It submits that traditional public international law has been dangerously unreceptive in capturing new transnational regulatory actors and normative dynamics, which makes it more vulnerable to anti-globalist and populist attacks. It looks into the corresponding rise and certain features of ‘informal international law-making’ and ‘global governance’, as they may offer some responses to, or at least some defences against, anti-globalist and populist politics. It also addresses the current challenges which traditional forms of international law-making, like treaties and customary international law, are currently going through. It concludes that public international law will have to adapt to both the challenges of globalization and anti-globalism, if it is to remain relevant in regulating international life in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
C. Dale Walton

This chapter examines the role played by nuclear weapons in international politics during and after the cold war, making a distinction between the First Nuclear Age and the ongoing Second Nuclear Age. After providing a background on the First Nuclear Age, the chapter considers the various risks present in the Second Nuclear Age, focusing on issues related to nuclear deterrence, nuclear proliferation networks, strategic culture, and ballistic missile defences. It then discusses the assumption that arms control and disarmament treaties are the best means to further counterproliferation efforts. It also assesses the future of nuclear weapons and whether the world is facing a Third Nuclear Age before concluding with an analysis of the relevance of deterrence in the face of changing political and technological circumstances.


2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Bernstein

AbstractTwo attempts at grand compromise have underpinned global order since the end of the Second World War. The first, a compromise between laissez-faire liberalism and domestic interventionism, famously described by John Ruggie as ‘embedded liberalism’, legitimated and stabilized a multilateral order for 50 years. A second attempt, this time between North and South at the end of the Cold War around a discourse of ‘sustainable development’, remains uneasy, conflict prone and much less institutionalized. They are compared and contrasted by asking whether they are truly compromises or reflect domination and hegemony, what conditions led to them, and what drivers of change have limited and challenged them. Ultimately, differences in their bases of legitimacy offer lessons for the prospects of building a new grand compromise in the wake of contemporary strains on global governance.


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