Law and Development

Author(s):  
Amanda Perry-Kessaris

This chapter introduces the Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law. Transnational law is at the center of lively discussions ranging from pronouncing the death of law to announcing the renewal of law. With stakes that high, the expectations for this field are potentially overwhelming. It is still unsettled what transnational law is. It was introduced to a wide audience of international lawyers in the 1950s, but is it a “new” legal field, or a particular kind of jurisprudence of “law and globalization,” or a sociolegal approach to law’s transformation in and beyond the state in the twenty-first century, or merely a synonym for legal pluralism, that is, an acknowledgment of the co-existence of law and (social, cultural, economic, religious, and other) norms? Finally, what is transnational law’s relation to the nation-state? While some suggest it marks the “end” of the nation-state, the better arguments suggest it remains closely intertwined with the state’s trials and tribulations. The chapter reviews contributions to these discussions but cannot account for the entire wealth and depth which is transnational law today. Instead, the chapter highlights some of the debates around the facets of transnational law and sketches a number of methodological reflections about the field. The contributing authors to this Handbook offer formidable insights into the complex details of law’s transnationalization in a wide range of key areas of the law and contextualize these developments against the background of the important normative discussions around the future of law in a globalized world.

Author(s):  
Peer Zumbansen

This chapter introduces the Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law. Transnational law is at the center of lively discussions ranging from pronouncing the death of law to announcing the renewal of law. With stakes that high, the expectations for this field are potentially overwhelming. It is still unsettled what transnational law is. It was introduced to a wide audience of international lawyers in the 1950s, but is it a “new” legal field, or a particular kind of jurisprudence of “law and globalization,” or a sociolegal approach to law’s transformation in and beyond the state in the twenty-first century, or merely a synonym for legal pluralism, that is, an acknowledgment of the co-existence of law and (social, cultural, economic, religious, and other) norms? Finally, what is transnational law’s relation to the nation-state? While some suggest it marks the “end” of the nation-state, the better arguments suggest it remains closely intertwined with the state’s trials and tribulations. The chapter reviews contributions to these discussions but cannot account for the entire wealth and depth which is transnational law today. Instead, the chapter highlights some of the debates around the facets of transnational law and sketches a number of methodological reflections about the field. The contributing authors to this Handbook offer formidable insights into the complex details of law’s transnationalization in a wide range of key areas of the law and contextualize these developments against the background of the important normative discussions around the future of law in a globalized world.


Author(s):  
Dionysia Katelouzou ◽  
Peer Zumbansen

This chapter explores corporate governance as a transnational regulatory field. Mirroring the rise in importance of the idea of shareholder wealth maximization as a firm’s definitive performance measure, corporate governance became a hotly contested field of competing visions of firms’ institutional and normative infrastructure in search of creating the most advantageous conditions to attract capital in volatile markets. This shift occurred at the same time that regulatory transformations in Western postindustrial societies since the early 1980s had begun to significantly shift public service provision and state-organized frameworks for old-age security guarantees and access to health services. Today’s corporate governance laboratory is a transnational force field, fought over by a host of different state and nonstate actors and also by private actors such as institutional investors. Meanwhile, following the financial crises in 2001, 2008 and 2020 and the simultaneously growing pressure on corporations from human rights, gender equality, and environmental groups, the corporate governance debate again is shifting. This time, a diversity of issues are being discussed under the corporate governance rubric, indicating a more comprehensive engagement with the firm’s purpose and functions and its societal obligations and responsibilities. Given the crucial role of firms as the residual claimants of a wide-ranging retreat of the state from its role in guaranteeing and providing a wide range of social functions, corporate governance is a mirror for the transformation of public and private power, and it has to address the twenty-first-century challenges, including global value chains and the proliferation of institutional investors, unfolding on a planetary scale.


Author(s):  
E. G. Ponomareva

The processes of globalization have determined significant changes in the prerogatives of nation states. In the twenty-first century the state no longer acts as a sole subject having a monopoly of integrating the interests of large social communities and representing them on the world stage. An ever increasing role in the global political process is played by transnational and supranational participants. However, despite the uncertainty and ambiguity of the ways of the development of the modern world, it can be argued that in the foreseeable future it is the states that will maintain the role of the main actors in world politics and bear the responsibility for global security and development. All this naturally makes urgent the issues related to the search for optimal models of nation state development. The article analyzes approaches to understanding patterns, problems and prospects of the development of this institution existing in modern political science. These include the concept of "dimensionality" based on the parameters of scale (the size of the territory) of the states and their functions in the international systems, as well as the "political order". In the latter case the paper analyzes four models: the nation-state, statenation, consociation, quasi-state. The author's position consists in the substantiation of the close dependence of the success of a model of the state on its inner nature, i.e. statehood. On the basis of the elaborated approach the author understands statehood as "the result of historical, economic, political and foreign policy activity of a particular society in order to create a relatively rigid political framework that provides spatial, institutional and functional unity, that is, the condition of the society’s own state, national political system." Thus statehood acts as a qualitative feature of the state.


Author(s):  
Vanessa Mak

This chapter makes an analysis of the theoretical foundations of lawmaking in European private law. It shows that they can be traced to transnational and constitutional pluralist theories. The main question is in which respects legal pluralism should replace the monist, state-centred perspective on lawmaking that prevailed in Western Europe since the creation of the Westphalian nation state. It is argued that, even though the state remains the primary locus for lawmaking in private law in the EU, the rise of private regulation and the interaction between courts through judicial dialogues plead in favour of adopting a strong legal pluralist perspective. ‘Strong’ or ‘radical’ legal pluralism, other than monism or ‘ordered’ legal pluralism, holds that norms can co-exist without a formal hierarchy. Both a descriptive and a normative case are put forward in support of adopting this perspective.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Cecamore

The castle of Morrea. Evolution and destiny of fortified structures in Central ItalyThe shape that today characterizes the fortified building of the castle of Morrea is only the last of the various stratifications that have modified the original layout thorughout the centuries. The current aspect of the building is most likely linked to the interventions promoted by the Piccolomini family between the twentieth and twenty-first century. The building represents the evolution from castrum to aristocratic residence that involves the various fortified structures placed along the Apennine ridge between the eastern and western front of Central Italy. In this area the various degrees of transformations of the castles, which are periodically updated for reasons due to oxidation and representative natures, are clearly readable. The artifacts analyseable represent a wide range of samples of fortifications of the most ancient form of specialized buildings which were often largely left in the state of ruins, including that of buildings yet still functional, however, far from their consistency and original purpose. The overall panorama of this architectural heritage outlines a complex scenario consisting of problems related to the conservation and maintenance where restoration projects need to find and be in the proper position of restoration and respect of the bond between the building environment, the landscape and the identities of the territory.


Author(s):  
Giulia Claudia Leonelli

This chapter seeks to establish whether a normative discourse on law’s legitimacy can be successfully reconstructed in the face of law’s increasing transnationalization. It explores the postmodern normative conundrum of transnational legal studies, highlighting the normative dilemmas of both Transnational Legal Pluralism and Transnational Legal Ordering theory. It then puts forward an alternative framing of “transnational law” and “transnational legal analysis”; this opens up new opportunities for an inquiry into law’s legitimacy through an application of Conflicts Law theory. After an overview of the merits of Conflicts Law, the chapter assesses the limits to its successful application. An inner tension exists between Conflicts Law theory’s modernist foundations and its application to increasingly complex legal and regulatory conflicts in the postmodern landscape. Against this overall backdrop, the chapter advocates a turn back to substantive, purposive forms of normativity and the rematerialization of law beyond the nation-state.


Author(s):  
Brian Z. Tamanaha

Legal pluralism involves the coexistence of multiple forms of law. This includes state law, international law, transnational law, customary law, religious law, indigenous law, and the law of distinct ethnic or cultural communities. Legal pluralism is a subject of discussion today in legal anthropology, legal sociology, legal history, comparative law, international law, transnational law, jurisprudence, and law and development scholarship. This book places legal pluralism in historical context going back to the Medieval period, describes the origins of legal pluralism in postcolonial countries and its implications today, identifies manifestations of legal pluralism within Western societies, discusses contemporary transnational legal pluralism, identifies problems with current theoretical accounts of legal pluralism, and articulates an approach to legal pluralism that avoids theoretical problems and is useful for social scientists, theorists, and law and development scholars and practitioners.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Macarena García-Avello

This article examines the evolution of the borderlands as an organizing trope by focusing on how the transcendence beyond cultural nationalist perspectives traces the shift from Chicano/a to Latinx discourses. In order to address this issue, I will analyse two twenty-first-century Latinx texts that delve into the intricate ways in which transnational forces collide with economic, cultural and political processes that persistently revolve around the framework of the nation-state: Alicia Gaspar de Alba´s Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders (2005) and Maya Chinchilla´s The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (2014). The corpus of works selected will focus on the political readings derived from textual negotiation with a changing political, social and economic reality. This results in constant tensions between globalising processes, worldwide interconnectedness and transnational interactions, on the one hand, and the regulatory power of the state, on the other.


2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVANTHI MEDURI

In this paper, I discuss issues revolving around history, historiography, alterity, difference and otherness concealed in the doubled Indian/South Asian label used to describe Indian/South Asian dance genres in the UK. The paper traces the historical genealogy of the South Asian label to US, Indian and British contexts and describes how the South Asian enunciation fed into Indian nation-state historiography and politics in the 1950s. I conclude by describing how Akademi: South Asian Dance, a leading London based arts organisation, explored the ambivalence in the doubled Indian/South Asian label by renaming itself in 1997, and forging new local/global networks of communication and artistic exchange between Indian and British based dancers and choreographers at the turn of the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Mary Youssef

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.


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