This chapter embarks on a rigorous examination of the evolving social contracts within the Gulf states delineating their foundational role in facilitating the region’s pursuit of decarbonization, climate change adaptation, and socioeconomic diversification. The analysis delves into the intricate web of socioeconomic, political, national security, and sociocultural transformations inextricably linked to the ongoing economic restructuring within the region and assesses how these countries navigate this multifaceted transition amid a complex interplay of domestic and global pressures.

This chapter explores the role of the shifting geopolitical landscape as a critical moderating factor that shapes the relationship between energy transition and IER. It outlines two contrasting trends of globalization and deglobalization and presents a preliminary quantitative assessment of China’s evolving energy trade relationships. The chapter concludes with an exploration of IER under various geopolitical scenarios.

This chapter explores the globalization of factor markets, particularly focusing on capital and labour, and how international monetary regimes have influenced these markets throughout European history. It discusses the evolution of capital markets and the role of different monetary systems, such as the gold standard and Bretton Woods, in facilitating cross-border capital mobility. The chapter also examines the impact of migration on labour markets, exploring how the movement of people has shaped economic outcomes in Europe. It highlights the benefits of globalization, such as increased efficiency and economic integration, while also acknowledging the challenges, including inequality and labour market disruptions.

This chapter examines the historical evolution of trade and globalization in Europe, focusing on the forces that have shaped trade patterns over time. It explores the impact of technological advancements, such as improvements in transportation and communication, as well as the influence of political decisions on trade policy, including cycles of protectionism and free trade. The chapter also discusses the economic benefits and challenges of globalization, analysing how trade has contributed to economic growth while also creating winners and losers within and between countries. The chapter argues that while globalization has generally increased economic efficiency, its effects have been unevenly distributed.

Opening with observations about public anxieties around the effects of rapid social change on children, this chapter offers a model of child socialization developed within psychological anthropology that provides more nuanced ways of thinking about how children are shaped by particular social and cultural contexts and children’s active participation in them. Drawing from experientially close, child-centered ethnographies, this chapter challenges dichotomous understandings of social change that flatten the rich variability and connectedness of societies and obscure the complex historical trajectories and emergent dynamics that shape such variability and connectedness. Alternatively, Chapin and Xu argue that all human communities must contend with the often-conflicted processes of fostering both individuality and sociality in children’s development in locally appropriate ways. The final section of the chapter challenges the view of children as passive recipients of socialization processes, arguing instead that children are agents who actively contribute to processes of social change.

This chapter examines the contributions of psychological anthropology and allied fields to the study of mental illness and psychiatric treatment. The chapter begins by laying out a historical overview of the study of mental disorder through four theoretical threads that have been important to psychological anthropology: culture, self and subjectivity, emotions, and institutions. The second section of the chapter explores contemporary work on mental illness and globalizing psychiatric treatment in psychological anthropology, highlighting contributions that offer new, critical attentions at a moment when concepts of mental health and treatment are increasingly constituted at the scope and scale of the global. The final section of the chapter addresses the contributions of psychological anthropology to the growing anthropological literature on psychopharmacology and associated pharmaceuticals. The chapter highlights the vibrancy of the subfield’s contributions to the study of mental illness, treatment, and recovery in diverse, often rapidly changing, world conditions.

Global capitalism is in deep crisis. The current moment in world capitalism is defined by three key developments. First, the system has become universal through globalization processes that date to the late twentieth century. Second, the system is undergoing a new round of restructuring and transformation based on a much more advanced digitalization and financialization of the entire global economy and society. Third, the system faces an unprecedented and multidimensional crisis that points to the impending exhaustion of global capitalism's capacity for renewal. The crisis is economic or structural, one of overaccumulation and chronic stagnation. It is a crisis of social reproduction. It is political, a crisis of state legitimacy, capitalist hegemony, and geopolitical conflict. It is ecological, with the threat of the collapse of the biosphere. The ruling groups launched a vast counteroffensive from the 1970s and on against the working and popular classes to reconstitute the hegemony of capital as a transnational capitalist class emerged. The dialectical approach and radical political economy are the tools for analyzing and theorizing the crisis of global capitalism. The study points us in the direction of a renewal of Marxist crisis theory and offers a bold theory of global capitalist exhaustion.

While not ignoring individual differences, this book assumes that generalizations can be made across the different processes of school adjustment. Following a short overview of the history of schooling, this chapter discusses what the term “school” stands for and the essential features that turn any setting into “school.” The origin of the word is the Greek word scholē, which stands for “leisure.” However, in most modern schools the emphasis is on working hard and gaining knowledge. Interestingly, across the various formats, goals, and articulations of school throughout history, several aspects are common: institutional life, adults’ decisions, transfer of knowledge, skills acquisition, fluency in languages, delivery of values, exposure to social life, and invasion into students’ private life. The differences between schools appear in the level of intensity that each of the components gains within a given school, rather than a completely different conceptualization of what the term school stands for. Thus, these suggested universal components are of special importance to understand students’ school adjustment.

In this book, I have tried to make sense of legitimacy at the international level, especially in relation to international law. I have paid a lot of attention to international law, in particular aligned with the demands of legitimacy and justice. But international law is only one aspect of the forces and the ecosystem that shape international order. Therefore, alone it cannot engineer the change that the international system requires today. This change has to be part of a more comprehensive approach. Here is not the place to offer a full account of the areas on which research could concentrate in the future to further encourage justice and legitimacy at the international level. However, it is worthwhile to present a general overview of these areas. In particular, three domains offer a possible road map for facilitating a constructive path forward: globalization, emotions and passions in social life, and the geopolitics of tomorrow.

The changes at play in the contemporary world bring about challenges that are impacting political legitimacy. They make legitimacy at the same time more problematic and more relevant, at both the national and international levels. From this perspective, how these changes and challenges are going to be addressed in the coming years is likely to determine, to a large extent, the evolution of political legitimacy—nationally and internationally. Among the changes and challenges underway, and their associated events and trends, I highlight the following eight: (1) the challenge of integration and disintegration, (2) the economic and financial challenge, (3) the geopolitical challenge, (4) the normative challenge, (5) the technological challenge, (6) the reassessment of globalization challenge, (7) the crisis of democracy challenge, and (8) the governance challenge. I unpack them in turn and, for each of them, allude to their possible meaning and implications for political legitimacy.

This chapter addresses questions concerning history and international law. First, it focuses on what traditionally has been, until relatively recently, the relationship between international law and history, including the history of international law itself. Second, this chapter reflects on the globalization of international law and its ambiguous nature and results, combining empowerment and disempowerment. In particular, it highlights that the ambiguity of the globalization of international law has been on display not only with the connection between modern international law and Western power in the context of colonization but also with decolonization since, to a large extent, after decolonization, this connection has continued in the form of neocolonization. The chapter refers as well to the ambiguity of the globalization of international law in relation to the rise of the individual as an international rights holder in the framework of international human rights. Ultimately, international law has both alienating and emancipatory effects.

This chapter advocates for a comparative approach to STS, asserting that innovation results from a complex interplay of resources, cultural norms, historical legacies, and diverse epistemologies. It explores appropriation, encompassing adoption, adaptation, and reverse engineering, while acknowledging their multifaceted consequences. Funding inequities are highlighted, emphasizing how affluent nations drive advanced research. The discussion scrutinizes technology transfer, focusing on localization and infrastructure, and extends to global policy variations, including priorities, centralization levels, and regulatory frameworks. Safety, ethics, intellectual property, and data protection are examined for their dynamic impact on societal values. Illustrative examples compare regulatory approaches, educational systems, and trust dynamics within the STS framework in diverse nations, emphasizing policy variations in GMOs and AI. Education systems in the US, Japan, India, and China are compared, exposing distinct approaches and outcomes. Trust in science and technology is dissected, considering societal values, cultural perceptions, and the impact of scientific misconduct on public confidence. Discussions extend to public engagement, power dynamics in knowledge dissemination, and concerns about privacy and data-driven technologies, addressing inequalities in education, infrastructure, funding, and technology access. In conclusion, the chapter underscores the global significance of studying scientific independence.

The old international tax regime (ITR) was created during the era of the League of Nations in the 1920s based on the consensus to allocate tax jurisdictions to avoid international double taxation. Underlying the consensus is the Benefits Principle that distinguishes between active business income, which is primarily taxed in the source country, and passive business income, which is primarily taxed in the residence country. The old ITR has been embodied in the model tax treaties developed by the OECD and the UN and in the over 3,000 bilateral tax treaties. However, the old ITR suffered from weakness due to the rise of large multinational enterprises and the growth of internationally mobile capital. Thus, a question arises whether the old consensus can still be justified, or a new consensus is needed.

Globalization, technological advances, and the mobility of capital resulted in international tax competition, in which sovereign countries lower their tax rates on income earned by foreigners within their borders to attract both portfolio and direct investment. Tax competition, in turn, threatens to undermine the individual and corporate income taxes, which traditionally have been the main source of revenue for modern welfare states. The response of developed countries has been, first, to shift the tax burden from (mobile) capital to (less mobile) labor, and second, when further increased taxation of labor becomes politically and economically difficult, to cut the social safety net. Thus, globalization and tax competition led to a fiscal crisis for countries that wish to continue to provide social insurance programs to their citizens while aging populations, increased income inequality, job insecurity, and income volatility that result from globalization render such social insurance more necessary. This chapter contends that both economic efficiency and equity among individuals and among nations support limits on tax competition.

The past decade has witnessed the creation of a new international tax regime (ITR). Since the advent of globalization in the 1980s and digitalization in the 1990s, the original ITR ceased to function as intended. The main problems were the increased mobility of capital related to intangibles, a relaxation of capital controls, and increased tax competition. The outcome was a significant fall in tax revenues that threatened the social safety net of the modern welfare state. The financial crisis of 2008 and harsh austerity measures led the public to pay attention to rich individuals and large corporations paying little tax on cross-border income. A new ITR has been created to resolve those problems. In particular, the United States enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which contributed for the OECD to develop a Common Reporting Standard for the automatic exchange of information; the OECD launched the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project 1.0; and the EU enacted the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directives. These developments still have some limits, resulting in the advent of BEPS 2.0 consisting of two Pillars. The key question is how the new ITR will deal with inter-nation equity.