This is not only a book for international lawyers. International relations scholars and economists will find it a useful thought-provoking critical analysis on how to understand the functionality of regional trade regimes in the Global South. This monograph is the first of its kind to provide an innovative account of four regional trade agreements (RTAs) – that is, the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the United States–Mexico–Canada Free Trade Agreement (USMCA) – from the prism of normative beliefs and interests. This book argues that while there has been immense enthusiasm amongst countries in the Global South to create RTAs, the enthusiasm has not been translated into concerted efforts to make the RTAs work as envisaged. RTAs in the Global South are largely void of concreteness. This book reflects on how normative beliefs and interests inform inter-state relations and, thereby, the law of regional economic community. In so doing, we argue that the idea of prosperity underpinning RTAs as they currently exist is more of a mirage than reality.

Considering the analyses in the preceding chapters, this chapter frames the discussions in the context of the contestations about regional trade arrangements and the extent to which interests and beliefs as a constructivist model enable us to understand the operationalisation / lack of operationalisation of each of the three RTAs discussed in the preceding chapters. This chapter extensively explores the fallacy of integrations in the Global South as a driver of prosperity. It discusses the relevant lessons that can be drawn from the operation of regional trade arrangements from the different regional groupings discussed in these chapters for academic scholarships as well as future trade negotiations. Although the substantive content of regional economic treaties hinges on what any regional grouping believes is international legal obligations that should govern their economic activities, such regional economic treaties will hardly stand the test of time if the same architects of the regional grouping do not buy into their presumed shared sense of economic and social commonality.

Policy triage in Italy is widespread across both environmental and social policy, reflecting a sizable gap between ever-increasing legislative demands and stagnating or declining administrative capacity. Political incentives and unstable governing coalitions encourage policy overproduction, as politicians face negligible blame-shifting costs. Implementation bodies, on the other hand, have few avenues to mobilize resources. Austerity measures and rigid, centralized personnel controls leave many agencies chronically understaffed, while constitutional and administrative complexities create fragmented responsibilities and blurred accountability. Consequently, authorities at both national and subnational levels must constantly decide which tasks to handle superficially, defer, or in some cases disregard altogether. Nonetheless, the most severe failures are partially mitigated by strong internal efforts to absorb additional workload. Motivated staff often work overtime, team up to reassign tasks, and exploit external funding or outsourcing arrangements. Although these compensatory strategies keep disastrous implementation deficits contained so far, they come at the cost of quality, timeliness, and workforce morale. Overall, Italy’s case highlights how constrained resource mobilization and pervasive blame-shifting can promote frequent triage, while strong organizational commitment helps to avert total breakdowns in policy implementation.

This chapter examines the ‘parliamentary novel’, a genre developed in the mid nineteenth century by Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope, as more Britons gained the right to vote. These novels often served to educate new voters about the virtues of the parliamentary system, portraying statesmen as noble figures and reinforcing traditional parliamentary ideals for an industrial society. The chapter surveys this genre, focusing on authors with first-hand experience in Parliament or close connections to MPs. It traces the genre’s evolution, particularly its post-1945 transformation from respected literature to what Gerald Kaufman labelled ‘trash’. While considering broader works by authors like Jeffrey Archer and Michael Dobbs, the chapter centres on Maurice Edelman and Edwina Currie. The motives behind these novels varied, but male authors in the genre’s classic period typically aimed to celebrate Parliament. However, as female authors emerged in the 1990s, they shifted the genre’s focus from glorifying male heroes to critiquing both these figures and Parliament itself, reflecting a growing scepticism towards male-dominated politics and altering the genre’s original celebratory purpose.

Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.

Drawing on the comparative findings from the six case studies of this book, this chapter contrasts policy triage patterns across countries, sectors, and administrative levels. The chapter highlights that while Denmark stands out due to its generally low triage levels thanks to well-funded, consensus-oriented governance, Italy and Portugal exhibit frequent and severe triage due to rapid policy growth, few limitations of blame-shifting, and scant opportunities to mobilize resources. Germany falls into an intermediate zone where bureaucratic rigidity fosters mostly moderate triage, while the UK and Ireland display more heterogeneous patterns across organizations in both sectors. The “aggregated” country patterns align well with what we would expect from the countries’ administrative traditions. Among other aspects, countries with a stronger legalistic tradition tend to exhibit more consistent triage patterns, whereas those where more independence is given and managerial leeway is granted to the authorities show more varied practices across organizations. Across the board, with regard to the cross-sectoral variation, the chapter highlights that environmental implementers tend to face more triage than social implementers, due to weaker overload compensation and greater opportunities for political blame-shifting. Furthermore, central- versus local-level differences tend to hinge on two key mechanisms: Organizations at the national level sometimes demonstrate robust capacity for resource mobilization and blame-shifting insulation, while subnational bodies, especially in Italy and Portugal, often lack such buffers. Across all settings, partial overload compensation can stave off the worst consequences of triage, yet some agencies’ capacities are already stretched beyond their limits. Taken together, these observations underscore the pivotal roles of limitations of political blame-shifting, resources mobilization, and organizational overload compensation in determining how policy implementers across Europe contend with administrative overload as a result of policy accumulation.

This chapter argues that, albeit with variations, each of the three countries – that is, the US, Mexico and Canada – that belong to the USMCA can point to some concrete positive economic and welfare developments that have been realised because of NAFTA. The relative success of NAFTA / the USMCA has largely happened because of the belief that the three contracting parties have in the institution created to enhance the implementation of obligations under the agreement. Indeed, in 1994, NAFTA placed emphasis on the creation of ‘effective procedures for the implementation and application’ of member states’ obligations. In contrast to dispute settlement under the AfCFTA, ASEAN and MERCOSUR, a premium was placed on an effective dispute settlement mechanism. This explains why the USMCA’s chapter 10 is viewed as the ‘crown jewel’ of the RTA. The same can be said of Chapter 14 on ISDS which even has authority to review decisions by, for instance, a state court in the US. Further, we have also argued that free trade agreements between a hegemon and countries at a lower level of economic and political development may likely lead to the loss of ability by the party at the lower stages of development to adopt trade measures for the protection of its own industries.

The idea of regional trade agreements like ASEAN, the AfCFTA, MERCOSUR and even the USMCA as useful linchpins for development and prosperity is driven by globalisation. Most of these fragmented trade regimes that have emerged in the later part of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century have been informed by the discourse on globalisation and the connectivity of international economic order. Therefore, this chapter explores the linkages between the concept of globalisation and regional trade agreements. These linkages are explored to provide some contexts in the second part of the book on how the idea of prosperity as a fundamental rationale behind RTAs in the Global South is more of a myth than reality. It further analyses the evolving discourse on the nexus between regional integration and prosperity to better improve existing and future RTAs to the benefit of its constituent members.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the findings and theoretical insights developed throughout the book. Over the past decades, the accumulation of policies often has not been matched by proportional expansions in administrative capacity, fueling bureaucratic overload. While some countries, agencies, and policy sectors have managed to curb triage and maintain effective implementation, others have become susceptible to frequent and severe triage. Three main factors determine these outcomes: first, policymakers’ ability (or inability) to shift blame for policy failures onto implementers; second, organizations’ capacity to mobilize additional resources amid new policy demands; and third, the extent to which agencies are able to compensate for overload. Notably, environmental policy implementers are more vulnerable to policy triage, due to weaker political incentives and more fragmented governance. Social policy agencies benefit somewhat from tighter oversight and direct voter visibility but can still be undermined by austerity and politicized attacks on bureaucratic morale. Ultimately, the sustainability of modern governance hinges on institutional reforms that align policymaking and implementation more closely. Failure to do so not only erodes administrative performance and public trust but can also enable intentional sabotage of the bureaucratic state by governments seeking to dismantle its core capacities.

Our point of departure has been that, by using the language of solidarity, we – consciously or not – participate in the politics of it. The group of authors coming together in this volume contribute analyses of solidarity as a norm, a process, a practice, or a vocabulary creating polyperspectivity. In so doing, we let the course of our analysis be directed by the actors we investigate over a span of time in history. From the start, our intent has been to engage in a double move: to deploy history as an interpretive practice – a theory, a methodology, a philosophy – with which to engage law; and, simultaneously, to offer history as a substantive arena in which other interpretive practices from across a broader array of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences can engage with law.

Chapter 1 introduces the region of Kiambu in detail, establishing the stakes of moral debate over wealth amongst men in the region. While an older generation preaches the labour ideology (the notion that hard work will bring success) that allowed them to prosper in the aftermath of independence, it has been undermined by dwindling land holdings and opportunities for ‘off-farm income’, creating a crisis of hopelessness as young men wonder if they will ever reach the ‘level’ of their elders. Framing the study of masculine destitution to follow, the chapter discusses the legacies of the ‘Kenya Debate’, a regional debate in political economy about the relative prosperity of Kenya’s peasantry after independence. It argues for a processual, non-static approach to economic change in central Kenya, allowing us to see how class divides have been opened across generations due to population pressure on land. Its subdivision within families exerts stronger pressure on young family members who find themselves in the situation of being virtual paupers – land poor and ‘hustling’ for cash.