This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s key findings, methodology and structure. It also introduces the principal questions the book seeks to address. How have agents, operating at national, international and transnational levels, attempted to institutionalise the norm of corporate accountability for human rights violations linked to transnational corporate activity? What do these initiatives reveal about the nature of transnational legalisation, and how legalisation should be framed or conceptualised in the twenty-first century? Finally, could a revised framework of legalisation help explain when transnational litigation and soft law initiatives are more likely to succeed in the future?

Why did Japan shift from being a status quo power in the 1920s to a revisionist power in the 1930s? This chapter argues that Japan’s rejection of the international order was hastened by changes in strategic thought reaching back to World War I. The rise of total war during World War I led military strategists to view self-sufficiency in resources and production as the prerequisite to success in modern warfare. This understanding of the importance of self-sufficiency did not influence national policy until the liberal order of the 1920s began to break down. Once the old order began to collapse, desires for autarky served as the backdrop behind a series of natural security solutions that gravitated toward war and establishing a new order in the region. The total war of World War II, in turn, shaped the entirety of Japan’s new order, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

While the academic study of International Relations immediately following the World Wars was focused on the causes of war and the conditions of peace, the diversification of IR in the mid twentieth century led to the creation of a discrete subfield of security studies. For the remainder of the twentieth century, this subfield focused exclusively on the problem of war – conventional and nuclear – between nation-states. But the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of multiple, opaque, and transnational security risks opened an intellectual space within security studies for a re-envisioning of the analytical approaches to security, as well as to a widening of the agenda. Security was no longer linked exclusively to war but also to a wider range of issues, and security was no longer exclusively conceptualized as the continued existence of the state but applied also to a multitude of actors.

The First World War and its aftermath destabilized the international economic system. From volatile exchange rates and hyperinflation to industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, the collective challenges facing the nations of Europe threatened to undermine the prevailing order. In response, the Bank of England assumed a set of responsibilities aimed at upholding the City of London as an international financial center. It employed technical advisers who were able to shape domestic industrial policy, coordinate the creation of new central banks across the empire, and exert additional pressure on foreign governments abroad. Through these interventions, the Bank established a reputation as a leading monetary and intellectual authority and, in the process, redefined the structures of economic governance.

This chapter is a short intellectual biography focusing on my interest and engagement in questions of political legitimacy over the years. The chapter is organized into three parts. I begin by discussing how the issue of legitimacy has been one of my key intellectual concerns ever since I started to do research on politics, initially in the context of the study of political and legal regimes in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). Next, I highlight my understanding of political legitimacy as a responsibility and what this means for the evaluation and judgment of politics. This understanding builds on one of my previous books, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility. Finally, I focus on how, gradually, in particular in connection with my work with the United Nations (UN), I became interested in the question of political legitimacy at the international level.

This chapter aims at raising a sense of reflectiveness regarding the use of the concept of “infrastructure” in the analysis of finance, through addressing different, if interconnected, problematizations of financial infrastructural reason. First, infrastructures are problematized as a modernist social imaginary that reproduces functionalist reasoning about society, thereby systematically effacing asymmetries and exclusions enabled by infrastructures. Second, infrastructural thinking is tightly coupled to conceptions of sovereignty and governability of populations, territories, and resources, thus inviting security thinking. Third, infrastructural reason in finance reproduces a globalist view on the international political economy together with a realist imaginary of international relations, modeled after a zero-sum game. Fourth, infrastructural reason in finance sidelines important political-economic critiques of the global financial economy, effectively correcting the imagery of the relationship between production base and financial economy. In conclusion, when using infrastructural reason to diagnose the present condition of the finance economies, it seems worthwhile to view infrastructures not so much as fungible, smoothly operating, and only in exceptional cases failing systems, but rather as leaky networks through which shocks, disruptions, and exclusions are disseminated.

Not one of the numerous global risks we confront can be averted without better governance through global cooperation. All these risks – the ones we face now and the ones we may soon face next – transcend national borders, cross the globe, and therefore require global solutions. Moreover, many of these risks are interconnected; thus, they require interconnected solutions. Within the biological and chemical container of the Earth’s biosphere, human civilization is not a collection of individual structures of living that are entirely separate and distinct. It is a complex system of interconnected – and interdependent – networks of all kinds, many of which extend across our imagined political borders. Moreover, the ecologies of the world that human cities and states inhabit are all connected through natural systems. The atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere of the Earth, the biosphere that comprises the Earth’s ecosystems, are all connected. The many parts make a whole. To find planetary solutions, we must employ systems thinking to create institutions and other political arrangements to achieve effective Earth system governance, which must see and treat the world as a whole. To do this, we need human cooperation in problem-solving at every level of human endeavor. Foremost among our tools in this task must be democracy, and democracy must be devoted to sustainable development. Although democracy is in retreat throughout the world, we must fulfill our duty of optimism by establishing democracy everywhere and at every level, including democratic global governance.

Economic theories point to the potential problems associated with a monetary union but offer limited insights into explaining how the policy is designed. This chapter employs international relations theories to investigate the sources of the main controversies that have characterized policy design reforms, especially those concerning the degree to which provisions constrain states and empower the Council or the Commission. The chapter uses an original dataset of positions on contested issues from 1997 to 2012. In a way that best reflects the recurrent themes of the book, it shows that a host of economic, supranational, and national factors shape positions. Governments with a greater risk of noncompliance prefer greater discretion and governments with higher voting power prefer more Council involvement in enforcement as their risk of noncompliance increases. National public support for the European Union emerges as the most relevant correlate of positions on the Commission’s empowerment: governments facing a more sceptical public display greater reluctance. Other factors, such as governmental ideology, euro area membership, and the sovereign debt crisis, also shape positions.