The chapter explores how the legal system, akin to science and economics, serves as a tool for depoliticizing human decisions. It argues that the transformation of political processes into seemingly apolitical directives is a strategic move to prevent the illegitimate use of power and violence. The status of law as autonomous and above politics is examined, tracing its historical roots to the naturalization of law and forming the basis for legitimate legal decisions. The chapter also considers Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent politics and Walter Benjamin’s perspective on violence within the law. The instrumental convenience of separating law and politics is examined, emphasizing the role of law in constraining politics and power. As Judith Shklar observes, the threefold approach to law in Western tradition – apolitical law, depoliticized law following parliamentary processes, and positive law imposed by hegemonic power – reflects different bases of objectification. The power of natural law, both enhancing and restricting individual freedom, is explored in the context of its capacity to disassociate from politics. The chapter concludes by discussing the broader implications of objectification in fields such as science, technology, and economics, emphasizing the impact on public trust and the diminishing space for ethical and political considerations in contemporary democracy.

International organizations have issued recommendations and prescriptions on constitution-making and reform, especially since 1989. However, such constitution-shaping activities by European and universal organizations, notably the UN, have for the most part not led to a better operation of the rule of law on the ground. Besides these problems of effectiveness, normative concerns against constitutional assistance and advice by international organizations have been raised. It is suggested that, in order to become more legitimate (which might then also improve effectiveness), constitution-shaping by international organizations needs to absorb postcolonial concerns. This includes respect for local rule-of-law cultures flowing from non-European constitutional thought and the inclusion of a much deeper social agenda with a global ambition. Thus revamped, international organizations’ constitution-shaping role could be reinvigorated so as to sustain the rule of law on the domestic level, thereby contributing to transnational ordering and global constitutionalism.

In the last decade, states have fixated on policing their borders beyond their territorial limits. This practice, which has been called “shifting borders,” undermines state legitimacy, because the latter depends on how states exercise their power, who they exercise it over, and also on where they exercise it. As the chapter shows, shifting borders generates a tension among rights, territory, and people, where it seems that we can have any two, but not all three. This chapter examines three responses to this tension. First, Sovereigntism seeks to stabilize the relation of people and territory. Second, Democratic Cosmopolitanism tolerates shifts in territory, as long as people and rights remain. Finally, the Watershed Model keeps borders in their place, but it accepts changes in the people, as it decouples democratic governance and rights from a particular national identity. It is argued that, in the long run, this model best handles the challenges in times of planetary crises, such as global poverty and climate change. For the Watershed Model, like the grass-roots movements of indigenous peoples and transnational migrant activists, can redefine territory, allow for human mobility, and resist state overreach in border control.

Based on a unique dataset of questionnaire survey about Chinese homeowners, I found that democratized neighborhoods have enjoyed better governing outcomes than have their nondemocratized counterparts, while also showing that the local government played a helping hand in establishing HoAs and thereby afforded neighborhoods mechanisms for self-governance. I also found that homeowner activists in democratized neighborhoods developed greater trust in the local government and deemed local officials both more supportive of neighborhood self-governance and less likely to collude with real estate management companies and developers than was the case within non-democratized neighborhoods.

In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of state responsibility, the set of norms that regulate how states are permitted to enforce their rights under international law. I describe it as an exceptional doctrine that is easy to oversimplify. I present my thesis on the recent origins of state responsibility, which was “born” sometime between 1870 and 1930. I discuss the problems with state responsibility that are unique to international law and how lawyers have coped with this differently depending on their standpoints. Accordingly, I structure the book to reflect three such perspectives: (1) American practitioners; (2) German philosophers; and (3) institutional publicists. Despite the UN’s successful codification of state responsibility in 2001, the book demonstrates the continuing importance of uncodified doctrines of state responsibility. Taken together, this expanded history highlights the complexity of state responsibility as well as the political contexts from which it emerged.

This chapter delves into the concept of legitimacy and introduces the readers to key debates on regulatory legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy has been extensively studied by scholars from various academic disciplines, including political theory, legal theory, political science, sociology and management studies. The resulting body of scholarship has, however, tended to remain in disciplinary siloes, making the study of legitimacy difficult to navigate. Chapter 11 offers first an exploration of different legitimacy claims that justify why individuals recognize an authority and its rules as legitimate. The chapter then moves to regulatory legitimacy.

The Conclusion provides a very brief recap of the issues discussed in the preceding chapters. It reflects on the larger context of regulatory change, and touches upon contemporary challenges of regulation such as the role of gender, race, sustainability, and future generations in the regulatory process.

This chapter offers an introduction to the book. It defines regulation, distinguishing it from other concepts such as governance. We define regulation as ‘intentional, organised attempts to manage or control risk or the behaviours of a different party through the exercise of authority, usually through the use of mechanisms of standard-setting, monitoring and information-gathering and behaviour modification to address a collective tension or problem’. The Introduction reflects upon the most important changes in regulation in the last two decades and the growing relevance of regulation in society. The chapter explains significant changes in the practice and context of regulation that have occurred since the first editions was published.

I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.

The child rights movement does not have a requirement of being built by children. When it speaks on behalf of children, where does its authority to represent children come from? Who has the legitimacy to demand major social change on behalf of children and between children? How can the child rights movement begin to open up to self-critique and discourse on how not to reproduce social inequalities of, for example, race, class, and gender? And when the child rights movement chooses the efficacy of the CRC over a democratic legal order, how is accountability for such decisions exercised?

Bartolus analyses the problem of tyranny according to biblical, Aristotelian, and legal authority. Starting from Pope Gregory the Great’s definition of the tyrant as one who rules without right in the commonwealth, Bartolus distinguishes between a tryant for want of just title, and a tyrant who possesses such just title but is tyrannical in his exercise of power. He is particularly interested in the validity or otherwise of legal transactions conducted by tyrants, and by those living under tyranny, and in how to prove by convincing legal means that a tyranny is or was in existence. The concept of fear, which invalidates certain legal agreements if proved, plays a major role in his argument here. He is especially interested in ‘veiled’ or covert tyrants, who have satisfied the legal formalities for legitimate government but are nonetheless tyrants. This leads him to explore the mechanics of popular election. Bartolus complicates the matter by noting that even legitimate governments need to behave in ways defined as tyrannical by Aristotle, and uses the concept of the common good as the ultimate criterion between legitimate and tyrannical rule.

In the adjacent to Market Studies research stream, the emerging Market System Dynamics (MSD) tradition similarly studies how markets are constituted as complex social systems and how actors and institutions actively shape (and are shaped by) them. This chapter firstly provides an overview of the body of work that has accumulated within this tradition. Secondly, our chapter outlines five theoretical processes that highlight specific aspects of how markets are constituted as from an MSD lens. These processes include the (de)legitimation, the (de)moralization, the (de)politicization, the aestheticization, and the complexification of markets. We conclude this chapter by briefly discussing a set of biases within the MSD tradition (process inflation, enabling lens myopia, presentism, and particularism), and discuss how MSD and Market Studies as distinct research traditions might benefit from greater interaction.

This chapter offers a ‘realist’ interpretation of the All-Affected Principle, as a democratic principle for distributing political inclusion. This interpretation aims to capture the AAP’s democratic appeal as a basis for political legitimacy in the pluralist institutional landscape of global governance practice. First, it is argued that the distinctive democratic value of the AAP derives from its concern with institutionally empowering those valuable dimensions of individuals’ political agency that are expressed through participation in the practical performance of global governance functions, alongside those expressed through deliberative or aggregative social ‘choice’ procedures. Second, it is argued that this interpretation of the normative point of the AAP supports a pluralist, rather than a cosmopolitan, institutional approach to democratic inclusion: the sites, types, and constituencies of inclusion should vary across institutional contexts, depending on their real-world consequences for the empowerment of individuals’ capacities to advance their interests through institutional collaboration with others. Third, the chapter elaborates the broader ‘realist’ conceptions of global democracy and political legitimacy that are implied by this interpretation of the AAP, and highlights some advantages and limitations of the realist account.