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This paper engages with debates over the Liberal International Order (LIO) and Latin America by focusing on Brazil. More specifically, it addresses President Jair Bolsonaro’s foreign policy. His radical-right populist and religious-infused approach has been characterized by an explicit rejection of practically all elements of the LIO, including multilateralism, multiculturism, and regionalism—historically core features of Brazilian foreign policy. We seek to answer two interrelated questions: (1) what were the political conditions—domestic and international—that allowed for such dramatic foreign policy change? (2) what impact is Brazil’s new foreign policy orientation having on the LIO? To address them, we resort to the aspirational constructivist theory, which has allowed us to theorize Brazil’s new identity formation. We argue that Bolsonaro has reshaped Brazil’s foreign policy as part of his endeavour to create a national self-image based on three pillars: anti-globalism, anti-Communism, and religious nationalism. By doing so, the Bolsonaro administration has transformed Brazil, otherwise an avid supporter of the LIO, into one of the order’s most vocal critics. While anti-globalism (and, subsidiarily, anti-Communism) undermines the normative and institutional foundations of the LIO, religious nationalism offers a replacement to the order, based on independent ethno-nationalist communities. If Brazil’s radical right populist model spreads across Latin America, it has the potential to hollow out the region’s support to the LIO.

The study of global politics is not an exercise in objectivity and rationality, but one that is embodied, personal, and deeply affective. Feminist scholarship both within and outside of International Relations (IR) have pioneered discussions of embracing our affective experiences as researchers, as well as maintaining ethical commitments to research participants and collaborators. In addition to feminist contributions, the emotional turn in IR has seen the emergence of vibrant scholarship exploring the role of emotions in sites and processes of global politics, as well as the role of emotions in the research process. In this article, I aim to contribute to this growing body of scholarship by speaking to these and other questions that explore the role of emotions in researchers’ engagement with their work. In particular, I draw on and interrogate my own emotional entanglements with the digital archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The goal of this article is to provide insights into the emotional process of reading and interpreting testimonies of violence, and to illuminate ethical concerns that arise – particularly as an ‘outsider’ – when reading and representing trauma in my research.

Drawing on the case of Wuhan, this article considers how nationalist discourses evolved in the Chinese context during the COVID-19 pandemic. It adopts a relational perspective to argue that, just as the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed countries’ vulnerability to diverse forms of nationalism and the danger that this presents, it also reveals an irony: how despite being treated as a ‘solution’ to the pandemic, nationalism can only exist and thrive insofar as its alter or Other—represented by the novel coronavirus itself and, for some countries, the ‘China threat’—also thrives. To prevent this from becoming a vicious cycle, the article contends that nationalism is no solution and that new thinking on coexistence is the vaccine needed for securing the post-COVID-19 world order.

Despite significant efforts to end it, violence, abuse and neglect continue to contribute to preventable harms and deaths among people using disability services. To explore why these harms persist and what is needed to prevent them, we examine the safety-related attitudes and practices among frontline staff delivering services in the context of an individualized funding scheme, Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Analysis of survey data (n=2341) showed almost half of frontline disability workers were aware of harms affecting clients in the past year, and three in five felt their employers’ safety and incident reporting protocols were inadequate. Workers’ accounts of barriers to performing their safeguarding roles underline how government’s meta-regulatory approach is enabling provider organizations to prioritise financial concerns and tolerate high safety risks. We argue that advancing the rights of people with disability to be safe from harm whilst engaged in social services requires changes in their external regulatory environments and in structures of power between workers and managers, so that policy, funding and regulatory settings enable appropriate local safety practices to flourish.

We identify the broker each corporate insider trades through, and find that analysts and mutual fund managers affiliated with such “inside brokers” have a substantial information advantage on the insider’s firm. Affiliated analysts issue more accurate earnings forecasts, and affiliated mutual funds trade the insider’s stock more profitably than their peers, following insider trades through their brokerage. Notably, this advantage persists well after these insider trades are publicly disclosed. Our results challenge the prevalent perception that information asymmetry arising from insider trading is acute only before trade disclosure, and suggest that brokers facilitating these trades are in a position to exploit this asymmetry.

The increasing international use of consulting firms in public administration has attracted warnings against diminishing policy capability, accountability and transparency. Whilst significant debates and multiple tensions exist, this article introduces an innovative Australian model which provides scope to harness and balance the strengths of the contributions of consultants and consultancy firms to improve government policy capacity. We argue that advantages exist for engaging Tier 1 consultants provided the conditions are right. Moving past binary debates about whether or not consultants should be used in the public sector, we call for a more nuanced understanding and discussion about how to better leverage expertise, comparative analysis and contestability. Using Wu et al.’s (Policy Soc 34(3–4):165–171, 2015) framework, our pragmatic and sophisticated approach shifts theory and practice on the use of consultants to ensure clarity in the rationale of seeking external advice in order to build or improve policy capacity.

Around the world an expanding array of behavioural conditions are being attached to social security payments. This paper offers empirical evidence of the various moral frames used in the welfare conditionality debate, by its supporters and detractors. We systematically analyse the debates in the Australian federal parliament in 2017 and 2018 on two bills attempting to introduce drug testing of working-age welfare recipients, each of which resulted in stalemate. We find that proponents of welfare conditionality primarily employed consequentialist and paternalist arguments, supplemented by social justice, contractualism and communitarianism whilst opponents primarily employed consequentialist and social justice arguments. We explore how proponents and opponents anticipated and engaged with each other's preferred moral frames. By investigating the normative lenses that underpin arguments made for and against the drug-testing proposal, we shed light on how the debate on drug testing might be moved beyond its current impasse.

This paper identifies the impact governance types can have on the transfer of city-scale climate change policy. We develop a new adaptation of the policy transfer heuristic (based on the work of Dolowitz, D., and D. Marsh. 1996. “Who Learns What from Whom: A Review of the Policy Transfer Literature.” Political Studies; Evans, Mark. 2009a. “New Directions in the Study of Policy Transfer.” Policy Studies 30 (3): 237–241. doi:10.1080/01442870902863810) which draws attention to different types of multilevel governance systems (Hooghe, Liesbet, and Gary Marks. 2003. “Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-Level Governance.” American Political Science Review 97: 02. doi:10.1017/S0003055403000649). This new adaption, “Policy Transfer Across Governance Systems” (PTAGS) heuristic helps to anticipate challenges and opportunities for potential transfer (Manwaring, Rob. 2016. “The Big Society in Australia: A Case of ‘Non’-Policy Transfer?” Australian Journal of Public Administration 75 (2): 191–201. doi:10.1111/1467-8500.12164). To demonstrate this, we present three hypothetical scenarios of policy transfer from the European Union Green Capital Awards (EUGCA) to Australia. Using PTAGS reveals three main complexities that policy actors’ may face when developing city-scale climate change policy. These are: problem identification; the type of transfer networks used; and what aspects of policy contents and goals can be transferred. We argue that the adapted PTAGS heuristic enables a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of transfer across different governance systems. This can better equip policy actors and relevant stakeholders to develop more holistic city-scale climate change adaptation policy that draws on the strengths of governance systems rather than amplifying their weaknesses.

In a 2017 speech to the United Nations, Theresa May referred to the United Kingdom’s ‘special responsibilities’. This article examines how the United Kingdom can properly discharge those responsibilities at the United Nations. We offer an innovative analytical framework that merges English School theory of international society with diplomatic practice theory, and find that there are limits to the claim that the United Kingdom compensates for its relative material decline through diplomatic activism. We identify the special responsibility of the permanent member in terms of a capacity to reconcile the ‘concert’ and ‘governance’ functions of the Council, and to contribute materially to the achievement of governance objectives in areas where consensus is possible. Drawing on extensive interview data, and illustrating with reference to current debates on peacekeeping, we find that a state’s capacity to ‘punch above its weight’ diplomatically is linked to its material commitments and to a more inclusive approach in the Council.

This paper investigates India and Australia’s respective strategic narratives of regional order in the Indo-Pacific. Despite apparently significant convergences in their terminology around the desire for a ‘stable’, ‘prosperous’, ‘open’, ‘free’ and ‘inclusive’ Indo-Pacific, the regional order narratives of India and Australia each promote a distinct conception of regional order, reflecting different sets of political, geopolitical, economic and institutional concerns and agendas. India’s narrative promotes ‘issue-based’ alliances with a variety of countries including China, Russia and the United States, to promote a multipolar regional order, and reflects a long-standing desire to culturally identify and economically integrate with East Asian states. Australia’s narrative seeks to perpetuate the post-World War II status quo in the region, with respect to the continuation of a dominant US presence. It promotes closer partnerships with countries like India, Japan and Indonesia, within a US-led regional order, to diversify its economic and security relationships amidst perceptions of China’s growing assertiveness. It also carves out a central strategic role for Australia in a region where its leaders have traditionally felt like ‘outsiders’. The analysis advances a cultural political economy (CPE) approach to strategic narratives, demonstrating how and why strategic narratives are formed, projected and received at particular junctures.

We introduce a theoretical model of the active fund management industry (AFMI) where performance and size depend on the AFMI’s competitiveness (concentration). Under plausible assumptions, as AFMI’s concentration decreases, so do fund managers’ incentives for exerting effort in search of alpha. Consequently, managers produce lower gross alpha, and rational investors, inferring lower expected AFMI performance, allocate a smaller portion of their wealth to active funds. Empirically, we find that a decrease in the U.S. mutual fund industry concentration over our sample period is associated with a decrease in its net alpha and size (relative to stock market capitalization).

The multiple interpretations in international law of ICHL's neutrality vis-à-vis religion in the case of sites with multiple religious/historical layers and the concept of "specially affected" state are explored with the latest issue of the transformation of Hagia Sophia into a mosque in mind.

Machine learning algorithms reshape how people communicate, exchange, and associate; how institutions sort them and slot them into social positions; and how they experience life, down to the most ordinary and intimate aspects. In this article, we draw on examples from the field of social media to review the commonalities, interactions, and contradictions between the dispositions of people and those of machines as they learn from and make sense of each other.

The rhetoric and practice of localism has attracted significant support within both political and academic circles in the UK in recent years. However, it is the contention of this article that there are, or should be, limits to localism as applied to the basic citizenship rights of vulnerable people. Drawing on a ten-year, mixed-methods study, we use the example of sharply rising homelessness in England to illustrate our argument that localist policymaking has an intrinsic tendency to disadvantage socially marginalised groups. While we acknowledge the central role played by austerity in driving up homelessness over the past decade, we advance the case that the post-2010 localist agenda of successive UK governments has also had an independent and malign effect. At the very least, we seek to demonstrate that localism cannot be viewed as a taken-for-granted progressive model, with centralism (that is, the consistent implementation of a policy across a whole country) also perfectly defensible on progressive grounds in relevant circumstances.

This article examines the strength of support for direct democracy among Australian citizens, both in general and, in a world-first, across different specific topics. Analysing data from the Australian Constitutional Values Survey, we investigate whether that support is higher among people who are more educated and politically interested (in line with a ‘cognitive mobilisation’ hypothesis) or those who are dissatisfied with politics, with low levels of political trust (‘political disaffection’). The article finds that Australians widely support the use of direct democracy, but especially with respect to constitutional issues and matters of principle that they feel they can readily engage with, whereas parliaments are still seen as best placed to decide more technical matters. The article also finds that support for direct democracy is strongest among politically disaffected citizens, in ways that suggest greater use of direct democracy may have a role to play in addressing decline in political trust in Australia.

Almost everything that we do, we do by doing other things. Even actions we perform without deliberation or conscious planning are composed of ‘smaller’, subsidiary actions. But how should we think of such subsidiary actions? Are they fully-fledged intentional actions (in the sense of things that we do for reasons) in their own right? In this paper I defend an affirmative answer to this question, against a recently influential form of scepticism. Drawing on a distinctive kind of ‘action-demonstrative’ representation, I show that the sceptic's arguments do not go through.

There is much change afoot in the financial systems of East Asia. Historically, states in the region have actively sought to shape financial markets for developmental–and indeed other political–ends. Yet, their capacity to do so has been significantly transformed by the fragmentation and transformation of financial systems in East Asia as well as the onslaught of globalising forces more generally. The increasing complexity of the financial landscape poses new challenges for the types of financial policymaking traditionally associated with the notion of the ‘developmental state’. These developments raise important questions for those interested in the relationship between finance, development and the state–not only in East Asia–but across the globe. How, to what extent, in what ways and with what purpose, do East Asian states continue to intervene in their financial markets? Can their interventions still meaningfully be characterised as ‘developmental’ in nature? If so, how effective are they? In seeking to address such questions, the contribution of this special section is threefold. First, theoretically, it advances debate on the relationship between finance and the state in East Asia, in particular against the background of new forms of financial (dis-)intermediation. Second, conceptually, it situates the changes it analyses vis-à-vis a renewed interest in questions of legitimacy and social purpose. Third, the collection provides new empirical insights drawing on original fieldwork in Northeast and Southeast Asia.

Since the end of WWII, the so-called developmental states of East Asia have become famous for their ‘financial activism’: their efforts to link the financial and productive sectors of their economies in ways that advance national development objectives. However it is now widely acknowledged that the twin pressures of global financial integration and financialisation have transformed the policymaking landscape and complicated the pursuit of financial activism. So what do these developments mean for the capacities of East Asian states to pursue developmental ambitions? To address this question, I adopt a novel, mindset-centred analytical framework for the study of developmental state evolution and apply it for the first time to the case of Taiwan. My analysis reveals that the evolutionary trajectory of Taiwan’s developmental state has not been linear; since the early 2000s, the state’s commitment to and capacities for financial activism have waxed and waned. Moreover, two factors emerge as particularly significant in this waxing and waning: social legitimacy and political leadership. This paper demonstrates the analytical utility of a mindset-centred analysis when it comes to investigating the dynamics of developmental state evolution, and why some national variants appear more durable than others at different moments in history.

This article reviews geographical research on labour market changes that pose a challenge to ‘work’ as a compelling category of analysis. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship that has sought to develop a frame for thinking about the concept of work so that other activities outside employment are recognised, it considers what everyday practices of work, including domestic and reproductive labour, can teach us about the realities and futures of contemporary capitalism. While ‘work’ has long served as a presumed norm or telos of ‘development’, this article considers the prospect of the ‘end of work’ and of a specific type of accompanying capitalist society. It outlines the challenges for policy making in bringing forth a ‘post-work’ world without cementing social and economic inequality.

Market instruments are increasingly used to drive innovation and efficiency in public services. Meanwhile, many governments recognize the need for services to be more personalized and ‘user-centred’. This was a key aim of major welfare-to-work reforms in both the UK and Australia over the past decade, which sought to achieve personalization through increasing service delivery by for-profit providers, contracted via Payment-by-Results. Drawing on three surveys of frontline staff, we show the impact of recent UK and Australian marketization reforms on frontline practices to consider whether the reform mix of increased commercial provision tied to Payment-by-Results has enhanced service personalization. We find that the UK's ‘black box’ model was associated with some increase in frontline discretion, but little evidence that this enhanced personalization, either compared to previous programmes or to Australia's more regulated system.

This paper analyses how precision has become a ubiquitous prefix in medicine, agriculture and education. The accompanying imagination in each of these domains is that “data” will enable greater predictive accuracy through new sensors and interfaces. In this paper, we aim to provide insights regarding the ways in which precision assemblages function to augment and extend existing knowledge and data infrastructures, while also being underpinned by the anticipatory promise of the ubiquity of digital and sensing technologies. We argue that precision is marked by new data production and aggregation frameworks to measure and intervene. At the same time, precision draws on–and augments–established clinical, agricultural and educational subjectivities in ways that depict new logics of patient, student and environmental care. As we outline below, the threshold of the shift to precision is articulated and institutionalized at different points in each field we analyse in the subsequent sections of this paper–namely medicine, agriculture and education. This suggests that precision should be understood as an unevenly realized moment in policy development, rather than as simply produced through processes of technological change.

The scope and intensity of policy transfer has increased in recent years as developing countries have drawn on public sector reform programmes based on new public management practices originally designed in western democracies. However, there is mounting evidence that to be successful, reform programmes must be adapted to local contexts. This article demonstrates that national government control of policy transfer can enable localisation which in turn enhances the effectiveness of public reforms. Analysis of the Position Classification System — which sought to enhance accountability, efficiency and professionalism in the civil service in Bhutan — highlights two conditions that enable domestic control of the policy transfer process: strong internal motivation for engaging in policy transfer and the establishment or adaptation of institutions to manage processes of policy transfer. We conclude that when these conditions apply, a developing country can engage in successful voluntary policy transfer and retain control of the process.

Dominant orthodoxies within the study of terrorism have developed and promoted a strategic understanding of terrorism which has, in effect, reinforced the very conflict it seeks to explain. In response, this article develops the challenge of Critical Terrorism Studies to propose a new strategic approach to terrorism. It posits that, while unable to achieve Clausewitzian victory over the state per se, terrorism is able to politically paralyse the state’s overwhelming power by shifting the moral horizons of that state’s constituency. We explore two mutually reinforcing mechanisms by which terrorism achieves this objective and explore a number of strategic policy implications of each. This new approach is needed as current approaches misrepresent the challenge the global community currently faces, creating a self-perpetuating loop of conflict and grievance which promises no end to terrorist violence.

Geographic analyses have centered on how state and capitalist enterprises—often in collaboration with each other—deploy volumetric territorial strategies and processes to achieve their ends, i.e., control in the form of securitization or resource extraction. We invite an exploration of different ways voluminous environments, their flows, and ecosystems can be experienced and represented with analyses of diverse activities of cave explorers in Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico. These activities call attention to the heterogeneity of volumetric territorial projects. By exploring and mapping subterranean spaces, cavers co-opt some of the techniques of the state and/or capitalist territorialization and commodification. But the experiences of underground exploration and even mapping exceed and sometimes contradict the motivations and effects rightfully associated with these volumetric practices. Not only are these activities deeply affective and embodied, they typically happen beyond state reach. Moreover, following cavers' explorations requires more open conceptions of both territory and voluminous spaces, and the ecological rhythms and flows that constitute them. Doing so leads to the recognition of how cavers experience and enact alternative volumetric territorial projects. In the process, some of these projects forge defiant national imaginaries, literally from below. The possibility and potential of these imaginaries come from the unique quality of subterranean exploration: only those who explore and survey passages underground know their location, extent, and at times, their content. Yet, there are dangers as well: not only are most of these projects far from emancipatory or inclusionary, they can be co-opted by state and/or capitalist enterprises. The implications of this last point are complex and potentially contradictory: while state knowledge and control of caves and karst environments may limit caver access and activities, lack of state knowledge and control may al

The election of President Trump, Brexit, and the amplifying of isolationist voices have signaled the possible emergence of a new era–one of retreat in the Liberal International Order. While this is one way of defining the present moment, it does not capture the full picture, as uncertainty has opened and/or widened new partnerships. In this scenario, MERCOSUL (Southern Common Market) has both sought and been sought by a growing number of countries and international organizations, recently (re)launching free trade negotiations with many partners, including Canada. This paper explores the empirical aspects of MERCOSUL’s apparently sudden growth in attractiveness, reflecting external and internal factors, with particular attention to Brazil recent negotiations. The case allows an opportunity to reflect if the world is witnessing indeed an “unravelling” of the multilateralist world order or rather a re-adjustment, whereby increasing diversification is pursued through untraditional and overlooked partnerships. The idea is not to minimize the significant worldwide impacts of the US’ inward-looking trade policies and discourse or deny the growth in appeal to isolationism, but to question whether such positions are still exceptions, or if reports on the open trade system’s death have only been greatly exaggerated.

This article aims to characterize and compare some approaches to regulation manifest in distinct yet intersecting domains of data assemblage and algorithmic development, and to explore some implications of their operating in concert. We focus on three such types of domain, each oriented towards different purposes: market jurisdictions; public science jurisdictions; and jurisdictions of humanitarianism. These domains we characterize as data jurisdictions because they tend to propagate distinct normative claims and concerns, and authorize particular types of speech and action, through algorithmic operations and data formatting. In this paper, we focus on the intersection of these archetypal data jurisdictions in two, related initiatives of the United Nations (UN): Haze Gazer and CycloMon. In the context of these projects, the market domain is represented by their incorporation of Twitter and social media data; the public science domain by their use of NASA Earth Observatory data, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data, and AQICN air quality data; and the humanitarian domain by their status as UN projects designed to serve the aims and enlarge the capacities of development and humanitarian professionals. We analyse how, and with what ramifications, these domains of algorithmic regulation intersect in Haze Gazer and CycloMon. In so doing, we advance two main arguments. First, we argue that certain normative commitments regarding data, data use, and data users circulate and gain ground through their embeddedness in seemingly benign infrastructures and formats of data handling and representation. Particular (contentious) norms are prioritised, spread and imbibed as much through day-to-day data usage as through explicit argument or endorsement. Second, we argue that blind spots tend to emerge from the intersection of different jurisdictions over, or approaches to, the challenge of responsible algorithmic regulation. The data jurisdictions that we an

In recent years, several actors at the sub-national level (e.g. California, British Columbia, New York City) have taken unilateral steps to mitigate climate change by reducing their emissions. These developments have commanded considerable attention in the empirical literature. In this piece, we consider the philosophical dimensions of climate action at the sub-national level. Specifically, we argue that climate action at the sub-national level is an instance of a more general class of cases in which the failure of some collective agent to discharge some duty to which it is subject entails duties for the sub-collectives of which it is comprised to partially discharge that duty. We begin, then, with a discussion of such cases, and a defence of the devolution principle, which sets out conditions under which such duties arise. We then set out the argument with respect to sub-national political communities’ duties to take action on climate change, specifically. The article concludes by considering complications arising out of the inevitable fact of partial compliance, drawing upon recent work in the literature on slack-taking duties.