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Foundations provide key funds for nongovernmental organizations. We know little about what they do for transnational activism or the mechanisms via which they seek/achieve influence. We carve a middle ground between those who see donors as supporting actors in transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and those who think they distort activism through impersonal market forces. Our negotiation-oriented approach looks at the micro-dynamics of donor–grantee relations. We argue that influence is a function of donors’ organizational characteristics. Only some, especially foundations, have the vision/means to shape grantees. However, internal complexity can cause coordination problems, complicating influence. Additionally, if many donors exist, recipients’ leverage increases. It does so too if their expertise is in short supply. Using archival evidence, we reconstruct how Ford tried to shape the Inter-American Human Rights Institute, a pillar of the region's human rights regime, and the factors conditioning success. For Ford, the Institute could play a role in a fledging TAN, but only if it downplayed its emphasis on research and directly engaged activists. Coupled with analyses of USAID’s relationship with the Institute and Ford's relationship with Americas Watch, we shed light on the activities of an important class of donor and illuminate foundations’ role in the development of TANs.

If the journal was to fulfil its given task, it obviously had to seek capitalism wherever it was available, without any consideration of national boundaries … This systematic expansion towards the ...

Rationalization, a core concept of Max Weber’s sociology, has so far largely been ignored in International Relations (IR) theory discussions, although his ideas about rationalization open new pathways for theorizing modernity and conflict. We revisit Weber’s concepts of rationalization and domination to show the limits of two key bodies of related knowledge in IR: scholarship on international organizations as bureaucracies and ideas on rationalization in the world polity approach. Rereading Weber’s approach to rationalization provides a distinct ground for our understanding of the current internationalization of rule. We illustrate the contribution our approach to rationalization makes by looking at budget support to sub-Saharan African states, and Mozambique in particular. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications that a critical rereading of Max Weber has for international politics.

Das Max Weber nicht nur ein soziologischer Beckmesser war, sondern ein lebendigerPolitiker, scheint ihm [Albert Salomon] nicht einmal aufgefallen zu seinHeinrich Blucher to Hannah Arendt1For most s...

EU scholars have long argued that regions can shape the integration process, but there is no agreement on why this is so. While some authors consider constitutional powers, intergovernmental relations, or differentiated regional elites as independent variables, those interested in Europeanization argue that the 'transformative power of Europe' enticed both central and regional governments to adopt consensual policy styles, akin to those prevailing in the EU. Accordingly, new territorial arrangements would have made effective participation in the integration process possible. However, scholars have failed to pay due consideration to a crucial factor: the decision-making rule employed in the coordination mechanisms. In this article, I argue that cooperation among regions actually depends mostly on whether decisions are taken by consensus or unanimity. Common regional positions and impacts on EU decisions become unlikely if peripheral parties increase the levels of conflict. The arguments build on theoretical warrants taken from actor-centered institutionalism.

While there has arguably been a partial reception of Weber in international relations (IR), we argue here that his ideas have either been misunderstood or neglected. In order to highlight the most valuable Weberian insights, we focus on two topics of crucial importance to IR. First, in our view, Weber's crucial contribution to the study of states is not his alleged emphasis on the monopoly of violence but his concern with the problem of legitimacy, which is the key to understanding why individuals actually orient an action according to their beliefs in the idea of a state. Second, Weber conducted seminal historical investigations on religion, the rationalization of economic ethics, and organizations that show that the diffusion of isomorphism has little to do with supposedly uninterested and persuasive scientific and professional associations. Instead, more attention should be paid to rational domination and less to reified concepts such as John Meyer's ‘rationalized otherhood’. These arguments are also e...

The holders of political power may choose among the myriad of institutional possibilities that exist between capitalism and socialism. After explaining why any system of production is mixed, this essay explores both why markets are frequently considered preferable to other arrangements and which are the “simple” wrongs associated with capitalist market economies. Among these “simple” wrongs, we find markets’ tendency to self-subversion, to permeate the whole of social life, and to inflict damage when it is permitted to markets to encompass the factors of production, like labor, natural resources, and money. Despite these “simple” wrongs, democratic socialists and social democrats believe that the political power mobilized within liberal democracies can cope with these side-effects by resorting to instruments like anti-trust legislation, market-constraining policies, and to the protection of the factors of production. Finally, the essay explains why social democrats and democratic socialists believe that liberal democracy, with its emphasis on liberty and equality, on the one hand, and on representation, contestation, and accountability, on the other, is the institutional arrangement that can best cope with the inherent pathologies of capitalist market societies

Any scholarly reading of Max Weber’s Economía y sociedad may substantially benefi t from a comparison between the German and the Spanish version of the work. This article fulfi lls this task. In order to accomplish it, the following aspects are examined: the external outlook of Economía y sociedad, its shortcomings in terms of oversights, changes in the word sequence, omissions, biased translations of a concept, and the rendering of Weber’s terms of the art, like Verband organization, Ordnung order y Betrieb establishment. In Economía y sociedad these terms are sometimes translated in ways that suggets connotations absent from the German original, suppress others that were actually implicit, without the required consistency. These shortcomings set hurdles to a proper understanding of the work and speak for a new translation.

During the last two and a half years of his life, Max Weber wrote letters that could be used to write a sociology of the Central European intelligentsia during the wars. Rather than discussing Weber’s encounters with the most renowned writers —Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal— and musicians —that of Richard Strauss, among several composers and conductors— of his time, this article discusses three more conventionally Weberian topics, which are nonetheless insufficiently understood: first Weber’s involvement, that and of some of his students, like Georgy Lukaçs, in politics at the end of World War I. Second, Weber’s writing style, which has been fre-quently decried, but that actually represents his attempt to overcome a challenge that had become important for his own project as a university professor. This is the third topic of the article: how Weber intended to found academic sociology as a disci-pline that should combine empirical facts, the historical past, and institutions, on theone hand, with the use of models, or ideal-types, as propounded by the Austrian School, on the other hand. To Weber’s short spell at the University of Vienna in 1918 corresponds an intellectual achievement as mediator between economy and sociology that has rested too long in oblivion.