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Despite having key implications for fundamental political science questions, slavery as a global phenomenon has received little attention in the field. We argue that slavery played an important role in state-building and international order formation. To counter a historical U.S./Atlantic bias, we draw evidence mostly from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. We identify two slave-based paths to state construction. A "slaves as the state" logic saw slave soldiers and administrators used to overcome the constraints of indirect rule in centralizing power. In a "slaves under the state" model the economy was based on slave production, itself underpinned by institutionalized state coercion. Norms often prohibited enslavement within communities, thus externalizing demand. This led to militarized slaving, and fostered increasingly long-distance trade in slaves. The combination of these normative, military, and commercial factors formed international slaving orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2009.01785.x Byline: J.C. SHARMAN (1) Abstract: A fundamental shift has occurred in the relationship between the state and the individual regarding financial privacy. The onus is now on citizens to show why governments should not have access to their personal financial information, rather than governments having to show why they should. This article argues that this shift has come about in large part because of the activities of autonomous and influential transnational networks of regulators. These regulatory networks have systematically favoured administrative efficiency and transparency at the expense of privacy in designing responses to financial crimes. Evidence is drawn from an examination of recent policy developments in countering tax evasion, money laundering, and the financing of terrorism. Currently, the principle of financial transparency suggests that financial privacy inhibits the fight against criminals and terrorists; by extension, asserting a right to privacy indicates some kind of roguery afoot. Author Affiliation: (1)J.C. Sharman is in the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Australia Article History: Date received 6 July 2007. Date accepted 17 March 2008.

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2008.00829.x Byline: J.C. SHARMAN (1) Abstract: Abstract This article examines how an internal deal to tax non-resident EU savings came to depend on the co-operation of non-member jurisdictions. These efforts were both motivated and sabotaged by a policy narrative asserting that increased capital mobility poses a new global imperative for national and regional policy-making. Author Affiliation: (1)Griffith University Article note: J.C. Sharman, Griffith University, Centre for Governance and Public Policy, 170 Kessels Road, Nathan, QLD 4111, Australia, email: j.sharman@griffith.edu.au

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.00518.x Byline: J.C. Sharman (*) Abstract: Twenty years ago not a single country had a policy against money laundering; currently, over 170 have very similar anti-money laundering (AML) policies in place. Why have so many countries with so little in common adopted the same policy so rapidly? This extensive diffusion is particularly puzzling given the lack of evidence that AML policies actually work. In explaining the international spread of AML policies, this article draws on recent literature from International Relations, sociology, comparative politics, and public policy dealing with policy diffusion and policy transfer, but also differs from most of this work in two key aspects: First, it is argued that the process of diffusion in the developing world has been much more power-based than voluntary. Second, the mechanisms driving policy diffusion (direct coercion, mimicry, and competition) are all shown to be discursively mediated exercises of power, rather than reflecting rational learning or brute material forces. Evidence is drawn from surveys, interviews, and participant-observation in developing countries from three regions. Author Affiliation: (*)Griffith University

Scholars have studied international NGOs as advocates and service providers, but have neglected their importance in autonomously enforcing international law. We have two basic aims: first to establish the nature and significance of transnational NGO enforcement, and second to explore the factors behind its rise. NGO enforcement comprises a spectrum of practices, from indirect (e.g., monitoring and investigation), to direct enforcement (e.g., prosecution and interdiction). We explain NGO enforcement by an increased demand for the enforcement of international law, and factors that have lowered the cost of supply for non-state enforcement. Increased demand for enforcement reflects the growing gap between the increased legalization of international politics and states' limited enforcement capacity. On the supply side, the diffusion of new technologies and greater access to new legal remedies facilitate increased non-state enforcement. We evidence these claims via case studies from the environmental and anti-corruption sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents an audit study of the crime and anonymity present in the financial system of the anonymous shell companies. The different anonymous corporate vehicles present in the international market and their impact on the international economies are also analyzed.

Abstract A growing body of analysis has explored how kleptocrats systematically capture and loot their domestic state institutions, but scholars and policy makers have paid less attention to how globalization enables grand corruption, as well as the laundering of kleptocrats' finances and reputations. Shell companies and new forms of international investment, such as luxury real-estate purchases, serve to launder the ill-gotten gains of kleptocrats and disimbed them from their country of origin. Critically, this normalization of "everyday kleptocracy" depends heavily on transnational professional intermediaries: Western public-relations agents, lobbyists and lawyers help to recast kleptocrats as internationally respected businesspeople and philanthropic cosmopolitans. The resulting web of relationships makes up a "transnational uncivil society," which bends global-governance institutions to work in its favor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the financial crisis, various supra-national initiatives have targeted banking and corporate secrecy, the conventional underpinnings of the illicit Global Wealth Chains through which money from tax evasion, corruption and other financial offences are passed across borders. This paper analyses the varying impact of these initiatives on the diverse types of Wealth Chains running through two stereotypical havens, Liechtenstein and the Seychelles, and one G20/OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) member rarely associated with illicit financial flows, Australia. Recent campaigns have had a significant impact on illicit Global Wealth Chains connected to micro-state tax havens, while leaving those to Australia unaffected. Even with reference to the micro-state havens, however, outside regulatory shifts have in some cases changed the flow or form of Wealth Chains by unintentionally creating new opportunities for offshore finance. Evidence is drawn from interviews and fieldwork in all three countries, secretly recorded footage of intermediaries explaining the workings of illicit Wealth Chains, and corporate and property records collected by a private investigator engaged by the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much International Relations theory explains the dominance of the sovereign state within the international system by a process of competitive selection. By analogy, the selection effects of market competition in promoting better-adapted firms are said to illustrate the selection effects of security competition under anarchy in promoting better-adapted units, specifically sovereign states. In critiquing this analogy, the article argues instead that the historical diffusion and current dominance of sovereign states is better explained by a sociological institutionalist logic. Units secure social acceptance, and incidentally survival, through conformity to promote legitimacy. This position is justified on three grounds. First, survival and violent elimination from the international system over the last two centuries are unrelated to military capacity, but highly correlated with legitimacy. Second, selection-by-learning rests on a series of highly demanding and unrealistic assumptions; the sociological alternative requires much less heroic assumptions. Finally, a qualitative study of micro-states, most-likely cases for competitive elimination, demonstrates their attempts to conform to idealized templates of the modern state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The growing body of literature on hierarchy in international relations has overlooked instances of contemporary imperial governance. These imperial arrangements constitute a strong test of rationalist contractual theories of hierarchy. They support the contention that some polities will eschew sovereign prerogatives, or even renounce sovereignty altogether. Contrary to historical instances of empire, current dependencies receive prominent material benefits from the continuation of their relationship with the metropole. But the failure of the metropoles to obtain equivalent benefits shows why contractual scholarship on hierarchy is incomplete in failing to incorporate logics of appropriateness. Thus the primary theoretical goal of the article is to show that such scholarship is right in claiming that there is more to the international system than just sovereign-like units under anarchy, but also that it is too narrow in seeking to explain all instances of hierarchy as mutually beneficial bargains. Evidence is taken from fieldwork and interviews in dependencies of the Netherlands, Denmark and New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tax havens represent a crucial, but neglected, test of deep trends in the international political economy. Over the last decade, and again after the onset of the financial crisis, tax havens have come under sustained pressure from powerful developed states and the international organisations they dominate. Despite their diminutive geographic and power profile, the havens have shown a puzzling resilience. Although like other economies havens have suffered from the financial crisis, they have nevertheless confounded predictions of decline premised on their purported vulnerability to discriminatory financial regulations imposed from onshore. This article explains the continued growth in offshore finance by the rise of new developing country markets. More broadly, the increasing availability of alternative markets means that G7 states are losing the crucial leverage they previously enjoyed by threatening to close their markets. The fortunes of tax havens are thus indicative of a tectonic shift: the rise of developing economies is producing a relative decline in the ability of core G7 states to dominate global economic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is the British Virgin Islands a bigger source of foreign direct investment into China than the USA, the European Union and Japan combined? Why is there 10 times more investment from China in the Caymans Islands than there is in the USA? This paper argues that these flows represent the efforts of Chinese and foreign investors to reduce governance and measurement transaction costs. Investors avail themselves of efficient institutions in offshore centers that are absent locally. These institutional attractions include the ease of raising capital on foreign stock markets, access to reliable courts, and more flexible and sophisticated financial products. Existing explanations of these capital movements, characterizing them as criminal money or tax arbitrage, are insufficient. Evidence is drawn from government statistics, private legal advice and interviews in offshore financial centers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scott's account of state-making is premised on the ‘legibility’ of society, facilitating administration by replacing idiosyncratic and particularistic local arrangements with a uniform bureaucratic grid. Along with conscription, extracting tax was the primary motivation behind this transformation. With the growth in cross-border economic relations, the current challenge for tax collectors is to make finance and banking legible at the global scale, moving from idiosyncratic and particularistic national arrangements towards a world-wide uniform bureaucratic grid. This is believed to be necessary to defeat would-be tax evaders looking to profit from the gaps and incompatibilities between different national tax systems. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is the main agent in homogenising tax data and procedures, and facilitating the exchange of tax information between states. As such, ‘seeing like a state’ on tax gives way to ‘seeing like the OECD’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that public blacklisting by international organizations can be an effective means of bringing about compliance in otherwise recalcitrant states. This contention is examined in light of overlapping campaigns by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Financial Action Task Force to pressure targeted states to adopt costly financial reforms. In a constructivist vein, blacklisting is held to be a form of speech act that changed the world by damaging states' reputations among investors, and thus produced pressure to comply through actual or anticipated capital flight. To be removed from blacklists, thereby preventing future economic damage, those targeted have had to comply with stringent regulatory standards mandated by these international organizations. Evidence is taken from interviews, press accounts, official documents and quantitative data relating to seven affected tax havens as well as Austria and Switzerland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom maintains that since 1648 the international system has comprised states-as-like units endowed with Westphalia sovereignty under anarchy. And while radical globalization theorists certainly dispute the centrality of the state in modern world politics, nevertheless most assume that the state retains its sovereignty under globalization. In contrast we argue that hierarchical sub-systems (and hence unlike units) have been common since 1648, and that the international system continues to be characterized by hierarchical (as well as anarchic) relations. The article goes on to reveal the existence of these multiple hierarchic formations and uncovers the differing social logics connected with identity-formation processes that govern their reproduction. Successive religious, racial, socialist and democratic social logics not only constitute their reproduction, but the emergence of new norms, social ideas and identities have to an important extent accounted for the rise and decay of successive hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]