Global Regime Research Articles

‘Eco-Nuclear’ Energy Transformation? Authoritarian Environmentalism and Regulatory Policy in China

In light of China’s rapid growth and increasing engagement in the global climate regime, the authoritarian regulatory model has attracted attention from researchers and policymakers alike. This paper examines the question of to what extent and in what way state authoritarianism leads to (un)successful environmental policy implementation in China, with particular attention to energy transformation. This study inter-connects macro and micro inquiries through a case study of nuclear energy policy in China. An examination of the extended policy cycle as a comprehensive process that brings a policy to fruition shows that authoritarian regulatory environmental policy intervenes in each stage, resulting in a particular path of the evolution of environmental policy in nuclearising energy transformation in China. Adding to commonly accepted tenets of authoritarian environmentalism in general, the explanations of Chinese distinctiveness in materialising environmental policy enhances the understanding of the merits and challenges of authoritarian mechanisms of environmental policy.

Reshaping Internationalization Strategy and Control for Global E-Commerce and Digital Transactions: A Hayekian Perspective

As the sharing economy has grown rapidly and replaced the traditional businesses, new rules and norms for data and digital trade have emerged divergently in many countries. Such divergence in global e-commerce policies may be a major barrier to the internationalization of the sharing economy business. This paper aims to develop an internationalization theory that addresses how the sharing economy firms can internationalize under the condition of the divergence of global e-commerce policies. Drawing on Hayek’s knowledge economy approach, we build a new internationalization theory for the sharing economy firms that facilitate autonomously self-organized business ecosystems and adapt to the lack of harmonized rules and norms for the sharing economy. We first theorize on the attributes of the digital platform-based transactions for the internationalization of the sharing economy firms and then provide some insights into the current international debates of e-commerce policies. Our theory offers two main insights: (1) the competitive advantages of the sharing economy firms stem mainly from digital platform algorithms to catalyze digital platform-based transactions between autonomous actors; (2) the divergence of global e-commerce policies and different internet regimes in different countries may affect the internationalization of business models based on such digital platform-based transactions.

Explaining the failure of global health governance during COVID-19

Abstract Global health governance (GHG) was one of COVID-19's earliest victims. Soon after the novel coronavirus escaped China, the World Health Organization (WHO) was marginalized, and the International Health Regulations became practically irrelevant, as nations adopted uncoordinated, ad hoc responses. Existing explanations of GHG's collapse are largely utopian, criticizing states for failing to empower the WHO with sufficient supranational authority. This misunderstands how GHG was supposed to work in the first place and hence mistakenly diagnoses the causes of failure. We argue that COVID-19 exposed the pathologies of an entire, neoliberal approach to global governance: metagovernance and state transformation. In this approach, international organizations are hollowed out and their role shifts to metagovernance—developing and disseminating ‘best practice’ policies, institutions and rules for states to embed domestically. Such global regimes' efficacy, therefore, depends on states' capacity to enforce global disciplines. However, nation-states are also hollowed out by neoliberal strictures, undermining practical implementation. Consequently, GHG was failing long before COVID-19, leaving the system dependent on ad hoc interventions by dominant states. With the latter also affected by COVID-19, GHG was left in disarray. Reform proposals should therefore focus less on global institutions and rules and more on building domestic capabilities.

Barium content of Archaean continental crust reveals the onset of subduction was not global

Earth’s earliest continental crust is dominated by tonalite–trondhjemite–granodiorite (TTG) suites, making these rocks key to unlocking the global geodynamic regime operating during the Archaean (4.0–2.5 billion years ago [Ga]). The tectonic setting of TTG magmatism is controversial, with hypotheses arguing both for and against subduction. Here we conduct petrological modeling over a range of pressure–temperature conditions relevant to the Archaean geothermal gradient. Using an average enriched Archaean basaltic source composition, we predict Ba concentrations in TTG suites, which is difficult to increase after magma generated in the source. The results indicate only low geothermal gradients corresponding to hot subduction zones produce Ba-rich TTG, thus Ba represents a proxy for the onset of subduction. We then identify statistically significant increases in the Ba contents of TTG suites worldwide as recording the diachronous onset of subduction from regional at 4 Ga to globally complete sometime after 2.7 Ga.

The Regulatory Space of Baseball: Is Global Regulation Needed to Govern the International Movement of Players?

Occupying baseball’s regulatory space are multiple regimes that govern global labour mobility and the international transfer of amateur and professional players. Professional leagues are the key regulatory actors in this space, non-state actors responsible for establishing the controls on a player’s labour mobility within the league and to foreign competitions. The dominant regulator in baseball is Major League Baseball (‘MLB’) that acts as a de facto international sports federation and custodian of baseball. This article uses regulatory space theory to explore how globalisation forced the increased interaction between professional baseball leagues around the world. Despite the subsequent accelerated evolution of the rules and processes governing the international movement of professional baseballers, the global regime primarily consists of bilateral player agreements involving either MLB or Nippon Professional Baseball (‘NPB’) and other professional leagues in Latin America and Asia. This article will analyse how this system of regulation created numerous problems in the recruitment and movement of amateur and professional players, most notably an exploitative labour system in Latin America that potentially violates various international human rights laws and led to the human trafficking of Cuban baseball players. In response to these regulatory failures the authors propose a number of urgent reforms to ensure the global regulation of labour mobility in baseball facilitates the movement of players in line with international human rights through a global player transfer system that includes independent dispute resolution and that is operated by an independent global regulator.

Articulating mobile gendered landscapes: Thinking with care cultures.

This paper relates work on global neoliberal gendered labor to geographies of care and it provides a tangible example of culturally specific dimensions of the relationship between health and place. The context is a temporary work migration pattern of Bulgarian women in Italy, who provide 24/7, live-in care to elderly, often dying patients. Through a longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, this paper illustrates how mobile gendered landscapes are articulated and made meaningful by the research participants, offering a different reading of global care regimes. I argue that this articulation is a way of thinking with care cultures and showing how these are (re-)imagined by women who care in less than caring institutional/economic/familial landscapes. The paper contributes the concept 'care cultures' as a productive lens, through which to account for how place, people, ethics and care practices grow, merge and (mis-)align in attempts to construct and maintain meaningful lives.

Community Responses to Fire: A Global Meta-Analysis Unravels the Contrasting Responses of Fauna to Fire

Globally, wildfires and prescribed fires are becoming more prevalent and are known to affect plant and animals in diverse ecosystems. Understanding the responses of animal communities to fire is a central issue in conservation and a panacea to predicting how fire regimes may affect communities and food webs. Here, a global meta-analysis of 2581 observations extracted from 208 empirical studies were used to investigate the effect of fire on aboveground and belowground fauna (e.g., bacteria, fungi, small mammals, arthropods). Overall, results revealed that fire had a negative effect on biomass, abundance, richness, evenness, and diversity of all faunas. Similarly, when considering wildfires and prescribed fires the data revealed that both fire regimes have negative effects on fauna. Similarly, fire had negative impacts on aboveground and aboveground fauna across most biomes and continents of the world. Moreover, there was little evidence of changes in pH, moisture and soil depth on soil organisms suggesting that other factors may drive community changes following a fire disturbance. Future research in fire ecology should consider the effects of fire across several species and across larger geospatial scales. In addition, fire effects on faunal community structure must be studied under contrasting global fire regimes and in light of the effects of climate change.

International Whaling Commission as a Natural Resource Management Regime

Abstract Whaling as governed by the International Whaling Commission (iwc) is a global regime of natural resource management, which has experienced significant changes over time. Currently, the iwc regime constitutes a legal framework aiming at protection of both whales and the interests of traditional indigenous whaling populations. The aim of this paper is to examine how the international management of the whale resource has evolved, what kind of an indigenous market it is today and where it might be heading. Although the iwc as a whaling organisation is today geared essentially towards facilitating indigenous whaling, the regime is not indigenous in substance. It is not even a collaborative system. In essence, indigenous whaling within the iwc remains a colonial regime where indigenous interests are subordinate to nation states and Western science. The fundamental ontological mismatch of traditional indigenous conceptions of the world and those on which the iwc is based makes it difficult to introduce changes. Development of participatory rights of indigenous whaling communities within the iwc regime could constitute a procedural first step with potential to contribute to improving also the substantive rights of indigenous whalers. Relational values approach could help to achieve more pivotal ontological change of mindsets to allow indigenous people to gain real agency and organise their relationship with whales in accordance with their worldviews.

Sports’ Global Anti-Doping Regulatory Regime: The Challenges and Tensions of Polycentricity and Hybridity

Sport has developed a global anti-doping regulatory regime of great sophistication. It is polycentric — operating at both the national and international level — and hybrid — combining contractual, criminal and administrative tools with public and private enforcement mechanisms. The regime is not without its challenges and tensions, however. Functional, democratic and normative challenges abound. There also are tensions that arise from nesting private transnational regulatory regimes in public domestic legal structures. This article critically examines these challenges and tensions using the Essendon Football Club v Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority as its case study. That case considered the legality and propriety of the Australian Football League collaborating with the state’s anti-doping regulatory authority to investigate alleged anti-doping rule violations in breach of the World Anti-Doping Code. This case illustrates the challenges that arise when the interests of players, clubs, competition administrators, national regulators, and sports’ global guardians, do not align. The article establishes that while sports’ global anti-doping regime has proven itself to be functionally stable, opportunities exist to broaden the regime’s democratic credentials to give other stakeholders a more meaningful voice. Doing so would not only improve the regime’s sense of fairness and justice, it also might improve its effectiveness.

Pasts, presents and futures: discourses of colonization and decolonization

AbstractIn this article, I reflect on the future of macro-sociolinguistic research from a global-south perspective. I discuss the role that activism has played in scholarly work, and how such activism was hampered by persistent ideologies of ‘thingification’; that is, ideologies that created languages and nations as ‘objects’ (to be managed and controlled by states and local/national/global elites). I ground the history of such discourses in colonialism-capitalism. I further explore the global and local regimes of language that were created through the dehumanizing violence of colonialism-capitalism, as well as the alternative futures that have been imagined by all those who resisted – and continue to resist – this violence. I conclude with some thoughts on temporalities, on the different relationships with, and to, time and the urgency of the present.

A novel method to predict current–voltage characteristics of positive corona discharges based on a perturbation technique. II. Global analysis and applications to electrohydrodynamic thrusters

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) thrusters can silently propel small unmanned aerial vehicles without moving parts using corona discharges. Computational fluid dynamics would be a powerful tool to model the EHD thrusters and then optimize them. The drift-diffusion-Poisson equations govern corona discharges; hence, the equations can predict the current–voltage characteristics curves of EHD thrusters. However, the equations are too stiff to analyze EHD thrusters in the time domain. Here, we propose a perturbation technique to efficiently solve the stiff drift-diffusion-Poisson system in global (i.e., full two-dimensional or three-dimensional) and nonlinear (i.e., applied voltages higher than the corona inception voltage) regimes. Furthermore, we validated the method with the experimental results of a previous study.

UNRRA in North Africa: A late colonial history of refugee encampment

Abstract This article tells the story of two long-forgotten United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) camps in wartime French North Africa, using their history as a lens through which to view the emergence of a modern global regime of refugee encampment. It examines these camps’ entanglements with the mechanisms of late colonial rule; their resonances with the systems of detention articulated by the Third Reich and its Vichy collaborationists; their rehabilitation of the practice of encampment for post-war colonial ‘development’ schemes like French Algeria’s centres de regroupement; and their eventual clearing of the way for the Cold War–era extension of an internationalist, American-dominated regime of refugee internment, first into Tunisia and Morocco and later across much of the Global South. Through its attempt to present its North African refugee camps as a new, modern, humanitarian form of encampment, UNRRA managed to rehabilitate the old colonial strategy of migrant internment as fundamentally humanitarian rather than punitive, successfully eliding its relationships with Nazi and Vichy practices in the process and establishing encampment as a central strategy of the modern internationalist refugee regime for the era of decolonization.

New Globalization and Multipolarity: A Critical Review and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Case

The present evolutionary phase in international economic and political relations involves the analysis of a "new globalization" and the profound reshaping of multipolarity. This article examines the fundamental elements of the newly emerging globalization morphology from a critical standpoint on the key aspects of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). It aims to discern why such free trade agreements are significant expressions and imprints of the unfolding new multipolarity. It focuses on crucial dimensions of such international socioeconomic agreements for deepened global cooperation and development. For the analysis, we distinguish between the structures of the previous globalization regime and some evolutionary dimensions of the gradual transition to a "new globalization" (e.g., the RCEP). We contend that such agreements enrich regional economic and social integration and can expand globalized transnational flows, thereby boosting efficient cooperation for reconstructing future dynamics of international economic development.

Can the Sick Speak? Global Health Governance and Health Subalternity

Global Health Governance (GHG) uses a set of financial, normative, and epistemic arguments to retain and amplify its influence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the GHG regime used its own successes and failures to prescribe more of itself while demanding further resources. However, the consistent failures of this form governance and its appeasement to a dominant neoliberal ideology lead to the following question: Is the global health governance regime failing at its goal of improving health or succeeding at other political and ideological goals that necessitate such failures? Using concepts and ideas from social theory and post-colonial studies; I examine the definitions, epistemic basis, and drivers of GHG and propose certain conditions for the legitimacy of a global health governance system. Examining historical and current cases, I find that the GHG regime currently fails to fulfil such conditions of legitimacy and instead creates spaces that limit rather than help many populations it purports to serve. Those spaces of sickness confine people and reduce them into a state of health subalternity. In being health subalterns, people’s voices are neither sought nor heard in formulating the policies that determine their health. Finally, I argue that research and policymaking on global health should not be confined to the current accepted frameworks that assumes legitimacy and benevolence of GHG, and propose steps to establish an alternative, emancipatory model of understanding and governing global health.

Article: European Union Law and Global Investment Regime: Unshell Proposal as a Next (Mis)step of the EU Against Investment Treaty Arbitration?

This article addresses a largely unchartered interdisciplinary research area of the global investment regime and European Union (EU) law with an emphasis on the prevention of international tax avoidance in the EU. It focuses on the intersections between newly proposed anti-tax avoidance legislation by the European Commission that is known as the Unshell Directive (UD) and international investment agreements (IIAs). In this article, the author sets a stage for the intersections by discussing the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case law and the commission’s actions aimed against the most powerful enforcement tool in the global investment regime, i.e., the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, by attempting to render it illegal and ineffective within the EU. The corresponding reactions from the arbitral tribunals are also addressed. The discussion evolves to identify and analyse the interplay between the proposal of the UD (also the Unshell Proposal or UP) and the IIAs to reveal that the impact of the former on the latter is ambiguous by design in order to minimalize legal certainty vis-à-vis protection of foreign investment in the EU via shell entities. This constitutes a foundation for potential, seismic tensions between the UD and the global investment regime that are not beneficial for marketing and development of the EU internal (single) market and may thus weaken the EU’s global competitiveness in the area of foreign investments. international investment law, EU law, good faith, ISDS, tax avoidance, shell entities

Entangled Paths through Different Times: Refugees in and from the African Horn

Migration has played a key role in the history of the Horn of Africa. This article looks at the migration experiences of three Eritreans who left their region for a safer life elsewhere, each under unique circumstances. Gerezghier, in the 1960s, could rely on his personal skills and luck. Fidel, in the 1970s, could make use of emerging asylum procedures and Western countries' anticommunist refugee policies. Samrawit's fate was more challenging and precarious, in the contemporary context of international refugees' deteriorating status. All three experienced violence, insecurity, and uncertainty. The global context of their personal experiences, however, has changed considerably over the past three generations. To explore the entanglements of individual trajectories with protracted regional conflict, international relations, and an emerging global refugee regime, this article adopts a phenomenological approach, one that takes into account social life-worlds and their zeitgeist.

A Critical Analysis of China’s Role in Global Energy Governance as a Strategy for Energy Security and Seeking Hegemony

In the turn of the twenty-first, China has grown to become the largest energy consumer in the world, the largest energy producer globally and has risen to prominence as one of the leaders in the development of alternative and renewable energy sources. This has granted China the status as a leader in global energy governance. But while China has actively participated in international energy markets as a massive competition, this has also been juxtaposed with an odd reluctance to ambitiously participate in global energy regimes. However, under President Xi Jinping this has changed, and China has become more and more dominant in the global energy sector; not just in the market but now in its governance. From its inclusion in international energy institutions to its role in energy development in the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS and New Development Bank; we can now see how China has expanded its dominance in the energy sector. By using qualitative methods, this paper critically analyses China’s strive to become a global hegemony via dominance in the energy development sector, both as a tool for its energy security as well as to hold geopolitical control over developing nations that rely on China for their energy needs.

KEBIJAKAN DONALD TRUMP MENARIK AMERIKA SERIKAT DARI KESEPAKATAN PARIS TAHUN (2016-2020)

This article aims to describe the United States' environmental foreign policy in the Donald Trump regime as well as to analyze the causes or factors that determine Trump's policy in withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement directly after he replaced the previous president, Barack Obama. Qualitative research methods, descriptive-explanatory and literature review were used, and used the Rational Actor Model described by Mohtar Mas'oed and Thomas Burch in looking at the foreign policy taken by Trump as the executive leader. The results of the study found that Trump's actions responded to the policies of the global climate regime to secure the accumulation of profits from the electricity industry which contributed large revenues to the country's GDP treasury and fulfilled its political promises to its supporters. Trump calculated that there would be losses in the economic sector and domestic coal resources due to the Clean Power Plan policy

Everything Stays the Same while Everything Changes

Everything Stays the Same while Everything Changes

(Some) refugees welcome: When is differentiating between refugees unlawful discrimination?

Europe’s extraordinary response to those fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has prompted many criticisms of Europe’s treatment of other refugees, and indeed people of colour and members of ethnic minorities fleeing Ukraine. While stark, this differentiated response in not unusual: The global refugee regime treats different refugees differently, as a matter of course. Refugees often encounter racialized migration controls, and systems which privilege some refugees over others. The article seeks to clarify when these practices violate the international legal prohibitions on discrimination on grounds of race and nationality. To do so, it focuses on race discrimination in general international human rights law, clarifying the interaction between general human rights principles and instruments, and the specialist instrument in the field, the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. We identify how differences in treatment on grounds of nationality may engage the prohibition on race discrimination both directly (in particular when nationality equates to national origin) or indirectly. Concerning nationality discrimination, the article focuses in particular on the added value of Article 3 of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, which obliges states to ‘apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin.’ We examine Article 3 both within the overall scheme of the Refugee Convention and as a source to guide interpretation of international human rights norms.