This thematic issue addresses the relationship between local self-governance and the state. Self-regulation is not understood as political organisation at the municipal level, but rather as the rules that emerge in the social context. Local self-regulations of individual local groups or communities and their arrangements with other groups at the local level are to be considered. On this basis, the interactions and relations with state authorities will be analysed.

In the various contributions based on a specific social science approach or preferring an interdisciplinary approach, we expect the analysis of different contexts and world regions. However, we assume that despite looking at the different constellations, common patterns emerge. This assumption underlies the thematic issue. Ultimately, an answer to the question of convincing liaison could lie in specifying its conditions.

All contributions should be based upon empirical research. They should explain the kind of methods and theories which are used; the definition of concepts like state, weak statehood, local self-governance, civil society or social capital or other concepts which contribute to an in-depth understanding of self-regulation. We suggest three key questions:

1) Which areas of community life are covered by collective rules that are given or upheld by this community? Which social norms, values or moralities do the regulations contain? What patterns of local self-governance can be identified?

2) What mechanisms of local community building can be observed? How are groups organized, and how does the internal decision-making work? What can we say about the collective identity and the legitimization of the groups?

3) What are the relations to the state? Are they mutually supportive and complementary, or are they in conflict? What form and styles of governance can be identified? How does the relationship between self-regulated groups and the state change the perception of weak statehood?

The proposed thematic issue on The Causes and Modes of European Disintegration seeks to answer two main questions: First, what are the drivers of potential European disintegration across countries? Second, what are the actual and potential modes of European disintegration beyond a full-blown exit from the EU?

The contributions on the causes of EU disintegration aim to go beyond the immediate causes of Brexit. They could for instance address the impact of ignoring referendums on EU Treaty changes, the impact of Covid-19 on political attitudes, and how domestic political reactions mediate the relationship between Euroscepticism and support for disintegration. It is clear that the extensively studied proximate causes of Brexit may be different from more long-term drivers in both the UK as well as other member states. Are other countries likely to want to reverse certain aspects of European integration?

The second question on the modes of disintegration asks a question that has been largely overlooked in the extant literature. The envisioned contributions on the modes of disintegration go beyond the growing literature on Brexit, differentiated integration, and noncompliance. Indeed, they can discuss issues such as exit by non-state actors, (temporary) opt-outs from the Eurozone or Schengen, and proposed changes to Article 50. We seek contributions that study how to exit partially or fully from aspects of European integration.

The thematic issue innovates not only by the questions, but also by deploying a multi-disciplinary social science perspective. Proposed contributions will be sought from quantitative, qualitative, and theoretical scholars from a wide array of disciplines in social sciences covering political science, economics, law, and sociology.

Taken together, the proposed articles will advance scholarly understanding of European (dis)integration, and produce timely and policy-relevant insights that should appeal to Politics and Governance’s traditional readership and beyond.

Since the 1990s, the study of the European Union has been increasingly informed by tools and approaches borrowed from comparative political science. This “comparative turn" in EU studies has taken place at conceptual, theoretical, and empirical levels. Both the analysis of the current state of the political system and institutional structures in the EU, as well as debates on historical polity-building processes and possible ways ahead, gain from comparative analyses of the institutional and constitutional setup of the Union and its functioning. Against the background of the current political and policy challenges the EU faces, it is high time to utilize the merit of analytical comparison—and the political system of Canada offers a splendid opportunity to do so.

The aim of this issue is twofold: First, it assembles comparative studies focusing on (parts of) the political systems of the EU and Canada to provide new insights into how the Union works. Second, the contributions of this issue will discuss how comparative analyses can improve our understanding of the EU and what the lessons, merits and limits of the comparative method are in EU studies.

We invite innovative empirical comparative analyses of the EU’s political system. Empirically, these studies can cover a broad array of foci as long as they explicitly compare the EU to Canada. The issue will focus on two general topics:

1. Constitution and institutions: This section discusses questions related to the constitutional development of the EU and Canada, their polity and institutional architecture and the functioning of democracy in a multi-level system.
2. Policy fields and decision-making processes: This section analyses how decisions are taken and implemented in different policy areas in the EU and Canada, including policy responses to crises, and how the involved actors and institutions interact.

Covering this broad range of aspects allows us to explore the potential of a comparative turn in EU politics on a conceptual and methodological level while at the same time giving insights into the current state of the art in using comparative approaches to study the EU.

International studies have come a long way to perceive the global level as composed of more than states and their interactions. There are now vibrant debates about the rise and role of non-state actors in global governance and the emergence of a global civil society. This thematic issue contributes to these debates by analysing the publics that shape global politics.

Rather than debating whether or not there is one global public, as is often done, the thematic issue stresses the plurality of publics and proposes to unpack this plurality by inquiring into the notions of publicness that underpin the various publics. Conceptualising publics as social spaces in which actors compete for attention and support for their political agendas and where they debate inter- and transnational issues, the thematic issue differentiates three notions of publicness: First, just as politics within states, global politics is marked by legitimating references to public interests—understood as general rather than particular interests—which are usually the subject of fierce deliberation and controversy. Second, public is an attribute ascribed to actors and issues, usually through distinctions between public and private actors and issues. These distinctions are likewise subject to contestation. Third, publicness in the sense of transparency is a matter of the availability—or withholding—of information about the issues that are debated in global politics.

One of the most visible developments that affects how publics shape global politics is the transformation of communication and information technologies. It is profoundly changing how publics are constituted and how they matter. Against the background of this transformation, the contributions in the thematic issue study publics in a range of policy fields, guided by the following questions: What is the role of publics in global politics? How do various actors shape the prevalent understandings of what is—or should be—public? How have the relations between publics and global politics changed?

Trade and investment policies are usually not high on the political agenda, but both policy areas have become a lot more controversial in recent years. It is argued that one important reason why Trump won the 2016 election was his appeal to groups in the American society who felt they had lost jobs and income due to increased competition from international trade. In Europe, too, a number of major trade agreements have been met with large protests, such as the EU's agreement with Canada, and not least the attempt to reach an agreement with the United States. Simultaneously, we have seen a strengthening of regimes designed to control investments flows.

Recent studies have shown that radical-right parties increasingly take issue-ownership of anti-globalisation and that this might be a breeding ground for protectionism not just in voters but among more mainstream parties as well. At the same time, in the WTO’s annual report, Director-General Roberto Azevêdo maintained: “Historically high levels of trade-restrictive measures are hurting growth, job creation and purchasing power around the world”. There are clear signs that trade and investments policies are increasingly assessed in a geopolitical context, with the rise of the Chinese economy as one important trigger.

These twinned conditions of increasing economic nationalism and an anti-globalization backlash provides the point of departure for this thematic issue. We want to investigate how these forces impact the management of current trade and investment policies, thereby redrawing economic borders. More specifically, this thematic issue aims to address how the management of economic globalisation is being shaped by internal and external pressure. We invite papers that address the following overarching questions:

• How do domestic and international (geo)political dynamics affect trade and investment policy?
• How do the responses of economic and political actors potentially shape the redrawing of economic borders and the future management of globalisation?

This thematic issue aims to provide a theoretical and empirical assessment of the impact of the “polycrisis” (Zeitlin et al., 2019) on the EU, focusing particularly on the most recent crises that the Union has been confronted with. In so doing, the thematic issue engages and contributes to a rich literature that has both theorized and assessed how the EU coped with the string of crises that have hit it, starting with the economic and financial crisis of the early 2010s.

By keeping its empirical focus on events that occurred from 2020 onwards, and on institutional changes—broadly defined: rules of behaviour, organizations, beliefs, and norms—the thematic issue provides new empirical data to understand the ongoing institutional adaptation/transformation of the EU and the contestation around it. At the same time, building both on theories of institutional change and theories of EU integration, it makes an up-to-date and rigorous assessment of the capacity (or lack thereof) of the EU to manage new challenges.

After the introduction of the editors, the thematic collection will include several substantive articles focusing on the impact of the pandemic, the implications of the war in Ukraine, and the responses to climate change. Together, the articles included in this collection will address questions like: To what extent, and in what ways have crises triggered the Europeanisation of public policy in the member states? How have they changed the powers of the EU institutions and inter-institutional relations? Has the legitimacy of the EU been strengthened or weakened because of such changes? Have institutional changes been (de)politicised by political parties and parliaments?

The thematic issue will deal with topical issues of high relevance both to scholars of comparative and EU politics and policies, and will also be of strong interest to civil servants and policy-makers.

This thematic issue focuses on the evolution of EU fiscal governance under the pressure of three major crises. When the euro crisis erupted, the EU reacted by strengthening fiscal regulation. The rules of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) became stricter and new measures constraining the spending of member states were adopted. On the contrary, with the output of the Covid-19 pandemic, these rules were temporarily suspended. Due to an unprecedented, if provisional, recovery programme—Next Generation EU (NGEU)—the EU could mobilise large amounts of resources and distribute them to the member states. An enlarged European borrowing power seemed to be the centre stage in the reaction to the pandemic. However, the EU’s fiscal rules have only been suspended, not abolished, and the NGEU is temporary, has no agreed repayment scheme, only half of its size comes in the form of grants, and it entails forms of conditionality which link to the pre-existing fiscal regulation. Most recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may lead to a new NGEU-type fund in response to the economic fallout of the war and possibly also to support common military spending. In this thematic issue, we aim to draw from the history of federations with different forms of fiscal federalism, including federal taxation, fiscal rules, and common debt. What can the EU learn from those federal experiences? Is calling those changes in the EU fiscal regime a "Hamiltonian moment" justified? How can we interpret EU fiscal developments if analyzed in a comparative fiscal federalism perspective? Has less fiscal regulation and more fiscal capacity changed the nature of EU fiscal integration and made the EU more similar to a consolidated federal polity? This thematic issue welcomes empirical and conceptual/theoretical papers with a comparative angle which will try to explore some of these questions.

Active labour market policies (ALMPs) play a pivotal role in facilitating school-to-work transition (Cefalo et al., 2020). Comparative research on the design and implementation of youth-oriented ALMPs has assessed the performance of different types of school-to-work regimes (e.g., Pastore, 2015) as well as the performance of different countries and the pertinent policies and institutions in place in them (e.g., Brzinsky-Fay, 2014). A gap in the literature concerns how peripheral regions in Europe have attempted to facilitate school-to-work transition and stimulate youth employment (Simões et al., 2022). Such regions (rural, coastal, mountainous, inland, or outermost regions) are faced with specific challenges that resonate with several concepts in political science, such as urban–rural cleavages or responsive policymaking.

This thematic issue offers a forum dedicated to discussing the design, implementation, and impact of youth-oriented ALMPs in European peripheries. The need to address territorialised, youth-oriented ALMPs is pressing for several reasons. For one, the whole socioeconomic paradigm is undergoing fundamental changes due to the dual transition (digital and green) that is expected to have an impact on the rural/urban divide. In certain regions, the level of youth unemployment tends to be higher than suggested by existing studies, which have mostly focused on the national level. This implies that closer inspection of the subnational level in general and the peripheral regions in particular will reveal more marked cross-national differences (Cefalo et al., 2020). Furthermore, the youth population in rural areas across several European countries (Denmark, France, Italy, and Germany) has been increasing quickly over the past ten years. These trends must be systematically explored so that researchers can draw well-grounded and meaningful implications for the territorialisation of youth-oriented ALMPs to the attention of stakeholders at regional, national, and European levels (Simões et al., 2022).

This thematic issue will inform readers about the challenges facing the development of youth-oriented ALMPs in European peripheries. These include the limited capacity of governmental actors to reach out to vulnerable young people, such as those not in education, employment, or training; existing mismatches between local economic opportunities, young people’s needs, and services and programs delivered at the regional level; and insufficient collaboration between the education/training sector and employment services. We also expect our readership to learn about on-the-ground best practices and to become better informed about the possibilities available to young people thanks to the digitalisation of public employment services.

This thematic issue is prepared in the context of an ongoing project supported by the EEA and Norway Grants—the Track-IN project (https://www.track-in.eu/web). The editors will organise a Summer School in June 2023 and corresponding authors of abstracts accepted for this thematic issue are invited to participate. Their papers will be discussed and authors will receive feedback from all the different teams involved. Expenses with participation (travel, accommodation, and daily allowance) in the Summer School will be covered by the project. The open-access licenses for the accepted papers will also be covered by the Track-IN project.

References

Cefalo, R., Scandurra, R., & Kazepov, Y. (2020). Youth labour market integration in European regions. Sustainability, 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093813

Brzinsky-Fay, C. (2014). The measurement of school to work transitions as processes. European Societies, 16(3), 213–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2013.821620

Pastore, F. (2015). The youth experience gap. Explaining national differences in the school-to-work transition. Springer.

Simões, F., Erdogan, E, Muratovic, M., & Sik, D. (2022). Scrutinising the exceptionalism of young rural NEETs: A bibliometric review. Youth & Society, 54(2S), 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118X211040534

Since its emergence at the end of the Cold War, Arctic regional governance has witnessed multiple changes involving various actors—nation-states, indigenous peoples, local and subnational authorities, non-governmental organizations, a plurality of regional and international organizations (IOs), and multilateral development banks. The studies on regional governance brought to our attention the importance of this variety of actors and their implications for development of the field of area-studies (e.g., Haas, 2016; Selin, 2012). The most known examples of these actors are the European Union (e.g., Andonova, 2003; Selin & VanDeveer, 2015), the United Nations (e.g., Conca et al., 2017; Dalmer, 2021), the Arctic Council, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, global forums and the World Bank (Buntaine & Parks, 2013; Kuyper & Bäckstrand, 2016; Lavelle, 2021; Obydenkova et al., 2022; Tosun & Mišić, 2021).

However, there are also younger and less known actors, yet significant ones, such as the Eurasian Economic Union, the Eurasian Bank of Development, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as other multilateral and national banks (see, e.g., Ambrosio et al., 2022; Djalilov & Hartwell, 2022; Gutner, 2002; Hall et al., 2022; Hartwell, 2021). The role of different types of regional IOs, that is, democracy-composed versus autocracy-led ones (Libman & Obydenkova, 2018a, 2018b; Obydenkova & Libman, 2019), became the focal point in some of the most recent studies on regional governance and comparative regionalism. Only recently scholars started paying more attention to the different implications of these under-studied actors for sustainable development and climate governance, for socio-political and economic transformations, as well as for security governance (Ambrosio et al., 2021; Hall et al., 2022; Obydenkova, 2022a, 2022b). Yet, the variety of these actors and their implications has not yet been applied to studies on Arctic regional governance. This thematic issue aims to fill in this gap.

To this day, the Arctic remains a fragile diplomatic zone where some EU member states and the US border Russia, whose commitment to sustainable development is a highly contested issue, in addition to the confrontation triggered by the war in Ukraine in February 2022 (Hartwell, 2022; Kochtcheeva, 2021; Obydenkova, 2022c). Moreover, China is becoming an important actor in the Arctic governance and Eurasia through its involvement in various regional IOs (see Agostinis & Urdinez, 2021; Fravel et al., 2021; Hall et al., 2021; Lavelle, 2021). The combination of democratic and autocratic actors within Arctic regional governance may have multiple implications for both collaboration and confrontation. The latter is in line with another set of literature on the importance of political regimes and historical legacies in regional governance (see, e.g., Andonova, 2003; Bättig & Bernauer, 2009; Nazarov & Obydenkova, 2021). Thus, the Arctic region is a unique case study: It encompasses all types of regional governance, environmental as well as climate-related, socio-economic, political, and even security governance, as well as a variety of actors.

This thematic issue aims to advance our understanding of Arctic regional governance by including into our analysis different types of actors, such as regional and non-regional international organizations, Indigenous peoples, social and environmental movements and organizations, nation-states and their political regimes. The goal is to shed more light on ongoing transformations, challenges, and perils in the Arctic region, and advance our knowledge of this highly fragile part of the world. The findings presented in this collection of articles aspire to be highly useful not only for scholars but also for policy-makers as well.

References

Agostinis, G., & Urdinez, F. (2021). The Nexus between authoritarian and environmental regionalism: An analysis of China’s driving role in the Shanghai cooperation organization. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(4/5). https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1974887

Ambrosio, T., Hall, A., & Obydenkova, A. (2022). Sustainable development agendas of regional international organizations: The EBRD and the EDB. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(4/5), 304–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1979412

Andonova, L. B. (2003). Transnational politics of the environment: The European Union and environmental policy in Central and Eastern Europe. MIT Press.

Bättig, M., & Bernauer, T. (2009). National institutions and global public goods: Are democracies more cooperative in climate change policy? International Organization, 63(2), 281–308. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818309090092

Buntaine, M. T., & Parks, C. B. (2013). When do environmentally focused assistance projects achieve their objectives? Evidence from the World Bank post-project evaluations. Global Environmental Politics, 13(2), 65–88. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00167

Conca, K., Thwaites, J., & Lee, G. (2017). Climate change and the UN Security Council: Bully pulpit or bull in a China shop? Global Environmental Politics, 17(2), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00398

Dalmer, N. (2021). Building environmental peace: The UN Environment programme and knowledge creation for environmental peacebuilding. Global Environmental Politics, 21(3), 147–168. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00617

Djalilov, H., & Hartwell, C. (2022). Do social and environmental capabilities improve bank stability? Evidence from transition countries. Post-Communist Economies, 34(5), 624–646. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631377.2021.1965359

Fravel, M. T., Lavelle, K. C., & Odgaard, L. (2021). China engages the Arctic:  A great power in a regime complex. Asian Security. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/14799855.2021.1986008

Gutner, T. (2002). Banking on the environment: Multilateral development banks and their environmental performance in Central and Eastern Europe. MIT Press.

Haas, P. (2016). Regional environmental governance. In T. Börzel & T. Risse (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative regionalism (pp. 430–456). Oxford University Press.

Hall, S. G. F., Lenz, T., & Obydenkova, A. (2022). Environmental commitments and rhetoric over the pandemic crisis: Social media and legitimation of the AIIB, the EAEU, and the EU. Post-Communist Economies, 34(5), 577–602. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631377.2021.1954824

Hartwell, C. A. (2021). Part of the problem? The Eurasian Economic Union and environmental challenges in the former Soviet Union. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(4/5). https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1960173

Hartwell, C. A. (2022). The world has changed: Moving to an officially post-post-transition region. Eastern European Economics, 60(3), 189–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/00128775.2022.2066939

Kochtcheeva, L. V. (2021). Foreign policy, national interests, and environmental positioning: Russia’s post Paris climate change actions, discourse, and engagement. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(4/5). https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1968912

Kuyper, J. W., & Bäckstrand, K. (2016). Accountability and representation: Nonstate actors in UN climate diplomacy. Global Environmental Politics, 16(2), 61–81. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00350

Lavelle, K. C. (2021). Regime, climate, and region in transition: Russian participation in the Arctic Council. Problems of Post-Communism. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1994422

Libman, A., & Obydenkova, A. (2018a). Understanding authoritarian regionalism, Journal of Democracy, 29(4), 151–165. https://journalofdemocracy.org/articles/understanding-authoritarian-regionalism

Libman, A., & Obydenkova, A. (2018b). Regional international organizations as a strategy of autocracy: The Eurasian Economic Union and Russian foreign policy. International Affairs, 94(5), 1037–1058. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy147

Nazarov, Z., & Obydenkova, A. (2022). Environmental challenges and political regime transition: The role of historical legacies and the European Union in Eurasia. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(4/5), 396–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1995437

Obydenkova, A. (2022a). Environmental regionalism and international organizations: Implications for post-Communism. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(4/5),  293–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2022.2044353

Obydenkova, A. (2022b). Global environmental politics and international organizations: The Eurasian and European experience. Post-Communist Economies, 34(5), 565–576. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631377.2022.2028477

Obydenkova, A. (2022c). Sustainable development and actors of regional environmental governance: Eurasia at the crossroads. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(4/5), 436–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2022.2109116

Obydenkova, A., & Libman, A. (2019). Authoritarian regionalism in the world of international organizations: Global perspective and Eurasian enigma. Oxford University Press.

Obydenkova, A., Rodrigues Vieira, V. G., & Tosun, J. (2022). The impact of new actors in global environmental politics: The European Bank for reconstruction and development meets China. Post-Communist Economies, 34(5), 603–623. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631377.2021.1954825

Selin, H. (2012). Global environmental governance and regional centers. Global Environmental Politics, 12(3), 18–37. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00121

Selin, H., & VanDeveer, S. D. (2015). Broader, deeper and greener: European Union environmental politics, policies, and outcomes. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 40(1), 309–335.

Tosun, J., & Mišić, M. (2021). Post-Communist countries’ participation in global forums on climate action. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(4/5). https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1994423

Within less than a year, two dramatic international events have thrown the liberal international order into a severe crisis. After three decades of using military force for complex peace-, state-, and nation-building missions, the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 is a tipping point of liberal interventionism. Less than a year later, the Russian invasion in Ukraine marks the return of inter-state war and nuclear threats to Europe. These events challenge two core features of the liberal international order: (a) the prohibition on the use of armed force against the territorial integrity of a sovereign state and (b) the collective governance of international security and conflict resolution via the Security Council of the United Nations. Contributions to this thematic issue will examine this dual challenge and its consequences on the two interrelated levels of the international normative order and the level of the states that have thus far maintained the liberal international order.

With a view to the international system, contributions to this thematic issue treat the root causes of the West’s failure in Afghanistan and elsewhere to bring peace, democracy, and human rights. Furthermore, contributions will discuss the consequences of the West’s retreat for peacekeeping and conflict management as viewed from the Global North and from the Global South.

With a view to the liberal democracies that have maintained the liberal international order, our authors examine how the dramatic events in Afghanistan and Ukraine impact national security and defense policy and force posture. While finding a general trend to withdraw from liberal interventions and to re-invest in homeland security, the contributions also point to country-specific path-dependencies and the influence of political culture and institutions. The articles draw on a wide range of methods, including single and comparative case studies, survey experiments, and quantitative analyses.

2024 will mark the 20th anniversary of the European Union’s “Big Bang” enlargement. EU’s conditionality not only amplified the ongoing “triple transition” in EU member states but was also instrumental in facilitating countries’ embeddedness into the West. However, assumptions of the EU’s transformative power on new members after accession are rather ambiguous, ensuing both from EU’s inability to enforce the rules once a candidate country becomes a member and from the fact that countries were preparing to join an entirely different Union—one that was, at the time, unmarked by economic and migration crisis, security threats, or centrifugal forces resulting in disintegration. As a response to external and internal shocks, Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries have also participated in redesigning dysfunctional EU policies: This thematic issue challenges us to consider how.

We invite up-to-date research that revolves around the following questions:

• How have CEE new member states, as passive actors, changed the EU? What were their degree of institutional quality and policy capacity to adapt to the EU? In turn, what was the level of absorptive capacity of EU institutions and their most prominent challenges (e.g., the creation of efficient decision-making mechanisms, democratic backsliding) in incorporating these new member states?
• How have CEE new member states, as active players, changed the EU? How have they used EU institutions to advance their own interests?
• Should global crises and EU dysfunctionalities be understood as intervening variables in the positive adaptation of new member states? How is global change a challenge to the EU?
• To what extent, if any, are new member states responsible for institutional inertia/institutional vibrancy in EU’s approach to endogenous and exogenous shocks (e.g., (de)democratization, resurgence of identity politics, ontological security, security threats, spread of extremism, etc.).

We encourage scholars and researchers to address why and under what circumstances are countries willing to proceed with the integration of “core state powers” and what are the repercussions of these dynamics for EU’s institutional set-up, as characterized by differentiation.

Migration, representation, and participation are three major processes that characterize contemporary politics. This thematic issue aims at connecting these processes and analyzing their dynamics. Around the world, an increasing number of migrants engages in the political life of their home and/or host country, and previous research shows the diversity of forms and consequences of this involvement, illustrating how migrants are politically represented or what are the obstacles for representation. The political representation and participation of migrants remains highly salient in the context of new waves of migration, of de-democratizing trends in several countries, and of processes of strong anti-minority rhetoric promoted by right-wing populists in many democratic countries.

This thematic issue addresses these topics from two different perspectives: the supply side of political parties and politicians who claim to represent and include migrants, and the demand side of migrants who participate and strive to be represented. It brings together articles addressing the following research questions: Why do migrants participate? How do they perceive the idea of political participation? Who represents migrants? What are the main outcomes of participation and/or representation? What are the contemporary challenges for migrants’ participation? How do political parties pursue the representation of migrants?

The thematic issue has a broad geographic coverage, including many countries in Europe and beyond, and advances the research agenda in migration studies and party politics in three ways. First, it proposes important analytical frameworks that can be used in further research. Second, some of the articles propose new measures that are used to gauge the extent of participation and representation, which can be replicated by future studies. Third, the contributions bring relevant empirical evidence indicating how migration is linked to politics in contemporary societies.

Democracy is not a hallmark of Muslim countries. Yet Indonesia is a democracy, but who is paying attention? This thematic issue will revolve around the central theme of agents of change and integration that have shaped Indonesia’s identity, culture, government, governance, law, security, and democracy in terms of geopolitics and internal stability.

A unique feature of this thematic issue will be the novelty of the approach to the proposed topics: Some articles will focus on individuals who have passed away or disappeared but who continue to influence Indonesian society—such as Indonesia’s fourth president, Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), jihadi activist and Muhammadiyah member Dr Fauzi AR, and even Indonesia’s dissident people’s poet Wiji Thukul, who remains an icon for social justice although his contribution to the 1998 Reformation Movement is still highly under-researched.

The thematic issue will also look at Indonesia’s Indo-Pacific agenda and regional security issues with an insider’s analysis of Indonesia as a global maritime fulcrum managing the vested interests of Southeast Asia, China, and the US. Some articles will concern Indonesian law, focusing on the downgrading of the powers of the Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission, laws protecting traditional knowledge and cultural expressions, and Indonesia’s state ideology—the Pancasila—reviewing its application in society: Together, these contributions aim to capture the sentiment for or against the current Jokowi government on important national issues.

Finally, research on women terrorists and deradicalization of Indonesian terrorists will complement the discussion of “heroes, traitors, and villains” to provide a well-rounded analysis of these last categories and what it means—officially and unofficially—to be a “hero” in times of turmoil.

Our aim is to fill in the gap in scholarly understanding of Indonesia from the perspective of local, national, and international themes. Thus this thematic issue will provide robust investigation, assessment, and debate about central agents and events relevant to all aspects of modern Indonesian society, politics, the state, and democracy, from experts in a range of complementary disciplines.

Inter-generational matters are relevant in many societal issues, many of which require consideration from an equity or justice perspective. For instance, climate change requires current generations to invest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, lessening the financial burden on future generations, and minimizing adverse impacts of climate change that are likely to affect the latter. The financial debt of countries today to cover governmental expenditures also affects the financial conditions of future generations. Nevertheless, democratic governance as seen in many countries today suffers from political “short-termism” as a structural problem of electoral democracy, because voters tend to vote for those who contribute to maximizing the well-being of the “generation of today,” ignoring that also the “decisions of today” will greatly impact the future.

Efforts are being made in some countries and regions to reflect certain considerations for future generations in current decision-making and academic literature on this topic is growing. There are, however, relatively few assessments that determine which current attempts to secure inter-generational equity and justice are successful, or that even attempt to explain their actual success. Ethical issues at the individual level, the capacity to anticipate and prevent, the question of representatives for future generations, deliberation processes, the roles of experts, cultural differences, modes of governance—all these aspects play certain and important roles, but how and to what extent they do so is yet unclear.

It is also unclear if an institution focused on dealing with climate change would also be able to address governmental debt crises at the same time. Therefore, this issue proposes to monitor progress and explore the efforts done in the world today to incorporate considerations for future generations in current decision-making, as well as to examine how academic circles in political science and economics are adapting their theories toward this end. Articles on matters of sustainability and climate change are especially appreciated, but submissions dealing with equally important issues for the inter-generational cause are also welcome.

Political forces critical of economic globalization have been on the rise globally over the past decade. As the world’s three major economic powers—the USA, China and European Union—have shifted towards more inward-looking economic strategies, the American-led liberal international order has entered a new crisis phase. The still ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and, more recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are arguably further reinforcing these trends. Against this backdrop, many observers have indicated that, after a period of “hyperglobalization,” we may be entering a new era, in which international trade and investment relations are again increasingly shaped by geostrategic and security considerations.

This thematic issue seeks to examine these trends and their implications in a critical and empirical light. It seeks contributions speaking to topics such as:

1. Continuities and change: To what extent have international trade and investment relations been transformed over the past decade? What are the major changes in the global political economic regime? And are there important continuities? What are the similarities and differences of the current period of globalization compared to earlier historical periods (e.g., Cold War, imperialism, etc.)?

2. Drivers of the geoeconomic turn: what factors have been driving the increased attention to geoeconomic competition in international economic policy-making? To what extent is it driven by the great power competition between China and the USA, as opposed to potential other structural trends?

3. Implications: How has the geoeconomic turn been manifested in various aspects of the global political economy (e.g., trade, investment, industrial policy, technology, finance, or knowledge regimes)? How has it contributed to rearranging economic linkages between the USA, China and Europe in the core of the global system? But also, just as importantly, what has the geoeconomic turn so far meant for countries in the periphery/Global South?

Until recently, we knew very little about the role of populist governments in EU decision-making. The “crucial case” of refugee distribution in the EU has demonstrated that their behaviour is ruled by “unpolitics”: they reject formal and informal rules of decision-making if these are not conducive to their preferred outcome; they reject traditional means of ensuring compromises such as package-deals and side-payments; and they reject the final solution and exploit the ensuing deadlock to prove that the EU is weak and dysfunctional.

However, to what extent is “unpolitics” a phenomenon unique to migration—an area prone to (nativist) populist capture? This thematic issue aims to compare the behaviour of populist governments in different policy areas to better understand under which conditions “unpolitics” are more likely to be used in EU decision-making and when they are more likely to be successful.

We expect “unpolitics” to be present and successful in areas of “low risk” and “high gain” like climate politics—namely, in areas where the harm provided by a non-decision is neither immediate nor blatant (low risk) and areas that are more easily politicised than purely technical legislative proposals (high gain).

The scope of gender equality reforms implemented across various political institutions—parliaments, political parties, government machinery—around the world has diversified. While women’s representation and particularly quotas have captured significant attention (Baker, 2019; Dahlerup, 2006; Franceschet et al., 2012; Krook, 2009; Lang et al., 2022; Rubio-Marín & Lépinard, 2018), political institutions are increasingly encouraged to reconsider their internal processes and norms. This includes changes regarding: working hours and cultures to improve work/life balance; work health and safety regimes to reduce gender-based harassment, intimidation, and assault; and work processes and outputs (e.g., legislation and policy) to normalise gender equality accountability mechanisms in the workplace (Childs, 2020; IPU, 2011, 2012, 2016; Palmieri, 2018, 2021; Palmieri & Baker, 2022).

The process by which these reforms are implemented, as well as their effectiveness and impact, is increasingly of interest to academic scholars. Yet, particularly evident in the gender sensitive parliaments literature, the academic focus to date has been on reforms initiated in the Global North (Euro-American-Australasian) than the Global South (Childs, 2016, 2020; Erikson & Verge, 2022), although there are important notable exceptions (Rai & Spary, 2019). This focus on developed, rather than developing, parliamentary institutions risks a more comprehensive analysis of the opportunities and drivers for change, as well as nuanced understandings of very different political contexts.

In this thematic issue, we aim to showcase research from colleagues in both the Global South and the Global North, and specifically encourage papers from “unusual suspects” across the disciplines of political science, anthropology, sociology, and development studies. We are interested in collaboratively answering the following questions:

1. Who are the critical actors that drive gender equality reforms in parliamentary institutions and to what extent do they rely on/mobilise supportive coalitions or networks for those reforms?

2. How do local contexts—political, economic, and cultural—enable and/or resist gender equality reforms within parliamentary institutions?

3. To what extent can lessons about institutional gender equality reforms be universally shared and/or applied, or are they by nature, always localised?

4. Which analytical and theoretical frameworks can contribute to better understand changes across different contexts?

References

Baker, K. (2019). Pacific women in politics: Gender quota campaigns in the Pacific islands. University of Hawai`i Press.

Childs, S. (2016). The good parliament. University of Bristol.

Childs, S. (2020). Gender sensitizing parliaments guidelines: Standards and a checklist for parliamentary change. Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

Dahlerup, D. (Ed.). (2006). Women, quotas and politics. New York & London.

Erikson, J., & Verge, T. (Eds.). (2022). Parliaments as workplaces: Gendered approaches to the study of legislatures [Special Issue]. Parliamentary Affairs, 75(1). https://academic.oup.com/pa/issue/75/1

Franceschet, S., Krook, M. L.,& Piscopo, J. M. (Eds.). (2012). The impact of gender quotas. Oxford University Press. 

IPU. (2011). Gender-sensitive parliaments: A global review of good practice.

IPU. (2012). A plan of action for gender-sensitive parliaments.

IPU. (2016). Evaluating the gender sensitivity of parliaments. A self-assessment toolkit.

Krook, M. L. (2009). Quotas for women in politics: Gender and candidate selection reform worldwide. Oxford University Press.

Lang, S., Meier, P., & Sauer, B. (Eds.). (2022). Implementing gender quotas in political representation: Resisting institutions. Palgrave Macmillan.

Palmieri, S. (2018). Gender-sensitive parliaments. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.215

Palmieri, S. (2021). Realizing gender equality in parliament: A guide for parliaments in the OSCE region. OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

Palmieri, S., & Baker, K. (2022). Localising global norms: The case of family-friendly parliaments. Parliamentary Affairs, 75(1), 58–75. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsaa050

Rubio-Marín, R., & Lépinard, E. (Eds.). (2018). Transforming gender citizenship: The irresistible rise of gender quotas in Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Rai, S., & Spary, C. (2019). Performing representation: Women members in the Indian parliament. Oxford University Press.

People and populists criticize existing democracy. Populists cite popular grievances as justification for their actions and people significantly respond to populist change agents or other forms of political radicalism. Despite extensive research, we do not know enough about the alternatives to representative party democracy that people and populists envision, apart from greater citizen involvement. For example, people shaped by authoritarian and nativist views centered on hierarchy may reject pluralism in contemporary democracy but have no qualms about a power structure dominated by native elites. Different non-mainstream ideas, i.e., emanating from the populist core or the host ideology, affect preferences for different democratic principles, especially representative, direct, deliberative, or stealth. Nonetheless, our understanding of how the ideas of populists and disenchanted citizens align is empirically and conceptually limited. Too little attention has been paid to the resilience of democracy, tradeoffs need to be better understood, and space is needed to explore untheorized democratic alternatives.

The picture is equally blurred when it comes to the views of the populist actors themselves. Research suggests that their calls for referendums decrease over time while alternative deliberative bodies are often rejected. To better understand the congruence between people and populists, one must also address the limitations of methodology in favor of innovative survey items, scenario-based interviews, and survey experiments.

This calls for a reassessment of our understanding of the extent to which the ideas of populists and citizens and the alternatives they propose coincide and for a wider dissemination of relevant research addressing these shortcomings. The articles featured in this thematic issue explore these points by presenting conceptually and/or methodologically innovative contributions that will introduce these new frontiers of democracy research to a wider audience.

Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 (or later), economic and political liberalism has been in retreat globally. The rise of populist alternatives to mainstream parties, promising radical change and pointing fingers at corrupt elites, has infected not only emerging markets but also developed economies. The seeming lack of response to economic decline, with “solutions” rooted in old-fashioned Keynesian policies and the promise of cheap money, has widened economic inequality and generated socio-political unrest.

On top of all of this came the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging from an authoritarian nation (who has been reticent to let investigators access to data regarding the first days of the pandemic); most importantly, massive prohibitions on economic activity (colloquially called “lockdowns”) and on freedom of movement and speech were embraced by governments in order to fight the disease. This thematic issue examines the decline in political and economic freedom since the global financial crisis and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring how authoritarian governance and economics have apparently come back into vogue. Authors are encouraged to submit papers dealing, inter alia, with the following themes:

• The failure of political elites to deal with crisis
• Populism and its left-wing policy prescriptions
• Political and economic resilience/institutions as complex systems
• Specific COVID-19 responses and how they have enabled authoritarianism
• Comparative studies of earlier waves of authoritarianism
• The Russian invasion of Ukraine as a consequence of perceived or real “Western weakness”
• The role of China in the pandemic and its response
• Economic policies in the post-global financial crisis world
• The revival of industrial policies and their danger for global growth
• Trade protectionism and killing the goose that laid the golden egg
• Electoral reforms in democracies and their effects on freedom
• Specific political actors and their agendas
• Institutional changes and deterioration in developed economies
• Rollback of property rights globally
• Financialization as a consequence of government policy
• Authoritarian regionalism and associations
• Mis- and disinformation and the weaponization of censorship/media freedom in general
• Preferred government narratives and their opposition to reality
• Business and government partnerships against society
• Privacy, surveillance, and mandates

Status is a core concept of the traditional International Relations (IR) canon and our understanding of status-seeking has improved especially regarding what types of status hierarchies exist and how both established and rising powers “seek” status competitively. Yet, important gaps remain. First, status needs to be understood as a daily foreign policy practice, which conventional analyses tend to overlook in favour of more conventional security or political economy perspectives. Second, many analyses have nevertheless remained conspicuously West-centric, both geographically, but also conceptually, i.e., in terms of what matters politically. They also remain, for the most part, state-centric. These omissions are at odds with attempts to make the IR more global, inclusive, and analytically diverse. The articles selected for this thematic issue shall attempt to address this challenge.

Contributions shall include research on status ambitions and anxieties by non-traditional actors, especially state actors in the Global South beyond the traditional so-called “rising powers,” but also a range of non-state actors, including global cities, resistance movements, or rebel groups. This broadening of seekers of status allows for a discussion, not just of a variety of actors, but also of novel conceptual and theoretical developments in the status literature at the intersection between domestic politics and global status-seeking.

Furthermore, the thematic issue will cover the potential variability of status politics across different issue areas, from environmental to nuclear politics, from the study of security policies to the global political economy of status-seeking. Lastly, one of the core, overarching ambitions of the thematic issue is to show that thinking about status is far from being an intellectual effort alone, but that a better understanding of the motive, strategies, and consequences of status politics has clear relevance for global cooperation. For instance, when it comes to the adjustment of mutual expectations as a basis for trust, effective governance, and reliability in bilateral and multilateral relations.

The European Central Bank (ECB)—like other central banks—experienced a widening of its mandate in the course of the financial crisis and the following public debt crisis, as well as under the pressure of the Covid-19 and climate change crises. Some of its activities, such as its decisions on crisis measures, had a high degree of public salience and were controversial, as evidenced by public and political protests. Other policies, such as those lined up on climate change could be possibly beneficial but venture into policy areas that are traditionally the domain of democratic institutions. Even though the credibility of the claim that monetary policy follows a narrow and transparent goal has been shaken in the EU context, the scope for democratic control over the interpretation of the extent and limits of the ECB’s mandate remains extremely narrow. Therefore, within an unchanged Treaty framework, the ECB became the institution in charge of defining the limits of its own mandate.

The reasons for war are always miscellaneous, but ending wars becomes a huge challenge as, in current war events, the belligerent parties could arise new legitimations to continue or extend their warfare. This becomes evident since former opponents of war sometimes find it difficult to maintain their critical stance as soon as one of the warring parties has been identified as being exclusively responsible for the armed conflict. Moreover, aggressors, who start a war, often suggest themselves as victim countries that only use military force in response to former warlike aggression—apart from the fact that the country that first uses armed force is not necessarily an aggressor and, therefore, that the judgement of a warlike conflict can differ from the perspective of international law to a rather moral point of view.
Hence, the rough distinction between an offensive right to war and the mere legitimisation of defensive wars launched by contemporary just war theories is not convincing anymore, especially since the claim to “defend” democracy, freedom, and human rights is also (ab-)used to justify military interventions. Today, political and social research has to reflect that any clear distinction between bellicose and pacifist attitudes has become difficult and that war itself is an existential ethical or identity conflict which is often suggested as a fight between the good and the evil.
Against this background, the thematic issue asks: How are or can wars be legitimised by different political actors and societies being directly or indirectly involved? What sets off the advocacy of wars and arms supply on an individual level? How do (media) discourses shape the negotiation of war and defence strategies as well as de-escalation and peace strategies? What moral-ethical and legal problems arise in conflict management? What influence do war dynamics have on decision-making processes? How did the legitimisation of wars and the negotiation of peace processes take shape from the past to the present?