Readings: Vital Interests - PDF

**[Week 1]** **Ansell, Christopher (2019). The Protective State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1 & 2** **Chapter 1: Thou Shalt Protect?** The role of the state to protect citizens from harm can be traced back before the origins of the modern state, but it has changed dramatically...

**[Week 1]** **Ansell, Christopher (2019). The Protective State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1 & 2** **Chapter 1: Thou Shalt Protect?** The role of the state to protect citizens from harm can be traced back before the origins of the modern state, but it has changed dramatically over the past half century, becoming more extensive, elaborate, and politically contested. This protective role is at the heart of an implicit social contract between state and society. - Citizens give up certain rights and in return they expect protection. The protective state even extends to international politics where an international doctrine known as "responsibility to protect" requires states to proactively intervene to protect citizens of other states from genocide or humanitarian disaster. The state's protective role is not limited to protecting people from physical harm, but also extends to - Property and property rights, - Critical infrastructures, - Data, - Animals - And the environment. While the "welfare state" and the "protective state" are overlapping concepts, they also diverge in important respects. - The welfare state provides "social protection" to individuals and families in the face of the vagaries of the labor market. - The protective state seeks to protect against discrete harms, accidents, hazards, threats, and risks. Demands for state protection cross partisan lines, with the left prioritising the welfare state and the right the protective state. The state's protective role is often fraught with moral ambiguity. - To protect, the state may sometimes infringe on civil liberties or rights. The term "state" is used here to signify all the democratic and authoritative institutions of modern government, including legislative, executive, and judicial branches. - As an analytical concept, the protective state is meant to illuminate how protection serves as a basic source of political legitimation, the increasing salience of protection as a logic of governing and it offers a lens for understanding a range of trends and developments that fall between or cut across traditional analytical categories like social welfare, public health, consumer protection, criminal justice, or international security. "The mission is to explore the political and institutional dynamics that arise around the state's protective role." Three broad features of protective state politics are noted at the outset: 1. Its debates about prevention 2. Its focus on risk 3. Its tendency to securitize issues **Prevention versus Reaction** ============================== The protective state is judged by how preventive versus reactive it is. - Although the public may only expect compensation and relief after an injurious event has occurred, it often expects the state to prevent accidents and disasters from happening in the first place. In part, this shift toward prevention represents changing perceptions about the causes of harm. - For example, the meaning of "accident" has changed over time from an event that is unavoidable to something that can be prevented. This preventive focus also partly reflects expectations about the capacity to control harms. The public health community has traditionally argued for prevention strategies. - A distinctive feature of the protective state is that this preventive approach is extended to policy domains like criminal justice that have traditionally been more reactive. The politics of the protective state tend to become structured along a reactivepreventive dimension. - The limits of a reactive approach often become the basis for arguing for more preventive action. **Risk** ======== A second prominent feature of the protective state is its expanding focus on risk and increasing contestation about how to respond to it. While risk assessment and management have expanded, so have criticisms of their ability to address uncertainty. - Greater public and scientific concern about uncertainty and the irreversibility of consequences has reinforced a precautionary approach to risk. Leading to "worst case" or "possibilistic" thinking that can in turn lead to the overestimation of threats. A central theme of the protective state is "who bears the risk?" -- a theme often linked to debates about whether risk is an individual or a collective responsibility. **Security and Securitization** =============================== If "threat" is understood broadly as a potential but intentional harm, we then come to appreciate that security is not limited to military threats and may be more generic. - The process of extending the logic of security to issues beyond military security as "securitization" The politics of the protective state tend to widen the scope of securitization, raising questions about which problems and risks will be brought under the security umbrella. **Chapter 2: The Rise of the Protective State** =============================================== "The developmental path of the protective state basically follows the trajectory of state building." - As states extended their geographical reach and control, as they developed a regularized administrative machinery to deliver services, as the sense of the state as a nation was consolidated, and as democratic modes of political contestation were institutionalized, so too was the protective role of the state elaborated, expanded, and constrained. The state's protective role was primarily focused on preventing foreign invasion, maintaining public order, and to some extent safeguarding public health. - The first modern wave of protective state building occurred in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. - Militaries expanded and professionalized police forces expanded and began to specialize in crime control and a "sanitation revolution" led the state to expand its role in disease prevention. - The late-nineteenth-century state also expanded into new areas of protection -- notably, into "protective" legislation regulating the conditions of labor, often with a special focus on protecting women and children. - A second wave of organizing occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, consolidating and extending the incipient protections developed at the turn of the century - A third wave of protective state building began in the 1960s and 1970s. - Legislative developments in the 1960s and 1970s expanded and consolidated consumer and environmental protection. - The fourth wave is hard to distinguish from the third, but through a series of events beginning in the mid-1980s, like the AIDS crisis and 9/11, the most recent set of developments in the protective state were triggered. Each wave built on political and institutional developments in prior waves. Although state protections are typically instantiated in particular sectoral policies or programs (food safety, human trafficking, etc.), state protection often expands in a more general fashion, affecting several sectors at once. **The Contemporary Transformation of the Protective State** ----------------------------------------------------------- In the mid-1980s, the sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) made the provocative argument that a "risk society" was replacing "industrial society." - In this new society, concerns about the consequences of risk were magnified and fell on rich and poor alike. As a result, the ethical rationale of society shifted from equality to safety, and the risk society became oriented toward the future and the potential for harms. **Rising Expectations and Loss of Control** ------------------------------------------- The contemporary protective state is born of the paradoxical tensions between rising expectations about being protected and the fear, anxiety, and distrust that comes with personal loss of control over protection. "Cultural changes in the past two decades have increased our intolerance of risk, resulting in greater expectations of security from physical hazards, illness, environmental degradation, and even from being cheated in the marketplace." - Citizen fear and anxiety about risks is one of the driving factors of the development of the protective state. **The Policy State and the Expanding Role of Science** ------------------------------------------------------ A very broad factor in the rise of a protective state is the major expansion of the "policy state" in the second half of the twentieth century. - By creating policies and programs, the policy state can institutionalize concern about protecting citizens. - Furthermore, by extending surveillance, funding research, or collecting statistics, the policy state may increase concern about some risks and reveal new risks. The expansion of the protective state also reflects the expanding role of science in policy making. - In a broad cultural sense, science has largely replaced religion in explaining and giving meaning to disasters. - More politically, science has authority that has been woven into the fabric of governing. **Rights and Changing Social Structure** ---------------------------------------- Another source of the protective state has been a "rights revolution." - With the expansion of the concept of rights to an ever more diverse array of issues and problems, come the claims that can be made about the protection of these rights. - Examples are protection against pollution (as a healthy environment is a human right), data protection, protection of ethnic minorities, protection of the LGBTQ+ community, etc. **Welfare, Regulation, and Crime** ---------------------------------- A focus on protecting citizens from specific harms may, in part, reflect a retrenchment of the more commodious social protections of the classic welfare state. - It is argued that welfare states have moved away from a concept of "social citizenship," a change that has been accompanied by a relative shift from redistributive to regulatory and coercive policies. In advanced industrial nations, the regulatory state has expanded in part in response to the privatization and the deregulation of markets. - Ironically, "freer markets" have led to "more rules". The combination of welfare state retrenchment (bezuiniging) and the expanding use of regulatory instruments may, in turn, be related to a greater emphasis on extending protections to individual victims and vulnerable groups. **Consumerism** --------------- Consumer mobilization is another source of the expanding protective state. - Although product liability law favored producers through much of the twentieth century, consumer-oriented legal scholars and the consumer movement succeeded in partially shifting responsibility and the burden of proof onto producers. **Public health** ----------------- The shifting role of public health has also contributed to the transformation of the protective state. - In the nineteenth century, the state's role in population health increased across urbanizing and industrializing countries, and its capacity to intervene to improve sanitation and prevent infectious diseases continued to develop throughout the twentieth century. - Science and medicine played a central role in supporting and defending this expanded state role. - While expanding its role to include chronic disease and widening its focus to consider social and political determinants of health, public health's attitude toward infectious diseases also shifted. Taken together, these various developments have encouraged the public health sector to engage in a more expansive protective agenda. **Changing Security Demands, Terrorism, and Globalization** ----------------------------------------------------------- Reconfigured by the end of the Cold War, the rise of terrorism, and globalization, a new security environment has also contributed to the transformation of the protective state. - The breakdown of the bipolar Cold War security logic has led to a more fluid and pluralistic situation characterized by amorphous threats and porous borders. - Among the consequences of these shifts has been the securitization of a wider range of issues and an erosion of the boundary between domestic and international security. **Collier, Stephen J, and Andrew Lakoff (2015). 'Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency.' Theory, Culture & Society 32, nr. 2, 19--51.** **Introduction** ================ It is striking that in so many different policy arenas we find a shared understanding in political discourse both of what constitutes a catastrophe and of the expected government role in preparing for and responding to potentially catastrophic events. - Catastrophes are understood as sudden and unpredictable events that disrupt the systems that are critical to economic and social life. - And government is held responsible for reducing vulnerability to such events as well as for ensuring the operation of critical systems in their wake. These matters are taken to be a matter of common sense. However, as we will show, such common sense is the result of a relatively recent 'event in thought'. - It is only in the last several decades that American planners and policymakers have come to understand collective life as dependent upon a complex of critical systems that are vulnerable to catastrophic disruption. - And it is only over the same period that vital systems security has come to be regarded as a central problem for government. **Reflexive Biopolitics** ------------------------- In what follows, we analyze the emergence of vital systems security as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. Whereas classical sovereignty sought to ensure the security of the state itself in the face of foreign and domestic threats, modern biopolitics aims to ensure the health and wellbeing of national populations. - Beginning in the first half of the 19th century, new apparatuses of population security such as public health and urban planning were invented to manage problems like poverty, unemployment and endemic disease. - Here, the technical and political category of risk played a central role. Vital systems security arose at a later conjuncture in the evolution of biopolitical government, beginning in the early 20th century. - With the intensification of modernization and industrialization processes, planners and policy-makers recognized that collective life had become dependent upon interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. - Indeed, these very instruments of biopolitical government, which aimed to foster the health and wellbeing of the population, came to be seen as potential sources of vulnerability. According to Beck there are two kinds of risks: 1. Risks addressed in what he calls 'first modernity' (such as unemployment, disability, and endemic disease) that are distributed over populations in regular and predictable ways, and were relatively constrained in scope. 2. Risks of 'second' (or 'reflexive') modernity that are unprecedented and therefore impossible to calculate based on historical patterns of incidence, and they are potentially unbounded in temporal and geographic scope. Vital systems security shares with population security the broad aim of biopolitics: to foster the health and welfare of populations. But these two forms of biopolitical security differ in their objects of concern, knowledge practices, and norms. - Whereas population security addresses regularly occurring events that are distributed over the population in predictable ways, - Vital systems security deals with events whose probability cannot be precisely calculated, but whose consequences are potentially catastrophic. **Kaul, Grunberg and Stern (1999), 'Defining Global Public Goods', pp. 2-19 in Kaul, Grunberg and Stern (eds.) Global Public Goods. International corporation in the 21st century. New York: UNDP** **Public Goods: The Generic Definition** ======================================== The counterpart of a public good is a private good. - A key condition for a market transaction is that the ownership or use of a good can be transferred or denied conditional on the offsetting exchange - the payment of its price. Thus private goods tend to be excludable and rival in consumption. **The Main Properties of Public Goods: Nonrivalry in Consumption and non-excludability** ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rather than offer an exhaustive summary, we will map out, in nontechnical language, the most important characteristics of public goods and clarify some of the key issues involved - notably those that help us understand the nature of global public goods. ### ### **Pure Public Goods** The ideal public good has two main qualities: 1. Its benefits are nonrivalrous in consumption - F.e. a traffic light works for everyone at the same time. If one person crosses a street safely thanks to a well‐functioning traffic light, this does not distract from the light's utility for other persons. 2. and are nonexcludable. - F.e. a traffic light works everyone, in the sense that it can't discriminate certain individuals or groups. Strictly speaking, there is a market for traffic lights, as they can be bought and sold. - But the traffic light regime - the lights, their shared meaning and the behavioural expectations they entail - is a public good. Peace is another example of a pure public good. - When it exists, all citizens of a country can enjoy it; and its enjoyment by, say, rural populations does not distract from its benefits for urban populations. ### ### **Impure Public Goods** Few goods are purely public or purely private, as most possess mixed benefits. - Goods that only partly meet either or both of the defining criteria are called impure public goods. Because impure goods are more common than the pure type, we use the term "public good" to encompass both pure and impure public goods. In line with this definition, we suggest looking at 'pure private' and 'pure public' as the extremes of a public-private continuum. - Even an activity such as consuming a nutritious meal, which at first glance seems to be highly private, upon closer examination has public benefits. Impure public goods fall into two categories: 1. Goods that are nonrivalrous in consumption but excludable are club goods. - A noncongested toll road is an example of a club good. It is possible to exclude someone from using it by simply denying them access but it is not a rival good since one person\'s use of the road does not reduce its usefulness to others. 2. Goods that are mostly nonexcludable but rivalrous in consumption are common pool resources. - So goods that are subject to depletion, but are accessible to all, like coal. Nonrivalrous --------------- -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Excludable Club good (cinemas, private parks, satellite television) Nonexcludable Pure public good (national defense, air, free-to-air television) Public goods with an existence value are purchased not because they can be consumed but because people derive value from the knowledge that the good exist. - Like biodiversity and the preservation of art. Merit goods are goods subsidized by the government because their existence or their consumption (as in the case of art) is highly valued by the community. ### ### **Externalities** Externalities arise when an individual or a firm takes an action but does not bear all the costs (negative externality) or all the benefits (positive externality). - Put differently, externalities are by-products of certain activities - spillovers into the public sphere. We will reserve the term 'public good' for goods and activities with positive utility, including positive externalities. If a public disutility is involved, we will use the term 'public bad'. ### ### **Supply Problems of Public Goods** Two main problems affecting the provision of public goods are: 1. The Free-Rider Problem - When someone benefits from a public good, but lays the burden of trouble and expense on others. 2. The Prisoner's Dilemma - A lack of information about the other's motives results in a suboptimal outcome, wherein both parties can still improve their result by choosing to do something else. But they don't because of a lack of information and trust. - It represents in simple terms many real‐life situations in which two or more parties face similar incentives to "defect" from cooperation unless mechanisms are established to facilitate communication and build trust. **Taking Public Goods to the Global Level** =========================================== The assumption is that public goods are national in character. - But today international, and particularly global, public goods are becoming more central to national and individual well‐being - Examples of public bads are banking crises, internet-based crime and fraud. - Among public goods, a striking example is the rapidly growing number of international regimes providing common frameworks for international transport and communication, trade, harmonized taxation, monetary policy, governance and much more. **Identifying the Global Public** --------------------------------- The world is marked by sharp disparities and clear dividing themes, thus it is no simple matter to determine the reach that a public good should have to qualify as global. Three divisions seem to be of special significance in our context: 1. The division of the world's population into countries 2. Socio-economic groups 3. Generations Thus, the requirements for a global public good are: 1. That it covers more than one group of countries. 2. The benefits of a public good must reach a broad spectrum (in socio-economic sense) of the global population. 3. It meets the needs of present generations without jeopardizing those of future generations (intergenerational justice). So, to offer maximal definition of a pure global public good and a minimal definition of an impure global public good: - A pure global public good is marked by universality---that is, it benefits all countries, people and generations. - An impure global public good would tend towards universality in that it would benefit more than one group of countries and would not discriminate against any population segment or set of generations. **Distinguishing Global and Nonglobal Public Goods** Goods that would [not] qualify as global public goods are f.e.: - The security services that NATO provided during the Cold War for Western bloc countries were a public good for the alliance or, in more general terms, a club good. - Donations to disaster victims, because they are a voluntary redistribution of private goods, from one owner to another, motivated primarily by empathy rather than by global concerns. - A poverty alleviation programme for Sub‐Saharan Africa, if it would not contribute to conflict prevention and international peace or improve global health conditions. **A Typology of Global Public Goods** ------------------------------------- Global public goods can also be sorted according to their place in the production chain. There is a distinction between: 1. Final global public goods - They are outcomes rather than "goods" in the standard sense. They may be tangible (such as the environment, or the common heritage of mankind) or intangible (such as peace or financial stability). 2. Intermediate global public goods - They contribute towards the provision of final global public goods, like international regimes, international infrastructure and economic growth. The purpose of identifying intermediate global public goods is to highlight the area, or areas, where international public intervention may be needed to provide a particular global public good. International regimes are perhaps the most important intermediate public goods, as such regimes provide a basis for many other intermediate products with global public benefits. International regimes can be split into two forms: 1. International agreements - Statements of commitment typically setting forth policy priorities, principles, norms or standards as well as decision‐making procedures and obligations 2. Organizations - Bodies or mechanisms, usually resulting from international agreements, intended to, among other things, facilitate consultations and negotiations among member parties, monitor treaty compliance or provide other types of information, or undertake operational activities. The benefits of global regime building are: - Enhanced predictability in international relations and transborder activities, reducing the risk of conflict and misunderstanding. - Reduced transaction costs, encouraging cooperation and improving efficiency. - Helps promote or restore universalism, such as the universal recognition of basic human rights. **The Supply Problems of Global Public Goods** ============================================== Public goods are essentially defined by the existence of a provision problem: by their nature, they cannot easily be provided by the 'invisible hand' of the market. Global public goods can vary in their qualities of nonrivalry and nonexcludability. - In this respect they are no different from any other public good. But in terms of beneficiaries, most global public goods do vary from other public goods, as their beneficiary groups are likely to be extremely large and much more diverse. Thus, one has to expect that interests and concerns will vary and cooperation will not be easy to achieve due in part to differences in policy priorities and other preferences - perhaps often simply due to lack of information and mutual understanding and trust. Additionally, given the large number of actors and beneficiaries and the tremendous uncertainty that results from their presence (in addition to the technical uncertainties that often surround issues under negotiation), one can expect collective action problems, such as free riding or prisoner's dilemmas, to abound. Moreover, states internationally behave like private actors, motivated by national self‐interest. - Which raises the issue of who exists at the global level to solve the intricate problem of collective inaction. Especially in the absence of a global sovereign. **Conclusion** ============== In today\'s rapidly globalizing world, people\'s well‐being depends on striking a careful balance not only between private and public goods but also between domestic, regional and global public goods. We have defined global public goods as outcomes (or intermediate products) that tend towards universality in the sense that they benefit all countries, population groups and generations. - At a [minimum], a global public good would meet the following criteria: its benefits extend to more than one group of countries and do not discriminate against any population group or any set of generations, present or future. **Nye, Joseph (2011) 'What is power in Global affairs?', pp. 3-24 in: Joseph Nye, The future of power. New York: Public Affairs** **Chapter 1: What Is Power in Global Affairs?** We experience power in our everyday lives, and it has real effects despite our inability to measure it precisely. Many tried to define power by a formula, but traditionally did so by measuring military force and recourses. - However, military force and combat proficiency do not tell us much about outcomes, for example, in the world of finance or climate change. Nor do they much about the power of nonstate actors. Any attempt to develop a single index of power is doomed to fail because power depends upon human relationships and contexts to produce an agreed overall power total. **Defining power** ------------------ Power is a contested concept and people's choice of definition reflects their interests and values. The dictionary defines power as the capacity to do things and in social situations to affect others to get the outcomes we want. - And as we live in a web of inherited social forces, some of which are visible and others of which are indirect and sometimes called "structural", there are many factors that affect our ability to get what we want. We cannot say that an actor 'has power' without specifying power 'to do what'. - We must specify who is involved in the power relationship (the scope of power) as well as what topics are involved (the domain of power). So to say that something has power requires us to specify the context (scope and domain) of the relationship. Actions often have powerful unintented consequences, but from a policy point of view we are interested in the ability to produce preferred outcomes. - Again, if the effects are unintented, so f.e. when a soldier accidentally kills civilians, there is power to harm (or benefit), but it is not power to achieve preferred outcomes. From a policy-oriented perspective, intentions matter in terms of getting preferred outcomes. - A policy-oriented concept of power depends upon a specified context to tell us who gets what, how, where and when. However, in practice this definition is often too complicated and unpredictable. - So, policymakers frequently define power in terms of the resources that can produce outcomes. The virtue of this second definition is that it makes power appear to be concrete, measurable, and predictable - a guide to action. However, this definition has a major problem: "Having the resources of power does not guarantee that you will always get the outcomes you want." Nonetheless, defining power in terms of resources is a shortcut that policymakers find useful. But many analysts reject the 'elements of national power' approach as misleading and inferior to the behavioral or relational apprach. - And strictly speaking they are correct. Power resources are simply the tangible and intangible raw materials or vehicles that underlie power relationships, and whether a given set of resources produces preferred outcomes or not depends upon behavior in context. "Knowing the horsepower and mileage of a vehicle does not tell us whether it will get to the preferred destination" In practice, discussions of power in global affairs involve both definitions. - As many of the terms that we use daily, such as 'military power' and 'economic power' are hybrids that combine both resources and behaviors. The two definitions of power:  In the end, because it is outcomes, not resources, that we care about, we must pay more attention to contexts and strategies. - Power-conversion strategies (from resources to behavioral outcomes) turns out to be a critical variable. Strategies relate means to ends, and those that combine hard and soft power resources successfully in different contexts are the key to smart power. **Three aspects of relational power** ------------------------------------- In addition to the distinction between resource and relational definitions of power, it is useful to distinguish three different aspects of relational power: 1. Commanding change - The first face of power - You can affect people's behavior by shaping their preferences in ways that produce what you want. 2. Controlling agendas - The second face of power - Agenda-framing focuses on the ability to keep issues off the table. If ideas and institutions can be used to frame the agenda for action in a way that make others' preferences seem irrelevant or out of bounds, then it may never be necessary to push or shove them. - Powerful actors can even make sure that the less powerful are never invited to the table, or if they get there, the rules of the game have already been set by those who arrived first. 3. Establishing preferences - The third face of powe - Ideas and beliefs also help shape other's initial preferences. - Power can be exercised over people by determining their very wants. Their basic or initial preferences can be shaped, not merely the situation that makes them change their strategy for achieving their preferences. Some analysts regard these distinctions as useless abstractions that can all be collapsed into the first face of power. - But if we succumb to this temptation, wer are likely to limit what we see in terms of behavior, which tends to limit the strategies that policymakers design to achieve their goals. - Another reason not to collapse all three faces of power into the first is that doing so diminishes attention to networks, which are an important type of structural power in the twenty-first century. - Positioning in social networks can be an important power resource. - A policymaker should consider preference formation and agenda-framing first as means of shaping the environment before turning to the first face of power. In short, those who insist on collapsing the second and third face of power into the first, will miss an increasingly important aspect of power in this century. **Realism and the full spectrum of power behavior** --------------------------------------------------- Realism assumes that in the anarchic conditions of world politics, where there is no higher international government authority above states, they must rely on their own devices to preserve their independence, and that when push comes to shove, the ultima ratio is the use of force. Realist come in many sizes and shapes, but all tend to argue that global politics is power politics. In this they are right, but some limit their understanding by conceiving of power too narrowly. Thus, not including soft power. - Mutual democracy, liberal culture, and a deep network of transnational ties mean that anarchy has very different effects than realism predicts. - In such conditions, a smart power strategy has a much higher mixture of the second and third faces of power. In an information age, communications strategies become increasingly more important. "Outcomes are shaped not merely by whose army wins but also by whose story wins." - Smart strategies must have an information and communications component. As, states struggle over the power to define norms, and framing of issues grows in importance. **Soft power behavior and resources** ------------------------------------- Many types of resources can contribute to soft power, but that does not mean that soft power is any type of behavior. - The use of force, payment, and some agenda-setting based on them is hard power. - Agenda-setting that is regarded as legitimate by the target, positive attractions, and persuasion are the parts of the spectrum of behaviors that is included in soft power. Fully defined, soft power is the ability to affect others through the co-optive means of framing the agenda, persuading, and eliciting positive attraction in order to obtain preferred outcomes. The types of resources associated with hard power include tangibles such as force and money. - But, resources often associated with hard power can also produce soft power behavior depending on the context and how they are use. - F.e. command power can create institutions that will provide soft power resources in the future. The types of resources associated with soft power often include intangible factors such as institutions, ideas, values, culture, and the perceived legitimacy of policies. - However, just like hard power, soft power can also produce things to do with hard power behavior. - Co-optive behavior can be used to generate hard power resources in the form of military alliance or economic aid. Whether the possession of power resources actually produces favorable behavior depends upon the context and the skills of the agent in converting the resources into behavioral outcomes. **Soft power and Smart power** ------------------------------ Smart power is the ability to combine hard and soft power resources into effective strategies. Smart power goes to the heart of the problem of power conversion. - Some countries and actors may be endowed with greater power resources than others, yet not be very effective in converting the full range of their power resources into strategies that produce the outcomes they seek. The first steps to smart power and effective power-conversion strategies are understanding the full range of power resources and recognizing the problems of combining them effectively in various contexts. **Walt (2017) "Who is afraid of a balance of power?", Foreign Policy** The balance of power theory = Because there is no "world government" to protect states from each other, each has to rely on its own resources and strategies to avoid being conquered, coerced, or otherwise endangered. - When facing a powerful or threatening state, a worried country can mobilize more of its own resources or seek an alliance with other states that face the same danger, in order to shift the balance more in its favor. Needless to say, "balance of power" logic played an important role in U.S. foreign policy, and especially when security concerns were unmistakable. Yet despite its long pedigree and enduring relevance, policymakers and pundits often fail to recognize how balance of power logic drives the behavior of both allies and adversaries. - Part of the problem stems from the common U.S. tendency to assume that a state's foreign policy is mostly shaped by its internal characteristics (i.e., its leaders' personalities, its political and economic system, or its ruling ideology, etc.) rather than by its external circumstances (i.e., the array of threats it faces). - From this perspective, America's "natural" allies are states that share our values. So when they describe NATO they suggest that the participating countries are supporting each other because they share the same values, not because they want to acquire more power. Shared political values are of course not irrelevant, but assuming that a state's internal composition determines its identification of friends and enemies can lead us astray in several ways: 1. If we believe shared values are a powerful unifying force, we are likely to overstate the cohesion and durability of some of our existing alliances. 2. If you forget about balance of power politics, you're likely to be surprised when other states (or in some cases, nonstate actors) join forces against you. 3. Focusing on political or ideological affinities and ignoring the role of shared threats encourages us to see adversaries as more unified than they really are. Instead of seeing extremist movements as competing organizations with a variety of worldviews and objectives, U.S. officials and pundits routinely speak and act as if our foes were all operating from an identical playbook. - Even worse, instead of looking for ways to encourage splits and schisms among extremists, the United States often acts and speaks in ways that drive them closer together. **[Week 2]** **Murphy C. 'The emergence of global governance.' (chapter 1) in Weiss, T. G., & Wilkinson, R. (2018). International Organization and Global Governance. Routledge.** **Global governance before the Great War** ========================================== At the time of the 1929 Wall Street crash, Robert Brady wrote the following: "... the world was organized on the basis of mass markets, mass production, and mass distribution. In the task of exploiting the resources of national and dependent territories, of refining, transporting, fabricating, and distributing products, machine technology played a dominant role." The part of the world in which the machines were made, where most of the machines lay, and where the overwhelming bulk of the trade in industrial goods took place was held together by the strong but thin threads of international institutions. - These were the public international unions and the hundreds of international NGOs created in the last third of the nineteenth century. The public international unions linked together the communication and transportation systems of seperate empires and established necessary industrial standards and inter-imperial rules governing intellectual property. - They also administered aspects of the inter-imperial monetary system and helped maintain rules of trade. In addition, a few international organizations supported large groups within the industrial core of the inter-imperial world that were likely to be harmed by the growing trade in industrial products fostered by the other public international unions. - Like the International Association for Labor Legislation, established in 1889, some of it done by private internation NGOs. NGOs and the international social movements that they helped institutionalize played an additional important role by broadly championing the internationalization of the economy that the public international unions would secure. - These also directly promoted internationalism, as international NGOs used the political space created by unions to argue that it was only right for similar forms of international cooperation to be tried in the various social fields, as well. **The UN era** ============== In 1933, Robert Brady wrote that the new associations all looked forward to a world economy of the greatest possible engineering efficiency. - Such an economy required regulation, global regulation, because 'national regulation is largely, and in some cases, completely ineffective in the modern world. Yet, ironically, the desire to achieve the greatest possible engineering efficiencies initially only gained ground as part of a struggle to create ever more efficient national economies, a struggle initiated by the shortsightedness of the Treaty of Versailles. - The reperations debts to be paid by Germany to the Allies caused an export value surplus on the world market, as Germany lowered its prices dramatically to try and get the money. As WWII wound down, the Franklin D. Rosevelt administration remained committed to creating the foundation of world peace on which a global system of regulation could ensure prosperity. - The administration's chosen instrument for achieving this end was the wartime alliance, which Rosevelt had named 'the United Nations.' - The allies reconfigured the world organization into the peace-maintaining instrument of the Security Council supplemented by other branches of global governance, like the Economic and Social Council. The Security Council was a substantial innovation in global governance. Beyond contributing to the foundation of peace, the UN system has played roles similar to those that the public international unions played before WWI, namely: 1. Supporting the communication and transportation infrastructure that link the world economy. 2. Maintaining global rules governing intellectual property. 3. Working with the complex system of standard-setting bodies united under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). 4. Worked with key national governments and private international associations to support and regulate the global monetary and financial system. 5. Maintaining the rules for international trade. 6. Supporting groups that could be harmed by a growing international industrial economy. - The UN provided significant support for decolonization and for a limited form of economic development. **Late twentieth-century crises and "global governance"** ========================================================= The environmental crises became a permanent part of the UN's work with the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, when governments affirmed 26 principles. - Problems like the consequences of pollution became the first of four long-term crises of international governance. The second crises emerged at almost the same time. When governments of developing countries began demanding that global economic governance be reformed to ensure that their countries actually caught up with the industrialized world. - Some governments hoped to achieve this through a general strike by raw materials producers, like the Arab oil producers did successfully. Many in the North saw that action and the subsequent worldwide recession as causing the end of the long period of postwar growth. At the beginning of that era, many Western countries turned away from welfareoriented policies based on constant increases in productivity, to laissez faire-oriented policies of limited government and reliance on the market to lower prices of labor and raw materials. - The fact that the economic policies of the 1980s onward led to greater income inequality and income stagnation for most wage earners in the industrialized world created the third long crisis. With the fall of the socialist bloc regimes of Eastern Europe a decade later, the UN system faced a fourth crisis. - The massive increase in demands for peacemaking and peacekeeping services in conflicts that became resolvable because the sides were no longer supported by competing superpowers. The end of the Cold War also provided new opportunities for global governance. - As the promoters of the more intergrated global manufacturing economy used the opening provided by the evaporation of the major alternative to global capitalism to promote stronger rules for liberalizing international trade and investment. **What the phrase denotes** =========================== Obviously, scholars have found 'global governance' to be a useful term, but perhaps activists have found it even more useful. - As most of the uses are from advocacy organizations or individuals who want to change some aspect of the way the world is governed. "Global governance" refers to a kind of governance, or the attempt to establish governance, at a particual, global, level. Collective problems are best solved at the lowest level at which they can be solved. - Therefore, the best form of global governance would be limited to collective problems that could not be solved by organizations at any lower level. Even though there are some forms of succesfull forms of governance at the global level, we need to recognize that organizations or coalitions often try to exercise governance at a global level, even if it is unwarranted. - Additionally, the standards and controls exercised by the governments and organizations promoting an unregulated liberal world economy, create global problems that are dealt with by relatively ineffective structures of global governance. There are three global problems, according to some critics: 1. The limited number of truly global environmental problems that were securitized in a world in which no one has effective responsibility for maintaining the various global commons 2. The regular recurrence of international financial crises created by the vested interest of most of the relevant actors in maintaining geographic spaces in which the main rules do not apply. 3. Persistent and sometimes growing inequalities across classes and regions. Even when we add all the fields in which there is some kind of global governance that is not needed, the entire field of 'global governance' is not a large one. However, it is of great significance. **Conclusion** ============== Relevant questions to ask are: - Is this a field in which there should be global governance? - If not, and if some kind of system of global governance does exist or is being attempted, then why is that the case? Who is being served by this unnecessary global governance? The concept of 'global governance' exists essentially to help us think critically about problems that humanity shares that cannot be solved by individuals, families, private organizations, states, or traditional international relations alone. **Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Mette, and Stephanie C. Hofmann (2020). 'Of the contemporary global order, crisis, and change.' Journal of European Public Policy 27, nr. 7: 107789.** In this paper we focus on the contemporary global order's foundations as well as on current international challenges to it. The present global order rests on three foundational ordering principles: 1. National sovereignty 2. Economic liberalism 3. Inclusive, rule-based multilateralism. These principles stipulate general rules of conduct, but leave considerable scope for contestation and renegotiation of specific norms and agreements. - Thus, the global order is a dynamic construct in which crises and contestations can occur without undermining the order as such. Only if one or more of the foundational principles are systematically violated, can we speak of a demise of the order. What we witness at present is not so much a profound or definitive crisis of the existing order, but rather its ongoing (and messy) transformation into a broader, more inclusive system of global governance, reflecting the need to accommodate new actors and problems. **What are core principles of the contemporary global order?** The characterization of the global order rests on what we see as its main foundational ordering principles: national sovereignty, economic liberalism and inclusive, rule-based multilateralism. Core principles are: 1. The global order is inter-national and state-led, based on principles of sovereign equality and national self-determination. - This means that national governments are the primary actors responsible for making and implementing international rules and policies. 2. The order is liberal insofar as it promotes economic openness and interdependence between most countries worldwide. 3. To sustain these substantive principles, governments have endorsed a procedural principle of multilateralism, including: - Rule-based justifications and behavior - The order is constructed around a set of widely agreed-upon rules and principles. - Inclusivity - Relations are based on generalized principles of conduct, involving 'nondiscrimination', 'indivisibility' and a rejection of specific, quid-pro-quo exchanges. The three foundational principles can be in tension, but these tensions make the contemporary global order a dynamic construct in which tensions can occur without undermining the order as such. Some see political liberalism (human rights, free movement, democracy) as another foundational principle, but we regard it as aspirational rather than foundational to the global order, because: 1. Their importance and definition are heavily contested. 2. Many participants in the construction of global order since 1945 have been nondemocracies. 3. Central players (including the U.S.) have exhibited varying commitment to advancing human rights norms over time. 4. Most states have kept firm control of national immigration policy. **Crisis within or of the order?** When considering whether the current order is in demise, it is crucial to distinguish between crisis within and crisis of the order.  **Current global challenges and crisis** ---------------------------------------- In the rest of the paper, global trends that scholars have highlighted as signs of crisis and demise will be discussed, and it will be considered whether they constitute critical challenges to the existing order. **Declining or disinterested U.S.: a threat to multilateralism and economic liberalism?** While U.S.-sponsored public goods such as free trade and freedom of the seas have contributed to the current order, U.S. leadership has arguably never been as critical to state-led and economically liberal order as this view assumes. America's involvement in the global institutional infrastructure has been both fractional and conditional for many decades, whereas new states have been integrated deeper into the system. - Thus, we do not consider declining U.S. hegemony a fundamental challenge to the contemporary global order. **Rising powers and regionalism: the end of economic openness and inclusive multilateralism?** Many scholars have worried that a changing global distribution of power will lead to increasing contestation and deadlock of multilateral institutions. - F.e. China getting more involved with existing multilateral institutions and setting up new China-sponsored organizations. However, the fact that more states use multilateral fora, whether regional or global, to push national or regional interests is not per se indicative of a corrosion of multilateralism or economic liberalism. - Instead, contestation within existing multilateral organizations, or the creation of new (regional) institutions alongside long-standing global organizations, offers a way of arbitrating conflicting interests through multilateral means, and of facilitating the integration of more states into the global order on a more equal footing. ### ### **Deadlock and decline of intergovernmental fora: the erosion of multilateralism** In addition to the disruptive effects of changing power constellations, many observers worry about a general decline of institutionalized multilateralism. - F.e. the failure to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Undoubtedly, failed negotiations or declining compliance with individual international agreements present signs of localized crisis within the current order. - However, we must be careful not to conflate the fact that specific international organizations are challenged by deadlock with the global order itself being in crisis. But recent studies have shown that competitive and cooperative inter organizational relations can coexist. - Thus, rather than signalling a crisis, institutional proliferation can also be viewed as an indication that multilateral cooperation remains the basis for international politics. **The proliferation of non-state actors: the end of state-led governance?** The growing prevalence of non-state authority could be seen to challenge the global order as we have defined it. - A world in which the political authority or financial power of non-state actors eclipses that of national governments would clearly constitute a radical departure from the current state-led order. At present, however, such a world seems a distant prospect. Instead, we suggest, the growing inclusion of non-state actors in global policymaking serves to fill gaps in state-led governance and helps to make governance outcomes more representative and responsive to local needs, thereby encouraging compliance with international rulesets by a wider range of global stakeholders. **Conclusions** --------------- The dispersion of power in the international system, cited by many as a critical challenge, has in contrast been associated with: 1. Greater heterogeneity of preferences and resulting disputes 2. Growing participation in core international institutions by both state and non-state actors 3. The proliferation of new institutions through which diverging preferences can be arbitrated. Sovereignty and economic liberalism remain important features of these multilateral fora. - This suggest a transition from a global order constructed around a few commanding international organizations dominated by powerful Western states, to a more multifaceted order based on complex and polycentric governance arrangements among a wider community of national governments, international organizations and non-state actors. While this growing complexity presents significant challenges of coordination, it does not fundamentally contest foundational principles of sovereign equality, economic openness, and rule-based multilateral interactions. - Rather, what we are witnessing may not be the impending crisis and collapse of the global order, but rather its ongoing transformation from within. **Lakoff, A. and Klinenberg E. (2010) 'Of risk and pork: urban security and the politics of objectivity', Theory and Society 39: 503-525** With the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) announcement of its Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grants, a long-simmering dispute over how to apportion funds for urban security had exploded into public controversy, as New York's budget had been cut in half. There were three key issues at stake in the public controversy over how to allocate federal resources for urban security: 1. How to distribute resources fairly and rationally to different cities and metropolitan regions, given that officials representing all parts of the nation haves clear incentives to request funds, and little cause to refrain. 2. How a fledgling governmental agency can construct methods of evaluation and calculation that a diverse set of powerful political actors will accept as fair and legitimate. 3. How a threat that defies probabilistic calculation is brought into the realm of governmental rationality. **Objectivity and bureaucratic authority** ------------------------------------------ Let us begin by asking why DHS initially sought to justify its UASI allocation decisions through a public demonstration of the complex calculations of its "risk methodology." - The display of numbers was meant to indicate that the agency's allocation decisions had not been shaped by the influence of illegitimate interests. To be objective and rational in public administration means to operate according to calculable rules and 'without regard for persons'. - However, such rule-based calculation as the basis for bureaucratic decision is an ideal rather than a description of typical practice. - Only under certain circumstances are bureaucratic agencies actually required to publicly demonstrate that they are following calculable rules. And it is typically the accusation of bias that forces administrators to demonstrate their objectivity publicly, like what happened with the DHS. With regards to the controversy, the specific details of technocratic calculation became the object of political dispute. - In other words, the UASI controversy was based not on a conflict between "rationality" and "politics" -- as many actors sought to portray it -- but rather serves to demonstrate the operations of a contemporary politics of rational calculation. **The political administration of risk** ---------------------------------------- Scholars of political rationality have become increasingly attuned to the centrality of formal decision tools, such as risk assessment, in contemporary administrative settings. - Through their apparent scientific rigor and universal applicability, these decision tools potentially provide a form of objectivity that will be resilient against external critique. - Examples are: - The use of cost-benefit analysis in land use policy - Evidence-based treatment protocols in health services delivery - Risk assessment in environmental regulation These decision instruments share the characteristic of quantifying diverse entities to make them comparable and thus to make decisions "calculable". These formal tools have been criticized from some quarters for shielding highly political judgments behind an image of objective technical decision. In the context of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' justification of its massive water projects, the Corps was forced to develop high technical methods of calculation. - Given a widespread "trust in numbers" rather than in experienced judgment within American political culture, quantification provided a defense for costly projects that might otherwise have been scuttled. **Of risk and pork** -------------------- DHS faced not only the problem of calculation, but also the problem of organization. - DHS was internally divided from its inception, with multiple visions of its mission, including border control, law enforcement, intelligence gathering, surveillance, and emergency preparedness. The backdrop to the controversy was an ongoing dispute around the allocation of homeland security funds in a federal system. Journalistic exposés and complaints from political officials in urban areas sparked an emerging conflict between what were seen as rational approaches to security threats ("risk") on the one hand, and the illegitimate use of security resources for political purposes ("pork") on the other. - "Pork" was shorthand for violation of the norm of impersonal bureaucratic rationality. The dispute over funding allocation mechanisms for urban security pointed to a longstanding problem for federalism: how to equitably, efficiently, and effectively distribute funds for the provision of public goods from the federal government to localities? The DHS was then tasked to develop a comprehensive threat assesment based on commonly accepted risk-assessment methodology, which can then be used to allocate funds. - The challenge was not merely improving the decision tool, but also finding one that would satisfy the different players in an escalating political conflict. But there were no impersonal means to adjudicate such a dispute: without agreedupon standards of measurement, it was impossible to compare the relative level of threat and vulnerability of various cities and regions, and so there was no definitive way to determine whether homeland security funds were being allocated objectively, that is, independently of "political" considerations. **Toward reform** ----------------- The failed government response to Hurricane Katrina in August and September of 2005 intensified the debate over urban security, as experts questioned whether DHS had neglected predictable hazards. - Soon afterwards, DHS introduced its new, "risk-based" methodology for calculating UASI grants. DHS's risk-based methodology: "Tremendous gains have been made in both the quality and specificity of information and analysis and incorporated within the model, yielding the most accurate estimation possible of the relative risk of prospective grant candidates". **Legitimacy crisis I: relative risk** -------------------------------------- While advocates of risk-based allocation were initially pleased with DHS's new methodology, they were taken by surprise by the eventual results of the calculative process. - In response to the drastic cut in funds for New York and the following confusion, the foreman explained that it was not that New York's overall risk was less, but that DHS had come to understand better the relative risk of other cities and that New York had already done a good job minimizing the risks. However, this explanation did not satisfy the assembled reporters. It was a massive database of critical infrastructure and key assets that, Foresman claimed, grounded DHS's calculations of "relative risk," and therefore the agency's 2006 UASI allocation decisions. - What critics called "pork," DHS insisted, was in fact the outcome of a complex, but rational and objective system of calculation. **Legitimacy crisis II: critical assets** ----------------------------------------- However, it turned out that the asset database was far from a reliable source of data on the nation's critical assets. - Soon after the hearings, a devastating critique of DHS's methodological claims came from a surprising place: within DHS itself. According to the report, "the presence of large numbers of out-of-place assets taints the credibility of the data". Small states sought to defend themselves from the outcry. - Perhaps the fault lay with states like New York for failing to include their relevant assets and therefore losing out in the federalist system of competition for resources. "If the New York list fails to include such things as the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, and Indiana's includes such things as Lehman's Amish Country Popcorn in Berne and lots of farms and nursing homes, it hardly seems fair to blame the federal government" To avoid the close inspection of its calculative process an agency needs credibility -- something DHS sorely lacked. **Recalibration** ----------------- By early 2007, it appeared that New York and Washington D.C. had succeeded in their efforts to reshape the UASI funding mechanism. - In the next iteration of the program, announced in January, urban regions were broken into two tiers with different systems of allocation for each and New York would no longer be in direct competition for resources with small cities such as Louisville. Meanwhile, DHS had significantly revised the National Asset Database--from over 77,000 critical assets to around 2,100. But the issue was not only whether funds would be allocated through a risk-based method, but also how risk would be calculated. - Critics attacked DHS's technique of calculating risk based on the vulnerability of critical assets rather than on the likelihood of a strike on economically or symbolically significant places. Despite such concerns, New York City officials seemed mostly pleased with the change in DHS policy, but this was most likely due to the fact that the program would likely provide more resources to New York City in the next round. - Perhaps a combined technicalpolitical solution that would satisfy DHS's critics had been found. **Conclusion** -------------- In the UASI controversy, a relatively new and weak bureaucracy responsible for homeland security was unable to defend its allocation decisions on the grounds of impersonal calculation and was forced to shift its policy in response to political outcry. - It seems that transparent and shared standards of measurement must be in place to make objective, "de-politicized" calculation possible. More broadly, the UASI controversy raised a number of questions around the definition of "homeland security": - Is it defense against terrorist attacks, or does it comprise protection against a broader set of threats, such as natural disasters - What exactly is to be protected: population centers or "critical assets"? - And who is responsible for deciding on priorities--the federal government, states, or local jurisdictions? While the UASI controversy was staged as conflict between risk and pork, or rationality and politics, it is better seen as a case of political struggle over how to define a concrete form of bureaucratic rationality in the context of high uncertainty and an urgent sense of threat. DHS did not have the power to impose its own understanding of "risk assessment" on other political actors for two reasons: 1. The agency itself was weak and internally divided. 2. The federalist system of sovereignty grants significant power to states and localities. - External critics from big cities strategically misunderstood the tool DHS had constructed, and emphasized the critique of "pork" in order to force the agency to recalibrate its risk assessment mechanism in a way that would be more amenable to their interests From the vantage of the analyst, it is not a question of saying that this is all "just" politics, then, but rather that the very basis of rational decision is an object of political struggle. - From this case, we can see that in contemporary struggles over security resources, the distinction between "rationality" and "politics" does not exist a priori, but rather is defined in the concrete political and technical struggle over the creation of a decision tool. **Ansell, Christopher (2019). The Protective State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3** **Chapter 3: The Political Dynamics of the Protective State** ============================================================= Demands for protection often start with public appreciation that a threat of harm exists. - The "discovery" of a problem may reflect objective and measurable features of a phenomenon. Yet some problems may be chronic without the public really fully noticing (Beamish 2002), and others may evoke great concern even when objective measures show a decline in significance. Clearly, more is at stake than objective conditions. The framing of harms and risks is central to the politics of the protective state. - A frame is a particular representation or interpretation of an issue. Frames that emphasize the systemic, societal, or environmental character of a harm or risk often provide a rationale for greater or more comprehensive state protection (securitization). Framing who is to blame or who is responsible for a hazard is often fundamental to protective state politics. - A moral framing can also be used to highlight the need for protection, as it has in the case of human trafficking Another framing strategy is to focus on vulnerability or victimization, with children and women often strategically framed as vulnerable and needing protection. - However, while a victim frame may be important in eliciting state protection, a victim frame may also be disempowering for the "victim." Protective state issues are often framed in term of security, public health, or human rights -- framings with different political implications and policy consequences. - Securitization depends on a claim of existential threats to society and can if successful lead to greater use of military and quasi-military capacities To a large degree advocacy groups and policy entrepreneurs frame protective issues. **Advocacy and Policy Entrepreneurship** ---------------------------------------- Advocacy mobilization is an important source of demands for state protection. - And to mobilize support for protective state issues, advocacy groups must often mobilize support from broad, ill-defined groups. Many issues related to state protection take the form of entrepreneurial politics, where policies benefit a diffuse population but harm a concentrated one. - But the precise character of advocacy depends on the policy sector. Historically, state protection often depends on how women's groups, consumers, and the labor movement interact to demand specific types of protections. - While certain interests may take the lead in driving protective policies, they must often build broader coalitions to achieve success. To mobilize support for a particular issue, advocacy groups often try to link up issues, such as obesity and health care costs. Protective state advocacy also mobilizes across local, national, and international levels. - Such multilevel advocacy may take the form of advocacy groups strategically operating at different levels. Advocacy may also build around existing policies, programs, and institutions operating at different levels. **Focusing Events and the Media** --------------------------------- The politics of the protective state are often driven by events that dramatize the lack of state protection or the failure of state protection. - Tragic focusing events can shift the "common sense causality" about what produces tragedies. - Such events are often critical for mobilizing diffuse publics to demand greater or more effective state protection. - When interests are diffuse, a crisis can increase political salience and facilitate broad coalition building to produce protective state responses. Focusing events rivet the attention of the media, the public, and politicians on problems and affect how public problems come to be framed. Focusing events can be either natural or human-made. - They can be f.e. major floods or a terrorist attack. Although the distinction between "natural" and "human-made" hazards may be breaking down, some research finds that human-made focusing events may garner more attention and have a greater effect on the political agenda than natural hazards. Focusing events are powerful, in part, because they galvanize attention to a public problem, often through elevated media coverage of an issue. - But media attention can also raise the salience of risk and a "culture of fear". Elevated issue attention can help to place issues on the agenda of political parties and legislatures and speed the production of responsive legislation. - However, scholars have found that the agenda-setting power of focusing events is quite varied, as the ability of focusing events to produce policy change may depend on how they interact with wider political change. Focusing events often create political opportunities for advancing certain agendas, in part by attributing blame. - Additionally, crisis events often lead to reform of state institutions, though postreform politics may also lead to "reversion to the mean". **Executive and Agency-Centered Political Mobilization** -------------------------------------------------------- The politics of the protective state are often centered on the executive branch of government, which is expected to provide a rapid and authoritative protective response to actual and potential harms and threats. - The securitization of protective issues (like terrorism) also tends to accentuate executive powers and may provide justification for the exercise of these powers. The historical arc of the protective state has been to gradually develop specialized and expert public agencies to administer protective obligations. - Over time, and often in response to specific focusing events, such agencies have developed elaborate institutional arrangements for administering protective legislation. Agencies may also ally with advocacy groups to advance the state's protective capabilities. - Government departments that have a mission of promoting gender equality, for example, have helped to spearhead more comprehensive "violence against women" protection policies, often in cooperation with women's movements. However, while agencies are sometimes charged with having an interest in emphasizing threats to expand their jurisdictions or to consolidate their budgets, they are also accused of ignoring threats. - As sometimes national agencies avoid responsibility for the issue, tragically delaying a response. Protective state issues have spilled over the sectoral boundaries of agencies and policy subsystems. - These spillovers encourage "whole of government" strategies of protection -- that is, strategies that mobilize government response across policy and agency boundaries. **Science, Experts, and Politics** ---------------------------------- Science and the politics of science play a large role in building support for the protective state. - Often the backing of science is important for convincing the public and politicians that protections are warranted. However, in many cases, the supporting science appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for protection. The boundaries between science, advocacy, and policy making are often blurred. - In some cases, advocacy groups may become critical sources of expertise, particularly when industry and government sources of expertise are distrusted. - In other cases, experts and scientists may themselves act as advocacy groups. One way that scientists and experts influence protective state issues is through the medicalization of issues, whereby problems come to be defined in medical terms. The production of statistics is another way that scientists and experts influence agenda setting on protective issues. **The Entrepreneurial Politics of the Protective State** -------------------------------------------------------- The best label to describe the politics of protection might be what political scientist James Q. Wilson's (1980) calls "entrepreneurial politics." - Entrepreneurial politics occur when the benefits of state action are diffuse but the costs imposed are concentrated. - Many public health, consumer protection, environmental protection, and public security issues do promise diffuse public benefits while levying more concentrated costs. The implication is that to get protective issues on the political agenda, advocacy groups and policy entrepreneurs typically need to build broad-based or multi-constituency coalitions and mobilize or leverage public attention. - To do this, they must frame issues in ways that attract public attention and support demands for state protection. - Events that galvanize the public's attention (focusing events) and mutually reinforcing actions between advocacy groups, the media, and science, however, are often necessary to tip the balance in favor of state protection. While the entrepreneurial politics of the protective state can be observed in all developed democratic nations, cross-national variations in political institutions can produce different varieties of the protective state, a topic that the next chapter discusses. **Zahariadis, Nikolaos (2016) 'Setting the agenda on agenda-setting: definitions, concepts, and controversies', pp. 1-14 in: Nikolaos Zahariadis (ed.) Handbook of Public Policy Agenda Setting. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing** What are man's greatest problems? According to Lasswell, the answer consists of two components: 1. Man's greatest problems are the most important, fundamental, but not necessarily most urgent issues of the day. - In other words, the policy sciences encouraged a steady stream of solutions to non-urgent social problems. 2. Solutions and problems were causally linked through ordered values. - The goal of policymaking was to produce the type of affairs we find most desirable: prosperity rather than poverty, peace rather than war, and so on. But, while Lasswell was deeply aware of the importance of politics in policymaking, he still assumed there would be some form of collective consensus on important priorities. - But if there is no consensus on today's priorities that urgently need to be addressed for their immediate consequences, how can there be consensus on issues that might become tomorrow's urgent priorities with uncertain long-term consequences? It took almost a decade for scholars to begin articulating the detachment of public problems from political priorities and its implications for democratic politics. - Policies reflect not only the preferences and power of those groups whose problems have been addressed but also the ability of the same groups to limit subsequent institutional attention to only those issues that reinforce or augment the status quo. - This makes some points of view difficult, if not impossible to hear. How democratic is that? - The problems that government institutions address tend not to be fundamental, universally desirable issues ("man's greatest problems") but rather those that interest and affect the elites and the well-organized (Schattschneider, 1960). - Because policymakers are assumed to be controversy avoiding, satisficing vote-seekers, they are predisposed toward addressing safe short-term issues rather than controversial long-term problems. Why, then, is the study of setting policy priorities important for students of public policy? 1. Studying the agenda as a list of priorities helps us understand social values. 2. Specifying the agenda illuminates potential gaps between government and the public in democratic and non-democratic societies alike. 3. By their very existence priorities create political winners and losers. So, the agenda says something about what groups are powerful and in what ways. 4. Agenda setting profoundly affects policy decisions, because it provides an imperfect glimpse of what policy options may be adopted. 5. Agenda setting imbues meaning and importance to individuals and institutions beyond any that is formally assigned by constitutional or other legal rules. Generally, understanding how the agenda is set, when, and by whom is a necessary step to comprehend how policy is made. **Definition of terms** ----------------------- Before proceeding any deeper into the nuts and bolts of agenda setting, it is imperative to define the terms that will be used. The term "agenda" here generally refers to a contextual list of actionable government priorities. 1. Context - Be they systemic, institutional, or decision, agendas are social artifacts and must be examined in context. The process by which agendas are set differs because of institutional and cultural variations, making it a politically fluid and dynamic process. Consequently, agendas must be evaluated within (or across) given societies and carefully circumscribed by particular temporal periods. 2. Actionable - The point is not that all agendas will focus only on actionable items but that serious consideration will be given primarily to those items that policymakers believe they can affect. 3. Government - While the media's role is important in shaping public opinion, as policy analysts we are interested primarily in how issues move from the systemic to the institutional agenda. 4. Priorities - The most important thing about any agenda is the fact that it reflects some form of ordering or prioritization. Agenda setting is defined as the process of turning public issues into actionable government priorities. - It is a process that is fundamentally shaped by cultural, institutional, temporal, and political biases and inertia. - The task is not only to tease out the roles that various actors and institutional contexts play in the process but also to model the dynamics of issue movement at variable speeds -- which may include amendment, recombination, or deletion -- through various agendas toward becoming (or not becoming) government's higher priorities. **The four p's of agenda setting** ---------------------------------- Stripped to its essentials, the process of agenda setting contains four fundamental elements, which may be termed "the four 'P's.": 1. Power - Power is perhaps the most important element of agenda setting. If actionable items are the result of political contests, the power to manipulate, persuade, prevent, or coerce may resolve these contests. - Actionable government priorities reflect the power of some groups or individuals over others in making their voices heard (or preventing others from being heard) and by implication turn their own parochial concerns into public problems that need to be collectively addressed. 2. Perception - Perception crucially affects what issues are deemed important and why. While many issues deserve government attention at any given time, only few of them become public problems. - Quite often policymakers, opinion makers, and other personalities of public life selectively report and interpret events so as to activate (or deactivate) empathy or support for an item. Thus, the perception of the issue is changed. 3. Potency - Potency refers to the intensity or severity of consequences of a given issue. - In general, the greater the intensity or severity of consequences, the more salient the issue(s) will be on the government's agenda. 4. Proximity - Proximity to people's lives -- safety, prosperity, and so on -- profoundly shapes their attention. - People are more likely to pay attention to issues that seem to have a more direct and (geographically or temporally) more proximate impact on their own lives. Assuming all else remains constant, changes in power configurations or perceptions will lead to movements up and down the agenda. - But each variable also affects the other(s). - Power shapes perception to an extent in that some issues, such as diversity, tend to be more salient to opposition groups precisely because they are not in power. - Similarly, perceptions of friends and foes shape the nature of political coalitions and consequently may lead to reversal of political fortunes Proximity and potency have indirect effects on the agenda as they are filtered through power and perception. The process of setting the agenda includes some configuration of links between the four "P"s. - While different theoretical models may add more variables and specify alternative relationships to the process, they all have to address the four "P" ingredients in some way, which is the topic of the next section. **Agenda building and political conflict management** ----------------------------------------------------- Driven by the need to reconcile democratic theory and actual practice in the United States, Cobb and Elder (1972) sketched out a model of agenda building that aimed to explain where public controversies came from and why some made it onto the government docket as legitimate political controversies while others did not. There premise was that issues arise out of group conflict (how to distribute positions or resources) and gain access to decision-makers by expanding in scope, potency, and proximity. - Issues that are broader in scope -- that is, they are more ambiguous, less technical, of higher social significance, and of longer temporal relevance -- are more likely to reach larger attention groups or attentive publics than others. - Issues that use more urgent, credible, and potent symbols are more likely to gain access to decision-makers. - The more durable an issue and the larger the public -- that is, the more intimately the issue reaches higher numbers of people -- the greater the likelihood will be to gain access to the institutional agenda. **Attention and agenda setting** -------------------------------- In contrast to the conflict management perspective of Cobb and Elder, John Kingdon (1984) authored the most frequently cited book on agenda setting, adopting insights from organizational theory and evolutionary biology. - He downplayed aspects of issue conflict and expansion and instead focused on ambiguity, perception, and policy entrepreneurship. He conceptualized a system based on temporal sorting: issues rising to the top of the agenda depend largely on what else is happening in the system and who is pushing the item and how. The fact that government systems are plagued by ambiguity, defined as a state of having many unclear and irreconcilable ways to interpret issues, creates two distinct dynamics: 1. The first dynamic refers to three streams of problems, policies, and politics. - Each stream is assumed to be largely independent of the other, obeying its own structural rules and shaping which item will bubble to the surface and which will not. 2. The second dynamic refers to how and when the streams interact. - To make this process more comprehensible, Kingdon (1984) added two more elements: policy windows and policy entrepreneurs. - Movement within and across agendas was intimately linked to windows of opportunity and policy windows, which open either in the problem or politics streams, make some linkages more possible than others. - The concept of "policy entrepreneur" gives an element of agency to models that had previously been more structural in orientation. - Items rise to the top of the government agenda during open policy windows, when key actors join two or more streams together. **The politics of attention and institutional friction** -------------------------------------------------------- Cognizant of the limitations of the works of Cobb and Elder (1971, 1972) and Kingdon (1984), Baumgartner and Jones (1993) wrote a book that theorized the rise and fall of issues on the agenda through periods of stability and punctuation. - The key differences are the added dimension of institutional power and the notion of venue shopping. Issues rise and fall on the agenda based on the notions of attention allocation and institutional friction. - Because attention is scarce and the number of potential issues too great, policymakers necessarily have to prioritize and interpret information. - They do so aided by institutional inertia (inaction) and friction. In this sense, it is very difficult for new issues to gain access to the agenda because most attention tends to be focused on areas of expertise, as well as in ways that do not deviate substantially from this expertise. - Furthermore, institutions add "drag" by imposing costs (collaborations, resources to build coalitions, and so on). However, the process of stability also encourages mobilization elsewhere in the system. - Because of limited attention, when policymakers f.e. attend to problems of health care, they necessarily leave transportation problems off the docket. When they turn their attention back to transportation, issues have become bigger, emotions stronger, and mobilization harder to resist because of neglect. Some groups are able to manipulate the system and switch institutional venues. This notion of venue shopping means they bring issues to the attention of different institutions that may be more sympathetic to their views, changing the dynamics of stability described above and introducing an increased likelihood of success.. **[Week 3]** **Welsh, Jennifer (2018) 'Humanitarian Intervention', pp. 457-470 in: Alexandra Checiu and William Wohlforth (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of International Security. Oxford: Oxford University Press** Humanitarian intervention is the coercive interference by outside actors to address humanitarian suffering within the sovereign jurisdiction of a state. Ethical and political debates about the legitimacy of military action by outside actors to address humanitarian suffering within the sovereign jurisdiction of a state have been an integral part of the evolution of modern international society. - However, despite the continuing power of individual-centric rather than state-centric notions of security, and the breadth of the consensus on the need to treat certain acts---commonly described as "atrocity crimes" ---as matters of international (as opposed to domestic) concern, the presence of a case for humanitarian intervention is much less likely to translate into an actual choice to intervene than it did during the last three decades. This chapter starts from the premise that the trajectory of the practice of humanitarian intervention is best understood in reference to its historical development. - Humanitarian intervention has always been facilitated, despite its potentially corrosive effect on sovereignty, by certain material and ideational conditions or 'hierarchies'. - But the past also matters in another sense: the willingness of states to intervene in the contemporary era has been profoundly shaped by previous instances of intervention (or nonintervention) and the perceived success or failures of such strategies. Humanitarian interventions are rarely (if ever) responses to perceived existential security threats, but rather constitute political and moral choices involving assessments of cost and benefit - often on the basis of comparisons with interventions in the past. **Early Interventions in the "Interests of Humanity**" ------------------------------------------------------ Around the middle of the nineteenth century, intervention already constituted a discrete act of interference that did not seek to change the formal legal status of an "intervened party". - The emergence of an identifiable class of great powers in the nineteenth century was critical to the spread and legitimation of this kind of coercive interference, as these custodians of order became leading political actors in maintaining stability and hierarchy in European international society - and beyond. - As intervention was deemed rightful if it was collective and based on great power consensus. Enabling humanitarian intervention was also made possible by intensifying the links between polities and peoples that made the suffering of others, in far-flung places, more accessible. However, the practice of humanitarian intervention goes back far further than the nineteenth century. - From the sixteenth century onward, princes and state leaders deployed armed force in other jurisdictions, without the consent of those in that jurisdiction, and justified their actions on the basis of the appalling acts of foreign sovereigns. So, humanitarian intervention is not something peculiar to the past two centuries, but is also evident in the previous efforts of sovereigns to address 'bad behaviour' that transgressed commonly accepted standards of conduct toward populations. There were a variety of humanitarian bases for intervention advanced in earlier centuries, ranging from the need to rescue fellow humans from egregious harm or vicious oppression by a tyrannical ruler, to the imperative to respond to massacres committed against members of particular religious groups. - Nonetheless, intervening princes and states were more likely to seek a change in the target's policy or behavior, rather than to change the regime itself. The legitimate grounds for intervention gradually narrowed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. - This reflected a shift away from the moral imperatives of the Middle Ages, toward the task of consolidating a modern international society, based on the emerging idea of de jure (according to law) sovereign equality. Humanitarian intervention developed into a coherent political notion in the nineteenth century. - As, while intervention in the late nineteenth century was not prohibited outright--- given its frequent practice on Europe's periphery---it had to be carefully circumscribed. The controversial place of humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth century also stemmed from a set of ethical and political concerns: 1. Mixed motives - How can we condone the practice of humanitarian intervention if interveners have additional motives--- beyond humanitarian ones---for employing military force? 2. Inconsistency - The selectivity with which powerful states have acted to "save strangers" has always informed opposition to legitimizing the practice of humanitarian intervention. 3. Scope - What kind of military action and what level of force are appropriate? 4. Participation - Who has the right to act in the "interests of humanity"? - In order to minimize the risk of self-serving interventions by powerful states, unilateralism had to be outlawed and the vast majority of interventions for humanitarian interventions since the Second World War have been undertaken multilaterally, through regional organizations or the United Nations. **The Multilateralization of Humanitarian Intervention in the Twentieth Century** --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While the United Nations Charter established clear limitations on the use of force, effectively outlawing aggression, it did not directly address the question of whether states can use military force to address a humanitarian crisis occurring within the sovereign jurisdiction of another member state of the UN. - This creates an irreconcilable conflict between two core principles of the United Nations system: sovereignty and human rights. A way to interpret the Charter is to recognize the ways in which it left open the possibility of interventions for humanitarian purposes through the directives of the Security Council. - Provisions containing collective obligations for the maintenance of international peace and security suggest that sovereignty is not a general and absolute barrier to action. Following the end of the Cold War, and the structural change which enabled more collaboration among the great powers, the Security Council began to take a more expansive approach in defining threats to peace and security - a power it theoretically always had - in dealing with a series of situations involving humanitarian crises. - It is crucial to note, however, that the practice from the 1990s legitimized multilateral action to save individuals in peril; the weight of state opinion and the majority opinion of international lawyers did not favour unilateral humanitarian intervention---by one state or a coalition of states acting without multilateral backing. In practice this meant that the legitimacy of intervention for humanitarian purposes clearly rested upon the condition of Security Council authorization---the body with "primary responsibility" for the maintenance of international peace and security. There were two core problems with this state of play: 1. Authorization of military measures was highly dependent on intergovernmental agreement, which could lead to inadequate international response and cost lives. 2. But at the same time, the Security Council's approval remained essential to legitimizing intervention for humanitarian purposes. It was this stalemate that in part helped to propel the development of the principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). In searching for a new consensus to respond more effectively to extreme humanitarian tragedies, the proponents of R2P advanced two principal claims: 1. The best path to protecting populations was to prevent situations. 2. The best strategy was a partnership for protection between national authorities (who bore the primary responsibility to protect populations) and the international community (which could play a supportive and remedial role). 3. This claim was based on the assumption that the rights of sovereignty were not absolute and unconditional, but rather depended upon a state's ability to ensure basic protection for its population. "Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, respression or state failure, and the state in question is unwill