This chapter takes stock of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals within countries. It explores the various initiatives taken by national governments, sub-national authorities, the corporate sector and civil society, and assesses their strategies and approaches to implement the Sustainable Development Goals in their spheres. The chapter finds that the steering effects of the global goals are so far mainly present in political discourse. While we also witness the emergence of new types of institutions, relationships and partnerships, they apparently reproduce existing structures and priorities of key players, indicating selective goal implementation. What we observe the least are steering effects on the (re-)allocation of resources. Thus, the chapter suggests that the Sustainable Development Goals are not (yet) leading to fundamental change and the voluntary nature of the 2030 Agenda makes it fairly easy for actors to implement the global goals in a way that benefits their self-interests.

This chapter examines to what extent and under what conditions the Sustainable Development Goals have fostered a better inclusion and support of poor and vulnerable communities within countries, and of the least developed countries internationally. We start with a conceptualization of inclusiveness as a matter of recognition, representation, and distribution. We then review the role of the Sustainable Development Goals in steering any normative, institutional or discursive changes in favour of inclusiveness within and between countries, drawing on both a Scopus search of all articles published between 2015 and 2020 in the social sciences subject area related to inclusiveness and grey literature. Although research evidence is strikingly limited, our review indicates that rhetoric and action do not match when it comes to the impacts of the Sustainable Development Goals on inclusiveness within and between countries. While vulnerable people and countries are often discursively prioritized in the implementation of the goals, such discursive prioritization has so far not resulted in creating or reshuffling norms and institutions towards inclusiveness.

British voluntary and faith organizations were important components of the rapidly expanding “third sector” of civil society and non-governmental organizations in the post-1945 international system. Many postwar international volunteers had participated in relief efforts for displaced persons during the war. This included the Friends (Quakers) Ambulance Unit (FAU), which operated the Friends Post War Service (FPWS, 1946–48) and the Friends Ambulance Unit International Service (FAUIS, 1948–59). These organizations provided Quaker conscientious objectors with an alternate means of completing their National Service. This chapter evaluates the historical experiences of FPWS/FAUIS volunteers as examples of international service motivated by moral conviction and argues that FPWS/FAUIS relief work constituted a form of private international social governance.

The first chapter posits the book’s approach in the context of dominant ideas about civil society in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is widely considered an authoritarian state with little space for any civil initiative to maneuver in or to flourish. The rentier state paradigm, which has dominated much of the discussion of state–society relations in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, assumes that the oil-rich state buys its citizens’ acquiescence through the strategic investment of hydrocarbon revenues into welfare and high living standards. Yet Saudi Arabia’s growing wealth gap challenges these assumptions.

This book presents a different perspective from which to view and understand Saudi Arabian society, not from a top-down vantage point but "bottom-up," from the point of view of local civil society initiatives. The chapter introduces the four charity organizations that form the basis of the book’s analysis. Given the difficulties of field research in Saudi Arabia, the chapter discusses opportunities and challenges that this project faced and how these contributed to the research design and findings.

Chapter 9 proposes concrete measures to promote role-based constitutional fellowship. First, the chapter acknowledges that bounded solidarity can support fellowship. Accordingly, the chapter identifies ways of imagining the nation to ensure that that solidarity is inclusive, and urges liberal democrats to promote inclusion cautiously. Second, the chapter discusses trust among political actors. The chapter acknowledges that some institutional arrangements – namely Westminster systems – seem relatively effective at channelling competition and alleviating the need for fellowship. Most democratic systems, however, are non-Westminster systems. Accordingly, the chapter suggests reforms that can make it easier for political competitors to act like fellows. Third, the chapter discusses trust among citizens at large. In addition to certain democratic education arrangements, the chapter argues that the integrated workplace and less-voluntary associations are more promising than voluntary civil societal associations as forums to promote trust. Fourth, the chapter demonstrates the need for some material redistribution to ensure that citizens feel that they are all in it together.

New social forces that emerge as part of the process of development turn structural change into political change. Their struggles for representation and incorporation occupy a prominent place in our understanding of regime change. Even elite-driven democratic transitions necessitate moments of mass mobilization that push liberalization into regime change. Many scholars also contend that an active citizenry leads to democratic stability via more effective government. In contrast, others warn that a mobilized and polarized civil society can undermine democracy – particularly if the demands of social forces outstrip the capacity of institutions to process them. In this chapter, we explore the effects of social organization and mobilization on democracy. Using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data, we gauge the extent to which organized and mobilized social forces are responsible for levels and changes in democracy. We find that civil society participation and nonviolent protest positively affect democracy and that rightwing anti-system movements constitute the largest threat to democracy.

Chapters 7 unpacks how lawyers can serve as brokers of compliance when controversial judicial decisions spark backlash. As European integration became politicized from the 1990s onwards, disruptive European Union (EU) laws and European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions have often provoked on-the-ground resistance. Yet these controversies can also open surprising opportunities for court-driven change, provided that Euro-lawyers mobilize as "interpretive mediators:" Public advocates who vernacularize EU law and rally local stakeholders and the press to promote compliance. The chapter develops a case study design to compare lawyers' role in two explosive controversies that generated litigation before the ECJ: The 1991 Port of Genoa case (analyzed in this Chapter), which quashed the control over port labor of a centenarian union of dockworkers, and the 2015 Xylella case (analyzed in Chapter 8), which mandated the eradication of thousands of centenarian olive trees. The chapter traces how Euro-lawyers in the Port of Genoa case preempted backlash and promoted compliance by mobilizing public and interest group support via media savvy advocacy. It speaks to readers interested in how contentious politics transform legal mobilization, how lawyers cultivate people's legal consciousness when the law is politicized, and how these efforts shape judicial policymaking and Europeanization.

This chapter has four objectives: (1) to explain the main concepts and the normative stance of the book, (2) to develop the main theory of the book, (3) to overview the history of constitutions and constitutionalism in the Arab world in relation to the book’s theory, and (4) to provide a concise introduction to the Arab Spring constitutional bargains across the region.

Chapter 9 proposes a normative and historical evaluation of the book's findings. It first considers how lawyers compare to other ghostwriters of institutional change, suggesting that what distinguishes lawyers is their capacity to wield a mediatory, boundary-blurring agency to seize opportunities for change that may be lost upon actors shackled to single institutional settings. It then addresses the ethics of lawyers’ ghostwriting, submitting that while concealed actions pushing the bounds of the acceptable are often necessary to jump-start institutional change, Euro-lawyering became more normatively problematic as it corporatized and stratified access to transnational justice. Finally, the chapter concludes by taking stock in light of the contemporary challenges plaguing the rule of law in Europe. As a wave of illiberalism and constitutional breakdowns has swept some EU member states, Euro-lawyers have gained a new raison d’être in the struggle to reclaim the elusive liberal promise of the judicial construction of Europe.

This chapter has two objectives: (1) to introduce the topic and discuss its importance, and (2) to provide roadmap of the book with a brief discussion of what each chapter covers.

Chapter 6 traces the evolution and corporatization of Euro-lawyering. The repertoire of court-driven change developed by the first Euro-lawyers only took root where a broader array of practitioners came to perceive it as professionally advantageous. Since the 1980s, a rising network of "Euro-firms" took charge of Euro-lawyering to tend to a corporate, transnational clientele in global cities. Conversely, in more resource-scarce client markets where lawyers are balkanized into generalists, practitioners perceive mobilizing European law as impractical - something one does elsewhere. Since the only national courts routinely solicited to apply EU law and solicit the ECJ are in cities where Euro-firms cluster, the judicial construction of Europe has evolved as patch-worked ecology hollowed by black holes. The chapter leverages geospatial analysis and comparative fieldwork across five cities where Euro-lawyering corporatized– Rome, Milan, Paris, Hamburg and Munich – and four cities where it never took root – Palermo, Naples, Bari, and Marseille. Readers curious about how lawyers rework economic and spatial inequities into place-based identities, how these identities refract access to courts and the promise of judicial policymaking, and how repertoires of legal mobilization are co-opted and corporatized will find this chapter of interest.

Chapter 8 unpacks how the absence of Euro-lawyering and mediatory public advocacy can embolden on-the-ground backlash to European Union (EU) laws and European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions. The chapter contrasts Chapter 7's analysis of the Port of Genoa case with a similarly explosive controversy yielding a far more regressive outcome: The 2015 Xylella case. As a plant pathogen described as "the coronavirus of olive trees" began devastating olive groves in southern Italy, the European Commission and the ECJ intervened by mandating the eradication of thousands of diseased trees. Farmers revolted against these decisions and called for disobedience, yet a legacy of noncompliance was hardly inevitable. Contentious resistance proliferated because it unfolded in a context devoid of Euro-lawyers ready to proactively advocate for compliance in a way that resonated with local stakeholders, judges, and journalists. In fact, some local lawyers and judges even joined resistance efforts and began trafficking in conspiracy. The chapter speaks to readers interested in how contentious politics can produce a defiant legal consciousness, how this consciousness can diffuse from the streets to the bar and bench, and how it threatens to corrode the judicial construction of Europe.

In this chapter, I examine the evolution of US democracy aid in Egypt through the eyes of the diplomats, practitioners, and bureaucrats engaged with such efforts in Egypt. I focus on the practical construction of democracy aid on the ground and the struggles undertaken by different actors to implement aid programs in an authoritarian state. I examine how ideas, interests, and institutions engaged in such aid evolved since 1990s to shape a kind of reform more attuned to the commercial and economic interests of the US and Egyptian governments rather than those of citizens in the country. In the first section, I focus on the nature of authoritarianism in Egypt, tracing its origins since the Nasser era to describe how power has since been exercised and maintained. In the second section, I examine how US democracy aid evolved in Egypt, focusing on the debates and discussions at the inception of USAID’s programs.

This chapter examines the political economy of democracy aid in Morocco in two sections. In the first, I focus on the context in which political and economic reforms began in Morocco and describe the foundation of authoritarian power in the country. The second section discusses the context in which US democracy aid began in the country. US democracy assistance in Morocco was executed later than similar efforts in Egypt and at significantly different funding levels. I discuss reasons for this variation as well as how that strategy was formulated over time. This section traces the United States’ increasing support in its democracy strategy for economic reforms over political aid for democracy that would mirror the regime’s own priorities and how its conception of democracy in the country changed to support the commercial and security interests of the regime and the United States.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s political orientation has proven surprisingly difficult to characterize. During his own lifetime and political career, Tocqueville was a self-identified liberal and a figure on the French centrist-left. However, his political thought in the twentieth century has increasingly become associated with the conservative Right, especially in the United States. In this chapter, Richard Boyd identifies five major elements of Democracy in America that have strong affinities for central tenets of political conservatism. He further demonstrates how different figures on the conservative Right in the United States have drawn on these dimensions of Tocqueville’s political thought to bolster various strands of conservative thinking and policy. Whether a matter of foreign affairs, welfare reform, criticisms of the administrative state, affirmations of the centrality of religion to political life, or complaints about modernity and cultural decline, thinkers on the Right have found abundant intellectual resources in Democracy in America. As Boyd demonstrates, however, the Right has often deployed these arguments selectively and sometimes even at cross purposes in light of changing domestic and geopolitical circumstances.

Many thinkers have alleged that free markets are inimical to a sense of community. According to critics such as Robert Putnam, commercial societies tend to dissociate people from one another and to undermine the basis of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America seems to present a challenge to this view insofar as he regards the Americans as both exceptionally commercial and uniquely associational. If markets and associations are in tension with one another, how can they coexist in the United States? As Rachael K. Behr and Virgil Henry Storr argue in this chapter, a closer attention to Democracy in America suggests several ways in which commercial society and the spirit of association are mutually supportive. Markets foster a complex division of labor that requires mutual cooperation. Markets encourage a sense of enlightened self-interest that teaches citizens how they might engage with one another in mutually beneficial ways. Further, markets facilitate innovations in communication that make it easier for citizens to coordinate and freely associate for political change. Rather than giving rise to Tocqueville’s dreaded pathology of “individualism,” as critics have alleged, markets are instead conducive to active civic engagement and the free association of democratic citizens.