This chapter outlines the main findings of this book, placing them in the broader perspective of global ICT standardization. It discusses the arising challenges and sketches a broader legal, economic, and political outlook on due process in ICT standardization. In particular, this chapter provides a concise summary of the book’s main argument: if standards development organizations’ (SDOs) frameworks are to fall short on procedural guarantees, which is increasingly becoming the case due to the complexity and public function of their standards, there is little chance that their governance bodies will address the issue, which may result in lack of legitimacy in the ICT standardization ecosystem; this can be remedied, at least in part, by an “external” review of SDOs’ processes and decisions, (to be) conducted by industry experts, courts, or public law bodies. This chapter further provides recommendations and suggestions for improving both the existing regulatory framework and internal rules of SDOs, emphasizing, however, that any modifications of operational frameworks should take into account the specific sector in which these organizations operate.

Chapter 8 concludes our analytic narrative. We describe the politically frozen, yet militarily hot conflict from 2015 until 2022. Russian military intervention in the Battles of Ilovaisk (end of summer 2014) and Debaltseve (February 2015) produced the Minsk Agreement, backed by France, Germany, and eventually the UN Security Council, whereby Russia sought to impose conditions on Ukraine over the status of the disputed Donbas territories and the sequence required for Ukraine to regain control of its borders. Kyiv rejected this interpretation of Minsk, resulting in a diplomatic stalemate. The stabilization of the de facto frontier in the East took on familiar characteristics of a frozen conflict. On its side of the line of control Ukraine became more Ukrainian in terms of national cohesion and language/memory policies. On the other side of the line, the DNR/LNR became more Russian. Consistent with our model predictions, the policy preferences of the Ukrainian West met less resistance. In the final part of the chapter, we describe Putin’s decision to abrogate the Minsk Process and initiate a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s account of the conflict is formalized in a mathematical appendix (Appendix B).

By analysing material from and slightly after Heidegger’s brief time as rector of Freiburg University, I show that he conceives of the state and the educational system as means to sustaining a communal commitment to a philosophically inflected nationalism. Although it relies on a distinctly Heideggerian conception of the state, Heidegger’s nationalism is by most measures rather trivial. He does, however, try to philosophically justify his nationalism and antisemitism by recourse to what has become known as the history of being. I show that this period of Heidegger’s thought is marred by several assumptions and inferences that contradict his earlier and much more convincing social ontology. I thus find myself in a position to criticise Heidegger’s politics from within. More specifically, I criticise Heidegger for inconsistently attributing an exceptional type of world-disclosure to the Führer; for confusing ontic and ontological senses of community and the shared world; and, finally, for giving methodological priority to a radical form historicism over and above transcendentalism.

This chapter examines the wartime population policy, the balanced distribution of population that became deliberated in the process of creating policies for “national land planning.” It analyzes the debates relating to population distribution policies as well as policy-oriented research activities mobilized for national land planning, the wartime government’s “sacred mission” to construct the new order in East Asia by establishing the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. By focusing on the population technocrat Tachi Minoru, the chapter describes how Tachi’s research reflected the political agenda of the wartime government, which primarily viewed the population as an invaluable resource to be deployed for the nation at war. It details how the research carried out with this understanding came to create the knowledge about gendered and racialized demographic subjects that were categorized around the notion of economic production and biological reproduction. The chapter also analyzes the technocrat’s research to illustrate the fragile nature of demographic knowledge produced for policymaking and concludes that the role of policy-oriented scientific investigation in wartime statecraft was by no means as stable as has been claimed.

To a hard-nosed “realist” reader, the scenarios of growing international coordination and pragmatic institution-building described in the preceding chapters will no doubt seem like an idealistic fantasy. From such a reader’s perspective, we are likely to see a very different sort of future unfold in the second half of the twenty-first century – a geopolitics based on continued rivalry, arms races, and frantic competition for dominance among China, the United States, and Russia, alongside the restless jockeying of new powers like India, Brazil, Japan, and perhaps a more tightly consolidated EU. Some prominent scholars of international relations subscribe to this view, and this chapter summarizes their arguments about the prospects of geo-strategic affairs over the coming decades. In such a scenario of “business as usual,” unfortunately, the planet-level instruments for managing our four mega-dangers would be distressingly weak, and the opportunities for large coalitions of nations to come together successfully in coordinated, long-range projects will be rare.

Chapter 9 reviews the attempt by Iranian local government to engage with the international municipal cooperation movement as a way to advance the goal of democratic local government inside Iran and highlights the geopolitical factors that pose sharp limits to that goal. For four years before Iranian security services terminated it, I was co-director of a pioneering “city diplomacy” project involving a multi-year collaboration between mayors and civil society groups from the Netherlands and Iran. The project included exchange visits between Iran and the Netherlands by city councilors, mayors, local civil society groups, and central government officials. It also included collaborative funded neighborhood projects inside Iran. The chapter traces the reasons for the failure of the city diplomacy project to geopolitical factors rooted in Iran’s rejectionist foreign policy and anti-Western and anti-liberal ideology. The international geopolitical factors compounded the antidemocratic ideological commitments of the regime that defeated domestic attempts at reform. Despite its abrupt curtailment, the four-year project made some valuable contributions to the discourse/project/ideal of local democracy in Iran, although its impact on the practice of local democracy is not clear. On the other hand, the Iranian state resolutely moved into the space of international municipal cooperation work in a way that negates and neutralizes democratization and imposed its own terms of Islamization on the interchange with the international community around the theme of urbanization and cities. This shows that the Iranian regime is extremely skilled at managing risk rather than eliminating it.

The Strategic Value Framework developed in this book explicates the dominant sectoral patterns of market governance in Russia today. Historical process tracing from sectoral origins of labor-intensive textiles and capital-intensive telecommunication in this chapter shows how Russian state leaders intersubjectively respond to objective economic and political pressures. The political basis and evolution of the perceived strategic value of national security and resource management took root in the Soviet era through Soviet collapse and transition to and away from democratic rule. In the context of macro-liberalization and mass privatization at the founding of the Russian Federation, interacting perceived strategic value and sectoral structures and organization of institutions have shaped the centralized role of the state in market coordination and variegated property rights arrangements of centralized governance in defense-origin dual use telecommunications reenforced by the rise of Vladimir Putin aided by economic and political crises. The less strategic value of non-defense sectors, such as textiles, is governed by the decentralized coordination and dominant private property of private governance and decentralized governance since Gorbachev’s perestroika. The rise of bifurcated oligarchy in Russian-style capitalism are shaped by the joined imperatives of resource security nationalism and path-dependent sectoral organization of institutions.

The Strategic Value Framework introduced in this chapter offers a unified explanation, linking macro- and micro-sectoral-level changes and continuities, of what appears to be contradictory and irreconcilable forces at work within globalizing countries. It first identifies historically and institutionally rooted values, objective and intersubjective in nature, which arise from state elite responses to political and economic pressures internal and external in nature experienced during significant moments of national consolidation. The perceived strategic value orientation evolves and transforms overtime; and interacts with sectoral structures and organization of institutions. The resultant dominant patterns of market governance vary by country and sector within country and filter the relative impacts of an open economy, global norms and international organizations, resource and factor endowments, regime type and political institutions, and national characteristics and domestic structures. The Strategic Value Framework is tested and substantiated with a multilevel comparative case research design, which systematically conducts across case and within case analysis at (time, country, sector, and company). The case studies leverage historical process-tracing and triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data, including in-depth interviews with state, subnational government, business, and industry stakeholders and primary and secondary documentation collected during extensive fieldwork.

This chapter exposes how the perceived strategic value of capital-intensive, value-added sectors, represented by telecommunications, for national security and resource management, interacts with sectoral structures and organization of institutions. The centralized governanceby the Russian state since the collapse of the Soviet Union and further reenforced during the Putin era witnessed in these sectors shows the federal government consolidating in one corporate entity the ownership and management of civilian and dedicated landlines of the Soviet military industrial complex. Centralized market coordination presides over the predominantly privately owned mobile and value-added service providers operating in fiercely competitive markets deregulated in the 1990s. The cross-time sector and company cases further show various lower-level bureaucracies and non-sector-specific economywide rules regulate telecommunications equipment privatized after Soviet collapse, perceived less strategic than the state-owned and managed backbone infrastructure. Similar interacting strategic value and sectoral logics apply to Information Technology (IT) Software, a sector which has benefitted from former science and technology personnel of the Soviet defense industry. In the face of perceived security threats from within and without after economic crises and conflicts with neighboring countries, however, the state has reenforced its control of the information communications infrastructure, including RuNet and cybersecurity, designated strategic assets.

World War I dramatically transformed Germans’ subject position regardless of whether or not they participated in the war or supported Imperial Germany. In addition to exposing Imperial Germany’s dependence on commodities from abroad for its industry and its residents’ well-being, it witnessed a kind of economic warfare that was just as unprecedented as the military conflict that took place in Europe. Around the globe, the Allied powers targeted Germans—citizens of Imperial German as well as ethnic Germans who were not that. That led to internments and confiscations; but the Allies applied pressure outside their territories as well. Latin America, in particular, became a site of extreme pressure as first the British and then the United States used the war to increase their economic and political power in the region at the expense of the German networks that had long competed against them. Facing a shared set of challenges actually served to bind many of these disparate German communities in the Americas together even as they radically reduced the size of many German communities in other European states and the colonial territories.