This chapter examines whether and to what extent information about the procedures and performances of international organizations affects citizens legitimacy beliefs. It examines this issue comparatively across seven international organizations in different issue areas, including the African Union, European Union, United Nations Security Council, and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The survey is conducted in four countries in diverse world regions (Germany, the Philippines, South Africa, and the US). The analysis shows that information about both procedures and performances impact legitimacy beliefs. Moreover, citizens update their legitimacy beliefs in line with information about democracy, effectiveness, and fairness in global governance.

This chapter examines how information on the authority and purpose of international organizations influences citizen legitimacy beliefs toward global governance. Advancing on previous research that primarily has studied effects of procedures and performances on citizens legitimacy beliefs, this chapter uses a conjoint experimental design to assess how different institutional qualities matter when simultaneously communicated to citizens. The chapter explores this issue across hypothetical international organizations in two countries (Germany and the US). It finds that citizens form legitimacy beliefs in line with information about authority and purpose in international organizations. However, this relationship depends on citizens’ political priors. Information about an international organization’s authority has a weaker negative effect on legitimacy beliefs among internationalist citizens. Moreover, the effect of information about an international organization’s social purpose depends on citizens’ political values. These conditioning effects are only found in the more polarized context of the US and not in Germany.

Our food systems have performed well in the past, but they are failing us in the face of climate change and other challenges. There is a broad consensus that transformation of food systems is required to make them sustainable and equitable for all. Transformation occurs via agents of change: individual behaviour, policies and institutions, research and innovation, and partnerships and alliances. Outcome-oriented agricultural research for development can help bring about directed transformation that maximises benefits and minimises trade-offs.

This chapter makes a case against a substantive understanding of the material constitution. It first centres on Carl Schmitt’s concrete-order thinking as a glaring example of a theory that attaches priority to the material over the formal and yet fails to explain where matter comes from. Materiality turns out to be a shorthand for the social, while what the social is remains mostly under-developed and eventually takes up communitarian and identitarian connotations. By building on Santi Romano’s and Karl Llewellyn’s theories, the author unearths an alternative notion of the material. The constitution is an institution in the sense of a set of organisational practices as practices, not their sedimented outcomes, such as behavioural standards, normative values or fundamental principles. Unlike substantive conceptions, the processual understanding easily accounts for how collectives make room for change of their substantive contents while preserving their collective character.

Wallace’s interest in the metanarrative systems that guide and govern human behavior persisted throughout his career, from urban geography, pharmacology and language through entertainment, taxation and alienation. One such system is that of citizenship, which arguably grows in significance the later we look in Wallace’s writing, reaching its zenith in The Pale King. This chapter outlines the configuration and operation of citizenship throughout Wallace’s work, situating it against a critical backdrop of studies of American space and citizenship more generally and working in dialogue with the accompanying chapters on ecologies, geographies and politics. A decisively American writer, Wallace’s writing deploys a complex set of images associated with citizenship and civic duty. Examining the shifting, almost hallucinatory qualities of nation space at play in Wallace’s late capitalist cultural imaginary, this chapter argues that Wallace’s image of citizenship emerges from a concept of community – individually and locally constructed by means of engagement with civic systems – rather than nationalist or historicist in nature.

In contrast to the small-scale we of shared action, this chapter analyses the large-scale and temporally prolonged we’s of communities governed by social norms. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of the Anyone and of historicity, I distinguish between anonymous social normativity and historical social normativity. Anonymous social normativity provides a set of social norms in the form of a relatively stable, socially inflected comportmental pattern that we assume to be a universal default. However, this kind of social normativity comes with only a minimal awareness of its own nature, extent, and origin. Historical social normativity, on the other hand, implies a historical awareness in which social norms are disclosed as historical and hence as fragile and contestable. For Heidegger, this leads to the proto-political possibility of what I call communal commitments—roughly, commitments in which a group of people commit themselves to sustain a particular set of social norms across generations.

This essay tests the definition of an institution as ‘an assemblage that organises, transmits, and validates’ something, ‘and that self-consciously represents itself as doing so’ that is offered in the introduction to this collection, particularly as it applies to large, diffuse institutions such as Authorship. I argue that much of the organization, transmission, and validation of authors that makes Authorship an institution is done by seemingly minor, but highly self-conscious microgenres, such as the sessions poem or the stylistic imitation. I then explore this idea by considering the phenomenon of Miltonic imitations, which detach John Milton’s manner from his exalted matter and antimonarchic politics in order to use it as a clever means of making familiar (and often highly unMiltonic) topics new. In so doing, they suggest that the essence of ‘Milton’ is somehow to be found in his style and so are, both individually and collectively, organizing, transmitting, and validating ‘him’. At the same time, these imitations are making the case that Authorship, as an institution, has the right and the duty to make such pronouncements about the essence of authors. Similar kinds of pronouncements were made through other microgenres, including the use of Milton’s ‘head’ as a shop sign for booksellers and scenes of Milton’s ghost interacting with other writers, both living and dead

The introduction begins by addressing the uses of studying cultural institutions. It provides a working definition of ‘institution’ and a historical overview of the emergence of the infrastructure of institutions in the period 1700 to 1900. The logic of choosing the period is addressed in relation to the uneven translation from cultural institutions based on the court and church to voluntary institutions that had an arms-length relationship to the state. It also discusses the historical irony that just as a ‘romantic’ definition of the literary individualism emerged that might seem to pit literature against Institutions, there was a proliferation of institutions of literature. The purview of the collection in relation to British national and imperial culture and identities is explained and the opportunities for further work in related areas discussed in the framework of the collection’s own historical moment at a time when the university-based discipline of Literature seems to be undergoing a fundamental change in its structure and purposes.

In Chapter 6, we find evidence that opposition successor parties from more closed opportunity structures experience centrifugal strains caused by the amalgamation of ideological orientations and perspectives that they represent. These strains lead to elite polarization that cause movement fracture and collapse. Conversely, opposition successor parties from more open opportunity structures are ideologically more coherent and thus do not suffer the same centrifugal tensions. Second, we see that nearly all opposition successor parties experience a dramatic decline in popularity after founding elections, due the ephemerality of symbolic resources in general (oppositional credibility, in this context). The positive reputations that helped opposition groups persuade citizens to vote for them in founding elections break down under economic strain and political disfunction that so frequently plague new democracies. Finally, we see that in contexts in which authoritarian state institutions persist beyond the transition, the resurgence of state repression against opposition successor parties becomes more likely, while authoritarian successor parties, in contrast, can integrate former regime members into the new democratic political system.

This chapter introduces the thought of Otto von Gierke. It outlines the philosophical tenets of classical pluralism and its rich vocabulary of group entities. It traces the rise of pluralism in nineteenth-century Germany, through its short golden age in early twentieth-century England, to its eclipse and afterlife following World War I. It argues that classical pluralism offers the most comprehensive and convincing theoretical model on which to regulate the relationship among individual, state and civil society in general, and between English law and British Islam in particular.

Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but a republican political leader whose success was based on a combination of patrician pedigree with a popular persona built on an extraordinary record of military achievement. He was no anti-senatorial, populist revolutionary but followed in the tracks of Roman heroes of the past such as the Scipios. His astonishing success hardened his enemies' determination to stop him, even at the price of forcing a civil war. His assassination on the eve of his departure for a great war of vengeance against Parthia precluded whatever plans for consolidation he may have had, but also propelled the violence of civil war into the next phase of what would become a decisively destructive cycle. If Gruen was correct to emphasize that civil war destroyed the Republic, not its preexisting institutional weaknesses, then human choices, especially those that brought about the Civil War, provide the most satisfactory explanation for the collapse of the Republic.

This article examines the relevance of Brecht’s ideas about theater and pedagogy for the contemporary university, suggesting that a Brechtian approach has the potential to liberate the way that we think about university education and the role of teachers, students, and administrators. Rather than accepting the world as static and given, a Brechtian approach to pedagogy can encourage and develop an active, student-centered approach. It can help to encourage students to create and take charge of their own meaning-making activities. Just as Brechtian theater insists on revolutionary change and invites audience participation, so, too, a Brechtian approach to pedagogy invites student participation and activity, turning over much of the responsibility for meaning-making to those who are seeking an education. This would constitute a revolutionary new way of looking at university education.

Chapter 2 conceptualizes constitutional properties in both domestic and international settings. Drawing on domestic experiences, it defines constitutions, whether written or unwritten, as a special category of institutions that provide fundamental rules (of recognition and change) as well as rules that regulate a community of members, their relations, and their rights and duties (rules of conduct). It then identifies corresponding constitutional properties in the international setting, acknowledging the limits of this analogy. While still embryonic, international rules with constitutional relevance are especially apparent in those binding treaties of public international law that are universal in intended participation, global in scope, and of substantive importance. These rules are underpinned by the principle of sovereignty, which provides for their stability and superiority. International constitutional rules define states as the prime members, organize inter–state relations in an anarchical environment by concentrating authority in circumscribed domains, and lay out rights and duties that enable collective action and set standards of appropriate behavior.