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This paper argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the role of democracy within globalised structures of power. Relegated to a socio-economic background that prompts new engagements with democracy, mobility has been neglected as a condition of possibility and as a form of democratic practice. Drawing on Georg Simmel's sociology of money, we show that practices of transversal mobility constitute democratic moments in relation to structures of power that are constituted across the territorial circumscription of national states. Mobility works directly upon structures of power through universal rights and the politics of the 'mob'. As democratic practices, both rights and mass politics rely on the principle of equality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Foucault’s analysis of biopower and its new technologies centred on life and the living lack a clear definition of the concept of life. While Giorgio Agamben’s reformulation of biopower has differentiated between two concepts of life, zoe and bios, bare life and politically qualified life, Agamben’s notion of zoe has often been equated with the Foucauldian understanding of life. This paper will show that the conflation of life and bare life, the zone of indistinction they enter erases the space for political action, for processes of re-subjectivation. To this end it draws on a Deleuzian understanding of life and confronts it with Foucault’s and Agamben’s. Deleuze introduces a different notion from both Agamben’s zoe and Foucault’s life, that of a life or ‘impersonal life’, life which cannot be attributed to a subject, which only exists in a matrix of desubjectivation. The challenge of abject life is that of its status as excluded, downcast life and therefore cannot be based on a biopolitics of impersonal life. In this understanding of life, biopolitics needs to be exposed as desubjectivating, as erasing political differences and short-circuiting political claims on the status of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how secondary states experience unipolarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there have been efforts to conceptualise institutional change in international relations theory - above all with regard to regime formation and demise - (e.g. Aggarwal 1983, Finnemore/Sikkink 1998, Gehring 1990, E. Haas 1975, P. Haas 1993, Keohane 1982/1984, Young 1982/1991, Young/Osherenko 1993), these efforts lack in richness and systematics. There are at least two reasons for this: first, the very concept of 'regime' or 'institution' implies a certain stability and stasis, so that the analysis of change and dynamics tends to be neglected, especially in view of a widespread preoccupation with 'equilibria'. Second, 'institution' at international level is still often equated with 'cooperation', and development of the regulative and normative content of the institutions is considered of secondary importance.The paper will therefore integrate insights from the comparative politics, economic and sociological literature dealing with domestic institutional change into international relations theory. Three distinct approaches to institutional change will be elaborated (Powell/DiMaggio 1990, Hall/Taylor 1996, Thelen 2002): a) a functionalist / utilitarian approach which traces institutional change to changes in the demand for problem solutions (neoliberal institutionalism, rationalist regime theory); b) a power-distributional approach that attributes institutional change to shifts in the balance of power or to changes in preferences of the most powerful actors (neo realism); and c) a cultural-sociological approach which highlights the role of transformations in wider cultural scripts defining legitimacy and appropriateness for institutional change (cognitive regime theory, constructivism). Beyond these three distinct approaches, there is a body of literature that bridges these approaches and sees institutions change as result of functional, power-distributional, and cultural processes, and which particularly deals with path dependence.The paper adopts this latter view and conceptualises the analysis of regime change in three steps. First, students of institutional/ regime change need to inquire about the results of change (What aspects of the institution changed?) and hence need to identify phases of institutional change with regard to a ?baseline' and dimensions of change (scope/ depth). Second, the process of institutional change (How did the institution change?) needs to be looked at, identifying the paths, critical junctures, and sequencing of institutional change. While the first two steps are largely descriptive-analytic ones, the third one tackles the causation of institutional change (Why did the institution change?). A framework of independent (and highly interdependent) variables is developed that includes as drivers of institutional change: functional advantages; legitimacy patterns; (exogenous) knowledge and ideas; (endogenous) institutional learning; institutional 'nesting' und interaction; co-evolution with the non-institutional environment. Power is seen as an intervening variable that impacts on many of the other variables; external shocks are assumed to be occasions rather than genuine causes of change. This conceptual framework of institutional/ regime change is illustrated by examples from the realm of international biodiversity politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study that suggests a rationalist concept of power that is sufficiently abstract in order to encompass economic bargaining power as well as legal power within the World Trade Organization (WTO). It cites some general reflections on the conceptualization of power in social sciences. It elaborates the causal model of power to outline its application to power contexts within the WTO.

Literature on governance recently has come under critique in both sociology and international relations, with governmentality proposed as an alternative. The argument is that governmentality reflects more aptly the power and "rationalities" involved in governing processes. This article argues that while the governmentality approach does access better the content and "mentalities" of governing processes, including global-level processes, it needs to acknowledge and theorize the gradations of eligibility for objectifying (achieving and enacting) government. Some types of "civil society" members and nonstate actors are better positioned to achieve the status of simultaneous object and subject of government-others, largely, remain subjects, depending on their positions within professional hierarchies and locations within inter-state power dynamics. Some nonstate actors are positioned better to define governmentality's content, and even manage the terms under which they themselves, as well as others, are produced as citizen-subjects. In our examinations of the mechanisms of power in governing processes, we need to consider nonstate actors' positions in global social contexts. The paper examines the global governance of mental health as a heuristic case-study, with special attention to processes of diagnosing eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, in which the standard diagnostic code is spreading globally even though its recommended treatments are not working. The case illustrates that within governmentality processes, some actors remain decidedly more subjects than objects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small states are characterised by a deficit of power. Due to their limited capabilities they lack both the capacity to influence other actors and to prevent these actors from influencing them. To overcome this dilemma small states have to choose between e ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]