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Anti-corruption efforts are inherently political. Corruption charges can be levied against political opponents as an instrument of repression; they can also be used against troublesome allies in the same party coalition to further consolidate power. In this paper, we focus on Indonesia and ask: Do major corruption charges follow a presidential electoral cycle—and if so, how? We contend charges against prominent members of the government coalition are more likely to happen before an election, allowing the government to replace intra-party rivals with loyal allies. Conversely, charges against prominent opposition members are more likely to happen after an election when fears of retaliation are low, opportunities for credit-claiming are high, and there is an incentive to remove veto players who may inhibit implementing the government's agenda. To test this argument, we use an original, newly assembled dataset of all major corruption charges—i.e., those involving high-profile politicians and garnering international attention—in Indonesia from 1998–2015 as reported in the Associated Press. We find a significant and robust relationship between the electoral calendar and major corruption charges. This relationship is robust across presidential administrations. These results yield insights into how anti-corruption efforts can become a political tool and counsel caution about the effectiveness of “good governance,” especially in new democracies. Finally, we discuss how contextual political factors external to Indonesia's anti-corruption commission, reinforce this empirical pattern.

On Revolutions integrates insights from diverse fields—civil resistance studies, international relations, social movements, terrorism—to offes new ways of thinking about the study of revolution. Conventional lines of thought draw on a number of categorical distinctions: social versus political revolutions, structure versus agency, violent versus nonviolent strategies, domestic versus international factors, and success versus failure. In contrast, the book outlines an approach that reaches beyond these dichotomies. Revolutions are not just political or social—they feature many types of change. Structure and agency are not mutually distinct—they are mutually reinforcing processes. Contention is not just violent or nonviolent—it is a messy process that usually involves both strategies. Revolutions do not just succeed or fail—they achieve and simultaneously fall short. And causal conditions are not just domestic or international—they are dependent on the interplay of each. The merit of this approach is demonstrated through consideration of a wide range of cases. The volume also explores new opportunities for conceptual thinking about revolution, provides methodological advice, and engages with the ethical issues that exist at the nexus of scholarship and activism. Taken together, these innovations chart a new path for revolution studies.

The book ends with a chapter that poses new questions and arguments that aim to move the field of revolution studies forward. It asks three main questions: What is the relationship between revolution and liberalism? What is the relationship between revolution and terrorism? What is the normative content of revolutions? The chapter discusses how these questions can open new lines of research on unruly politics and revolution in the contemporary world. Revolutions, as highlighted numerous times in this book, are a story without an end. This is why this closing chapter has highlighted questions rather than provided full stops, let alone exclamation marks. Revolutions are always unfinished.

The opening chapter provides an overview of the various ways revolutions have evolved over the past two centuries. It highlights how contemporary revolutionary movements tend to be unarmed, urban, cross-class coalitions that aim at relatively limited goals such as the resignation of a despot or an end to corruption. In contrast, 19th- and 20th-century revolutions were usually armed, class-based, ideologically oriented projects that aimed for comprehensive social transformation. The chapter also provides a brief overview of the four “generations” of revolutionary theory, noting their limits and revealing how none of these theoretical approaches adequately capture the experience of revolution in the 21st century. Finally, the Introduction provides a road map of the book: Part I aims to deconstruct the dichotomous ways that scholars think about revolutions, and Part II provides guidance on new ways of doing revolutions research.

Chapter 2 takes on the debate surrounding the relative importance of structural conditions versus human agency in revolutions. There is a tendency among scholars of revolution to see the relationship between structural factors and revolutionary agents as a theoretical zero-sum game that must be resolved before a theoretical contribution can be made. Historically, the social scientific study of revolutions has favored structural accounts and theories, and this has led to a structural bias within the field. However, with the study of revolutions becoming fragmented and examined by researchers who might not identify as revolution theorists, new opportunities for novel thinking have appeared. This chapter merges insights from the study of civil resistance with more conventional wisdom from revolution studies to show that neither a heavy-handed focus on agency nor on structures constitutes a viable way forward. Rather, structure and agency must be seen as complements in revolutionary mobilization. At the moment, there is little analysis of how structural conditions may shape strategic choices or how human action might bring about structural shifts that create state vulnerability. As an alternative, the chapter proposes that “strategy,” defined as “structurally situated agency” may provide a way out of this particular dichotomy. Here, the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 is used as a case study to highlight the potential benefits of such an approach.

This chapter challenges the domestic-international dichotomy. Many established theories of revolutionary emergence focus on domestic factors such as economic downturns, elite conflict and defection from the state, and the mobilizing capacity of opposition forces. This dichotomy makes the international influence on all of these domestic factors opaque. Domestic economic conditions are heavily shaped by international markets. Elite decisions about whether to support or oppose the state are linked to alliances with other nations and international organizations. And oppositional organizing capacity is enhanced by support from transnational movements (such as the influx of resources from diaspora supporters) and the transmission of tactics and strategies from revolutionaries in one region of the world to another. In short, there are no fully domestic revolutions; revolutions are always influenced by international factors. Yet all too often, revolutionary scholarship has seen international factors as a backdrop to domestic factors, which are perceived as having the real explanatory power. Researchers have grafted international factors onto existing models in an “add and stir” approach, rather than examining how international dynamics permeate and shape domestic dynamics “all the way down.” The chapter proposes an alternative “inter-social” approach. It highlights how international dynamics help to constitute revolutionary situations, trajectories, and outcomes through an analysis of the 1977–79 Iranian revolution.

Chapter 8 addresses issues of ethics in revolutions research. As revolutionary actors and scholars interact, the dichotomy between revolutionary insiders and outsiders appears to be not as firm as some may have assumed. What are scholars’ ethical responsibilities? While each situation raises its own ethical considerations, this chapter provides some general points of reflection and engages questions of how scholarship is linked to practice in revolutionary studies. The chapter also evaluates three false dichotomies that permeate contemporary ethics discourse on revolutions and engaged scholarship more generally: research/practice; descriptive/prescriptive analysis; and complicity/resistance. It shows how and why these dichotomies can be misleading and potentially counterproductive in generating constructive and transformative integration between revolutionary scholarship and practice. It concludes by offering 12 self-reflective questions to scholars of revolution, which may help to inform an ethically engaged study of revolution. The chapter may be useful for researchers who engage in public-facing scholarship and those who consider themselves scholar-activists or movement participants more explicitly.

This chapter explores the dichotomy of successful versus failed revolutionary outcomes by examining the 1989 revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. Initially, these revolutions were declared a success as Soviet-style regimes were toppled and democratization programs implemented. However, weak democratic institutions failed to achieve revolutionary hopes and aspirations. Inequality deepened as neoliberal economies took root and economic development that would benefit the broader population was thwarted by intra-oligarchic competition and corruption. As a result, the 1989 movement for democracy, civil liberties, and human rights gave way to a populism that has scapegoated immigrants for failures by elites to realize the hopes of the revolutions. These developments help to show the ways in which a dichotomy of success or failure is problematic: all revolutions fail in that they do not, indeed cannot, fully meet the expectations of those who wage them. In this way, all revolutions are unfulfilled projects. But not all fail in the same way, for the same reasons, or to the same degree. And some revolutions have achieved significant change and notable improvements in the lives of their citizens. This chapter explores whether there is a link between revolutionary means and ends: is there a relationship between the tactics of revolutionary movements and post-revolutionary outcomes? While many armed struggles have created a dynamic of violence, counter-revolution, and war, many unarmed struggles have suffered from a “moderation curse.”

Chapter 1 challenges the dichotomous categorizing of revolutions as either social or political. This is a long-standing practice within the field but it is problematic because it conceals other possible outcomes. For instance, many movements are able to oust existing regime leaders but are not able to fully transform rules of governance or institutions under state control (such as the judicial system or the armed forces). In other words, the actors aimed for political revolution but achieved only regime change or executive leadership change. This dichotomy shapes researchers’ thinking about revolutions as events—those explosive moments when insurgents seize state power and oust incumbent rulers—rather than the longer process of changing governance rules and state institutions. A processual view rather than an event-based view shows that revolutionary processes are not linear and unidirectional. A revolutionary regime may move toward a new system, such as democracy, then regress back toward its old system. Hence revolutions may not entail a tidy, direct transition from one type of system to another; state transformation may instead reflect an erratic trajectory. These dynamics are illustrated through an examination of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Euromaidan Revolution of 2014.

Chapter 6 argues that political theory can help explain emergent properties of revolutionary struggles that are unfolding now. Hannah Arendt’s book, On Revolution, departs from the social science model that seeks to generate empirically verifiable propositions about causal dynamics. She asserts the normativity of revolution and embraces “the political” as a decisive sphere of human action. Her ideas value the emancipatory and innovative potential of revolutions and decry their co-optation, derailment, or violent suppression. She invites scholars to evaluate as well as explain revolutionary processes and outcomes. She critiques the revolutionary tradition established by the French Revolution and perpetuated by Marxists, which defines freedom as liberation from economic misery. For Arendt, this social-economic emphasis of revolutionary theory has neglected the political emphasis, which is about the creation of something new and the freedom to participate in community life. This chapter reflects on the way Arendt’s work explores and challenges current theoretical dichotomies and discusses some of the ways it has influenced and aggravated writers concerned with colonial emancipation and racial subjugation.

Chapter 3 argues that the violence-nonviolence dichotomy is problematic for two reasons. First, many revolutionary movements make strategic shifts over time. It is not uncommon for an unarmed movement to take up weapons against the state, just as it is not uncommon for armed guerrillas to lay down their weapons to embark on civil resistance campaigns. The same revolution may be violent in one stage and nonviolent in another. To illustrate how, why, and when such strategic shifts occur, two cases are discussed: the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement, which eventually declined in favor of the armed revolt of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and the West Papua Liberation movement, which turned from armed struggle to civil resistance. The second problem with the violence-nonviolence dichotomy is that movements rarely adhere strictly to one set of tactics or another. Violent revolutionaries often make use of nonviolent actions, such as boycotts or general strikes, using these tactics in tandem with armed struggle. And nonviolent civil resisters sometimes damage buildings or police vehicles, which some consider to be violent. Although a movement may predominantly rely on one strategy or another, there are messy areas that blur the violent-nonviolent boundaries. When researchers break free of this dichotomous way of thinking, they are able to explore when, where, and why these strategic shifts occur and what the impact is of including violent tactics in a nonviolent movement and vice versa.

[T]he United States is voluntarily abdicating much of its global leadership role. And it is doing so in what appears to be a fit of petulance, as though it has been aggrieved and made into a victim by the very international order it helped to build.

Claims by liberal states to be furthering democratic values and material prosperity are being contested due to the manner in which liberal states are attempting to provide for their own security, to the way in which democracy is being more forcefully projected onto the international order, and to the dislocations and inequality associated with global capitalism. The appeal of liberalism as a form of political and economic organization has declined even as its tenets have come to be taken for granted by virtue of their grounding in scientific reasoning. A sustainable resolution to the crisis of legitimacy of the liberal state requires the internal regeneration of the liberal state itself, a renewed commitment to dialogue in multilateral institutions, and a persuasive revitalization of the claims liberal states make that render their example attractive to others.

As part of an overall focus on governance in international political economy, the corruption issue has catapulted from the margins of academic and policy discourse on international affairs to a position as one of the central problems facing transition economies and the developing world today. But the irreducibly normative character of anti-corruption discourse is in tension with the predominantly rationalist, technical and instrumental justifications for open markets which have long dominated the academic and institutional discourse on international political economy. A survey of the anti-corruption consensus reveals omissions and oversights which cause analysts to evade and obscure, rather than directly engage, core problems of politics and ethics; this may have practical consequences for anti-corruption efforts. Republican political thought, though not without its own risks and flaws, may balance and correct some of the omissions and oversights of liberal and rationalist discourse on corruption.

FAULT LINES OF INTERNATIONAL LEGITIMACY Edited by Hilary Charlesworth and Jean-Marc Coicaud Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 4o6pp, US$105.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-521-76446-9Armed interventions in Kosovo and Iraq have exposed what this volume calls "fault lines" in the terrain of international legitimacy. How do we reconcile the apparent contradiction in the assertion, made by the independent international commission on Kosovo, that the NATO intervention was "legitimate but illegal" (390)? In this substantial volume, a distinguished group of legal scholars grapples with the problem that we cannot fully equate legitimacy with international law and institutions, and with the tensions produced by conflicting norms and imperatives within those institutions themselves. Although the case studies addressed vary to include not only the Kosovo and Iraq interventions but also issues such as economic sanctions, the legitimization of the war in Afghanistan, women's peace movements, and the coordination of UN peacekeepers with regional organizations, the volume as a whole is haunted by the "legitimate but illegal" dilemma as manifested in the Kosovo intervention, and by the widespread popular and scholarly anger and anxiety generated by the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.Most of the contributors work primarily in the field of international law, but the essays engage a broad array of scholarly work in international relations, political theory, history, and policy commentary and analysis. In the first three chapters, Jean- Marc Coicaud develops the concept of international legitimacy as "a process through which both political power and obethence are justified" (17). He presents a solid and in-depth review of how legitimacy matters to international relations, with examples drawn from history and, importantly, not exclusively from the European-Atlantic context. Coicaud directly engages and draws on works by scholars such as Ian Hurd and Thomas Franck, among others, in demonstrating how legitimacy structures international political life. In his view, "international legitimacy is about socializing international life by trying to find the right balance between status quo and change" (87). Coicaud develops the notion of "fault lines" in the third chapter, noting that "what is important in understanding fault lines of international legitimacy are the competing right claims put forward by actors in the language of norms ofthe multilateral system, ofthe UN, on which no resolution or agreement is being found" (100). The post-Cold War world has revealed many such fault lines.The analytical integrity of the first three chapters disappears amid the diverse perspectives and traditions informing the subsequent essays. All the contributors are sensitive to the potential charges of neoimperialism, evoked not only by armed interventions but also by the assertion of the universality of certain international norms, but they deal with this dilemma in different ways. …

The case of the French Revolution supports the proposition that principles of political legitimacy which shape state identities are linked to domestic social structures, and help determine the resources states mobilize in international competition. To the degree that they are shared across states, legitimacy principles also shape international society. The enactment of a deviant principle of legitimacy by a major power will have systemic consequences because it undermines the existing rules of the game; it may have transformative effects if the efficacy of the new principle is demonstrated in competition. Closer attention should be paid to the complex manner in which new principles interact with existing rules of international society.

In recent international relations theory debates, constructivists have argued that explanations based primarily on interests and the material distribution of power cannot fully account for important international phenomena and that analysis of the social construction of state identities ought to precede, and may even explain, the genesis of state interests. This claim has proved difficult to operationalize empirically, though some persuasive results are now emerging. This article analyzes the relationship between state identity and state interest in the development of American neutral rights policy from U.S. independence to the War of 1812.

The language of special responsibilities is ubiquitous in world politics, with policymakers and commentators alike speaking and acting as though particular states have, or ought to have, unique obligations in managing global problems. Surprisingly, scholars are yet to provide any in-depth analysis of this fascinating aspect of world politics. This path-breaking study examines the nature of special responsibilities, the complex politics that surround them and how they condition international social power. The argument is illustrated with detailed case-studies of nuclear proliferation, climate change and global finance. All three problems have been addressed by an allocation of special responsibilities, but while this has structured politics in these areas, it has also been the subject of ongoing contestation. With a focus on the United States, this book argues that power must be understood as a social phenomenon and that American power varies significantly across security, economic and environmental domains. --Introduction --Part I. Theoretical Framework: 1. A practice in search of a theory --2. Special responsibilities in world politics --Part II. Three Global Problems: 3. Nuclear proliferation --4. Climate change --5. Global finance --Part III. Ethical Dimensions: 6. The ethics of special responsibilities --Conclusion --Bibliography --Index

Acknowledgments vii Chapter One: Introduction: The Transformation of Legitimacy 1 Explaining the Transformation International Political Culture Plan of the Book Chapter Two: International Political Culture and Systemic Change 15 The Cultural Dimensions of International Politics Interplay between Culture and Strategy Methodology Conclusion Chapter Three: Old Regime Political Culture 61 International Relations: Strategic Overview The Political Culture of Old Regime Europe Cultural Complementarities: Enlightenment and Monarchy Cultural Contradictions in the Old European Order Conclusion Chapter Four: The American Revolution 110 Republicanism Political Economy Cosmopolitanism versus Nationalism in American Foreign Policy Conclusion Chapter Five: The French Revolution 165 The Collapse of the Ancien Regime Revolution and War Conclusion Chapter Six: Conclusion: Fractured Hegemony and the Seeds of Change 211 Legacies Political Culture and Systemic Change Bibliography 235 Index 247

Legitimacy in International Society. By Ian Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 288p. $55.00. Ian Clark's book offers the most comprehensive analysis of legitimacy in international relations available today, in the process breathing new life into the concept of international society. Organized into two main sections—a historical review of major peace settlements and an analysis of contemporary international society—the book develops a framework designed to disentangle the complex threads of discourse that make up both scholarly and public discussions of international legitimacy. The author refines and brings the tradition of the English School into direct dialogue with mainstream U.S. international relations discourse, to productive effect.