Geographical indications (GIs) have increasingly been conceptualised within international intellectual property law as development-oriented instruments associated with rural development, cultural heritage preservation, and improved market access, particularly in the Global South. This review essay examines how this developmental rationale is articulated and critically assessed in three recent contributions to GI scholarship. It argues that these works collectively challenge the assumption that legal recognition of GIs is sufficient to generate equitable economic outcomes. Instead, they show that GI regimes operate as institutionally mediated and politically contingent governance frameworks, whose distributive effects depend on regulatory capacity, producer organisation, and market structures. Drawing on comparative perspectives from Asia and Africa, the essay situates GI protection within broader debates on legal transplantation, development governance, and distributive justice in the Global South.

China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI), launched in 2022, has rapidly turned into a flagship programme through which Beijing seeks to present itself as an international security actor and foster strategic alignment both within and beyond its immediate neighbourhood. While emerging scholarship mostly discusses China’s intentions behind the GSI, this article places emphasis on analysing how the initiative has been received. In particular, we seek to investigate why a large number of states from the global south have endorsed the GSI by not only lending rhetorical support to the initiative but also increasingly moving to implement specific security-related cooperation projects with China. We take a role-theoretical approach and make the argument that growing role alignment between China and its GSI partners best explains this development. That is, China’s emerging role conception as an international security provider – particularly in non-military domains such as law enforcement, police training, and IT surveillance – resonates with the expectations and needs of many global south states as security seekers, which tend to share similar understandings of security with China and often prioritise internal and regime security. To validate our argument empirically, we provide empirical examples from continental Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and (East) Africa.

Across a fractured geopolitical landscape, the Global South faces renewed constraints on its capacity to pursue sovereign development. Rather than treating these pressures as symptoms of a ‘new Cold War’, this article returns to the original Cold War as a decisive moment in the consolidation of the legal and epistemic foundations of today’s global economy. It argues that the Cold War was a pivotal phase in a longer history of disembedding, through which economic governance was separated from social and political life and reorganized through juridical, financial, and metrological techniques. While the Soviet project often advanced more solidaristic visions of development, both socialist and Western frameworks ultimately relied on technocratic and growth-centred models that narrowed the space for postcolonial demands for redistribution and structural reform. Through a longue durée analysis of the colonial, Cold War and post-Cold War periods, the article traces how international law and development co-evolved as interlocking techniques that rearticulated imperial hierarchies into global economic norms and institutions. Revisiting this history reveals the juridical infrastructures that continue to reproduce global inequality and the legal imaginations and material sites through which the Global South continues to contest its fate.

This study examines the systemic politicization of public policy in Indonesia, rooted in its historical, political, and sociocultural contexts. Adopting a Global South perspective, it challenges Northern-centric frameworks by showing how political elites strategically set agendas to consolidate power, while bureaucrats respond through adaptive strategies prioritizing visibility over substantive service delivery. Analysis of official documents from Indonesia’s Supreme Audit Agency, Corruption Eradication Commission, Ombudsman (2023–2025), and Ministry of Administrative Reform (LAKIP 2022–2024) reveals systematic decoupling: performance metrics indicate progress, yet independent assessments show persistently medium service quality at 74.64 percent. Donor influence fosters isomorphic mimicry, with 43 percent of foreign-funded e-government platforms inactive. The study develops a five-dimensional framework, elite agenda-setting, bureaucratic adaptation, donor-induced isomorphism, symbolic compliance, and digital governance paradox, capturing their self-reinforcing interaction. This framework offers an analytical tool for understanding governance in Indonesia and comparable Global South contexts.

How can we read International Relations from the perspective of Africa in a way that does not perpetually put the continent in a permanent state of exception vis-à-vis global politics? What strategies are available to study Africa without overhyping narratives of its rise or demise? This article contends, drawing on Edward Said, that adopting contrapuntal reading enables reading Africa’s place in international politics beyond narratives and counter-narratives of Africa moving from one exceptional state of despair to an exceptional state of prosperity with nothing in between. The article uses the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative and its counter-narrative of Africa as a place of perpetual lack, deviance, and demise to illustrate how to practically adopt contrapuntalism as a method and as an ethos when engaging African perspectives in IR. It argues that contrapuntalism is a commitment to practicing critical thinking and questioning Eurocentric modes of thinking when approaching mainstream accounts of the history, origin, or interpretations of any political event. Contrapuntalism acknowledges that dominant narratives need to be read side-by-side with narratives of resistance and that non-Western concepts do not always need to be translated or rendered legible by creating (forced) Eurocentric equivalents for them to be legitimate or valid.

This article argues that the current Anglican Communion crisis is best understood as constitutional erosion: the weakening of shared norms that historically mediated disagreement through recognizable form, restraint and reception. Doctrinal and moral disputes function as triggers, but the deeper driver is the loss of a common grammar of legitimacy, so that procedurally valid provincial actions can be constitutionally unintelligible to other provinces. The article interprets key African and Global South interventions not primarily as theological or cultural reaction but as contested constitutional reasoning rooted in episcopal guardianship, communion discipline and inherited catholic order. It analyses the Global Anglican Future Conference and Global South instruments as substitute constitutional documents generated by the incapacity of the Instruments of Communion to secure effective restraint and proposes a minimal inter-provincial accord: clarified instrument authority, operationalized reception, limited covenantal discipline and a standing advisory process for communion impairment.

The present article proposes to examine the 1985 and 1986 arrival in Brazil of Iranian Bahai forced migrants who left their homeland claiming religious persecution. The article presents original research undertaken with this group and aims to contribute to the limited body of research on migrants from the Middle East, and especially from Iran, in Brazil. The Bahai community of Brazil had been established decades earlier by pioneers from different countries, including Iran and the United States, working to bring their religion to Brazil. The arrival in 1985–86 of Iranian refugees was made possible by mobilization of the Bahai community of Brazil. Joint efforts were made with governmental and civil society groups to receive and welcome Bahai families to Brazil, facilitating their integration into Brazilian society. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I analyze here the trajectory of several of these forced migrants who had been living in Brazil for almost forty years. They provide a diverse set of perspectives on notions of “success” and enable a consideration of economic prosperity and family and religious support networks, as well as the forced migrants’ perceptions regarding Brazil as a choice of host country.

Why do states under-expend? Conventional explanations point to institutional failures. By contrast, drawing on the case of cesses in Indian tax history and practice, I take underspending not only as symptomatic of flaws in state administration, but also as constitutive of state forms. In this specific case, I argue that the underspending of earmarked funds, and their consequent pooling and remobilisation, produce a bifurcated state through its revenue arrangements. This argument is of substantive value, but it is also in the service of a broader conceptual move: reinterpreting something that might conventionally be understood as a marker of state failure or dysfunction, as in fact constitutive of the state. Finally, the argument also has a methodological dimension. In order to execute this redescription, I draw on a mix of archival material and analysis of case law. This extends an insight from tax law scholarship on the importance of a multi-disciplinary methodological apparatus to bring tax and constitutional scholarship together.