This chapter contrasts two perspectives for understanding workplace resistance: a managerialist perspective that treats resistance chiefly as ‘resistance to change’ – a behavioural, individualised problem to be managed – and a critical perspective that locates resistance in relations of power, structural conflict, and workers’ claims to autonomy and dignity. Using seven analytical categories (position, needs, interests, power, level of analysis, rationality, theoretical tradition), the chapter shows how managerialist accounts naturalise authority, infantilise workers, and depoliticise dissent, whereas critical traditions (Labour Process Theory, Critical Management Studies, Critical Leadership Studies) begin from the subordinate standpoint, reconceive oppositional practices as rational and morally significant, and define resistance as organisational misbehaviour directed upwards in the hierarchy. The chapter concludes that managerialist knowledge legitimises control and narrows inquiry, while the critical lens restores conceptual clarity and ethical depth, treating resistance as an enduring, constitutive feature of organisational life rather than a pathology to be eliminated.

This chapter traces the forms of epistemic violence that asylum seekers are exposed to when using data from digital platforms to substantiate their claims for international protection. Drawing on a selection of decisions by the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber in the UK, it challenges accounts of generalised digital surveillance by showing how asylum seekers are forced to engage in more and more data wrangling without resources, time or equipment. In so doing, asylum seekers do not just have to make themselves surveillable but are confronted with a demand to know the contours and limits of surveillance on digital platforms. By introducing the concept of platform power, the chapter shows that asylum seekers face an impossible demand to know the unknowable. Platform power undoes the binaries of privacy/publicity, transparency/opacity, openness/secrecy, and monitoring/indifference. It also obfuscates the attempts to ascertain the likelihood of digital surveillance.

This chapter explores feminist International Relations (IR) theory and its application to the Middle East, demonstrating how gendered power dynamics shape the region's international politics. Feminist IR challenges traditional IR theories by foregrounding gender as a fundamental category of analysis, revealing how hierarchical constructions of masculinity and femininity underpin state behaviour, security policies, and other global processes. The chapter examines key strands of feminist IR, including liberal, critical, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and queer feminist theories, emphasising their respective contributions to understanding the significance of gender, as well as race and sexuality, in global politics. Through a case study of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, still ongoing at the time of writing despite an announced ceasefire in October 2025, the chapter highlights the gendered dimensions of settler colonialism, militarism, and genocide. It interrogates how gendered and racialised discourses normalise violence and explores the war’s devastating impacts on women, social reproduction, and human security. The chapter critiques the complicity of colonial feminism in perpetuating oppression and underscores Palestinian women’s resistance. The chapter concludes by highlighting the role of feminist IR in offering pathways towards more just and inclusive international relations.

Realism is the dominant theoretical approach to international relations. The realist tradition finds its roots in a pessimistic supposition that international relations are unavoidably shaped by power politics. This chapter examines the core assumptions of classical realism. Classical realists lay a claim to a long tradition of thought going back to eminent thinkers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. Classical realism recognises that the drive to be all-powerful is inherent in human nature. States not only seek to accumulate power but also to make sure that no other state shifts the balance of power in their favour. The chapter then examines modern variants of classical realism and explores how it has been applied in the context of the Middle East. While classical realism seems to be the most fitting tradition to explain international relations in the Middle East, its application to the region has not been without limitations. The chapter then analyses Saudi foreign policy in the post-2011 Middle East through a classical realist lens. While the Saudi Kingdom played the role of regional stabiliser for decades, it emerged in the post-2011 Middle East as a regional player vying for power and attempting to shift the regional balance of power.

Chapter 6 examines authority and the fragile structures that hold society together. It surveys concepts of justice and order, the roles of kings and councils, and the practice of assemblies, including debates about the ‘seeds’ of democracy. Through episodes of dispute and persuasion, it shows how Homeric communities negotiated power when coercion, charisma, and tradition competed.

Why do individuals embedded in organizations act corruptly? Functionalist and economic approaches to corruption have had limited success in explaining why individuals choose corruption where there are strong institutional constraints, including monitoring systems, high costs, and strong punishments. The persistence of corruption despite such constraints has prompted researchers to consider more seriously the individual psychological drivers of corruption. This chapter reviews evidence on the psychology of corruption, finding that power, ethical leadership, personal gain and self-control, loss aversion and risk acceptance, rationalization, moral ambiguity and disengagement, learning, and emotion all influence an individual’s propensity to act corruptly within an organization. Anti-corruption measures that constrain these drivers include transparency, participation, and accountability measures that reduce incentives and opportunities for corruption. Organizations can also implement ethical measures like codes of conduct, anti-corruption training, attend to cultural dynamics, and use nudging interventions to incentivize clean behavior.

This chapter discusses health system dynamics, including how health systems vary by the degree of State involvement in stewardship, financing and provision of health services based on specific principles for population eligibility. Significant changes in health systems are political processes often involving many types of actors wielding different forms of power. To analyze these changes, we introduce two well-known frameworks – Kingdon’s multiple streams and Sabatier’s advocacy coalition. Understanding how health systems evolve helps to compare health systems within different countries and contexts.

Change isn’t always harmonious – in fact, it rarely is. Chapter 4 explores a tension perspective on change, where conflict, contradiction, and power struggles aren’t problems to be solved but engines that drive transformation. This view reframes conflict not as dysfunction but as a sign of deeper dynamics at play. Drawing on dialectics and dialogic theory, the chapter shows how competing interests and political tensions shape the course of change through friction, negotiation, and narrative. Rather than seeking neat resolutions, it invites readers to embrace tension, plurality, and the messy – but often generative – nature of organisational life. At its core, this perspective reminds us that change is as much about who holds power as it is about where an organisation is going.

Power is fundamental to co–management in numerous ways. In this chapter, key theoretical approaches to the concept of power are reviewed, drawing on conceptions of ‘power over’, ‘power to’ and similar. The chapter then investigates the concept of power in three ways: what power sharing means and how it is experienced, what dominant power relations are observed in co-management and what empowerment means in the context of co–management. In relation to power sharing, it is found that power is often unequally shared, with government having greater power than resource users, evidenced in control of resources and decision-making. Dominant power relations include elite capture, patron–client relations and gender relations. Constraints on the potential for co–management to be empowering for resource users are found to be related to power dynamics and unequal power sharing, encouraging a more technical approach to empowerment being taken rather than a more critical, political approach.

Chapter 3 examines how international lawyers see the world and argues that this visual orientation is a product of longstanding forms of power embedded in the cartographic medium. It begins by challenging the liberal assumption that law stands apart from power. Instead, it shows that structural and productive forms of power have shaped the architecture of International Law from its inception. Central to this inheritance is the dominance of the cartographic map: presenting the Earth through geometric grids, territorial containers, and the seemingly naturalized image of the “World Map.”

By reversing the discipline’s hierarchy of text over image, the chapter reveals how cartographization has governed international legal perception, and traces how mapping practices became foundational to the very conditions of global legibility. Cartographic power fashioned territory, borders, and jurisdiction into universal categories and naturalized a Eurocentric, state-centric world order.

The chapter then introduces cartogenesis: the historical process through which geometric mapping remade earlier spatial literacies and consolidated the cartographic globe as the default ontology of International Law. Yet this visual regime now strains under emerging spatial realities that elude planar representation.

Ultimately, the chapter argues that rethinking international legal space requires breaking with this cartographic template.

Hobbes is sharply criticizing the phenomenon of dueling. He is famous for the claim that the fear of death is the strongest passion and that the security provided by the state is the decisive source of its legitimacy. He is, therefore, often regarded as the founder of liberalism with a new, security-oriented, or bourgeois mentality and made responsible for a decline of honor in early modernity. The chapter aims to critically discuss and enrich this decline-of-honor hypothesis. Hobbes’s redefinition and devaluation of honor is important – but it is only one part of the story. The other part is a subliminal morality of natural honor that is in tension with the security-oriented morality. The chapter discusses different explanations for this tension and offers a complimentary one: The subliminal morality of natural honor might be a part of Hobbes’s goal to get the power-seekers on board, to pacify them, and to turn them to the economic realm. The chapter thus contributes to the differentiation of the decline-of-honor hypothesis, sheds light on the complex and puzzling role of honor in Hobbes’s political philosophy, and offers a starting point to reflect on the role of honor in contemporary liberal democracies.

In this chapter, I consider whether Rorty’s political theory can make sense of the legitimate hopelessness/despair that might follow entrenched marginalisation or historically embedded forms of injustice. Since Rorty appears to present hope as a political attitude and theoretical disposition that we can embrace relatively straightforwardly, we might read his normative commitment to liberalism as an expression of privilege that is incapable of getting to grips with urgent political struggles. To determine Rorty’s response to this concern, I juxtapose his critique of Marxism to his interpretation of feminism, arguing that his reasons for rejecting the former (as held captive by scientism) relate to his affirmation of the latter (as the expression of political and philosophical hope). I then explore whether Rorty’s thought can make sense of the concept of power. Finally, I show how one of the most striking contemporary implications of Rorty’s world view is that commitment to political realism is hopeless.

This chapter describes the way capitalism, while posing as simply an economic process, captures the political will, commandeering the state and colonizing the subject to its regime of accumulation so as to eliminate politics and secure its dystopic order.

This chapter evaluates the efficacy of Emulated Guardians, focusing on the EU’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) and Meta’s Oversight Board, using criteria adapted from Peter Cane’s administrative law framework: rules, authority, and culture. It argues that neither body currently functions as a truly effective adjudicatory overseer of corporate power due to weak mandates and structural limitations. These shortcomings reflect a broader challenge of emulative institutions: they replicate formal structures from public law but lack the enabling sociopolitical contexts—such as democratic rulemaking or judicial authority—that underpin their role models. However, the chapter also identifies the performative potential of these bodies. By leveraging adjudicative symbolism and public expectations, both ODSs and the Oversight Board can incrementally expand their normative authority. This process, while slow and fraught, mirrors historical adjudicative strategies seen in domestic and international courts. Moreover, early practices show potential for innovation, such as integrating large language models into decision-making. By analyzing rules, authority, and culture, the chapter highlights the ambivalence of Emulated Guardians: while they risk becoming ceremonial “accountability theater,” they may also lay the groundwork for meaningful control over powerful private organizations. These findings have implications far beyond content moderation, applying to emerging governance challenges in AI, biotechnology, and other globalized sectors.

How can we regulate private power in a globalized, digitized world where state-centered sovereignty, territorial boundaries, and traditional legal frameworks fall short? This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, its arguments, methodology, and contributions, addressing the urgent need for accountability mechanisms to tame the increasingly unilateral global governance by a handful of corporations. Focusing on content moderation, it examines two key case studies: the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Meta’s Oversight Board. Both exemplify “emulation,” where public law mechanisms, particularly constitutional and administrative, are adapted to private governance.

Analyzing these “Emulated Guardians”–institutions borrowing the legitimacy of courts while operating in private or hybrid contexts–this book highlights their reliance on performativity and public perception to assert authority. Through interdisciplinary analysis, empirical findings, and expert interviews, the book reveals the ambivalent outcomes of emulation: promising tools for accountability yet sometimes lacking practical efficacy. Ultimately, this work frames these mechanisms as harbingers of new accountability norms, arguing that governance in the digital age demands not only novel institutions but also robust public engagement. It situates these developments within broader debates about power, legitimacy, and the evolving role of public law ideals in globalized, networked environments.

This chapter explores the genesis, structure, and potential of the European Union’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs), a cornerstone of the Digital Services Act (DSA) aimed at regulating social media platforms. As a manifestation of Governance by Emulation, ODSs blend public law principles with private governance, emulating individual rights adjudication to hold platforms accountable. This chapter examines the political context behind their creation, tracing the EU’s regulatory evolution and the legislative battles that shaped Article 21 of the DSA. While hailed as innovative tools for ensuring accountability, ODSs face significant structural limitations, such as non-binding decisions, weak cost incentives, and a narrow enforcement focus. Nonetheless, they present a promising avenue for resolving disputes efficiently and experimenting with integrating large language models in decision-making. Early implementation highlights a mix of creativity and challenges, offering insights into the EU’s broader regulatory ambitions to administrify platform governance and set global standards. By analyzing ODSs’ hybrid institutional design and initial practices, this chapter illustrates their dual potential: advancing accountability while exposing the risks of emulating public law mechanisms in private contexts. It concludes by reflecting on ODSs’ role as Emulated Guardians and their implications for future governance of digital public spaces. European Union

This chapter focuses on Amis’s short story ‘State of England’ to examine the role of the British Empire in Amis’s literary and cultural imagination. I argue that imperial meta-narratives echo in Amis’s writing in the form of parallel spaces – nightclubs, science-fictional solar systems, global financial systems – that imaginatively persist in spite of post-Thatcherian England’s decline. Amis treats the idea of empire as a floating signifier, a heterotopia that his protagonists are both drawn to and alienated from. I draw a line from Joseph Addison’s ‘The Royal Exchange’ to Amis’s perspective on domestic Britishness as an ultimately imperial form of identity. The structural tragedy for Amis’s characters is that their ‘imperial’ explanatory mechanisms for English life, particularly among the underclass, remain private psychological affairs.