The Middle East has famously been described as a region ‘dripping with identity politics’. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that constructivism has gained prominence among scholars studying the international relations of the region. Following an introduction to the philosophical and sociological roots of constructivism as a social theory, the chapter discusses various strands among constructivists. It also explores how Middle Eastern scholars employ a constructivist approach holding distinct characteristics compared to those found in the broader debate on constructivism within International Relations. Scholars of Middle Eastern politics have been attentive to challenges to state identity, at supra- and sub-state levels, resulting in puzzling international behaviour. Insights from these debates on constructivism inform the case study, which contrasts the ‘classic’ Arab cold war among Arab states in the 1950s and 1960s with the regional rivalries that emerged following the Arab uprisings, which some observers have characterised as a new (Arab, neo-sectarian, Sunni–Shia) cold war. While supra- and sub-state identities played a crucial role in regional politics during both periods, notable differences existed. The case study examines whether and how identities and ideas matter in the international relations of the region in these two eras of Middle East history.

This chapter introduces the English School (ES) theory through a powerful earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria in February 2023, with insights from disaster diplomacy. An effective disaster response requires efficient aid delivery, sound governance of impacted areas, and productive diplomatic dialogue in cross-border cases. In civil war-torn Syria, the earthquake response was hampered by the prior collapse of a United Nations aid delivery mechanism, a governance vacuum, and a lack of diplomatic relations with Turkey. The chapter contrasts ES concepts of pluralist international society, which prioritises state-centric norms, with solidarist international society, which prioritises transnational humanitarian norms, to define two ideal types of disaster response. While the pluralist/consensual model necessitates the approval of the host state, the solidarist/coercive model permits bypassing the host state if it obstructs access to survivors. Syria and other cases demonstrate that the solidarist response, which may involve the suspension of ongoing conflicts, is often a temporary phase followed by the reassertion of state-centric norms and resumption of hostilities. The chapter concludes by questioning whether disasters, increasingly exacerbating in scale, severity, and frequency due to climate change, can instigate a more structured solidarism in the Middle East.

Although potential immigrants had an opportunity to migrate abroad, some gradually become disenchanted with the future life they envisioned they would have in countries of immigration. Synthesizing their narratives illuminates a common sequence of processes, with immigrants first becoming bored and disappointed with a host society unlike what they had envisioned, then frustrated with the language barrier and sentiments of cultural alienation due to their unfamiliarity with cultural references, customs, and norms. Then even after they culturally assimilate, aspiring immigrants encounter both racial discrimination that they perceive as hostile and local gender norms that make it difficult to find a stable relationship. After working for several years, they gradually become aware of how they are unable to advance their career within their job as an immigrant. The social forces and restrictive immigration policies discussed earlier can lead aspiring immigrants to cut their losses from their immigration project out of the belief they will have a happier life as an ex-immigrant in their homeland than “just an immigrant.”

Chapter three develops the concept of corporate ordering as a general framework for understanding how corporations govern social conflict. Corporate ordering refers to internal systems that allow firms to make rule-like decisions that affect large populations under conditions of disagreement and uncertainty.

The chapter introduces a tripartite framework consisting of rule formation, executive decision-making, and monitoring. Each function addresses a different governance challenge. Rule formation allows firms to set standards before conflicts arise. Executive decision-making implements those standards in real time through choices that require justification. Monitoring evaluates whether practice aligns with principle and enables revision.

The chapter explains why no single mechanism is sufficient. Consultation without monitoring produces symbolic commitments. Disclosure without standards produces inconsistency. Monitoring without authority produces reports without consequences. Corporate ordering emerges when these functions operate together.

Drawing on legal theory and institutional analysis, the chapter distinguishes corporate ordering from regulation, contract, and hierarchy. It argues that corporate ordering is neither a substitute for public law nor a form of private sovereignty. It is a practical response to the limits of existing governance frameworks.

Chapter 5 recounts interviews conducted with Cuban lawyers and law students regarding how they understand law, legal reasoning, and social change. It identifies key differences in the assumptions of the interviewees and the interviewers.

This chapter uncovers the role of business in coproducing European standards during the 1992 Program. Building on the argument of Chapter 1 that the Commission strove to create a regional business environment in which firms would regionalize, it finds that the interests of European business and European policymakers converged around the issue of standards. The Commission promoted common norms as a means of market integration. While some European companies, executives, and BIAs were skeptical of the potential for standardization to function as a form of regulation, they also understood that standards were determinants of market access. Consequently, many worked to shape new regional norms to their advantage.

I theorize that a state’s foreign policy objectives depend on a combination of its intrinsic foreign policy motives—which I call a principle—and its historical context. States can prioritize different principles, such as nationalism, security, or prestige. Depending on the principle, the specific issues a state cares about most depend on its historical context. For example, states intrinsically motivated by nationalist projects prioritize territories they historically controlled, whereas status seekers may prioritize colonies. I develop a structured way to study how an observer’s threat perceptions form and change when a rival holds these more complex preferences and the observer has some information about the rival’s historical context. I show that rationalist threat perceptions change unevenly in response to a rival’s costly military actions through a novel mechanism that I call “qualitative inferences.” This mechanism is qualitative because states rely on historical information about how a rival’s specific demands serve particular principles (e.g., Hitler’s demand for Austria held historical significance, whereas Uganda would not), rather than on the scope of those demands or rates of militarization (e.g., 1/2, not 3/4, of Austria).

Under the usual rules of US political parties, candidates are vetted by party insiders, and people who lose a presidential race don’t get a second shot. Trump defied this and many other historical traditions. Understanding this means understanding election narratives and beliefs about electability, and how those in the GOP today are different from what they were in the past and what the Democratic Party has. The chapter provides a book outline.

This chapter surveys how moral content shapes behaviour through language. It considers moral foundations theory and morality-as-cooperation theory, outlining their dimensions, correlates, critiques, and refinements. It then reviews lexicon-based approaches to normative analysis, from moral foundations dictionaries to newer MAC-aligned resources, and discusses the limits of current tools in separating personal, injunctive, and descriptive norms. Building on these insights, the chapter proposes language-based utility functions (LiMoLNoS and LiMoLENS) that integrate normative and emotional valuations to explain choices in economic settings. Overall, it argues that morality is multidimensional and measurable in text, enabling models that connect linguistic framing to decision-making and behaviour.

Although traditional game theory has a tendency to study games in isolation, strategic interaction in human society involves people engaged in numerous interrelated constellations over time. This chapter studies the role of sanctions and enforcement, and strategies not just to play the game that society presents us with but to change the game itself.

This chapter argues that to understand cooperation and conflict in large-scale societies we need to blend these ideas with a systematic study of within-society conflict and the institutions and norms that structure these relations.

In this chapter, I contrast the account of fictionality presented in the previous chapter with Walton’s, whose work was decisive in shaping it. In recent work, he gives up his account of the fictionality of p in a fictional work in terms of prescriptions to imagine emanating from it. He offers examples that allegedly show that a prescription to imagine p in a given work of fiction is not sufficient for the fictionality of p in that work. Both in support and in further elaboration of the constitutive-norms speech-act variation on Walton’s account that was presented in the previous chapter, I critically discuss his objections here. In addition to answering his concerns and developing the account further, this chapter provides additional abductive support for its explanatory virtues vis-à-vis both Walton’s account and Gricean speech-act proposals.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s key findings, methodology and structure. It also introduces the principal questions the book seeks to address. How have agents, operating at national, international and transnational levels, attempted to institutionalise the norm of corporate accountability for human rights violations linked to transnational corporate activity? What do these initiatives reveal about the nature of transnational legalisation, and how legalisation should be framed or conceptualised in the twenty-first century? Finally, could a revised framework of legalisation help explain when transnational litigation and soft law initiatives are more likely to succeed in the future?

This chapter begins by describing the mirror image between Africa and Europe and what it looked like on the dawn of colonial occupation, as described by Western anthropologists. In Europe, we find freedom, monogamy, the rule of law, patrilineal descent, and WEIRD people (Western, educated, industrialized, reading, and developed). In Africa, we find the opposite: slavery, polygyny, customary law, matrilineal descent, and not WEIRD. The proposed explanation for the difference, and the one that also explains the mirror image quality of the comparison, is freedom as a widespread social norm in Western Europe and slavery as a widespread social norm in Africa. The chapter then presents the conceptual framework behind the historical explanation. It highlights the difference between norms and institutions; discusses slavery and freedom as social norms; defines the institutions that preserve slave wealth; highlights the distinctions between “freedom” and “liberty”; and describes the inefficiencies of slavery and how its abolition unleashes freedom dividends.

This chapter systematically teases out and reflects on the antinomies and aporias that characterize each of two broad sets of international human rights solidarity argumentation. These are the broadly shared discourses on the issue that emanate in each case from the Global North and Global South. Why do Global North States tend to accept and focus on binding international human rights obligations in the civil and political (CP) rights area, while demurring regarding similarly mandatory legal duties to express international solidarity in regard to economic and social (ES) rights? And why do Global South countries tend to argue in favor of such binding obligations with regard to ES rights but not nearly as much regarding CP rights? The chapter is mainly concerned with the rather ironic circulation and eclipsing of relevant antinomies and aporias in plain sight; their relationships to state sovereignty argumentation; and their connections to global power relations as ideationally constitutive forces. In the last respect, the key question is what the relative roles of values/norms in international human rights solidarity argumentation are, vis-à-vis global power relations. And these questions should highlight for scholars the imperative to track internationalist praxis over the longue durée.