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International law in national courts, and among politicians and citizens, does not always have the desired effect at the domestic level. This volume is a genuinely interdisciplinary analysis of international law and courts, examining a wide range of courts and judicial bodies, including human rights treaty bodies, and their impact and shortcomings. By employing social science methodology combined with classical case studies, leading lawyers and political scientists move the study of courts within international law to an entirely new level. The essays question the view that legal docmatics will be enough to understand the increasingly complex world we are living in and demonstrate the potential benefits of adopting a much broader outlook drawing on empirical legal research. This volume will have great appeal to anyone interested in the effects - rather than just the processes and structures - of international law and courts.

Despite the successes achieved in liberalizing trade by multilateral trade negotiations sponsored by the World Trade Organization (WTO), numerous countries have separately negotiated preferential trade treaties with one another. Representing a significant departure from the WTO's central principle of non-discrimination among member countries, preferential trade blocs are the subject of an intense academic and policy debate. The first section of this 2005 book presents a rudimentary and intuitive introduction to the economics of preferential trade agreements. The following chapters present the author's theoretical and empirical research on a number of questions surrounding the issue of preferential trade agreements including the design of necessarily welfare-improving trade blocs, the quantitative (econometric) evaluation of the economic (welfare) impact of preferential trade liberalization, and the impact of preferential trade agreements and the multilateral trade system

International audience ; The author suggests twelve hypotheses to revive enthusiasm as a political category and, eventually, to restate the possibility of political action. In this perspective, the enthusiasm of the masses was the essential political element of " The Glorious Thirty Years " that followed the Second War World, characterized by a strong tension to realize a greater social justice. It was also at the base of the " Long Sixty-Eight " and of the processes of decolonization. Enthusiasm is thus thought in opposition both to the monopolistic pretension of political innovation forwarded by communist parties in the past and to the exclusive competence on political-economical decisions claimed today by democratic élites. Rethinking the enthusiasm that animated these historic sequences of the twentieth century should offer the possibility to respond to " the sad passions " that dominate the era of neoliberal administration of global democracy.

How do we describe the agency of someone who acts in a context of governing definitions, meanings, and intuitions that fail to create a foundation for others to interpret their actions as they intend them? Descriptions of intention typically begin with the premise that it is the agent herself that authors the meaning behind her acts. However, because actions gain collective meaning through their social context, it is others that help confer meaning agential intention. We generally rely on shared meaning in an ongoing process of interpreting our own and others' behaviors. We act in such a way to be understood by others, to make sense, in order to carry on in a social world. Through acknowledging each other's intentions via a mutually constructed background of meaning, we legitimize each others' actions as "reasonable," "understandable," and "clear."

This article seeks to explain the influence of the democratic-peace thesis on politics by offering a new understanding of theory: as a hermeneutical mechanism of attaching meaning to political concepts. The hermeneutical mechanism is understood as a three-stage model in which theoretical constructions transform into public conventions and then into political convictions. By using discourse-tracing—analyzing the process in which the theoretical discourse was transformed into political discourse—the article explores two case studies in which the democratic-peace thesis played a political role: the Israeli Right and its criticism of the Oslo accords, and the American neoconservatives and their policies in the Middle East. En route, I will apply Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony to reconstruct constructivism from a purely social theory to a sociopolitical theory that considers seriously the political dimension of social reality. The model that is developed here advances our metatheoretical understanding of theory as offering a holistic understanding of reality, rather than a mere limited explanation of specific phenomena; highlights theory's involvement in real-world politics; and emphasizes theory's political capital, with the resulting moral responsibility of theoreticians.