Suchergebnisse

AbstractWhat happens to a public, domestic institution when its authority is delegated to a privately run, transnational institution? I argue that outsourcing traditionally national legal responsibilities to transnational bodies can lead to the stagnation of domestic institutional capacity. I examine this through a study of international commercial arbitration (ICA), a widely used system of cross-border commercial dispute resolution. I argue that ICA provides commercial actors an "exit option" from weak public institutions, reducing pressure on the state to invest in capacity-enhancing reform. I find that the enactment of strong protections for ICA leads to the gradual erosion of the capacity of domestic legal institutions, particularly in countries with already weak legal systems. I test the mechanism driving this dynamic using dispute data from the International Chamber of Commerce. I find that pro-arbitration laws increase the use of international arbitration by national firms, suggesting that firms use ICA as an escape from domestic institutions. This article contributes to debates on globalization and development as well as work on the second-order effects of global governance institutions.

This volume by Kristina Hinds represents a recent wave in critical Caribbean scholarship. This wave turns away from liberal, structural and Marxian economics, institutional politics and cultural pluralist paradigms that used to dominate Caribbean studies. These paradigms, driven by the academic elites at the University of the West Indies, had focused on class, race, ethnicity, market, mode of production and small size as organizing concepts for deterministic accounts of Caribbean reality. They lost traction under the changed conditions of neoliberal capitalism and its discourses. The new framing that Hinds represents is more nebulous, emphasising intersubjective meanings from standpoints of gender, language and ethical values. The interpretive methods familiar in History and Literary Studies are applied to social and political phenomena. This new Caribbean approach is part of the constructivist trend in global scholarship. In this epistemology, the main factor in the explanation of social change, is the constructed meanings arising from public discourses, and inherited from the colonial past. [excerpt from the review] ; N/A