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The international governance of artificial intelligence (AI) is at a crossroads: should it remain fragmented or be centralised? We draw on the history of environment, trade, and security regimes to identify advantages and disadvantages in centralising AI governance. Some considerations, such as efficiency and political power, speak for centralisation. The risk of creating a slow and brittle institution, and the difficulty of pairing deep rules with adequate participation, speak against it. Other considerations depend on the specific design. A centralised body may be able to deter forum shopping and ensure policy coordination. However, forum shopping can be beneficial, and fragmented institutions could self-organise. In sum, these trade-offs should inform development of the AI governance architecture, which is only now emerging. We apply the trade-offs to the case of the potential development of high-level machine intelligence. We conclude with two recommendations. First, the outcome will depend on the exact design of a central institution. A well-designed centralised regime covering a set of coherent issues could be beneficial. But locking-in an inadequate structure may pose a fate worse than fragmentation. Second, fragmentation will likely persist for now. The developing landscape should be monitored to see if it is self-organising or simply inadequate.

This paper uses a large panel of bilateral bank flow data to assess how institutions and politics affect international capital -bank in particular- flows. The following key findings emerge: 1) The empirical "gravity" model is the benchmark in explaining the volume of international banking activities. 2) Conditioned on standard gravity factors (distance, GDP, population), well-functioning institutions are a key driving force for international bank flows. Specifically, foreign banks invest substantially more in countries with i) uncorrupt bureaucracies, ii) high-quality legal system, and iii) a non-government controlled banking system. 3) Beyond institutions, politics exert also a firstorder impact. 4) The European Integration process has spurred cross-border banking activities between member states. These results are robust to various econometric methodologies, samples and the potential endogeneity of institutional characteristics. The strong institutions/politics-bank flows nexus has strong implications for asset trade and international macro theories, which have not modelled these relationships explicitly.

Institutionalists commonly assume that the operation of regimes accounts for much of what happens in international society. Realists & neorealists, by contrast, typically regard institutions as epiphenomena that reflect deeper forces in international society & that can be expected to change when the deeper forces change. As is so often the case in debates of this nature, the truth no doubt lies somewhere between these polar perspectives. To identify the signal of the effects of institutions & especially to track variations in the strength of this signal, we need to find ways to draw clear-cut inferences about the causal links between institutions & collective outcomes at the international level. Ideally, we should also devise an integrated index of regime effectiveness that would allow us to compare & contrast different regimes or the same regimes over time in terms of their effectiveness. This article offers a critical review of the leading efforts to develop useful inferences & indices with particular reference to international environmental regimes. It concludes that our efforts in this realm to date have yielded only modest -- though hardly trivial -- results. Yet we are far from exhausting the available analytic resources in this field, & there is much that can be done to improve inferences & indices in this important area of research in the future. 1 Figure, 46 References. Adapted from the source document.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the challenges faced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle. NASA is in the midst of one of the most challenging periods in its history. As part of its Vision for Space Exploration, NASA is simultaneously developing a range of new technologies and highly complex systems to support future exploration efforts, completing assembly of the space station, and retiring the space shuttle. This is NASA's biggest transition effort since landing humans on the moon more than 3 decades ago and then initiating the Space Shuttle Program a few years later. Taken together, these efforts create significant challenges in terms of managing investments, launch and other facilities, workforce, international partners, and suppliers. Clearly, any delays or problems in completing and sustaining the space station itself, may well have reverberating effects on NASA's ability to ramp up efforts to develop technologies needed for future exploration or to support other important missions. GAO has undertaken a body of work related to NASA's transition efforts that include NASA's industrial supplier base, its workforce challenges, development of new crew and cargo spacecraft, and NASA's assembly and sustainment activities related to the ISS. This statement focuses on the preliminary results of on-going efforts, as well as other GAO work completed to date. Specifically, it will address the following challenges: (1) executing plans to use the shuttle to complete the ISS; (2) maintenance of the shuttle workforce through retirement of the shuttle; and (3) filling the gap between the shuttle and new NASA-developed vehicles to service the ISS. NASA's ability to overcome these challenges will be critical to ensuring the availability of the International Space Station as a viable research entity into the future. While these results and findings are preliminary, many have been echoed in other studies and identified by NASA itself. Our work is being conducted in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards."

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of tables -- List of contributors -- Preface -- Introduction: social, political, and cultural theory since the sixties: The demise of classical Marxism and liberalism, the new reality of the welfare state, resistance, and the loss of epistemic innocence -- PART I: Living traditions -- 1. Foucault and the promise of power without dogma -- 2. Pierre Bourdieu and his legacy -- 3. Lacanian theory: Ideology, enjoyment and the spirits of capitalism -- 4. The Marxist legacy -- 5. Critical race theory