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This book examines the results of the special portion of the 2003 PISA survey of student achievement that relates to problem-solving skills. Covering 40 countries (Australia; Austria; Belgium; Canada; Czech Republic; Denmark; Finland; France; Germany; Greece; Hungary; Iceland; Ireland; Italy; Japan; Republic of (South) Korea; Luxembourg; Mexico; Netherlands; New Zealand; Norway; Poland; Portugal; Slovak Republic; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; Turkey; United Kingdom; United States; Brazil, Hong Kong-China, Indonesia, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Macao-China, Russian Federation, Serbia, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay), it provides, for the first time, a direct assessment of life competencies that apply across different areas of the school curriculum. The assessment looked at students abilities to identify problems in various settings, to choose relevant information or constraints, to represent possible alternatives or solution paths, to develop solution strategies, to solve the problem, and to communicate the solution. This report examines how countries can raise their performance in this competency area and what countries with lower performance levels can learn from those whose students do well. It also provides insights into some of the factors that are associated with the development of problem-solving skills and into how these factors interact and what the implications are for policy development. Finally, the report sheds light on countries that succeed in achieving high performance levels while at the same time providing an equitable distribution of learning opportunities.--Publisher description

This article looks at the change in the conceptual foundations of the immunity of international organisations, paying special attention to the nature of the immunity of the first international organisations and the later disappearance of that unique approach. Three distinct stages in the development of the concept of immunity of international organizations can be discerned. In the first stage the early international organizations were bestowed immunity derived from an augmented concept of neutrality. The second stage witnessed the granting of diplomatic privileges and immunities to certain organizations and their officials. The third stage involved the adoption of the concept of 'functional immunity' of international organizations. The article will also engage with the discussions (or lack of them) surrounding the adoption of immunity provisions and study the progression of analytical engagement with the concept of immunity. An examination of these stages will reveal how changes in the conceptual bases of immunity initially came about mostly due to practical considerations and without an analysis of the conceptual transformation that resulted.

MDG 6, 'to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases', is unique among the MDGs because it emerged in the context of unprecedented prior international mobilisation, especially around HIV/AIDS, thus both reflecting and facilitating an expanding international health agenda. MDG 6 built on the idea of 'health as development', originally articulated at the 1978 conference on primary health at Alma-Ata, but was profoundly shaped by the political traction and fund-raising successes of AIDS activism and the international AIDS response. This underpinned the expansion of MDG 6 targets to include antiretroviral treatment (ART), helped forge partnerships to reduce the prices of ART and essential medicine, thereby contributing to MDG 8 ('building partnerships for development') and, in high HIV-prevalence regions, also to MDGs 4 and 5 (maternal and child health). The moral-economic dimensions of the international AIDS response point to the importance of civil society mobilisation in shaping the AIDS and international health agendas. Continued support for civil society organisations is necessary for continued progress on global health.

This paper examines the emergence and the main features of International Framework Agreements (IFAs). IFAs originated in the 1980s and proliferated after 2000. They aim to secure core labour rights across multinational corporations' global supply chains. Global Union Federations, as well as other global (World Company and Works Councils), regional (European Works Councils or European Industry Federations) and national trade union structures, are parties to IFAs. Based on various features of international trade union activity, such as World Company Councils, codes of conduct, the trade and labour rights campaign or international social dialogue, IFAs constitute an important and innovative tool of international industrial relations. An analysis of the substantive and procedural provisions of IFAs leads to an analytical distinction between 'rights' agreements and 'bargaining' agreements. The article assesses the substantive and procedural aspects of the 38 IFAs concluded before June 2005. Finally, key issues such as the scope of agreements, trade union capacity, and global supply chains are discussed in the context of international labour's campaigning, organising and negotiation activities.

AbstractHow are images, emotions, and international politics connected? This article develops a theoretical framework contributing to visuality and emotions research in International Relations. Correcting the understanding that images cause particular emotional responses, this article claims that emotionally laden responses to images should be seen as performed in foreign policy discourses. We theorise images as objects of interpretation and contestation, and emotions as socially constituted rather than as individual 'inner states'. Emotional bundling – the coupling of different emotions in discourse – helps constitute political subjectivities that both politicise and depoliticise. Through emotional bundling political leaders express their experiences of feelings shared by all humans, and simultaneously articulate themselves in authoritative and gendered subject positions such as 'the father'. We illustrate the value of our framework by analysing the photographs of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy who drowned in September 2015. 'Kurdi' became an instant global icon of the Syrian refugee crisis. World leaders expressed their personal grief and determination to act, but within a year, policies adopted with direct reference to Kurdi's tragic death changed from an open-door approach to attempts to stop refugees from arriving. A discursive-performative approach opens up new avenues for research on visuality, emotionality, and world politics.

In recent years, the concept of identity has become central to International Relations theory. Opposing rational actor assumptions, constructivist and post-structuralist identity scholarship has argued that preferences and interests are tied to actors' identities, which, in turn, explain action. While we welcome the attempt to move beyond rationalist and materialist accounts of state action, we argue that identity scholarship conceptualizes identity in methodologically individualist and causal terms. However, understanding identity in this way hinders us from grasping how actors are situated and continually develop within complex networks of social interdependencies. We suggest an approach that draws on processual-relational thinking and figurational sociology, and that shifts analysis from searching for identity to analysing identification processes. Contrary to the notion that identities inform action, we argue that specific sets of identifications are temporarily and incompletely stabilized in decision-making, and do not precede or inform action. To this end, we develop a model for empirical research that makes agency in identification processes visible and apply it to Swiss foreign policy decision-making. We suggest that non-foundationalist research revisit and discuss how identity is conceptualized and used in research, lest it reproduce the pitfalls of rationalist and materialist approaches.

AbstractBlockchain is a new general-purpose technology that poses significant challenges to policymaking, law, and society. Blockchain is even more distinctive than other transformative technologies, as it is by nature a global technology; moreover, it operates based on a set of rules and principles that have a law-like quality—the lex cryptographia. The global nature of blockchain has led to its adoption by international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. However, the law-like nature of the technology makes some of its uses by international organizations questionable from an international law and foreign affairs perspective. In this light, the article examines the effectiveness and legitimacy of the use of blockchain for international policymaking.

This article presents post-Habsburg central and eastern Europe as the flagship campus of the new international order of 1919. It shows how the international project of imperial liquidation, and the predicament of the successor states, produced a wide range of new international schemes, techniques, and frameworks—spanning the economy, crime, humanitarianism, and rights—that significantly shaped the global governance of today. Where historians customarily trace the implications of imperial collapse for the region's nationalization, I focus instead on internationalization. I isolate three different "border effects" in which the boundaries of sovereignty were reworked or challenged. International authority and jurisdiction grew and thrived on the sorts of qualified sovereignty that emerged in empire's wake.

The article analyzes the transformation of theoretical principles that underlie the formation of the international reserves structure over the past few centuries. It is concluded that these principles are based on the postulates of different schools of economic thought that perpetuate unequal exchange of goods in international trade, stimulate export of raw materials from developing countries and accumulation of international reserves, and also contribute to improving the level of consumption in developed countries. In addition, the article presents the results of studying the structure of Russia's international reserves portfolio using the method of H. Markowitz. The implementation of this approach would make it possible to increase the income generated by the Russian reserves, and reduce the risk of fluctuations in their value.

The international responsibility to protect is the most important and value-added element of the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine. However, the existing accounts of the international responsibilities of R2P are often fairly ad hoc and not clearly systematised, largely focusing on particular responsibilities. Consequently, this article provides a typology of the various international responsibilities required by the R2P. In particular, it presents six types of international responsibility to protect: (1) the responsibility to undertake direct action; (2) the responsibility to support direct action; (3) the responsibility to authorise; (4) the responsibility not to act; (5) the responsibility to advance R2P; and (6) the responsibility to reform. In doing so, it will clarify how these responsibilities hang together and highlight underappreciated responsibilities.

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This paper uses the concept of gains from trade in government revenue to clarify and extend the analysis of Keen and Wildasin (2004). It shows that their results derive from the use of trade taxes to achieve gains from trade in revenue in circumstances when direct international transfers cannot be used for this purpose. The paper shows that, in such circumstances, Pareto-efficient international equilibria are globally production-inefficient only in special cases, but origin-based commodity taxes, source-based capital taxes, and taxes on trade are nevertheless typically part of a Pareto-efficient international tax system. However, this conclusion depends on ruling out the use of international transfers to trade revenue, the case for which is not compelling.

This article explores the turn‐of‐the‐century development of an American internationalism geared towards a peaceful global federation rooted in international law and guided by the example of the United States of America. American ideals played a critical role in defining and creating perception of what international law was how it could be developed through the creation of a tribunal or international court of arbitration, and what that development would mean for the peaceful coexistence of nations. Peace advocates were united in their commitment to using legal means to settle international disputes before resorting to violence, and to creating behavioral guidelines for the future based on a firm belief in Christian, Anglo‐Saxon racial superiority and juris prudence.

"The G20 brings together the most important global actors. The club sharpens the international development agenda. They all use development cooperation as a soft power. That is why international development is always used as an important instrumental approach to foreign policy. This timely reader is a crucial contribution to better understanding the G20 in a highly dynamic and disruptive global context." —Stephan Klingebiel, Chair of the Research Programme "International and Transnational Cooperation" of the German Development Institute "This edited work, connecting the role of the G20 with the changing development landscape, is valuable in stretching our traditional understanding of these dynamics. Originally elevated as a crisis committee in the context of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the G20 has struggled to widen its agenda. As well mobilized by Emel Parlar Dal, the collection demonstrates both the will and skill of select non-Western countries within the G20 to push the privileging of South-South development cooperation and an alternative policy consensus more generally. Although facing some structural limitations, the book is testimony to the expansion of agency in an increasingly multi-polar world that needs to be considered by both scholars and practitioners." —Andrew F. Cooper, University Research Chair, Department of Political Science, and Professor, the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo This book aims to explore G20 rising powers' increasing role in international development from a comprehensive perspective. The first part focuses on the historical development and current dynamics of (G20) rising powers' evolving actorness in international development to assess their main motivations. The second part examines the main contributions, trends and limits of G20 rising powers in South-South Cooperation. The third part analyses the linkage between G20 rising powers' active involvement in international development and their foreign policies. Emel Parlar Dal is Professor at Marmara University's Department of International Relations. She is the Jean Monnet Chair on the EU and Rising Powers (2020-2023) and the director of JM Center of Excellence on the EU's sustainability in Global Governance (2022-2025).