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As the economies of China, India, and other Asian nations continue to grow, these countries are seeking greater control over the rules that govern international trade. Setting the rules carries with it the power to establish advantage, so it's no surprise that everyone wants a seat at the table-or that negotiations over rules often result in stalemates at meeting of the World Trade Organization. Nowhere is the conflict over rule setting more evident than in the simmering "standards wars" over the rules that define quality and enable the adjudication of disputes. In Global Rivalr

How does a standard-setting body based in the United States influence domestic regulatory contests in rising powers like China and India? And why might it be more successful in imposing its norms in one country or another? This paper answers these questions through a comparative analysis of domestic regulatory contention over pesticide residue standards for soft drinks in India and over nutritional standards for infant formula in China. Drawing together insights from science and technology studies, political economic approaches to standards and science, and the institutional approach to hegemonic transitions, I make three arguments. First, standard-setting bodies are increasingly available for hire by transnational firms; however, as their authority is not automatic, they are strategically cultivating scientific and policy networks in rising powers. Second, states in rising powers respond differently to the advocacy of standard-setting bodies, depending on distinct patterns of inter-firm and inter-state competition across the sectors to be regulated. Finally, because both standard-setting bodies and states in rising powers are compelled to build new coalitions of scientific and political actors to wield influence, these struggles are recasting the geographies of institutional power over standards in new ways.

Transnational firms have rolled out new forms of private governance at the same time as the rise of new economic powerhouses like China has fomented growing inter-state tensions. This points to critical questions: how does inter-state competition shape private governance of transnational commodity chains and how does private governance shape inter-state rivalries? I explore these questions by tracing the construction and dissolution of sectoral hegemonic coalitions that govern commodity chains. Drawing on the case of cotton quality governance from 2000-2012, I argue that a coalition of the U.S. state and transnational merchants has reconstituted its sectoral hegemony to allow expanded accumulation and accommodate their main rival~China. The U.S. state created standards with Chinese characteristics, while transnational merchants made the authority structure of their institutions more inclusive. However, this reconstituted hegemony remains unstable. Facing continued regulatory competition from China, the U.S. state has constructed new forms of meta-governance that could facilitate a shift to Chinese-led sectoral hegemony but under U.S. oversight. Moreover, these sectoral hegemonic struggles compelled Western transnational merchants to fracture their long-standing relationship with the U.S. state in the hegemonic coalition in order to position their private institutions as geopolitically neutral and thus compatible with the hegemonic leadership of either the U.S. or Chinese states in the sector. By tracing struggles among coalitions of leading firms and states for hegemony over the institutions governing particular commodity chain sectors, we can shed light on possible trajectories within broader world-system level hegemonic struggles that at once constitute and are constituted by these sectoral dynamics.

We are in an era of uncertainty over whose rules will govern global economic integration. With the growing market share of Chinese firms and the power of the Chinese state it is unclear if Western firms will continue to dominate transnational governance. Exploring these dynamics through a study of contract rules in the global cotton trade, this article conceptualizes commodity chain governance as a contested process of institution-building. To this end, the global commodity chain/global value chain (GCC/GVC) framework must be revised to better account for the broader institutional context of commodity chain governance, institutional variation across space, and strategic action in the construction of legitimate governance arrangements. I provide a more dynamic model of GCC governance that stresses how strategic action, existing institutions, and dominant discourses intersect as firms and states compete for institutional power within a commodity chain. This advances our understandings of how commodity chain governance emerges and changes over time.

How do "international" epistemic communities shape regulatory contests between transnational firms and civil society organizations in the Global South? With the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), member states committed to basing trade-restrictive national regulations on science-based "international" standards set by "international" standard-setting bodies. Yet we know little about how the WTO regime has shaped the operation of epistemic communities within standard-setting bodies and, in turn, how standard-setting bodies articulate with national policy-making processes in the Global South. Building on work in the new political sociology of science, I argue that neoliberal globalization and the establishment of the WTO have created incentives for Western epistemic communities to at once cast themselves as "international" under the WTO regime and orient their scientific agendas toward the priorities of transnational firms. Moreover, this transformation of epistemic communities has created opportunities for transnational firms facing contentious policy environments in the Global South to effectively outsource regulatory decision-making to "international" epistemic communities that can claim legal status under the WTO regime. Empirically, I focus on the case of one Western epistemic community—the Association of Analytical Communities International—and its claim to epistemic jurisdiction over pesticide residue standards for soft drinks in India.

International volunteering has become a popular way for students to travel, engage in rewarding service, and build credentials of global citizenship for a competitive job market. In this context, we explore a puzzling phenomenon: why would a group of students choose to end a seemingly successful international volunteer program legitimized by affirmation from their community partner in the global South, their peers, and their institution? Research has shown that international volunteering organizations, and development organizations more broadly, are resilient, even amid critique, as they continually reconstruct their legitimacy vis-à-vis donors. We argue, however, that student volunteer organizations that intentionally foster reflexivity in development work may choose organizational demise after grappling with the tensions inherent in international alternative breaks. These volunteer programs train students in critical perspectives on international development, yet the institutional conditions under which they operate, as well as some of their implicit neoliberal assumptions, frustrate the realization of this critique in practice. Students develop critical and neoliberal anxieties that lead them not only to indict the moral legitimacy of the organization but also to reject the credentials and career paths of global citizenship they initially sought to attain.

This article argues that interstate competition over the organization of the world economy shapes the spatial configuration of commodity chains. This departs from much of the literature that emphasizes firm- and sector-level dynamics. To illustrate this argument, we use formal network methods in conjunction with a historical analysis to examine the evolution of the global cotton trade between 1973 and 2012. Through this analysis, we demonstrate that changes in the spatial configuration of the cotton market were shaped by changes in the nature of competition among the most powerful states in the world economy. While the cotton trade was once characterized by a bipolar network reflecting the nature of interstate competition under the Cold War, by the early 2000s China's accession to the World Trade Organization and the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement had dramatically reshaped the global cotton market. The result was a binodal network in which trade flows were increasingly concentrated between China and the United States.

Social cohesion has become a magic bullet that policy makers imagine will rescue communities from the ravages of the market. Behind the apparent cohesiveness of rural community, however, lies another reality. This article examines characteristics of social cohesion in two rural communities in Saskatchewan. Although new forms of cohesion are emerging, these communities are riven with cleavages along multiple axes. Some of these local divisions appear to be deepening with global and regional processes of socioeconomic transformation. Long-term crises lead to strategies and solutions that precipitate new problems. Ongoing practices of inclusion and exclusion affect the possibilities of development in these communities.

We explore puzzling outcomes in a Virginia school district: in 2018, the Williamsburg-James City County School Board voted to redraw attendance boundaries to achieve greater racial and socio-economic integration among its middle schools, yet abandoned similar efforts for high schools. Drawing on Critical Race perspectives, we conducted a content analysis of archival materials, including school board meeting transcripts, to analyze the conditions under which school decision-makers mobilize to enact equity-oriented policy reforms. We found that school board members abandoned high school rezoning in the face of fierce opposition from white, affluent residents who saw school reassignments as a threat to their entitlements to a highly rated school and to their property values. For the middle schools, board members avoided white families' entitlements, which neutralized opposition, at the same time as strong community advocacy in favor of equity and integration shifted the political landscape. This activated 'interest convergence' among school board members supportive of equity and resulted in the approval of middle-school attendance boundaries that produced greater racial and socioeconomic integration. This case underscores the importance of community advocacy for equity-based reforms; however, the scope of these efforts may be limited to changes that do not substantively threaten white parents' perceived entitlements.