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This article investigates how expansive new security projects have gained both legitimacy and immediacy as part of the 'global war on terror' by analysing the process that led to the fencing and securitising of the border between India and Bangladesh. The framing of the 'enemy other' in the global war on terror relies on two crucial shifts from previous geopolitical boundary narratives. First, the enemy other is described as not only being violent but also as outside the boundaries of modernity. Second, the enemy other is represented as posing a global and interconnected threat that is no longer limited by geography. These two shifts are used to justify the new preventative responses of pre-emptive military action abroad and the securitisation of the borders of the state. This article argues that in India the good and evil framing of the global war on terror was mapped onto longstanding communal distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. In the process, Pakistan, Bangladesh and increasingly Muslims generally are described as violent, irrational and a threat to the security of the Indian state. These changes led to a profound shift in the borderlands of the Indian state of West Bengal, where fencing and securitising the border with Bangladesh was previously resisted, but now is deemed essential. The article concludes that the framing of the war on terror as a global and interconnected problem has allowed sovereign states to consolidate power and move substantially closer to the territorial ideal of a closed and bounded container of an orderly population by attempting to lock down political borders.

Extending and further testing the theory advanced by Bruce Jentleson with post-cold war data, variations in U.S. public support for the use of military force are shown to be best explained by the principal policy objective for which military force is being used, with a third category of \"humanitarian intervention\" added to the previous two of \"foreign policy restraint\" and \"internal political change.\" The principal policy objective theory is shown through a series of tests, including regression and logistic analyses, to offer the most powerful and parsimonious explanation, both directly superseding and indirectly subsuming such other alternative variables as interests, elite cues, risk, and multilateralism. These findings support the broader theoretical view of a rational public purposive and not purely reactive in its opinion formulation and have important implications for the basic dispositions of the types of military interventions the American public will and will not support in the post-cold war era.

Among the questions that vex the federalism literature are why states check the federal government and whether Americans identify with the states as well as the nation. This Article argues that partisanship supplies the core of an answer to both questions. Competition between today's ideologically coherent, polarized parties leads state actors to make demands for autonomy, to enact laws rejected by the federal government, and to fight federal programs from within. States thus check the federal government by channeling partisan conflict through federalism's institutional framework. Partisanship also recasts the longstanding debate about whether Americans identify with the states. Democratic and Republican, not state and national, are today's political identities, but the state and federal governments are sites of partisan affiliation. As these governments advance distinct partisan positions, individuals identify with them in shifting, variable ways; Americans are particularly likely to identify with states when they are controlled by the party out of power in Washington. States also serve as laboratories of national partisan politics by facilitating competition within each political party. In so doing, they participate in national political contests without forfeiting the particularity and pluralism we associate with the local. By instantiating different partisan positions, moreover, states generate a federalist variant of surrogate representation: individuals across the country may affiliate with states they do not inhabit based on their partisan commitments. Attending to the intersection of partisanship and federalism has implications for a number of doctrinal controversies, such as campaign finance across state lines and access to state public records. The analysis here suggests that porous state borders may enhance states' ability to challenge the federal government and to serve as sites of political identification.

We live in a shrinking world where interdependence between countries and communities is increasing. These changes also affect—as they should—the concept of sovereignty. In past decades the predominant conception of sovereignty was akin to owning a large estate separated from other properties by rivers or deserts. By contrast, today’s reality is more analogous to owning a small apartment in one densely packed high-rise that is home to two hundred separate families. The sense of interdependency is heightened when we recognize the absence of any alternative to this shared home, of any exit from this global high-rise. The privilege of bygone days of opting out, of retreating into splendid isolation, of adopting mercantilist policies or erecting iron curtains is no longer realistically available.

Past decades have witnessed a shift in international cooperation toward growing involvement of transnational actors (TNAs), such as nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and philanthropic foundations. This article offers a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of TNA access to IOs. The analysis builds on a novel data set, covering formal TNA access to 298 organizational bodies from fifty IOs over the time period 1950 to 2010. We identify the most profound patterns in TNA access across time, issue areas, policy functions, and world regions, and statistically test competing explanations of the variation in TNA access. The central results are three-fold. First, the empirical data confirm the existence of a far-reaching institutional transformation of IOs over the past sixty years, pervading all issue areas, policy functions, and world regions. Second, variation in TNA access within and across IOs is mainly explained by a combination of three factors: functional demand for the resources of TNAs, domestic democratic standards in the membership of IOs, and state concerns with national sovereignty. Third, existing research suffers from a selection bias that has led it to overestimate the general importance of a new participatory norm in global governance for the openness of IOs.

There is broad agreement in the literature that international courts (ICs) make decisions with bounded discretion in relation to state governments. However, the scope of this discretion, and the determinants of its boundaries, are highly contested. In particular, the central mechanism in separation-of-powers models of judicial politics—the possibility of legislative override—has raised controversy. We argue that the uncertainty that judges face regarding the political reactions to their decisions has important and undertheorized implications for their behavior. On the one hand, cautious judges are likely to be attentive to signals that contain information about the probability of an unfavorable override. On the other hand, misjudgments of the political risks are likely to be made. Thus, the possibility of override is a significant factor affecting judicial behavior, but it is also a fairly blunt mechanism for balancing the independence and accountability of courts. The empirical study focuses on the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which has long been at the center of theory development regarding the legalization of world politics and the rise of international courts. The results demonstrate a strong correlation between the CJEU's rulings and the political signals it receives, in a pattern that goes beyond legal merit, and that fits with the override mechanism. State governments are crucial parts of the broader audience that defines the political boundaries of judicial discretion.

Over recent years African states have become increasingly prominent actors in high-level international politics. This article makes the case for studying Africa's international relations from the point of view of agency. The article outlines contemporary contexts within which questions of African agency have come to the fore and argues a need to think conceptually about agency in international politics in a way that accommodates the range of different agencies at work. The article outlines three elements as foundations for the analysis of African agency: first, a conceptualisation of different dimensions of agency; second, a recognition of the importance of sovereignty in differentiating between state, or state-enabled agents, and others; and third, a temporally embedded approach to agency that historicises contemporary agency. Combined, these elements suggest that future work on African agency would be able to engage seriously with the continent's role in international politics in a way that presents Africa as actor not just acted upon, historical agent not just history's recipient.

Beginning with reflections on the idea of tradition, and questions it can generate, Asad proceeds to address developments in Egypt since the beginning of 2011 with questions about time (the authority of a religious past versus that of a revolutionary future), discourses (defining national identity, defending the sacred dignity of the modern state, restoring the people's will, establishing national stability), and the emotional undercurrents of the secular politics that culminated in the military coup of Jul 3, 2015. He argues that while the army, the business elite, and the 'deep state' (those within and those loyal to state apparatuses), all supported the coup because of converging interests, the liberal and leftist youth who legitimized it were driven by hostility to 'religion-in-politics.' But the major crisis in modern Egypt, the article suggests, goes beyond the confrontation between those who fight for an inclusive secular state (in the name of a democratic revolution) and those who want a religious state of unequal citizens (in the name of a Muslim majoritarian tradition), between ethically motivated fighters for freedom and repressive forces that seek to restrict it. He maintains that the modern sovereign state and the neoliberal global economy in which it is enmeshed together make the cultivation of political virtues difficult if not impossible, and therefore render certain forms of ethically informed politics problematic. Adapted from the source document.