How can global economic regimes be “embedded” to become more equitable, inclusive and responsive to social concerns — particularly those of developing countries? Ibis thesis explores this policy question through a case study of the evolution of the global intellectual property regime as it relates to pharmaceuticals “the global IP regime”) from 1994-2009. Encapsulated in the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the global IP regime of the 1990s required developing countries to grant stringent patent monopolies on medicines, however, the regime has since evolved to afford substantively greater policy space for developing countries to take into account public health needs. How did this regime change come about? Beginning around 1995, a small set of developing country governments, civil society organizations, and experts succeeded in de-stabilizing the legitimacy — and thereby the authority — of the IP regime by problematizing and beginning to re-frame IP rules as a social issue. This re-framing attracted new actors and resources, facilitating further re-framing and the shift of IP debates into new institutional arenas, such as the World Health Assembly. The movement for global access to AIDS treatment created a policy crisis from 1999-2001, which opened a window of opportunity for regime change； codified in the WTO Doha Declaration, the revised regime afforded greater priority to health concerns and allowed increased flexibility in IP rules. These new norms were consolidated in the ensuing years through a series of interconnected global and national-level political contests over national legislation, court cases, and policy decisions. By 2009, the IP regime had become at least partially embedded to take into greater account public health concerns reflected in changes in formal and informal rules, norms, and the discourse and practices of all the relevant actors. By using global networks to tap into a broad range of power resources normative, structural, institutional, expert and economic), a loose coalition of developing country governments, CSOs and experts changed the global IP regime. The case demonstrates how relatively “weak” actors in the global system can marshal various sources of power to render global economic rules more equitable and inclusive.

Current international guidelines for informed consent in research on human subjects should be revised in order to be more globally applicable. Because many from less developed countries value community to the extent that they would wish to include community in the informed consent process, the foundation and guidelines for informed consent must attend to how community involvement can enhance or impede autonomy. The present provisions for involving community are not specific enough. The reason for this lies in the reliance on the traditional account of respect for autonomy, which overlooks the impact that social structures, or differences in race, class and gender, can have on autonomy. What is needed is a relational account of autonomy that attends to the many ways that social structures affect autonomy. To illustrate how this change would be reflected in policy, I argue for a set of ethical conditions for respecting relational autonomy in research and propose amendments to the current guidelines.

The accelerated trend of globalization has transformed the traditional role of the state. According to James Mittelman and Robert Johnston, the state is engaged in a courtesan role, which consists in shifting from serving citizens to acting as tacit partners in market relations, including with globally organized criminal groups. Building on the concept of the courtesan role of the state, this study addresses: (a) the general question of direct and indirect connections of states with illicit transactions in the post-Cold War, with a special attention to arms trafficking； (b) the reaction of the United States, as the remaining unique superpower, to the behavior of states associated with global illicit transactions, especially when involving security-sensitive cases such as arms transfer； (c) the security implications of this particular feature of the global illicit economy, particularly how threats are defined in international politics in the post-Cold War unipolar world. Focusing on the Argentina venta de armas case of illicit arms transfer to the Balkans and Ecuador in the 1990s, the research explores (a) the structural conditions and the domestic roots of a state engaged in illegal transactions in the post-Cold War； (b) the superpower’s reaction to policies involving illicit transactions； (c) the security consequences. Through these venues, the dissertation aims at refining the debate in IR Theory to provide a better understanding of the international security dynamics in the post-Cold War.

This dissertation examines foreigners–Danes, Swedes, and Swiss–who volunteered to join the Nazi SS. Despite being from neutral countries, these volunteers took up leadership role in the SS and were willing to fight and die for Hitlers New Order. I argue that far from being molded by Nazi propaganda once in Germany, these men arrived with an embryonic transnational fascist worldview, including beliefs in the regenerative quality of violence and the need for a more organic and authoritarian political re-organization of North-Western Europe. They saw this Germanic core of Western civilization as being threatened both by the Bolshevik East and the Liberal West. Although post-war historiography and collective memories identify the volunteers as criminals and asocials duped by the Nazi regime, the men were, in fact, highly educated and motivated and had been well-integrated into pre-war society. Once in Germany the volunteers served not only as combat officers but contributed actively towards the formulation of a Germanic variant of National Socialist ideology. In addition to the experiences of these men, this study focuses on the Germanische Leitstelle, the SS office tasked with recruiting, training and coordinating Germanic soldiers and policies. As the military wing of the SS grew in the later years of the war, this office sought to use the organization to spread the Nazi revolution throughout Western Europe and to create a Germanic Empire in the place of independent nation states. For this purpose, beyond fighting Bolshevism, service in the SS was seen by the Leitstelle as a way of creating and cementing the future leadership corps of this Germanic Empire. In their effort to mold the SS into a Germanic National Socialist organization, the neutral volunteers and the Germanische Leitstelle were opposed and eventually discredited by competing offices which promoted a more German-centric reading of National Socialism. As such, this dissertation is a case study of the polyocratic nature of the Nazi regime and the competition over political and ideological influence in Germany and across occupied Western Europe. It provides insight into the significant support the Nazi New Order enjoyed among certain young Western European elites and the regimes inability to make effective use of such willing collaborators.

The dissertation investigates the origins of contemporary international society through the lens of the seventeenth century free seas debate. My inquiry focuses on the interplay between normative beliefs and political institutions in the formulation of states legal claims and their international adjudication. I illustrate how ideas on the role of the individual in the political community and theories of government legitimacy are not only evoked in the justifications presented i.e. , the reasons given for the appropriateness of certain actions), but determined the institutions regarded as legitimate actors on the world stage and the mechanisms used to evaluate competing claims. After linking the evolution of the law of the sea to the transformation of these philosophies, I trace the justifications made in early modern Europe by Spain, Portugal, the United Provinces, and England in their claims to sovereignty over the sea. The attendant shift in justification from one based on Catholic scholasticism to one that draws upon the humanist ideals of the Reformation, I claim, reflects the existence of a fundamental change in the underlying principles, institutions, and adjudicating mechanisms of international society. The result of this shift is the increasing role played by state power as a determinant for behavior – the defining characteristic of Hobbesian state of anarchy frequently employed as a metaphor for the international system. The prominence of power in post-Westphalian international society is accompanied by the development of domestic and international institutions that can be seen as having their intellectual foundations in post-Reformation understandings of the individual and his relationship to the political community. Sovereignty and challenges to it as the basis for state behavior in early modern Europe, I argue, could only be established given the presence of a certain set of philosophical prerequisites. The movement from a God-centered mental universe to one based on the individual provided that basis. By concluding with this understanding of change within international society, I suggest a more prominent role to be played by domestic political theories and institutions than has previously been recognized in the literature.

The hallmark of a free, democratic society is the civil rights that society bestows upon its population. Access to civil rights, however, is often only afforded through challenges and struggles that a society must confront. The present research considers carefully the linguistic pragmatic challenges that exist in civil rights court cases that may affect accessibility to those very rights. One such pragmatic challenge is the linguistic device of hedging. This mixed method study focuses on how native and non-native speakers perceive a range of hedging in attorney summaries of civil rights court cases. Participants read unhedged and hedged texts of attorney summaries and completed a Likert item questionnaire. They responded to how they perceived component parts of hedging； how they felt about the subject matter of the text； and which side they thought won the case. I performed a Mann-Whitney U quantitative analysis on the Likert item data and a qualitative analysis on the narrative comments. The data would seem to indicate that there is a statistically significant difference with respect to how individuals perceive truthfulness with regard to the amount hedged in attorney summaries. Non-natives were less discriminating than natives regarding hedges in the legal register, meaning that they missed an aspect of the message attorneys tried to send. Not only is this a significant revelation of the importance of hedging in courtroom communication, but it also addresses the gap in the literature that I have identified and the claims that I have put forth within my research.

The contemporary political sphere is characterized by an increase in the number of regulation levels. A new structure has been emerging, defined by the overlay of national institutions, sub-state entities and supranational regional and international) organizations. The State, while remaining in a privileged position, no longer monopolizes the production of policies； the national area is not the sole locus of political life anymore. Such dynamics of change have affected the design of citizenship, central element of politics. The 1990s have seen a proliferation of studies regarding post/trans/supra-national, or global, citizenship； according to those analyses, the locus of citizenship is less and less national and more and more supranational. From a multiple and dynamic understanding of citizenship, the dissertation proposes to move beyond the locus issue. Citizenship is here conceived as a dynamic construction, whose moving outlines evolve through time and space. Individuals are not citizens “by nature”； they become citizens through a “citizenization” process, as political entities are built and consolidate. Institutional structures and public policies set up within supranational political entities create citizenship links with individuals, and those links evolve as institutional structures and policies are changing. The dissertation presents a contextualized analysis of the “citizenization” processes in progress at the supranational level. In this regards, it questions the meaning of the recent developments that affected the European Union and the United Nations for supranational citizenship-building. Important pillars of the multilevel governing structure characterizing the current political sphere, both entities have been engaged for the last years in profound institutional reform processes. Relying notably on the concepts of “citizenship regime” and “governance” and an institutionalist theoretical framework, the dissertation proposes an analysis of the impact of the institutional changes in progress within the European Union and the United Nations in citizenization terms. Keywords: Citizenization – European Union – United Nations – Citizenship regime – Governance – European citizenship – Active citizenship – Participation – Institution-building – Institutionalism.

Crimes against humanity are widespread and systematic attacks on civilian populations, sometimes committed by officials of a state against citizens of that state. These atrocities are inhumane acts that intentionally make the lives of the victims impossible, intolerable or indecent. In the words of the International Criminal Court these crimes “shock the conscience of mankind.” In the aftermath of these atrocities victims and those who stand in solidarity with them call for justice. But who has the authority to answer this call for justice? More pointedly, if we are to respect the political autonomy of states, how could any international institution have the standing to prosecute perpetrators of a crime that has occurred solely within the borders of that state? In response to this question, I develop an Alternative Cosmopolitan Account ACA), wherein I argue that an international tribunal could have the standing to redress these crimes in virtue of being part of a global institutional structure necessary for fulfilling the demands of justice, in particular, by making determinate the content of what we owe to one another as members of a global moral community. I begin my account with a commitment to minimal cosmopolitanism: that each person stands in a morally salient relationship with each other person, and that this requires that we view one another as objects of moral concern. I argue that the obligations we have to one another in virtue of this relationship are not determinate without a mediating political institution that can provide a coherent, univocal, enforceable system of law. This problem of indeterminacy requires a global mediating institution that articulates both law between states international law) and between individuals cosmopolitan law), of which the prohibition on crimes against humanity is a part.

Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a Pew Research Center poll reported that distrust of the United States had intensified across the globe, with respondents citing U.S. foreign policy and “American-style democracy” as the reasons. Independent critiques of American foreign policy that predate the attacks of September 11, 2001 suggest that discontent with the U.S. goes far beyond the policies of George W. Bush. The purpose of this dissertation is to illuminate problematic aspects of American power by viewing them through a Japanese lens. Citing patterns from religion, education, and psychology, it presents two paradigms of power: visible and direct doing/acting) in the United States, and invisible and indirect watching, waiting, and yielding) in Japan. Utilizing a critical hermeneutic methodology, eight expatriate Westerners living in Japan were interviewed. The primary aim of the research was to explore which of the paradigms they used, and whether this changed over time. Most of the transnational informants in this study modified expressions of power to accommodate the host culture. A more noteworthy finding is that the frustrations recounted by the informants mirror the macroscopic problems and complexes of the United States–once the worlds lone superpower–as it struggles to adapt to a multipolar world. In a particularly interesting parallel, extremes of one paradigm precipitated violent swings to the other side. Viewed depth psychologically, this is the enantiodromia through which unconscious aspects of psyche are integrated and individuation takes place. Although unsettling, this developmental process can be seen as a sign of hope for the future.

Special and differential treatment (SDT) provisions in GATT were created to assist developing countries achieve economic progress while assimilating into the multilateral trading system. Despite these intentions, global trade imbalances still persist. Within this context, I focus on the region of East Asia which has experienced astounding growth in just several decades, propelling it far beyond other developing country regions. Although international trade continues to be the crucial factor driving growth in the region, reliance on SDT has in certain circumstances hindered development. As such, East Asia should seek alternatives to SDT. In that vein, I argue that sustainable growth and trade liberalization can be achieved by enhancing integration through a regional trade agreement. I further discuss various proposals for an East Asian trade agreement such as ASEAN＋3, FTAAP, and EARTA. Finally, I highlight the importance of governance and identify several institutions essential for a successful regional arrangement.