The debate on governance originates in the OECD world. At the latest since the postcolonial debate, we know that we need to “test” our assumptions under radically different conditions. This book offers an extended perspective of local self-governance by examining cases from South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, together with a study of militias in the USA. The chapters present a wide variety of local actors who pursue different notions of order legitimized by local traditions based on hierarchy or deeply rooted communalism, Islamic theology, or grassroots democracy. Some local actors claim a state-like authority and challenge the territorial state. In such cases, there is no longer “a shadow hierarchy” but opposition to the state. Different violent actors fight for supremacy, and the state is just one actor among others. The empirical studies presented in this book show how different kinds of local self-governance are combined with varieties of statehood, and thus contribute to an understanding of the notion of governance in a fundamental sense that goes beyond the special case of the OECD world.

Democratic and consolidated states are taken as the model for effective rule-making and service provision. In contrast, this book argues that good governance is possible even without a functioning state.

This Oxford Handbook will be the definitive study of governance for years to come. 'Governance' has become one of the most popular terms in contemporary political science; this Handbook explores the full range of meaning and application of the concept and its use in a number of research fields.

Unpacking the major debates, this Oxford Handbook brings together leading authors of the field to provide a state-of-the-art guide to governance in areas of limited statehood where state authorities lack the capacity to implement and enforce central decision and/or to uphold the monopoly over the means of violence. While areas of limited statehood can be found everywhere - not just in the global South -, they are neither ungoverned nor ungovernable. Rather, a variety of actors maintain public order and safety, as well as provide public goods and services. While external state 'governors' and their interventions in the global South have received special scholarly attention, various non-state actors - from NGOs to business to violent armed groups - have emerged that also engage in governance. This evidence holds for diverse policy fields and historical cases. The Handbook gives a comprehensive picture of the varieties of governance in areas of limited statehood from interdisciplinary perspectives including political science, geography, history, law, and economics. 29 chapters review the academic scholarship and explore the conditions of effective and legitimate governance in areas of limited statehood, as well as its implications for world politics in the twenty-first century. The authors examine theoretical and methodological approaches as well as historical and spatial dimensions of areas of limited statehood, and deal with the various governors as well as their modes of governance. They cover a variety of issue areas and explore the implications for the international legal order, for normative theory, and for policies toward areas of limited statehood.

Scotland and Catalonia, both ancient nations with strong nationalisms within larger states, are exemplars of the management of ethnic conflict in multinational democracies and of global trends toward regional government. Focusing on these two countries, Scott L. Greer explores why nationalist mobilization arose when it did and why it stopped at autonomy rather than statehood. He challenges the notion that national identity or institutional design explains their relative success as stable multinational democracies and argues that the key is their strong regional societies and their regional organizations' preferences for autonomy and environmental stability

The concepts of statehood and self-determination provide the normative structure on which the international legal order is ultimately premised. As a system of law founded upon the issue of territorial control, ascertaining and determining which entities are entitled to the privileges of statehood continues to be one of the most difficult and complex issues. Moreover, although the process of decolonisation is almost complete, the principle of self-determination has raised new challenges for the metropolitan territories of established states, including the extent to which 'internal' self-determination guarantees additional rights for minority and other groups. As the controversies surrounding remedial secession have revealed, the territorial integrity of a state can be questioned if there are serious and persistent breaches of a people's human rights. This volume brings together such debates to reflect further on the current state of international law regarding these fundamental issues.

The nucleus of society is situated at the local level: in the village, the neighborhood, the city district. This is where a community first develops collective rules that are intended to ensure its continued existence. The contributors look at such configurations in geographical areas and time periods that lie outside of the modern Western world with its particular development of society and statehood: in Antiquity and in the Global South of the present. Here states tend to be weak, with obvious challenges and opportunities for local communities. How does governance in this context work? Scholars from various disciplines (Classics, Theology, Political Science, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Human Geography, Sinology) analyze different kinds of local arrangements in case studies, and they do so with a comparative approach. The sixteen papers examine the scope and spatial contingency of forms of self-governance; its legitimization and the collective identity of the groups behind them; the relations to different levels of state governance as well as to other local groups. Overall, this volume makes an interdisciplinary contribution to a better understanding of fundamental elements of local governance and statehood.

The Oxford ILDC online database, an online collection of domestic court decisions which apply international law, has been providing scholars with insights for many years. This ILDC Casebook is the perfect companion, introducing key court decisions with brief introductory and connecting texts. An ideal text for practitioners, judged, government officials, as well as for students on international law courses, the ILDC Casebook explains the theories and doctrines underlying the use by domestic courts of international law, and illustrates the key importance of domestic courts in the development of international law.

Considers H.R. 50, to provide for the admission of the state of Hawaii into the Union, and similar H.R. 888 and numerous identical bills, to provide for the admission of the Territory of Hawaii into the Union.