This chapter is about the perspectives and experiences that female sex workers in China share across tiers of prostitution. The daily lives of low-tier sex workers, hostesses, and second wives in China differ from each other in important ways. Yet despite relatively fixed boundaries between tiers of prostitution, these women do not exist in unrelated, independent silos. After all, their source of income comes from the same activity: exchanging sex for money or other material goods. The chapter first highlights how movement across tiers of sex work is limited, and how low-tier sex workers and hostesses express a preference for the work conditions in their own tier, rather than voice a desire to move up in the pecking order. It then examines narratives that these women have in common across all three tiers. Lastly, it discusses how sex workers who cross paths with grassroots organizations develop a shared consciousness of their membership in a global community of sex work civil society, and appropriate its language and symbols in their own lives.

This chapter captures the current state-of-play of the West Line hub in a continually turbulent region, speculating on how things might and should go in the future – both in the West Line and in other e-waste hubs that share many dynamics and predicaments. The future of the West Line and its long-standing e-waste industry teeter in the balance, buffeted by geopolitical currents. The West Line waste flows and burning emerged from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have embodied it for decades, in a way that is increasingly salient in the recent years of a right-wing coalition government, and intensified conflict after October 7, 2023. The politics of waste is now explicit, with Palestinian municipal rubbish collection trucks blocked by military checkpoints, and Israelis calling for a creeping “green” annexation of Area C and whittling away of Palestinian authority in Areas A and B as the only way to prevent the “chemical terrorism” of waste burning. While these regional politics, which have so frustratingly frozen our promising hub-driven efforts, are surely sui generis, the underlying challenges are instructive globally for the interfaces between the e-waste hubs, environmental NGOs, and national e-waste policies, and this chapter closes in teasing out these broader lessons.

Chapter 3 addresses the suggestion that for a special regime to exist, there must be a mutual engagement of community members. As the chapter argues, in the context of international law, a mutual engagement among a group of international law specialists can be inferred from their participation in a distinct legal discourse, and from their further specialization and distinct way of ascribing functions to legal agents. More specifically, it can be inferred from: the publication of specialized international law journals; the way of organization of conferences and workshops; the creation of inter-governmental organization; the work of NGOs; the specialized research profile of international scholars and description of chairs; their separation of tasks and division of labour; and the function that they ascribe to the judiciary and to the international legal scholar.

This chapter focuses on the specific role of social movements and NGOs in energy policy-making in the CEE region. This is structured through a series of case studies that highlight contemporary energy policy issues, specifically with relation to energy pricing, issues of equity and energy poverty, nuclear energy, shale gas and renewable energy. The chapter examines how these issues are framed, justified and legitimised, and the extent of broader societal participation and support. To provide context this chapter considers the developing role of civil society in the region, including legacies of socialism, the historical and contemporary role for societal input into general policy-making, changes in state-civil society relations and the development of NGOs and interest groups and their influence on climate and energy policy. It studies these issues in four sub-sections: energy poverty, the shale gas debate and the role of opposition on environmental grounds, nuclear energy and public participation, and local and community energy initiatives.

The human rights movement is by no means uniform and a series of challenges, both within the movement and in respect of its role as a political actor, have become more pronounced with the increasing power of human rights and its advocates. This development has cast the light on human rights advocates, such as NGOs, and has raised questions both of legitimacy – who are you to make claims in the name of human rights or on behalf of certain people? Are you living up to human rights principles in your own practice? – and effectiveness – are you really making the positive difference in people’s lives you claim to make? Responses to these challenges testify to a growing self-awareness and critical assessment of the nature of human rights work, which includes an evaluation of the efficacy of strategies used to promote and protect human rights. Inevitably, human rights advocates are increasingly drawn into the political domain and are faced with the difficult task of marrying principle with pragmatism. This chapter explores the tensions arising in these contexts and assesses the strategies used by human rights actors, namely documentation, human rights reporting, advocacy, awareness-raising, training and education and, where relevant, litigation

This chapter introduces a self-development theory of the nonprofit sector, informed by alternative development and basic-needs theory. The theory presented in this chapter suggests that nonprofit law plays a role in creating a legal framework that allows people to participate in the improvement of their own lives and communities through self-development. With a nonprofit-friendly legal environment in place, individuals have greater economic incentive to work within their own communities to create organizations that help individuals, families, and communities to meet their own needs. This paradigm stands in contrast to views of nonprofit organizations as facilitators of rescuing behavior, in which one group of people seeks to uplift another. Based on cases in Nigeria and South Africa, this paper describes the role and importance of nonprofits in facilitating the development of individuals, institutions, and communities from within.

As Bernhard Harms pushed demanded a more global League trade policy, Lucien Coquet tried to establish firmer European substructures. Coquet embraced regional trade policy as a means to address unresolved Franco-German tensions over security. In effect, he was trying to reimpose the temporary constraints that had been placed on German commercial rights through the Treaty of Versailles by applying them to the rest of Europe as well. To advance this goal, he helped rally French politicians and business leaders in a new organization that was simply called the European Customs Union (Union Douanière Européenne, or UDE). Working in close partnership with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Coquet built out national branches of the UDE across Europe. Coquet and Riedl joined forces in 1929 to promote a proposal for European federation from the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aristide Briand, and a parallel plan for a League-sponsored tariff truce. This marked a brief moment of unity when diverse League collaborators tried to work together to respond to the onset of the Great Depression through concerted European tariff reduction. This cooperation quickly lost momentum as the Great Depression advanced, however.

Much of the existing literature has addressed authoritarian learning from external examples but has failed to analyse internal examples. The chapter begins by analysing learning from China, Singapore, and Kazakhstan among the case studies, finding that China is a source of learning. Another example is the restrictive NGO laws that took off after the Russian foreign agents law across the post-Soviet region, which highlights copying at the very least, if not direct learning. The chapter then turns to the domestic, analysing Belarusian learning from the Soviet Union. The main point of interest in the chapter is that the Moldovan and Ukrainian regimes appear to learn from the internal, both in terms of failure and success. This is particularly the case regarding the examples of Plahotniuc and Poroshenko learning from previous regimes both belonged to. The chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of success and failure in authoritarian learning.

This chapter begins exploring Fambul Tok’s program. It looks at how the organization illustrates the different ways they project themselves as local and what this says about the reproduction of common local tropes by people who know and understand this vernacular, namely by highlighting national identity – Sierra Leonean – and cultural and traditional practices by examining the materials they produced. This is contrasted with ethnographic observations, which explored how the organization actually operated on a daily basis, looking in particular at the interactions and hierarchies both within the organization, between staff and program participants. Exploring these interactions demonstrates how local transitional justice organizations also create and reinforce internal societal hierarchies, mirroring international-local hierarchies. Thus, knowledge of transitional justice and how the local is constructed within TJ programs is its own form of power. Exploring how the agency is employed by different people in different contexts enriches how we understand the micro-dynamics of power, knowledge and discourse within post-conflict contexts.

Chapter 3 focuses on the challenges and opportunities of transnational worker representation and their consequences for the development of more democratic governance institutions. We examine these from two key theoretical perspectives. Starting from the notion of associational democracy, we differentiate between two logics of democratic representation: representation as claim versus representation as structure. The first approach is associated with a discursive or communicative model of transnational democracy as put forward by political theorists. Rather than thinking of representation in terms of representative structures, representation becomes the dynamic and ongoing process of making “representative claims” that reflect certain discourses, categories, concepts, judgments, dispositions, and capabilities. In contrast, structural ideas of representation are grounded in industrial democracy. Here, constituents of an organic political unit defined by voluntary membership, such as a trade union, authorise their representatives to deliberate, negotiate or bargain on behalf of members. We develop their theoretical grounding in structuralist and post-structuralist thinking, and question to what extend these approaches may be reconciled with each other to advance prospects for transnational worker representation.

Globalisation has placed democratic institutions under severe pressure as economic actors seek to take advantage of the disjuncture between national political governance and transnational economic activity. This chapter provides an introduction and overview as to the key themes to be addressed in the book. In particular, we highlight the debate between different approaches to democratic representation and associational democracy which is the theoretical framing for the remainder of the book: representation as claim versus representation as structure.