What is the transformative potential of civil society in the neoliberal era? This essay responds to John Keane’s “Hopes for Civil Society.” While civil society plays an integral role in democratic transition, its role in countries experiencing democratic backsliding or erosion is less clear. In the longstanding liberal democracies today, political party ties to civil society groups have weakened, parties are less differentiated on economic policy, and citizens increasingly turn to mass protest, rather than civic engagement, to express their grievances.

This article addresses the question of to what extent conventional theories of high reliability organizations and normal accidents theory are applicable to public bureaucracy. Empirical evidence suggests precisely this. Relevant cases are, for instance, collapsing buildings and bridges due to insufficient supervision of engineering by the relevant authorities, infants dying at the hands of their own parents due to misperceptions and neglect on the part of child protection agencies, uninterrupted serial killings due to a lack of coordination among police services, or improper planning and risk assessment in the preparation of mass events such as soccer games or street parades. The basic argument is that conceptualizing distinct and differentiated causal mechanisms is useful for developing more fine-grained variants of both normal accident theory and high reliability organization theory that take into account standard pathologies of public bureaucracies and inevitable trade-offs connected to their political embeddedness in democratic and rule-of-law-based systems to which belong the tensions between responsiveness and responsibility and between goal attainment and system maintenance. This, the article argues, makes it possible to identify distinct points of intervention at which permissive conditions with the potential to trigger risk-generating human action can be neutralized while the threshold that separates risk-generating human action from actual disaster can be raised to a level that makes disastrous outcomes less probable.

Globalization has eroded borders, fostered mobility, and deepened inequality virtually everywhere. The waning of the state as the world’s default political unit has had myriad consequences; among the most challenging may be the simultaneous expansion of supranational norms of human rights and contraction of legal, enforceable citizenship. The upheavals of the Arab Spring provided eloquent testimony to both the appeal of rights-based political discourse, as protesters across the region called for “bread, freedom, and social justice,” and the catastrophic consequences of reliance on weakened and ineffectual states to enforce such rights. The baleful landscape of the Middle East today suggests a warning for the rest of the world: enfeebled states may herald the demise of universal human rights.

As the public orders in the global community, in particular being liberal or illiberal, have lost their “social conscience”, we build on lessons learned to create better circumstances, rather than simply making historic judgements. All while striving to reinvigorate the “social conscience” with a greater sense of collectiveness to provide a more comprehensive order for a new global culture. The goal here is to determine how best to regenerate a wider understanding of the “common good” amongst our societies, and how to ensure that we as “peoples” appreciate and embrace collectiveness and determine that our decisions will increasingly have a greater “social conscience” collectively. In a world of globalization, it is important to understand the interconnectedness of people and systems alike. Decisions built on an understanding of the “common good” and “social conscience” will ultimately have a wider influence on a potential global culture willing to reap benefits of individual assets and achievements. Changing from a “balance of power and authority” driven systems to ones driven by different systems is an attempt to achieve a “balance of interest” is due. A paradigm shift should be in force, whereby marginalization and inequality will be reduced; yet not erased. With this critical juncture in the 21st century, it is imperative to rethink the common good. As well as, reinvigorate the “social conscience” and collective sense which are essential to facing the ever-changing global order.

In this interview, Claus Offe and Helmut Anheier examine the state of Eastern Europe 30 years after the fall of communism, explore the relationship between capitalism and democracy, and discuss what the social sciences mean today. They talk about the stresses liberalism is currently experiencing, current political developments in the US and UK, and the current relevance the fields of sociology and economics.

The article is written in the form of an essay (for Dahrendorf Symposium), speculative in essence, yet based on the new selected evidence concerning peoples’ opinions and attitudes disclosed during the pandemic. It starts with remarks about predictions in social sciences and the complex problems in studying the shocks created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Second part is devoted to major challenges and trade-offs states, governments and citizens have to face currently, focusing on one particular which is crucial for the future quality of liberal democracies, that is a trade-off between democratic norms and values and surveillance practices. The article concludes with a discussion of several issues, which have become more salient during the pandemic, challenging our previous knowledge about them.

In this invited comment piece, I argue that the Lima de Miranda and Snower SAGE framework represents not just another “beyond GDP” alternative but is an important contribution to a larger shift underway in economics regarding our understanding of human behavior and the nature and purpose of economic systems. Recognizing this broader shift helps us see how SAGE might be strengthened and built upon. In this spirit, I suggest some starting points for strengthening the normative foundations of the SAGE framework, discuss an alternative interpretation of the welfare effects of inequality, propose further work on the “material gain” part of the framework, and and briefly suggest an alternative approach to SAGE’s utility maximizing decision model. I conclude that SAGE provides a framework for a very rich future research agenda.

This article argues that one of the key questions—or even the key question—of our times is how to foster enhanced compatibility between national policy-making sovereignty and effective multilateral cooperation. There are multiple reasons for this. First, given the growing importance of global public good-type policy challenges and the rising trend toward multipolarity, the relationships among countries are now de facto marked by universal multilateralism. International cooperation is no longer only an option, as it conventionally was (especially for the major powers), but a compulsion. This new, binding type of multilateralism is called here “multilateralism 2.0” to distinguish it from the conventional, more optional type of multilateralism. Second, necessary systematic reforms to make global governance fit for the new reality of multilateralism 2.0 are still lacking, because states value their sovereignty. However, a persuasive reform vision and reform leadership have not yet emerged; currently, uncertainty exists about how to have both sovereignty and effective cooperation. The world is experiencing a “Kindleberger moment”: crisis and no leadership. Accordingly, this article offers concrete suggestions on possible ways forward. It suggests that the most important and urgent reform is to forge consensus on a new principle: the “dual-compatibility principle” calling for a commitment of states to (i) more sovereignty-compatible multilateral cooperation and (ii) an exercise of national policy-making sovereignty that is more compatible with multilateral cooperation. To clearly see the critical importance of this principle, a prior, eminently doable reform step is needed: widening the analytical lens of multilateralism to capture both the “real” and the “political” sides of this phenomenon and to recognize that the former is, in effect, the independent variable and the latter the dependent one.

The past decade has seen a gradual convergence between the modernizing, top-down development agendas associated with “new donors” to Africa and the human development agenda more commonly linked to traditional donors. But while instruments such as the Sustainable Development Goals now demand both industrialization and empowerment, donors still struggle to reconcile these competing expectations. This article uses a variety of qualitative data to examine one such project: the attempted transfer of Japanese management techniques (or kaizen ) to workplaces across Ethiopia as part of Japanese official development assistance. Asking why and how the Japanese and Ethiopian governments pursue these aims, the article finds an intervention that is low modernist in design: its goals and logics are modernist but tempered by a respect for local knowledge and a preference for evolutionary over revolutionary change. The fact that Japan is the donor to promulgate such a paradigm is no coincidence, I find, given the historical origins of kaizen and Japan’s long-standing hybrid role in international development debates. Low modernist interventions such as Ethiopian kaizen demonstrate the utility of moving beyond dichotomies (China/West, growth/equity, efficiency/empowerment). But in both Ethiopia and the Japanese aid apparatus, powerful centrifugal forces still make low modernism a difficult balancing act to achieve.

This essay uses the tools of Western empirical reasoning to analyze the origins and driving forces of the ongoing geopolitical contest between China and the United States. The essay argues that the origins of the geopolitical contest lie in China’s rapid growth from the Deng era, the relative socioeconomic decline of the United States, and the failure of the United States to work out a rational, comprehensive strategy for managing China’s rise. Finally, in the fallout of the global COVID-19 pandemic, where the relations between the two countries have been further strained, the essay argues that the two countries can manage their geopolitical rivalry if they concentrate instead on five “noncontradictions” that also characterize their relationship: that between the fundamental national interests of both countries; in tackling climate change; in the ideological sphere; in the American and Chinese civilizations; and in their worldview.

The outbreak of Covid-19 prompted the greatest political intervention in our lifetime. Governments around the world introduced measures that shattered our private life, brought economic life to a virtual standstill, and threw into question the value of international organizations. The article first shows how the political interventions undertaken throughout 2020 have crushed long standing equilibria on such fundamental issues as the notion of a common good, the limits of individual freedom, or the relationship between the state and markets. It then analyses the battle of power and minds between the main political protagonists. The following section scrutinizes the policies applied by these actors, and their implications for democracy. The final section tries to envisage a democratic politics suitable for the world of viruses, super-bugs, climate change, poverty and hyper-connectivity.