The chapter explores the origin of APEC’s trans-regional structure and operating mechanism, which is based on the 1995 Osaka Action Agenda designed to fulfil the Bogor Goals. It also explains APEC’s credibility crisis due to the failure of premature liberalization efforts and its inability to assist countries during the Asian financial crisis. Furthermore, the chapter provides insight into key APEC members’ legal and political approaches that have affected APEC’s evolution and agendas. For instance, the US Indo-Pacific strategy, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and ASEAN’s AEC Blueprint 2025 have influenced APEC’s current connectivity initiative involving infrastructure development. To evaluate APEC’s incremental achievements, the chapter centers on APEC’s FTA-related model measures, trade facilitation essential to the regional supply chain, and tariff liberalization for information technology and environmental products. Finally, taking into account the APEC Putrajaya Vision 2040, the chapter provides recommendations for APEC’s legal and institutional reforms. The feasible pathways to the FTAAP, including the CPTPP and the RCEP, will also be examined in the context of new Asian regionalism.

Chapter 2 explores the ILC framework of international responsibility. The aim of the analysis is to identity rules which govern the allocation of international responsibility in a multi-layered structure where sovereignty is shared between different subjects of international law. This study argues that the purpose of both the ARIO and the ARSIWA is to determine whether a subject of international law is internationally responsible. If the question of responsibility arises in the context of a multi-layered structure, such as that of the EU, additional questions arise. The allocation of international responsibility within an international body falls outside the scope of the ARIO framework. Instead, this book suggests looking for guidance in the rules of organisation and the international dispute-settlement practice in which these rules operate.

The chapter explores the legalization of the ASEAN Economic Community. It offers insight into the major characteristics of the new AEC Blueprint 2025 and the changing nature of the ASEAN way that have collectively shaped Asian integration. Furthermore, it analyzes ASEAN’s evolving legal framework that governs trade in goods, trade in services, investment protection and liberalization and dispute settlement. Emerging areas such as banking services, electronic commerce (e-commerce) and development assistance will also be discussed. Importantly, ASEAN’s economic integration trajectory is distinct from the neoliberal approach premised on the Washington Consensus. The chapter explains why and how the ASEAN approach guided by pragmatic incrementalism could benefit the development of the Global South. Finally, the chapter examines the externalization of the ASEAN way under ASEAN’s external agreements that underpin the regional economic architecture.

As the introduction notes, no corner of the globe is exempt from the scourge of deadly and durable armed conflict. Yet in the face of seemingly intractable conflicts, state and nonstate parties are time and again able to reach a negotiated compromise that leads to a durable peace. At other times, unfortunately, the process is rushed or misconceived and the peace is short-lived or never reached. In both cases, there are lessons to be learned with regard to how to solve the various puzzles and associated conundrums faced by parties seeking to design resilient peace agreements and establish a durable peace.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been an age of primacy marked by a series of conflicts for which powerful states have chosen to go to war over nonvital interests against much weaker state or nonstate actors. In these asymmetric conflicts, the powerful have coerced concessions, imposed regime change, and suppressed the spread of violence through counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations. Powerful nations have largely succeeded in achieving both their military and political objectives by taking advantage of asymmetries in technology to wage war from afar, at low risk to their own forces. War outcomes have not, however, always translated into broader foreign policy objectives of long-term peace and stability. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the evolution of air power theory, presents characteristics of contemporary air warfare and measures of military and political effectiveness, and then briefly assesses the ten air wars examined in subsequent chapters.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the idea that a system of international commercial law was gradually replacing domestic laws in the sphere of international transactions began to interest a group of European scholars. Using a bygone expression, they called this phenomenon lex mercatoria, or “law merchant.” The exploration of lex mercatoria also coincided with the emergence of a full-fledged school of thought – what could be described as the French school of international arbitration. As this chapter shows, this was a time of intense renewal, which carried great appeal and led to bold, cutting-edge research. At the same time, vacillating between renewal and anxiety, many scholars strongly disagreed with the existence of lex mercatoria and voiced their disagreement. The first section of this chapter sketches the intellectual history of lex mercatoria; the second investigates its relationship with a nascent school of thought in international arbitration; and the third looks at the quarrels over lex mercatoria that marked the movement from renewal to anxiety.

The need to rebuild the security infrastructure in a postconflict state is of paramount importance for ensuring a durable peace. This chapter examines the complicated tradeoffs parties face sharing and/or reestablishing the monopoly of force, including when sharing force with the international community; the questions of the consent of the state, and often the consent of the nonstate parties; the nature and configuration of the international forces, including the command structure of the international forces; and the mandate of those forces. The chapter also analyzes cases during which the state seeks to integrate nonstate armed actors into the national forces, when parties are faced with the questions of how best to provide for the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of nonstate forces, coupled with security sector reform for the national forces. The chapter additionally examines the questions that arise when the state seeks to restore limited control over the monopoly of force by permitting nonstate actors to come under the umbrella command of the national forces, including to what extent to promote some degree of integration among special units of the state and nonstate forces, as well as a timeline for the eventual integration of forces.

Chapter 1 introduces new Asian regionalism as a paradigm shift in international economic law. It discusses three waves of global regionalism with a focus on the Third Regionalism and its unique characteristics. To promote interdisciplinary dialogues, the chapter explores theoretical debates on regionalism and the normative framework of the New Regional Economic Order, which explains the changing North-South relations in the multilateral trading system. In the post-war era, Asian regionalism has been based on the ASEAN-centered regime known as the ASEAN Plus Six framework. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the structure and objectives of the book.

This chapter introduces the issue addressed in this study, that is the allocation of international responsibility in a multi-layered structures like the European Union. It discusses the key doctrine on the question of responsibility of international organisations and points to the different approaches that dominate the discourse. This chapter also addresses the scope of the study, noting that it is focused on the questions of international responsibility that arise in international economic law. The introductory chapter also notes the methods of research employed in this study.

At the core of the politicization of Islam is the territorialization of Islamic belonging, which during the nation-building phase has manifested itself in ways previously unknown in the former Muslim Empires. This territorialization was combined with the elimination of religious and cultural diversity, leading to a specific form of religious nationalism called hegemonic. The genealogical investigation shows the conceptual and institutional changes that constitute the bedrock of the current manifestations of Political Islam from the last phase of the Ottoman Empire to the current national situations. Areas of politicization in Syria and Turkey are presented from the inception of the nation-state to today’s civil war in Syria and the role of Turkey. These areas cover the status of sharia in state law, the boundaries of the secular space, the status of political violence, and the influence of regional and transnational political and religious actors.

Access to natural resources and the allocation of revenue generated by resource exploitation is at the core of many conflicts and plays an important role in many others.Yet natural resources can also be a key factor in promoting a durable peace. This chapter explores the puzzle of whether and how to address natural resource ownership, management, and revenue allocation in a manner that promotes durable peace. This chapter reviews the peace processes related to conflicts in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville, Indonesia and Aceh, Iraq and Kurdistan, the Philippines and Bangsamoro, Sierra Leone, Sudan and South Sudan, Sudan and Darfur, and Yemen to understand if and when parties broach the subject of natural resources in the peace process, and how they then decide upon matters such as the ownership, management, and revenue allocation.

The methodological risks of defining religion a priori are discussed. The alternative is to study ideas, groups, and institutions that are defined, perceived or contested as religious. In any given case, the dimension of religion that is at stake is identified (specifically, one or all of the three Bs: belief, belonging or behaving) along with which specific interactions between the three are at play for both political and religious communities. The interaction between the two sets of three Bs, religious and political, can explain the politicization of religion and vice versa in specific contexts. From these findings, three trends emerge that cut across all the cases and would be worth further exploration: the loss of local autonomy of religious communities, the securitization of religion and the blurring of the national and international political division. In closing, the respective limits of variable-centered investigations and postcolonial studies are discussed.

There is an inherent disparity between the statist and the ideological conception of the nation (rossiiskii/sovetskii) and its ethno-cultural components (russkii). In these conditions, the Russian Orthodox Church competes with the state to regulate the immanent. These tensions emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the westernization policies of Peter the Great (1682-1725) and subsequently Catherine the Great (1721-1725) and have continuously pervaded the political status of religion while going through substantial transformations from the Soviet Empire until now. In the current politics since the end of the Soviet Empire, tensions over the orthodox nature of the nation have resurfaced as the state rulers tend to instrumentalize the Russian Orthodox Church for domestic and international purposes.