The global refugee regime encompasses the rules, norms, principles, and decision-making procedures that govern states' responses to refugees. It comprises a set of norms, primarily those entrenched in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which defines who is a refugee and the rights to which such people are entitled. It also comprises an international organization, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has supervisory responsibility for ensuring that states meet their obligations toward refugees.

From November 26 to 29, 2008, ten heavily armed members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Kashmiri separatist group, attacked several public sites in Mumbai, India, with automatic weapons and grenades, killing 164 people and wounding three hundred. This was one of the first known instances of terrorists employing powerful search algorithms such as Twitter's or the link analysis used in Google's PageRank system, which allowed LeT members to access information from massive data pools in real-time. During the attacks, an LeT operations center based in Pakistan communicated with the terrorists via sattelite and GSM phones to provide them with open-source intelligence. From the operations center, LeT members data mined the Internet and social media, tapping into the power of Big Data to provide the attackers with an intelligence advantage over Indian law enforcement agencies. The attackers were thereby kept up to date on the status of the Indian government's response and even received personal profiles of the hostages they took in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel.

Why, despite well-established and well-publicized intergovernmental processes that date back to the early 1970s, have we been unable to put in place effective mechanisms to combat climate change? Why, despite the existence of extensive global human rights machinery, do we live in a world where mass kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder continue to blight the lives of so many? Why, despite a great deal of effort on the part of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nonstate actors, have we been unable to make much of a difference to the lives of the ultra-poor and attenuate the very worst aspects of growing global inequalities? Most fundamentally, why have the current international system and the outcomes that it has produced remained so inadequate in the postwar period?

For many students of global governance who explore the myriad institutions, rules, norms, and coordinating arrangements that transcend individual states and societies, what really marks the contemporary era is not the absence of such governance but its “astonishing diversity.” In addition to “long-standing universal-membership bodies,” such as the United Nations, writes Stewart Patrick, “there are various regional institutions, multilateral alliances and security groups, standing consultative mechanisms, self-selecting clubs, ad hoc coalitions, issue-specific arrangements, transnational professional networks, technical standard-setting bodies, global action networks, and more.” The proliferation and diversification of governance mechanisms—yielding a jumble of formal and informal arrangements—has supplanted the simpler image of state representatives gathering at official assemblies. Many scholars believe this pluralism opens important new avenues for tackling a growing array of complex transnational problems, particularly at a time when the responsiveness of traditional multilateral institutions is being called into question.

The global financial crisis of 2008 was a reflection point for global economic governance. The crisis, which started in the U.S. banking system and had a disproportionate impact on North America and Europe, provoked widespread contemplation of the legitimacy, relevance, and effectiveness of the core ideas, rules, and structures that have governed the world economy over the past century. In turn, the crisis also illuminated the emergence of new players, power dynamics, and paradigms that promise to challenge—if not fundamentally change—the characteristics of the institutional architecture that has governed international finance, trade, and development since the end of World War II.

Governance arrangements have become increasingly complex over time, such that today everything from the Internet to medicine and warfare is subject to some form of governance at the global level. Notably, these changes in global governance can come slowly or quickly, depending on circumstances. For example, evolutionary change is evident in the establishment of new treaties and protocols on regulating the various aspects of war and its aftermath—an area where the list of agreements is long and growing. But change can also happen very quickly as new mechanisms—for example, for coordinating states’ responses during pandemics—are established during crises.

This essay is about the drivers and consequences of changes in the voluntary consensus standard-setting (VCSS) system, the part of the contemporary global governance system that most of us encounter the most frequently, but that we rarely even notice. The VCSS system is made up of thousands of “technical committees” in which hundreds of thousands of experts (most of them engineers) create standards that constantly affect our lives—from the unique number that identifies this journal, to the electronic codes that translated my keystrokes into the words you are reading at the moment, to the rules governing the supply chain for the “fair trade” coffee you may have in a mug by your side. Historian Mark Mazower calls the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the organization that stands at the apex of the largest network of groups that sponsor these technical committees, “perhaps the most influential private organization in the contemporary world, with a vast and largely invisible influence over most aspects of how we live, from the shape of our household appliances to the colors and smells that surround us.”

Despite the popularity of arming rebels as a foreign policy option, there is very little, if any, detailed engagement with the ethical issues surrounding the practice. There is a growing literature on the ethical issues surrounding civil wars and, more specifically, the conditions for engaging in just rebellion; but the focus of this literature is largely on the question of the justifiability of the rebels themselves in engaging in civil war and their conduct when doing so, rather than the permissibility of the arming of rebels by other agents. It is precisely this issue that I want to address here. Overall, I argue that the process should be generally eschewed. More specifically, this article seeks to establish that arming rebels is generally impermissible and only exceptionally morally permissible (even, as I will argue, when rebels are engaged in unjust wars). The former, far more restrictive claim will be established in the first part of the article. The latter, more permissive claim will be established in the second part of the article.

The image of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned on September 2, 2015, as he tried to cross the Mediterranean with his family to seek safety in Europe, may finally shock Europe and the world into offering greater protection to refugees fleeing from war and persecution in Syria and elsewhere. Aylan's death was a tragedy of a kind that has become all too familiar. In 2015 alone, thousands of people have died trying to reach European shores in unseaworthy, overcrowded boats. Many of those who drowned were children—including in a single instance an estimated one hundred children (out of a total of some eight hundred fatalities) lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Libya in April.

Two pronounced features of modern globalization are an emerging global human rights culture and the growing trend toward democratization. In her new book, Carol Gould integrates these two features to construct an interactive approach to the core democratic values of justice and political participation meant for an interconnected global world.