Chapter 3 examines mythical, historical, and scientific facts. It offers a brief history of East Asian international relations, paying particular attention to the Chinese World Order, the Khmer Empire, and post-colonial Filipino historiography as samples for how to theorize histories from an IR perspective. The chapter discusses war and peace as well as political economy, the subject matters important for East Asian history and IR theory. It also offers a section on impacts and lessons of history, illustrating how history contributes to background knowledge, historiography and belief systems, foreign policy analysis, and IR theory. A better understanding of East Asian history allows us to contextualize contemporary issues without which we may not be able to put together a puzzle. Historical experiences inform our belief system, into which people typically fit new events or factors as explanation. History is evolutionary by nature, whether we frame it that way explicitly or not.

Balancing individual autonomy and collective action is crucial in promoting dignity in participatory policy processes, particularly within urban policymaking. This chapter presents a case study of Lancaster City Council’s efforts to redesign the deteriorating “Mainway” housing estate, home to approximately 500 diverse inhabitants, within a dignified, inclusive framework. The project required devising a participatory process that effectively solicited input from all community members, including both regular meeting attendees and those sceptical of authority or unable to leave their flats due to health concerns. Amidst these complexities and COVID-19 restrictions, the My Mainway initiative was born. This ongoing initiative aims to transform the challenged estate through a £35 million urban regeneration project. Using a dignity-focused legal design framework, we examine how such an intricate process can facilitate dignified participation, ensuring a fair, respectful platform and offering advocacy for the seldom heard in community decisions.

Chapter 1 outlines why we wrote the book, namely, to provide a clear-cut account of the EU’s ‘silent revolution’ leading to a much more vertical new economic governance (NEG) regime after the crisis of 2008 and its effects on European employment relations, public services, welfare states, and democracy; to develop a new analytical paradigm capable of capturing the interplay between the supranational formulation of the EU’s NEG prescriptions, their country-specific deployment, and their effects on labour politics and democracy; to empirically assess the policy orientation of EU interventions in two policy areas (employment relations and public services), three public service sectors (transport, water, and healthcare), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), during the pre-NEG (1957–2008), the NEG (2009–2020), and the post-Covid-19 (2020–2022) period; to analyse the responses of unions and social movements to these NEG interventions since 2009, and their feedback effects on the EU’s post-Covid NEG regime; to show that labour politics matters, as unions and social movements are essential in framing the struggles about the policy direction of EU economic governance along a commodification–decommodification axis rather than a national–EU politics axis – a direction that may lead to the EU’s disintegration.

Chapter 7 shows that EU leaders had already started in the 1980s to steer the trajectory of national public services in a commodifying direction. The commodifying pressures from direct EU interventions reached a peak in 2004 with the Commission’s draft Services Directive, which failed to become law because of unprecedented transnational protest movements. After the financial crisis however, the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime empowered EU executives to pursue public service commodification by new means. Our analysis reveals that the NEG prescriptions on public services for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania consistently pointed in a commodifying direction, by demanding both a curtailment of public resources for public services and the marketisation of public services. Although our analysis uncovers some decommodifying prescriptions, namely, quantitative ones calling for more investment at the end of the 2010s, they were usually justified with policy rationales subordinated to NEG’s commodification script.

Chapter 8 traces the EU governance of transport services from the Treaty of Rome to the new economic governance (NEG) regime adopted by the EU after the 2008 financial crisis. Initially, European public sector advocates were able to shield transport from commodification, but, over time, the Commission gradually advanced a commodification agenda one transport modality after another. Sometimes, however, the Commission’s draft liberalisation laws encountered enduring resistance and recurrent transnational protests by transport workers, leading the European Parliament and Council to curb the commodification bent of the Commission’s draft directives. After 2008 however, NEG provided EU executives with new means to circumvent resistance. Despite their country-specific methodology, all qualitative NEG prescriptions on transport services issued to Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania pointed towards commodification. But the more the Commission succeeded in commodifying transport services, the more the nature of counter-mobilisations changed. Accordingly, the European Transport Workers’ Federation’s Fair Transport European Citizens’ Initiative no longer targeted vertical EU interventions, but rather the social dumping pressures created by the horizontal free movement of services and fellow transport workers. This target made joint transnational collective action more difficult.

Chapter 6 shows that workers’ wages and employment relations were, until the 2008 crisis, shaped by horizontal market pressures rather than direct political vertical EU interventions in the labour policy area. That changed radically after the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime. We found that the EU’s NEG prescriptions on wage levels, collective bargaining, and hiring and firing mechanisms followed a consistent trajectory that furthered the commodification of labour in Italy, Ireland, and Romania, but less so in Germany. Instead, Germany received decommodifying NEG prescriptions on wage policy that were linked to a rebalance-the-EU-economy policy rationale. Although this policy rationale was still compatible with NEG’s overarching commodifying script, the diverging policy orientation of prescriptions in this area across countries made it hard for unions to challenge NEG transnationally.

Chapter 10 traces the EU governance of health services and its discontents. The first European interventions in the health sector facilitated mobile workers’ access to health services in their host countries, thereby decommodifying cross-border care, albeit by recourse to solidaristic mechanisms situated at national rather than EU level. Since the 1990s however, European horizontal market pressures and EU public deficit criteria have led governments to curtail healthcare spending and to introduce marketising reforms. Thereafter, healthcare became a target of EU competition and free movement of services law. In 2006, transnational collective action of trade unions and social movements moved EU legislators to drop healthcare from the scope of the draft EU Services Directive. After the financial crisis of 2008 however, EU executives pursued commodification of healthcare through new means, as shown by our analysis of their new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania. Even when commodifying prescriptions were on occasion accompanied by decommodifying ones, the latter remained subordinated to the former. Although NEG’s country-specific methodology hampered transnational protests, the overarching commodification script of NEG prescriptions led not only to transnational protests by the European Federation of Public Service Unions, but also to the formation of the European Network against the Privatisation and Commercialisation of Health and Social Protection, which unites unionists and social-movement activists.

This book is about ways that people can build and exercise power to influence the systems that affect their lives. Each chapter provides a deep examination of a different approach. This introductory chapter begins with a discussion on definitions of empowerment and then lays out five perspectives that orient the contributions in the book. It then describes the structure and contents of the book, which are organized into six parts: (1) organizing and activism, (2) participatory governance, (3) civil society and coalitions, (4) enterprise, (5) participatory and community arts, and (6) education and engaged research. This is followed by reflections on the book’s scope and potential uses by different audiences.

The field of youth organizing emerged in the 1990s, as nonprofit organizations began engaging low-income youth of color, aged thirteen to nineteen, in political education and community organizing work while also providing developmental supports, such as academic tutoring and mental health resources. Over the last thirty years, the field has expanded rapidly. This chapter discusses the unique features of youth organizing and identifies trends in the field, including the growth in different kinds of youth organizing groups, the rise of coalitions, and changes in the demographic makeup of participants. It then presents a case description of a long-standing youth organizing group, Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL), based in Oakland, California. Next, the chapter reviews the literature addressing how youth organizing promotes the psychological empowerment of its participants and builds community power situationally, institutionally, and systemically. It concludes by highlighting the implications of this research and suggesting opportunities for future scholarship.

Mathematical models based on evolutionary and ecological principles can help explain and predict variation in political organization and inequality across societies. This chapter introduces five major themes in human behavioral ecology that contribute to this goal. First, vertical power relationships between dominants and subordinates arise when resources are economically defensible and environmental or social circumscription limits outside options. Second, inequality increases when resources are durable and can be accumulated and inherited between generations within lineages. Third, egalitarian leveling can limit dominance behavior and inequality when there is a high degree of social interdependence, contributions to cooperation can be voluntarily given or withdrawn, or leveling coalitions facilitate collective bargaining. Fourth, organizational hierarchies are favored when they provide net benefits to group members compared to more egalitarian alternatives; inequality within these hierarchies is limited by the ability to replace aggrandizing leaders or move between groups. Finally, large-scale territorial hierarchies such as states and empires arise under conditions of escalating competition between groups over concentrated and defensible resources, such as high-quality agricultural land. The ecological parameters highlighted by these models define a multidimensional space of possibilities for human political organization and inequality.

This introductory chapter explains the central role of psychology in revolutions, as well as the psychological perspective for understanding revolutions. The central puzzles to be solved include the puzzle of why at a deep level so little changes after revolutions, and why so many revolutions against dictatorships result in new dictatorships coming into being. There are potentially thousands of revolutions that could be the focus of this book, and the selection of the French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions as the focus of this book is explained. The contents of the book are briefly explained: Two chapters focus on psychological theories relevant to revolutions, three chapters on regime change, and (very importantly) three chapters on what happens in the post-revolution period. It is during this post-revolution period that typically moderates get pushed aside and extremists take over. In the final part of the book, one chapter presents a new psychological model of revolution, and another chapter addresses the question: Does human nature doom revolutions? Finally, in the Afterword, revolutions are interpreted as acts of collective creativity.

In this chapter, young Black changemakers offer words of hope and calls to action for researchers, educators, organizers, and the public. Black youth envision a world without racism, and it is imperative to follow Black youth’s leads to eliminate racism. To help Black youth sustain their changemaking, it is valuable to invest in Black youth, including youth-led initiatives and Black-centered spaces. As a call to action, it is urgent to root out anti-Blackness in schools, on social media, and in broader public narratives. Each author reflects on major lessons learned from the study. We underscore how Black youth bring society hope for the future and point the way forward on the road to racial justice.

This chapter introduces a model in which a government allocates financial resources across several policy issues (development dimensions), and a set of public servants (or agencies) that, through government programmes, transform public spending into policy outcomes. We start by describing the macro-level dynamics and the relevant equations involved. Then, we introduce a political economy game between the government and its officials (or public servants). First, we describe the public servants’ decision making in an environment of uncertainty through reinforcement learning. Second, we elaborate on the problem of the government (or central authority) and how we can specify its heuristic strategy. Finally, we provide an overview of the entire structure of the model.

This chapter reviews the Framers basic design principles, including separation of powers, federalism, and a frank recognition that all governments are and must be coercive.  It then presents a simple baseline for describing voter (un-)happiness with whatever policies the government adopts. The chapter ends with a detailed roadmap of succeeding chapters.