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International law in the age of permacrisis : ESIL research forum, Catania, 20-21 March 2025
No full textThe ESIL Research Forum 2025 Proceedings bring together selected contributions from the ESIL Research Forum held in Catania, exploring the status, function, and transformation of international law in an age increasingly characterised as one of “permacrisis”. Across a broad range of substantive fields—including international dispute settlement, human rights, international criminal law, sanctions, climate change and ocean governance, the law of state responsibility, and the use of emerging technologies in adjudication—the contributions interrogate whether permacrisis constitutes a genuinely new paradigm or rather exposes longstanding structural features of the international legal order. The volume also examines how international legal norms, institutions, and interpretive practices respond to conditions of persistent instability, overlapping crises, and heightened uncertainty, and how crisis narratives reshape legal authority, legitimacy, and governance. Taken together, the papers offer critical and interdisciplinary insights into the ways international law both manages and is transformed by permanent crisis, highlighting tensions between resilience and erosion, innovation and normalisation, and global inequality and solidarity
Cambios estructurales en los mercados de deuda soberana europeos
No full textPublished online: January 2026Los mercados de deuda soberana europeos están atravesando un periodo de importantes cambios estructurales que reducirán la demanda de bonos del Estado y aumentarán la oferta al mismo tiempo. No obstante, la fijación de precios de los instrumentos de deuda soberana en los mercados de bonos europeos muestra una mayor estabilidad que la observada en el pasado reciente, incluso en un momento de incertidumbre geopolítica sin precedentes. La explicación es que las instituciones de la Unión Europea (UE) y los gobiernos de los Estados miembros están respondiendo a requisitos reales que los participantes en los mercados financieros pueden comprender e incorporar a sus modelos de fijación de precios. Esta relativa estabilidad es tranquilizadora si se compara con el comportamiento reciente en momentos de crisis. Los participantes en el mercado deben seguir prestando atención a los cambios estructurales que se están produciendo en los mercados de deuda soberana europeos, pero actualmente no hay motivos para alarmarse
Bipartite interference and air pollution transport : estimating health effects of power plant interventions
No full textPublished online: 27 January 2025Evaluating air quality interventions is confronted with the challenge of interference since interventions at a particular pollution source likely impact air quality and health at distant locations, and air quality and health at any given location are likely impacted by interventions at many sources. The structure of interference in this context is dictated by complex atmospheric processes governing how pollution emitted from a particular source is transformed and transported across space and can be cast with a bipartite structure reflecting the two distinct types of units: (i) interventional units on which treatments are applied or withheld to change pollution emissions; and (ii) outcome units on which outcomes of primary interest are measured. We propose new estimands for bipartite causal inference with interference that construe two components of treatment: a “key-associated” (or “individual”) treatment and an “upwind” (or “neighborhood”) treatment. Estimation is carried out using a covariate adjustment approach based on a joint propensity score. A reduced-complexity atmospheric model characterizes the structure of the interference network by modeling the movement of air parcels through time and space. The new methods are deployed to evaluate the effectiveness of installing flue-gas desulfurization scrubbers on 472 coal-burning power plants (the interventional units) in reducing Medicare hospitalizations among 21,577,552 Medicare beneficiaries residing across 25,553 ZIP codes in the United States (the outcome units)
EU's clean industrial deal : a risk or an opportunity for sustainability?
No full textPublished: August 2025The European Commission published the Clean Industrial Deal in February 2025 with a view to bridge climate action and competitiveness under one overarching growth strategy. This article critically analyses the Clean Industrial Deal as a key component of the EU’s evolving industrial strategy, focusing on its implications for achieving broad sustainability goals. It draws on the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) to allow for a structured and theoretically supported analysis of how different aspects of the Deal may contribute to, or hinder, systemic change. In doing so, the article analyses whether the measures proposed in the Clean Industrial deal shift the regulatory balance in ways that compromise the EU’s environmental commitments put forward in the 2019 Green Deal, particularly in cases where speed and flexibility are prioritized over precaution and long-term ecological considerations. It finds that the Clean Industrial Deal has major potential to mainstream and integrate particularly climate change objectives into EU industrial, trade and competition policy. However, the jury is still out on how the Clean Industrial Deal fares in terms of other sustainability objectives such as biodiversity, pollution and resource sufficiency, but it nevertheless offers both opportunities and risks for sustainability
The changing boundaries of trade governance : the cases of the EU and the UK
No full textPublished online: 19 February 2025Territory and boundaries in international trade do not necessarily align with national borders. Trade governance does not merely organise flows between states as invariant territorial units nor is deterritorialised – instead, it can change boundaries and decouple the delineation of territory from national borders. Conceiving of the boundaries of territory in international trade – the space governed by trade rules – as subject to change, thus being endogenous to trade governance, avoids falling into the territorial trap. Adopting such a dynamic view of territory, this article develops a conceptual framework of changing boundaries in international trade. It identifies three conceptually distinct processes through which trade governance changes the boundaries of trade rules and, thus, of territory: (i) redrawing boundaries, when trading blocs as transnational agents negotiate common rules such as preferential trade agreements (PTAs); (ii) shifting boundaries, when trade rules are established by separate governance frameworks where spill-over effects give rise to interdependent trade policies that shift the actual boundaries of trade governance; and (iii) blurring boundaries, when trade rules are porous and entail provisions that extend to non-parties beyond their parties. Blurred boundaries render PTAs a ‘false dichotomy’ as formal membership does not fully delineate territory. Modern, deep trade governance intensifies these processes. Changing the boundaries of territory and maintaining their governance frameworks inherently entail political choices. Examples from EU and UK trade policy illustrate the three mechanisms of territorial change and the central role of political objectives: EU trade policy relies heavily on redrawing boundaries overseas. During Brexit, the UK selectively shifted the boundaries of EU trade governance, despite its policy independence. Lastly, blurred boundaries and overlapping territoriality in Northern Ireland are crucial to its post-Brexit governance architecture
'Stand by those who share our values' : how refugees fleeing the Taliban improved European attitudes toward immigration
No full textPublished online: 21 May 2025Several existing studies have found that negative political framing of immigrants increases anti-immigrant public attitudes. I conduct two studies that reveal conditions under which the opposite dynamic unfolds. I argue that when refugees are framed as vulnerable, assimilable, and deserving of help, this should cause a reduction in anti-immigrant sentiment. In the first study, analyzing the case of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, I demonstrate such deservingness frames with computational and qualitative text analyses of news archival data and social media posts by political elites. In the second study, I show with an unexpected event during survey design that the positive framing of refugees during this highly salient event led to a significant immediate and long-term increase in pro-immigration attitudes across Europe. Together, these findings suggest that it is possible for politicians and journalists to effectively reduce xenophobia during large-scale refugee arrivals by highlighting refugees’ vulnerability and assimilability
Race and transitional justice
No full textPublished online: 20 January 2026Why has the field of transitional justice failed to address one of the greatest injustices of human history: racism? Could it be different? This chapter introduces the edited collection, which grapples with these questions and explores some potential responses. The contributions show that while race is an important aspect of many of the crimes that transitional justice is supposed to address and of the historical and socio-political contexts in which transitional justice mechanisms work, the field in fact has a poor sensitivity to the concept of race. As a result, transitional justice institutions may be sustaining the very racialization that they could be expected to remedy. This chapter identifies two structural features that make it challenging for transitional justice to address racism: the legalization of transitional justice and epistemic injustices in transitional justice. The contributions to this volume vary in their hopes for redemption, ranging from calls to abandon the whole field because of its complicity in the indefinite maintenance of settler hegemony to the view that transitional justice provides an essential space to work towards a more just, non-racist, social order
The influence of social investment on subjective capacity throughout the life course
No full textPublished online: 12 June 2025This article investigates how social investment welfare provision affects a novel subjective wellbeing concept ‘subjective capacity’ that is understood in terms of agency, resilience, optimism and a sense of purpose. It explains how social investment service provision, such as early childhood education and care, active labour market policy, and active ageing support influence subjective wellbeing across the critical life stages of parenthood, unemployment, and ageing. The subjective capacity approach enables this study to move beyond traditional wellbeing concepts such as income or happiness, and thereby offers a deeper understanding of the influence of social investment. Utilizing data from Eurofound’s European Quality of Life Survey, OECD’s Social Expenditure Database, and Labour Market Programme statistics, this study employs linear multilevel regression models to analyze cross-level interactions between policy effort (in terms of expenditure) and consecutive life-course stages on subjective capacity. Specifically, in-kind expenditure on family and old-age policies demonstrates significant positive effects. However, the influence of labour market policies is less pronounced. With higher in-kind spending, parenthood is associated with a positive impact on optimism and a sense of purpose. By contrast, unemployment exhibits minimal changes in agency, optimism, and purpose, yet yields positive effects on resilience. Ageing positively influences agency and resilience, with minimal impact on optimism and purpose
Situating the dynamic competition approach
No full textPublished online: 10 November 2025The dynamic competition approach defines an improvement path for antitrust law. Interested in competitive realities more than political activities, the growing body of scholarship studying dynamic competition (i.e., competition through technology) wants to make antitrust diagnosis and analysis more accurate without sacrificing administrability. At a high level, the dynamic competition approach appears to some as a twenty-first-century equivalent of the Chicago school of antitrust. This article shows that the analogy is only partially correct. Unlike the Chicago school of antitrust law, the dynamic competition approach is innovation oriented, empirical, enforcement friendly, and interdisciplinary. To illustrate this distinction more concretely, the article reviews past cases through the lens of the dynamic competition approach. It concludes that the dynamic competition approach is the natural evolution for all systems of antitrust law that reassess doctrine in light of the progression of economic and technical understanding of competition
Was global economic governance born between the wars?
No full textPublished online: 13 October 2025This article offers a critical assessment of works tracing the birth of global economic governance back to the interwar era. As part of the revival of international history of this period, these books and articles make a decisive contribution to a better understanding of this period. The thesis they defend, however, exaggerates the caesura represented by the First World War, and does not adequately account for how the globalized economy of the late nineteenth century was governed. Drawing on the literature on the international organizations that emerged from the 1870s onwards, as well as on original research on international financial control institutions, this article highlights the need to reconnect this period to the history of global economic governance