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This chapter provides an introduction to some of the central issues of international law. The first part of the chapter discusses the complex relationship between power and international law, mainly dealing with the ability of international law to control the actions of sovereign states in various ways. Also examined in this section are the situations in which international law as a legitimizing agent is able to constrain and orient state power. The second part is conceptually more challenging. Adopting the theoretical framework of ideational power, this section introduces the crucial role of international law to construct and reconstruct realities in various dimensions of international relations. Lastly, the trans-civilizational perspective is introduced as a means to fill the perceived ‘legitimacy gap’ in international law as it exists today.

This chapter elaborates the book's main arguments. It introduces the ideational security dilemma as an analytical framework and defines ideational power, what its resources are, and how it has been employed as a tool of statecraft in the Middle East. These sections are followed by an in-depth discussion of symbols. The last part describes the components and logic of ideational balancing—the targeted regime's response to an ideational threat. Ideational balancing aims to mitigate the domestic political threat from a projected transnational political ideology. Consisting of domestic and foreign policies, ideational balancing aims to mitigate the threat of ideational power projection. States employ counterframing and resource allocation measures to undermine the credibility of the ideational threat's source and to bolster commonly held beliefs about regime legitimacy. Examining the components and logic behind these responses further illuminates the source and mechanism of this non-military, domestic symbolic threat.

This chapter introduces the argument of the book, identifies the limitations of previous scholarship, describes the research design, and provides the road map for the rest of the book. The chapter discusses the main theme running through the book: transnational ideologies may present a greater and more immediate national security threat than shifts in the military balance of power. This argument has two main components. First, ideology, or ideational power, triggers threat perception and affects state policy because it can undermine domestic political stability and regime survival in another state. Second, states engage in ideational balancing in response to an ideological threat. The analytical framework for understanding strategic interaction in this realm of international politics is called an “ideational security dilemma.”

Vivienne Schmidt discusses the Rudolph’s development of their interpretative approach in the context of the spirited debates about epistemology and social science inquiry. She builds upon the Rudolphs’ approach to elaborate ‘discursive institutionalism’, a mode of analysis that theorizes the nature of discourse and how discursive exchange contributes to political action and institutional change. Schmidt’s chapter advances beyond most discursive analyses by theorizing ‘ideational power’, or the capacity of actors to use ideas to: influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs; control the meaning and normative value of ideas; and structure discourse by controlling its agenda. Ultimately, Schmidt makes a cogent case for methodological pluralism in the study of ideas, one that can engage and even synthesize a range of analytical approaches.

This book examines ideational power by focusing on the energy and momentum that are built into “flashes of conviction.” The discussion centers on the affective dimension of collective ideas and on how ideology comes to matter in the lives of people. Using the concept of conviction, the book analyzes the fluctuating intensity and quality of attitudes, motivations, and beliefs. It looks at different examples of conviction with particular emphasis on the impulses and resonances generated by assertions of truth. These topics are explored in the context of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, and particularly in the mining town of Kokjangak, at a time of economic collapse and political turmoil. This introduction explains how the concepts of conviction and ideology are employed in order to lay the foundations for the conceptual framework developed in this book.

Chapter 4 explains why and how TNGOs have become powerful advocates in global affairs. It argues that TNGOs were at the “right place at the right time” and benefited from favorable geopolitical conditions in previous decades. The chapter examines the nature of TNGO power historically and explains how TNGOs have exerted influence throughout various stages of the policy process, including issue emergence, agenda-setting, policy formation, and policy implementation. Even as TNGOs have largely benefited from professionalized activism and elite access, their power today may be plateauing, if not waning, because of a less favorable operating environment and the increasing incongruity between their contemporary ambitions and their legacy forms and norms. Such conditions suggest that the sector is likely to struggle to live up to its rhetoric of social transformation without significant changes.

After addressing the scope and limits of Fund autonomy, this chapter identifies the sources of the IMF’s power to speak with intellectual authority about economic policy. It then analyses conditions of possibility for the Fund’s exercising intellectual authority and influencing advanced economies. It finds that the institution’s ability to achieve this is contingent upon the Fund’s ability to frame policy advice in a way which resonates with policymakers, as well as its ability to mobilize its scientific expertise, knowledge bank, and mandate in a given policy context. Between 2007 and 2009, the Fund’s crisis (and crisis legacy) narrative resonated widely with national authorities. Yet from 2010 onwards the Fund proved something of an outlier in contemporary fiscal policy thinking. Many advanced economies chose not to take up the growth-supporting fiscal policy opportunities the Fund sought to carve out.

This book has studied the relationship between sociopolitical instability and conviction by focusing on how secular and religious collective ideas fared in conditions of existential uncertainty in Kokjangak. It has also examined the precarious attempts of “secularists” to position themselves between fading Soviet atheism and assertions of new forms of religiosity and how spiritual practitioners who were sometimes labeled “shamans” operated in unpredictable spiritual fields. This conclusion considers the pulsation and dynamics of conviction and introduces a conceptual framework to show how collective ideas gain and lose force. The term “pulsation” emphasizes impermanence and fluctuation as key characteristics of ideational power. Three aspects of pulsation are discussed involving hope, tension, and effervescence: voicing, responding, and reverberating, respectively.