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This book examines how the global environment is regulated and, in particular, the diversity of actors involved in addressing the problem of climate change. It considers the role of private actors, such as nongovernmental organizations and transnational networks, in global environmental politics. It shows that private actors are increasingly assuming duties normally associated with governments. They are taking on the role of regulators, as they create, implement, and enforce rules to manage global environmental problems. The book asks when and why private actors perform these regulatory roles. It cites three examples to demonstrate the diversity of private authority and the ways in which nonstate actors are serving as rule makers: the first deals with Walmart, the second is about the ruffed lemur, and the third relates to the Kyoto Protocol. The book distinguishes between two different types of private authority: delegated authority and entrepreneurial authority.

This chapter underlines the Janus-faced nature of religious nonstate actors' involvement in the provision and protection of human welfare, rights, and freedoms. In doing so, it draws on a critical examination of the case of Turkey, supported by a content analysis of four religious and two secular newspapers and interviews with Islamic nonstate actors. This exercise helps us to better understand both the multifaceted impact of religious and nonreligious actors on human security and the complex concept of human security itself.

This chapter explores the dramatic growth in nonstate actor violence, focusing on the crucial role played in this trend by changes in international norms. It seeks to understand the rise of nonstate violence by bringing attention back to the word “legitimate” in Max Weber's definition. In doing so, the chapter addresses the question of how to explain the relatively rapid decline of the norm against actors other than states using military force — a norm that once resided at the conceptual core of the sovereign states system. The chapter then turns to analyze militias and paramilitaries together in a somewhat generic category of armed nonstate groups. The chapter looks at the literature on nonstate violence. It then assesses the increasingly important role played by the private military and security companies.

This chapter returns to the idea that the case studies of nonstate violence examined in the book are, in fact, parts of a single phenomenon — one with important implications for the international system. It starts with addressing some of the connections among these and other types of nonstate violence, including transnational organized crime. The chapter then examines the question of control over, and accountability for, transnational violence. While it is important not to overstate the degree to which sovereign states themselves are always held accountable for the violence they employ, they are nevertheless subject to pressures that can sometimes induce restraint. Nonstate actors, on the other hand, are more often beyond the reach of such measures. In conclusion, the chapter considers some policy implications of nonstate actor violence.

This chapter discusses nonstate electoral violence, exploring the circumstances under which nonstate actors resort to violent means to achieve their ends, how state-initiated violence and nonstate violence interact, and also how nonstate electoral violence is produced. It demonstrates a strong and consistent empirical association between violence committed by nonstate actors and corruption, together with a link between this form of violence and vote buying suggestive of carrot-and-stick tactics. The chapter then explores the use made by nonstate actors of violent electoral protest as a mobilizational device, and the techniques whereby politicians enlist vigilante groups and proxies to carry out high-risk forms of violence. Analytically, mobilizational violence can be understood as taking two principal forms: protests against state electoral manipulation and violence between competing informal groupings seeking to secure the loyalty of their clients. Case studies of Pakistan, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, and Côte d'Ivoire help to probe these casual mechanisms and to analyze the production of electoral violence.

This chapter examines the role of nonstate actors in armed conflicts, with particular emphasis on the principles of distinction and reciprocity in international humanitarian law. Adopting a historical perspective on the evolution of humanitarian law, it shows how its provisions may change to meet each generation's new challenges but argues that continuity in its principles should remain. It further contends that the balance of intrinsic to humanitarian law—between state equality and the protection of civilians—may be adapted to nonstate actors in today's armed conflicts through a broad interpretation of Article 44(3) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. It also considers the application of the principle of distinction between civilians and combatants in international armed conflicts and concludes by discussing the idea of reciprocal rights and duties as they apply to nonstate actors, along with the implications of the breakdown of the reciprocal relationship between states and nonstates.

Chapter 3 lays out the main argument of the book, that in the context of the invisibility bargain, a democratic government has a political incentive to prioritize the interests of citizens over migrants (even when formal institutions promise protections), and thus may be an inadequate guarantor of security in migrant-receiving areas. The resulting gaps in formal state protections can increase migrant vulnerability and escalate conflict between migrants and citizens. Governance networks that connect international organizations, nonstate actors and the state can emerge to fill these gaps, adapting innovative forms of governance that complement, substitute, or compete with state authority and security provision. More diverse and dense networks provide a greater number of potential access points through which migrants might gain the resources and protections they need to thrive in the host community. The chapter provides a theoretical framework for understanding how governance networks contribute to host-migrant human security.

The role of nonstate actors in polar governance is complex. In Antarctica, the private sector managed to successfully avoid regulation of tourism under the Antarctic Treaty System through self-regulation of the tourism industry for a long time. On the other hand, in the Arctic, indigenous peoples’ organizations and local governments were explicitly recognized in regional forums for cooperation, through the establishment of innovative mechanisms for their participation, for example, in the Arctic Council as permanent observers. Recognizing the critical role of nonstate actors in protecting polar regions sometimes means crafting special statuses in environmental governance regimes. However, the growing pressure from climate change and increasing interest in both polar regions has complicated this practice. This chapter examines the role of nonstate actors in polar environmental governance and addresses the ways in which nonstate actors can participate in governance practice.

Over the past 15 years, the field of international relations has produced a great deal of work on international cooperation and international institutions. This work has immediate relevance for conceptualizing a new era and a new approach to international development cooperation. Once we understand development cooperation as a problem of providing global public goods, our attention is immediately drawn to the problems of strategic interaction and opportunistic behavior that confront states as they attempt to cooperate in the pursuit of mutually beneficial goals. Drawing on public goods models and related concerns, the literature on international cooperation identifies strategic problems that states must overcome if they are to cooperate effectively – and how international organizations can facilitate state efforts to cooperate, primarily through the provision of information. This chapter summarizes the central claims of political science about the conditions for international cooperation and the roles of international organizations and nonstate actors in helping states achieve the benefits of cooperation. It concludes that the most useful functions of international organizations involve the provision of information about state preferences and behavior – particularly about standards and causal knowledge.

This book presents key debates on the legal underpinnings and policy implications of asymmetric warfare for international humanitarian law (IHL) as it confronts new challenges, conflicts, actors, battlefields, and norms in the contemporary security environment. It examines the challenges posed by asymmetric warfare to IHL and the role of nonstate groups in many of the world's conflicts, as well as the involvement of irregular actors—paramilitaries, child soldiers, civilians, and private military firms. The book considers how legal instruments historically designed to humanize the anarchy of the battlefield have become politicized weapons in contemporary conflicts. The discussion is organized around four overarching debates: threshold issues in defining armed conflicts in the twenty-first century; status and liabilities of nonstate actors engaged in hostilities; changing twenty-first-century battlefields and armed forces; and military necessity and humanitarian priorities in IHL.

This chapter deals further with the technical difficulties of legal classification, and begins to demonstrate how a simple choice between a law and a nonlaw form of agreement does not exist in the peace agreement context. Rather, opting for legal form for peace agreements in intrastate conflict involves sacrificing a correlation between the parties to the written agreement and the parties to the underlying ‘agreement’. The chapter analyses whether the difficulty of finding a legal form for peace agreements matters to their implementation, or is a purely academic matter.

This chapter presents the theoretical framework for the nonstate actor violence in international politics, examining an important but neglected cause of normative change. It unfolds a different avenue of normative change, one characterized by the contestation of preexisting norms whose coherence has been undermined in unintended ways by changes in other norms to which they bear a logical or mutually constitutive relationship. This can be understood through what the author calls “the principle of normative coherence.” The chapter also looks at how changes in some norms, especially significant constitutive norms that define actors' roles or relationships, can trigger crises of coherence for others. It explains how the macronormative shifts — one granting independence to colonized peoples and the other greatly reducing states' discretion in choosing to use force — made it more difficult to sustain the vision of sovereignty that gives states a monopoly on force and set the stage for nonstate actors to contest that monopoly. The chapter investigates how changing ideas about the relationship between sovereign states and political violence often contributed to the rise of, and the demand for, nonstate military force.

This chapter looks at the seventeen international courts (ICs) with the formal jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes pertaining to a broad range of issues. Fourteen of these ICs have jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes between state parties; thirteen have jurisdiction regarding disputes involving nonstate actors (international institutional actors or private litigants). Quite often the dispute settlement role primarily binds others to follow the terms of the legal agreement, and quite often the IC has also been delegated other roles. Indeed, all but three of the ICs with a formal dispute settlement jurisdiction also have been delegated either enforcement, administrative, or constitutional review roles. These facts help explain why more often than not ICs have compulsory jurisdiction for their dispute settlement role.

This chapter explores how efforts to identify and protect “at risk” victims of domestic sex trafficking have resulted in interventions that blur carceral control with protection, such as arresting or detaining girls to help them under the guise of securing their safety. Specifically, it argues that collaboration between various state and nonstate actors allows overlapping forms of control and protection to occur. Although cooperation between state and nonstate actors is commonly framed as a way to achieve more responsive, victim-centered anti-sex-trafficking responses, collaboration sometimes softens carceral processes and outsources the protection and control of at-risk victims to state and nonstate actors alike. When assistance for victims is attached to carceral activities and hinges on public-private partnerships, some at-risk victims are treated neither as victims nor offenders. Instead, they occupy a uniquely different subject position of “victim–offenders” that certain localized antitrafficking activities support rather than challenge.

This chapter develops a new balance-of-interests framework for understanding how states and nonstate actors identify and enlist one another as allies in times of civil war. It begins by considering the relevant terms and develops the concepts and categories useful for the study of state-nonstate alliances. A brief overview of the relevant scholarly approaches provides potential explanations as well as the foundation for a new theoretical framework, which is then detailed. The chapter also considers the scope conditions for the argument. It concludes by describing the research design and methodologies used for data collection and analysis.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Indian state, Muslim nonstate actors, and the inherent relationship between religion, secularity, and human security. It focuses on Muslim activists and secular leaders in western India, particularly on Mumbai and Gujarat where, in recent decades, targeted attacks on Muslims have occurred. In fact, in both these cases, the state has been indicted for its complicity in the violence. These events and their aftermaths provide a window through which we can observe nonstate Muslim activists directly contesting with the state for the sake of increased human security. Human security includes the provision of welfare, human rights, and a socially subjective view of human autonomy. Because of a large Muslim population, the Indian state cannot limit its jurisdiction to the protection of property. It must also include the defense of Muslim rights as well as the recognition of Muslims' social and subjective desires for self-expression and autonomy.

This chapter examines the dividing line between combatants and civilians during contemporary asymmetric conflicts against nonstate actors, the preeminent type of military conflict in this age of global terrorism. Although the dividing line between combatant and civilian is well explored in both the legal and philosophical literatures, this chapter examines the subject explicitly through the lens of necessity. In particular it conentrates on the difficulty of sorting out civilians from combatants when an individual may cross the line at will, and may be involved in exercises such as serving as a human shield. The chapter concludes that the fundamental element of status (civilian versus combatant), which is the foundation for status-based targeting and status-based detention, is starting to break down in contemporary asymmetric conflicts.

This chapter builds on the past to learn about the future: How does today’s use of tunnels differ from yesterday’s? What will tomorrow’s underground warfare look like? These questions are answered through the historical narrative and a database of over 40 years of New York Times reports on the use of tunnels in conflict. The NYT data fills some of the holes left by the absence of literature and helps shape the first typology of tunnels. This chapter offers conceptual and analytical tools for understanding and contending with tunnel warfare. It also encapsulates one of the book’s major arguments that, absent a major technological breakthrough, underground warfare is likely to intensify and continue its rapid diffusion in the coming years, following a pattern resembling that of suicide terrorism.