Despite facing profound teaching anxiety stemming from the politically intense surroundings in Israel and his own writer’s block, Oded Löwenheim crafted an innovative college course that breaks free from the traditional classroom setting to explore the depths of Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus campus. He takes his class—and by extension, the reader—to explore the political and historical imprints scattered throughout Mount Scopus, such as the Jerusalem British War Cemetery, the botanical garden of the campus, and the bomb shelter of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute. Drawing from a rich tapestry of disciplines that include political geography, botany, literature, history, and archaeology, this book invites readers to find the international in the everyday. Expedition Escape from the Classroom offers a unique narrative where teaching and its inherent challenges intersect with the intricacies of global politics, history, and identity. While recounting his academic experiment, Löwenheim grapples with the changing landscape of academia in a neoliberal age, while illustrating how personal vulnerabilities can transform into powerful tools for growth, exploration, and enlightenment. Whether you’re an educator, student, or just a curious reader, Expedition Escape from the Classroom promises a journey of reflection, critical thinking, and profound revelations.

This article explores the distinctive features of Latin American regionalism by examining its rhetorical justifications during the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic offered an exceptional opportunity to witness the professed role of regional organizations in the Global South as bridges between national and international systems: how this role is discursively constructed and the practical limitations it faces in times of disruption. We address different attempts to (self-)justify the relevance of regionalist visions, analyzing how three (inter-)regional organizations of the Americas reacted discursively to the global public health crisis: the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Ibero-American Summits (SEGIB). We examine three features that have traditionally shaped Latin American visions of regionalism: coping with world hegemony; striving for regional autonomy; and expressing transnational solidarity. The findings provide insights for further understanding the legitimation of regional and global governance under conditions of uncertainty.

How do variations in regime complexity affect the overall stability of cooptation bargains amidst shifting great power rivalries? Increased complexity creates opportunities for institutional bargaining during cooptation deal negotiations, enabling cooptees to explore outside-options, engage in regime-shifting and countervailing institutional creation. While great power dynamics influence actors’ decisions regarding cooptation deals, regime complexity shapes their ability to employ cross-institutional strategies, affecting deal stability. Focusing on China's cooptation deal with the World Bank since 1980, we find that during the Cold War, the deal remained stable due to China's limited outside-options and significant power asymmetry with the US. Post-Cold War, increased complexity offered China with only limited outside-options, while it couldn't effectively engage in regime-shifting. The establishment of the AIIB, however, threatens the stability of the cooptation deal made in World Bank by providing China with genuine orum-shopping and regime-shifting opportunities. This analysis highlights how regime complexity and power dynamics interact to affect cooptation bargain stability amid evolving global rivalries.

Cognitive and behavioural studies are making inroads into international law literature and international policy-making; yet their implications for international legal theory remain under- explored. This book is premised on the assumptions that first, human cognition affects the perceptions and behaviour of real-world international law decision-makers; and second, that cognitive processes matter in how international law is formed, interpreted, implemented, and theorized. The book's chapters set out to unearth if and how implicit or explicit assumptions about human cognition are present in various international legal theories; as well as if and how these theoretical approaches can be informed and potentially modified by cognitive studies. Following a succinct discussion on the ‘cognitive turn’, the Introduction briefly addresses somecentral terminological and conceptual issues of cognitive and behavioural studies used in the following chapters. It also exposes some key concepts of cognitive-behavioural studies, sheds light on various interactions between the latter studies and some prominent properties of international legal theories, and provides brief summaries of the book’s chapters.

Disadvantaged residents in contested cities often mistrust and resist official authorities due to historical deprivation. However, their urgent needs compel them to approach municipal bodies, both formally and informally, exhibiting ‘flexible compliance’. Through interviews with Palestinians and a public opinion survey in Jerusalem, we analysed the preferences of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian residents for public goods provision. Results indicate that Palestinian residents prefer unofficial institutions, but this varies by location. Inner-city and outer-city East Jerusalem residents prefer the municipal government, while those beyond the separation wall favour the community councils. We elucidate flexible compliance and propose municipal tools to address it.

This article examines why foreign actors promote rooftop photovoltaic (PV) projects in cities characterized by ongoing ethno-national conflicts, and why the host government accepts these projects despite viewing them as undermining its sovereignty. It finds that foreign aid providers increasingly view off-grid PV technology as a low-cost solution for helping the embattled minorities of the city strengthen their autonomy and self-sufficiency by disconnecting them from the state-controlled national electricity grid. Local authorities accept these projects because they view them as benign initiatives that can help them address ‘infrastructure vacuums’ in neglected spaces of the city. This allows foreign actors to shape the status quo of the disputed city while avoiding political pushback by the host government. This dynamic is examined in the case of East Jerusalem, where EU and UN bodies invested in rooftop PV projects over the past decade with the stated goal of strengthening the energy autonomy of the city's Palestinian neighborhoods and preserving the option of dividing the city's infrastructure in a future peace agreement. Through government protocols and interviews with foreign aid representatives who promoted the projects, Jerusalem municipal officials who approved them, and Palestinian users who installed them, this article finds that Israeli authorities viewed these projects as a necessary buffer to address ungoverned areas of the city where Palestinians viewed municipal integration projects as an act of occupation. Foreign actors introduced PV solutions to these areas but struggled to overcome technical, bureaucratic, and social hurdles that limited their progress.

Forthcoming in International Legal Theory and the Cognitive Turn (Anne van Aaken & Moshe Hirsch, eds, Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

Systematic research at the intersection of sociology and cognition began in the late 1990s, with international law scholars increasingly turning their attention to the socio-cognitive dimension of international law. The bourgeoning scholarship at this interdisciplinary juncture integrates some well-known sociological concepts (such as socialization) with insights gained from new cognitive and behavioural studies (such as cognitive biases). While the conventional sociological approach to international law principally explores society’s influence on decision-makers’ behaviour and vice versa (e.g., via social norms); the recent cognitive-sociological analysis of international law largely highlights the influence of society on legal decision makers’ perceptions of reality (via cognitive processes like attention or memory).  

This chapter aims to explore some major implications of cognitive-behavioural studies for the sociological analysis of international law. To cope with this task, we discuss the two major streams in cognitive-sociological literature: the embodied-cognitive approach (prominently inspired by Bourdieu) and the cultural-cognitive perspective (notably developed by Zerubavel and his followers). Embodied-cognitive scholars view cognitive structures (particularly, the ‘habitus’) as unconsciously grounded in various features of the human body and material environment. Cultural-cognitive scholars underscore that distinct cognitive patterns (such as norms of attention) prevail in different social groups; occasionally leading people from different societies to view the same reality in divergent manners. Each of the above streams in cognitive sociology casts a different light on international law and influences the ways we conceive the international legal system and its institutions.

This chapter explains why and how changes in the security environment after the Cold War affected the growing trend toward space commercialization in the US. The primary argument is that throughout the Cold War, the US government mainly perceived the dual-use characteristic of space technology as a threat to national security. Thus, it closely monitored technology diffusion, and commercial activity was minimal. In the decade following the end of the Cold War, the decrease in the intensity of global threats led to a reduction of overall government budgets allocated to space activities. It also waived some of the restrictions on technological diffusion. At the same time, space technology matured into a force multiplier for terrestrial military campaigns. The 1991 Operation Desert Storm (First Gulf War) demonstrated to many in the strategic community that space capabilities were highly significant for future warfare. This reasoning supported a new concept of warfare, known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Dominance in space was one of its pillars, but demanded investments in force buildup. In that context, using the same technologies for both commercial and military/civil applications had the potential for more efficient and low-cost empowerment. Consequently, the US government no longer perceived dual-use space technology only as a considerable threat but also as an opportunity. The US government began to cooperate with commercial players to develop and operate advanced space technologies. This trend led to greater space commercialization.

Scholars and practitioners widely posit that listening to other people facilitates efforts to persuade them. Listening may facilitate persuasion by promoting cognitive processing, reducing defensiveness, and improving perceptions of the persuader. However, empirical tests of this widely-theorized hypothesis are surprisingly scarce. We review the case for and against this hypothesis, arguing previous research has not sufficiently attended to reasons why listening may not facilitate persuasion. We test this hypothesis using a pre-registered, well-powered field experiment in which trained professional canvassers, acting as confederates, had ~10 minute video conversations with U.S. participants (N = 1,485) about unauthorized immigration, a salient topic of political disagreement. We independently randomized whether confederates shared a persuasive narrative about an undocumented immigrant and whether they practiced high-quality non-judgmental listening to participants' opinions. We measured outcomes immediately after the conversation and again five weeks later. Sharing a persuasive narrative meaningfully and durably reduced prejudice and changed policy attitudes. The listening manipulation also successfully improved perceptions of the persuader and increased processing. Surprisingly, however, the listening manipulation did not facilitate persuasion---persuasion was just as effective in the absence of high-quality listening. Listening also had no lasting direct effects. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for persuading across divides.

The study of populism's international links has grown significantly. Yet, there are gaps in conceptualizing potential implications for the international order. Our study contributes to filling this gap by asking: if a ‘populist international order’ (PIO) were to emerge, and populists could envision the world close(r) to their liking, what would this order look like? We pursue answers through a plausibility probe of three deductively-derived normative pillars: 1) cooperation under a PIO is characterized by more fractured, mostly symbolic, small-scale multilateralism; 2) a PIO relies on a narrow, selective embrace of the rule of law, to be respected only when seen as representing the wishes of the ‘real people’; and 3) the commitment to pluralism in ‘international society’ is replaced by an anti-pluralist, monolithic notion of popular sovereignty as the primary behavioural driver. Our analysis is based on contemporary populist leadership from Latin America: Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador. We examine how these populists have addressed our proposed PIO pillars in different ways and shaped their world-order visions in relation to them. The lessons derived from this study can contribute to bridging gaps regarding the effects of global populism in International Relations, including prospects of mitigating the systemic impact of populism on the international order.