The chapter recalls and summarizes the principal arguments made in the book.

This chapter explores the promise of “semi-parliamentarism” by asking whether it can be adapted to suggest versions of non-parliamentary regimes that better reconcile the values of democratic governance and address the contemporary challenges of party polarization and fragmentation. The focus is not on which regime type is superior overall but on how to maximize the potential benefits of semi-parliamentarism through ambitious, but not wholesale, design reforms in the face of current democratic challenges. Specifically, I argue that semi-parliamentarism’s core feature of “symmetrical” and “incongruent” bicameralism is detachable from parliamentarism and that, with suitable customization, is available in presidential and semi-presidential versions that may reduce the pathologies of party systems and better balance the underlying values of democratic governance than existing regimes of these types. The adapted forms may also address some of the causes, and resist some of the consequences, of democratic backsliding in general and authoritarian populism in particular.

The ILC Study Group on Fragmentation of International Law asserted that the proliferation of special regimes poses a threat to the unity of the international legal system. Chapter 6 challenges this assumption. It builds on the distinction made in epistemology between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. The idea of a special regime as a community of practice makes it a system of knowledge-how. As such, it is compatible with all of the legal positivist’s, legal realist’s and legal idealist’s conceptions of an international legal system, which either see it as a system of knowledge-that or a combination of a system of knowledge-that and a system of knowledge-how. In the former case, in no way does the proliferation of special regimes affect the unity of the international legal system. In the latter case, the unity of the international legal system is indeed affected, but only in a positive sense, as it increases the efficacy of international law relative to the assumed legal ideal.

This chapter first describes the dependent variable – agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence – and its three categories (nonelectoral, party-building, and candidate-centered) in terms of their reliability and costs. Then, it introduces a new theory to explain the variation in agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence under democracy. It highlights the role of two independent variables – perception of an existential threat and intragroup fragmentation – to explain when and how agrarian elites will organize in the electoral arena. It argues that agrarian elites will enter the electoral arena only when they perceive an existential threat. In turn, landowners’ level of intragroup fragmentation conditions the way they organize their electoral representation. Where landed elites are cohesive, they will engage in party-building. In contrast, highly fragmented elites will prefer a nonpartisan, candidate-centered strategy of representation, supporting individual like-minded politicians across partisan lines. Lastly, the chapter assesses three main alternative explanations, previous history of electoral organization, electoral rules, and the relevance of congress as a policymaking arena.

Heterogeneity and integrative levels are other aspects of the dialectical approach. In this chapter we elaborate our fundamental argument concerning the landscape nature of biodiversity conservation, emphasizing the role of agroecosystems in evaluating the biodiversity effects of various landscape forms. The fragmentation of natural habitats leads to a heterogeneous landscape where biodiversity conservation depends on how those patches are interconnected at various spatial and temporal scales. We emphasize the ecological nature of the project (e.g., the need to preserve metapopulation structures) and the sociopolitical aspects (small farmer perspectives on nature and biodiversity). We introduce here some more advanced ecological topics such as ephemeral sources and propagating sinks, and note that the recent emphasis on novel ecosystems fits snugly within the agroecological framing of biodiversity conservation.

Island biogeography theory views island species richness as an equilibrium of extinction rates and the immigration rates of novel species to an island. At equilibrium, MacArthur and Wilson’s model predicts that species composition will change over time, but species richness will remain relatively stable. In addition, large islands with low extinction rates and high immigration rates will tend to support more species than will small islands. Geographic ecologists also want to understand why particular species or groups of species have a particular geographic distribution. The theories of continental drift and plate tectonics have helped to resolve these questions. More recently, developments in molecular technology have allowed biogeographers to answer numerous questions about species distributions. Landscape ecology explores how variation in landscape structure, such as configuration or scale, influences the distribution and abundance of species. Conservation ecologists are particularly concerned that industrial, agricultural, and urban development have led to increased fragmentation of habitat that is suitable for sustainable wildlife populations. Applying the lessons of island biogeography, ecologists recommend erecting immigration corridors to increase immigration rates of novel species into nature preserves, thereby increasing species richness.

How should we best characterise the UK party system in the wake of nearly a decade and a half of Conservative government? Has it undergone a significant and enduring realignment, or merely amounted to passing turbulence, after which things have returned to the seemingly eternal verities of stable two-party competition? The question for us to consider in this chapter is whether we can regard the period since 2010 in such terms: in particular, does the general election of December 2019 constitute a moment of critical realignment? Or is it more sensible to view this as the mere culmination of a relatively prolonged period of Conservative Party ascendancy based on a regular swing of the electoral pendulum – a swing which will inevitably reverse itself as the centre of electoral gravity shifts in favour of Labour once more? In other words, a simple affirmation of the age-old dynamics of the two-party system.

Systemic integration has made its way into the parlance and practice of international scholars and adjudicators, particularly as a tool against the fragmentation of international law. The chapter analyses it as a particular instance of what Foucault termed ‘problematization’, that is, ‘how and why certain things (behavior, phenomena, processes) became a problem’. In fact, while the issue of fragmentation is not a recent phenomenon, only in the late 1990s did it receive special attention. Why was it so? The question of what drove most international lawyers to present fragmentation as one of the most pressing issues of the time, and the International Law Commission to issue a report on fragmentation and international law, prepared by Martti Koskenniemi in 2006, is examined. The chapter argues that the wide acceptance of the systemic integration principle could be explained by international lawyers’ continuous quest for unity, uniformity, and coherence.

This chapter highlights the importance of government composition in explaining the nature of domestic conflict in the refugee crisis. It puts into evidence two important aspects of this composition: fragmentation and ideology. Most of the governments in our study are coalition governments and therefore should not be treated as unitary actors. The type of governments in charge during the crisis ranges from monolithic single-party governments to fractious grand coalitions. Fragmentation is fairly closely linked to the prevalence of intragovernmental conflict, while the link with ideological distance between the parties appeared to matter less. We confirm that center right governments are more likely to engage in debates centered on immigration with the opposition. However, the general relationship between ideology and partisan conflict is weak. The source of the partisan challenge matters more than the ideological make-up of the government: When the challenge comes from the radical right – and to a lesser extent, from the center right – security–sovereignty–identitarian frame types are more likely to be prevalent compared to challenges from the mainstream left, where humanitarian–solidaristic–democratic themes are likely to take center stage.

This chapter analyses global value chains. First, we explain how globalisation leads to fragmentation of production and dispersion of activities. Global value chains consist of nodes, where each node represents the value added received from the previous node. Countries can now specialise in activities and functions – nodes of the global value chain – rather than in the whole production of certain goods. Second, we discuss how to measure global value chains, which is challenging. Recent efforts allow us to estimate so-called forward- and backward linkages. Third, we provide a framework to map the governance configuration of global value chains based on the complexity of the knowledge to be exchanged in a transaction, the ease of codifying information about the transaction, and the capability of the supplier with respect to the specificities of the transaction. Fourth, we describe some possible sources of inefficiencies in global value chains (taxation, rent-seeking, contracts and trade costs).

We provide an introduction to the world economy. World population levels have risen drastically since 1800, in conjunction with (per capita) income levels. Economic leadership regularly shifts from one country to another. Rich countries are usually well connected in terms of international trade, contacts, investments, migration and capital flows. Historians have identified two big ‘waves’ of economic globalisation: at the end of the nineteenth century and after World War II. These episodes show decreases in international price gaps and increases in relative international trade- and capital flows. The ‘fragmentation’ process, in which different parts of goods are provided in different nations before they are combined in final goods, is a relatively new phenomenon. The most recent wave of globalisation is slowing down at the moment (slowbalisation), but it remains to be seen how much the backlash against globalisation will affect trade- and cross-border investment in the years to come.

This chapter offers an analysis of the challenges for governments and the private sector in cybersecurity governance from a systemic perspective. It first identifies the challenges that the liberal international order, characterised by political liberalism, economic openness, and international cooperation, has faced in the area of cybersecurity governance. It also observes that there have so far been no successful global efforts to harmonise rules or create a unified regime. This chapter then emphasises how the private sector’s essential role as innovators possessing technological expertise is unique to cybergovernance and explains how the interplay of different actors, both public and private, has practical meaning for states and actors.

Interorganizational coordination is increasingly viewed as crucial to frontline crisis response. Contemporary crises often require the collective action of multiple organizations. Many researchers recommend integrating frontline responders of diverse organizations to make good use of scarce resources and synchronize their actions. In practice, frontline responders frequently choose fragmentation by dividing responsibilities and limiting interactions instead. This allows them to implement a fast response without being dependent on others. At the same time, it can lead to safety risks and suboptimal outcomes. Frontline responders face a dilemma, because they have an interest in pursuing both integration and fragmentation. It is useful to note that coordination may not always be the right course of action in a crisis. Even if it is, it does not necessarily need to be formal, as much coordination emerges in the operational field. For more structured ways of coordinating, the nature of the crisis and existing interorganizational relations are useful guides in how to organize the coordination. Generally, it must be conditional upon the situation at hand.