In the course of comparative research and consulting work, one comes across many examples of local policies and preferences that clearly reflect worldwide fashions. It is a familiar story, and examples can readily be found from any part of the world. For instance, observing schools in rural West Africa, a group of us watched a teacher conducting a language lessons. She was the only teacher present in the school - it was Friday, and as was often the case, none of the other teachers had come. The lesson was problematic. The teacher was barely literate, and no sixth-grade student could read even a simple sentence in English, supposedly the language of instruction. But hte Ministry of Education official who was with me seemed not to notice. He turned to me and said that was was really needed in the region was improved textbooks, materials, and instruction in science. "After all, our children have to compete in the global economy." Of course, he was following a standard story line, coming from the United States perhaps fifteen years ago. It was formed partly in response to Japanese economic success and has now gone worldwide. It is the conventional little story about the need for reform in science education to facilitate economic development.

"If Russia eventually reverts to a full-blown autocratic regime, it is not inconceivable that tension and competition once again will define Russian-American relations. At this critical moment in Russia's internal development, American foreign policy makers cannot afford to be disengaged."

The fifth enlargement round (Enlargement) of the European Union (EU), which took place on May 1st 2004, is rightly recognized to be a momentous landmark in the history of modern European integration; the culmination of a fifteen-year process that has variably transformed and will continue to deeply impact the regime characteristics of the post-communist New Member States (NMS) and the remaining candidates (Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey) - as well as the EU governance system and its perception of itself as an international actor.

Women's human rights lie at the intersection of two intellectual and political movements: gender equality, and multiculturalism. In this chapter I argue that the role and the reach of regional human rights institutions should be expanded so that they participate more fully in developing women's human rights jurisprudence. Regional courts could help to mediate between the human right to be equal and the human right to be different. Regional human rights institutions could provide an important institutional supplement to better adjudicate differences between national and international human rights standards.

Big dams built for irrigation, power, water supply, and other purposes were among the most potent symbols of economic development for much of the twentieth century. Of late they have become a lightning rod for challenges to this vision of development as something planned by elites with scant regard for environmental and social consequences, especially for the populations that are displaced as their homelands are flooded. In this book, Sanjeev Khagram traces changes in our ideas of what constitutes appropriate development through the shifting transnational dynamics of big dam construction.

Khagram tells the story of a growing, but contentious, world society that features novel and increasingly efficacious norms of appropriate behavior in such areas as human rights and environmental protection. The transnational coalitions and networks led by nongovernmental groups that espouse such norms may seem weak in comparison with states, corporations, and such international agencies as the World Bank. Yet they became progressively more effective at altering the policies and practices of these historically more powerful actors and organizations from the 1970s on.

Khagram develops these claims in a detailed ethnographic account of the transnational struggles around the Narmada River Valley Dam Projects, a huge complex of thirty large and more than three thousand small dams. He offers further substantiation through a comparative historical analysis of the political economy of big dam projects in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China as well as by examining the changing behavior of international agencies and global companies. The author concludes with a discussion of the World Commission on Dams, an innovative attempt in the late 1990s to generate new norms among conflicting stakeholders.

Among the constellation of states with interesting constitutional stories to tell, tiny Moldova holds a unique place. It is one of only a handful of countries that has ever switched the structure of its constitutional system midstream without experiencing a democratic breakdown. Whereas some countries, such as Nigeria, have been able to adopt a different kind of constitution following their return to democracy - after a military or authoritarian regime has been swept from power - only a handful have ever managed to change their institutions midstream without experiencing such an intervening crisis.

We assess the factors affecting national administrative rationalization in the context of the current worldwide movement for governance reforms. Focusing on indicators of corruption control, the rule of law, bureaucratic effectiveness, and investment openness, we conduct cross-national and longitudinal analyses for the period 1985-2002. First, we find a modest overall expansion of rationalization in countries worldwide, with the most substantial changes occurring in developing countries and previously communist countries. Change is mostly on the specific indicator of investment openness. Second, we find that national change tends to reflect links with global society - expanded trade, the penetration of scientific logics, and embeddedness in world organizational activity play prominent roles. We conclude, then, that the rationalization of national governance, as with a good many other dimensions of modernization, is not simply or principally a consequence of endogenous national development or social complexity. Rather, it directly reflects international trade, and institutional linkages with wider rationalizing movements in the current context of a neoliberal world polity.

A recurring theme in the sociology of education is that schooling produces citizenship or a sense of membership in the nation-state. Much of the literature on civic education explores this theme, either lamenting school failures in this arena or fearing that hyper-successful schools will create massive conformity. Different though these perspectives are they share the premise that schooling is designed to produce national citizens with the national heritage and the nation-state as the crucial and bounded referential standards. This premise is challenged by the development of the human rights movement and its more recent human rights education focus. Human rights has emerged as an influential discourse and this discourse is changing from a solely legal to a broader human rights education focus. Civic education, once the central curricular area for teaching national citizenship, now teaches global citizenship and incorporates a rights discourse that extend beyond national borders.