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.

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.

This paper presents an institution - the Community Responsibility System (CRS) - which presents a missing link in our understanding of market development. The CRS fostered market expansion throughout pre-modern Europe by providing the contract enforcement required for impersonal exchange characterized by separation between the quid and the quo over time and space. It supported market expansion because it did not entail the high marginal cost of establishing new exchange relationships based on a reputation mechanism or the high fixed cost associated with establishing an effective centralized legal system. Merchant communes, motivated by concern over their collective reputations, utilized their local and partial intra-community legal institutions to discipline members who cheated in inter-community exchange and to create the organizational infrastructure required for anonymous merchants to credibly reveal their identities. The CRS endogenously declined as the trade it fostered undermined its self-enforceability. Depending on the prevailing political conditions, it was gradually replaced by a centralized legal system based on personal (rather than collective) legal responsibility and supported by the state. This institutional dynamic supports the view that long-distance trade impacts economic growth through its influence on intra-state institutional development.

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.

This volume centers on the movement toward global legal standards, an increasingly recognized dimension of the quest to improve the rule of law. Although the drive to make law uniform across disparate political jurisdictions has a rich and imposing history, the contemporary enterprise to enact and enforce standard legal norms and procedures in fields as diverse as the law of companies, financial regulation, labor, constitutional dimensions of trade disputes resolution, environment and criminal procedure is clearly a growth industry. On the surface, the primary question posed by explaining this push toward standardization is why standard setting is emerging as a more prominent mechanism through which legal uniformity is pursued. There are numerous traditional and contemporary modes of extending the law across polities, among which the recent trend toward standardization commands particular attention. But just below the surface lie two related questions posed by the multiple movements toward legal homogenization.

Suicide attacks occur in the context of a conflict between warring groups, supported by an organization and sometimes even by families and communities which proudly sacrifice their children. Their design and planning, the construction of weapons and associated equipment, the recruitment of trainers and attackers, and the actual execution all occur within a group engaged in a conflict. Understanding the use of suicide attacks as a tactic of war requires understanding all the factors identified in the study of diplomacy and military strategy - military capability of the warring parties, terrain, payoffs and costs, etc. But that is not enough. Understanding suicide attacks also requires heightened attentiveness to support among the general population, for suicide attacks would not long endure without popular support. Understanding the social climate is thus a key ingredient in understanding suicide attacks.

This paper establishes empirically the existence of structural convergence: country pairs that converge in terms of per capita income also tend to converge in terms of their sectoral similarity, measured by the bilateral correlation of their sectoral labor shares. This is a robust feature of the data at various levels of sectoral disaggregation and data coverage. We shed light on some explanations for structural similarity, chiefly trade related determinants. Convergence in relative factor abundance accounts for approximately 1/3 of the extent of structural convergence. We argue that the existence of structural convergence has important implications for our understanding of business cycles transmission, of long-run development patterns and of the dynamics of specialization.

This paper revisits the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic integration and economic growth. First, we present an updated dataset of openness indicators and trade liberalization dates for a wide cross-section of countries in the 1990s. Second, we extend the Sachs and Warner (1995) study of the relationship between trade openness and economic growth to the 1990s, discussing recent criticisms of their measurement and estimation framework. Our results suggest that the cross-sectional findings of Sachs and Warner are sensitive to the period under consideration. In particular, an updated version of their dichotomous trade policy openness indicator does not enter significantly in growth regressions for the 1990s. Third, and most importantly, we present new evidence on the time paths of economic growth, physical capital investment and openness around episodes of trade policy liberalization. In sharp contrast to our cross-sectional results, we find that liberalization has, on average, robust positive effects on growth, openness and investment rates within countries. We illustrate these large sample findings with detailed case studies in a subsample of representative countries.

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. In our model, political integrationbetween two countries results in a positive country size effect and a negative effect through reduced openness vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Additional effects stem from possible changes in other growth determinants, besides country size and openness, when countries are merged. We estimate the growth effects that would have resulted from the hypothetical removal of national borders between pairs of adjacent countries under various scenarios. We identify country pairs where political integration would have been mutually beneficial. We find that full political integration would have slightly reduced an average country's growth rate, while most countries would benefit from a more limited form of merger, involving higher economic integration with their neighbors.

The past two decades have seen a worldwide shift to markets. Globalization has opened domestic markets to international competition. The ex-communist countries have converted themselves, to varying degrees, into market economies. In the low-income countries, privatization has shrunk state production. The results of this expansion of markets have been mixed. What lessons does the experience with reform, in both ex-communist and developing countries, hold for future developing-country reformers?