The concluding chapter identifies three broad contributions of the book: explaining the choices made by states about language; offering explicit historical institutionalist accounts of the politics of language by centering the analysis on the state and using notions of legacies, critical juncture, path dependency, layering, conversion, and drift, among others; and, the further development, leveraging, and testing of the concept of state traditions as a theoretical and analytical focus for explaining language policy. The chapter also synthesizes the important points coming out of the case studies drawn from a multiplicity of contexts, namely that processes of state-making and state-building are central in forging the state traditions that steer linguistic policies towards specific developmental paths; that the specific nature and configuration of political institutions within a state, not only at founding but also as it evolves over time when adjusting to changing societal dynamics and circumstances, heavily condition the choices states make about language; and that political ideas and norms are central to state traditions since they tend to structure both political and policy development by conditioning the choices of political actors, pushing societies into specific paths of linguistic choices at the expense of others.

This introductory chapter situates the book within the field of comparative politics, noting its distinction from debates that focused on the language planning process, on social mobilization to secure language rights, or on linguistic justice. Instead, it highlights state traditions that produce language regimes, which themselves have a powerful influence on language policy choices. The introduction provides two diagrams that frame the theoretical conception and identifies how each chapter contribution deepens and refines the framework.

This chapter investigates how the International Organization for Migration (IOM) dramatically expanded its involvement in humanitarian emergencies over the past three decades. Building on insights from historical institutionalism in international relations, we hypothesize that crises which touch upon matters of migration may constitute opportunities for IOM to expand the range of its activities as contingencies call for flexible responses that the organization is (the only one) apt to deliver. The 1990-91 Gulf War served as a ‘critical juncture’ in this regard, where IOM started to expand more forcefully into the broad realm of humanitarian assistance. It set a precedent that served as best-practice example and led to an ex post formalization of the institutional expansion through corresponding frameworks for action. As we show in case studies of the 2011 Libyan civil war and the 2014-16 Ebola crisis, this pattern holds across a variety of crisis contexts: humanitarian emergencies expose gaps in the governance architecture that IOM is quick to fill, thereby increasing the range of its activities which is later normalized in institutional rules and practice. Today’s vast array of humanitarian and other crisis-related tasks fulfilled by IOM attest to the lasting ‘power of precedent’.

The conclusion considers the wider significance of the book’s arguments. The concept of ‘modernisation’ was a potent resource for projects for social-democratic renewal over the late twentieth century. Many had the potential to become defining influences on a Labour government – even if, at turning points in the early 1980s, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they lost out due to a combination of social and economic, intellectual, institutional, and political forces. This means that the rise of New Labour was not inevitable and that its opponents were not straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’. It also means, however, that New Labour’s leaders drew heavily from the left when forging their own agenda, including policies and institutions that endure today. This has implications for the histories of Britain after the 1970s: the rise of neoliberalism, though important, should not obscure other pivotal forces, especially deindustrialisation, constitutional agitation, and popular individualism. The conclusion ends by using this history to suggest that ‘modernisation’ is an idea that is unusually prominent in the tradition of social democracy.

There is no paucity of definitions of the concept of ‘institution’, and often they are somewhat over-encompassing. The chapter discusses several approaches and elaborates on the implications of each of them. The conclusion is that what constitutes an institution is not generalisable and depends largely on the researcher, the object of research and the research question. Different conceptions of institution serve egregiously different research programmes and different types of situations. However, too often different approaches extend their specific understandings of ‘institutions’ to the whole world of institutions, presenting themselves as general theories of institution. This generates inconsistencies when the approach and its theoretical results are applied outside the original scope and extended to the entire universe of institutions. Discussion of the different approaches helps to identify the core properties each highlights and to reconstruct the semantic field of the concept of institution. I focus on the main characterising elements of different understandings.

This chapter introduces the concept of Temporal Focal Points in explaining change in international institutions. In doing so, it elaborates theoretically the arguments contained in the introductory chapter. It models the coordination challenge facing states as a stag hunt game, where international actors can all benefit if they are able to cooperate. In hunting stag – or, engaging in institutional change efforts – actors can move to a Pareto-superior, payoff-dominant equilibrium. The challenge that they face is that if they hunt stag and others do not, they will expend scarce assets and end up significantly worse off. The risk of acting cooperatively when others do not leads actors to persist at inferior, risk-dominant equilibria. This can change suddenly, however, when actors reach a temporal convergence of expectations. The convergence is often facilitated by the arrival of Temporal Focal Points. The heightened probability of successful coordination leads to sharp increases in political and analytical investments. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methodology and case selection.

Chapter 3 unpacks why national judges broadly eschewed turning to European law and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) when doing so could bolster their own power. It reveals historically rooted practices and knowledge deficits embodied in the trudge of daily work within civil service judiciaries that fostered what I call an “institutional consciousness” of path dependence: An accrued social identity tied to institutional place that magnifies the reputational risks and labor costs of mobilizing European law. This consciousness reifies judges’ sense of distance to Europe, legitimating a renouncement of agency and resistance to change. The core of this chapter revolves around interviews and oral histories with 134 judges across French, Italian, and German courts, contextualized via ethnographic fieldnotes, descriptive statistics, and secondary sources. The chapter will speak to readers interested in a historical and sociological understanding of what path dependence looks, sounds, and feels like in the courthouse, why judges in civil service judiciaries can be likened to street-level bureaucrats, and how immersive fieldwork can illuminate the habitual practices calcifying the behaviors and identities of judges.

Institutions are essentially temporal, in the sense that, definitionally, they endure. Setting aside the conventional understanding of a historical institutionalism, we focus on the interplay of institutions and temporality. The chapter begins with a conception of time that is complex and social, and identifies four concepts amenable to deeper exploration: duration, tempo, and “temporal location,” which itself involves distinct notions of sequencing and timing. Institutions shape and are shaped by all of these aspects of temporality. The chapter surveys a range of institution-theoretic analyses, combining them in myriad ways via more complex notions such as the power of the institutional status quo, institutional intercurrence, punctuated equilibrium, critical junctures, and path dependence. While temporal approaches offer limited leverage on institutional origins, they show great strength in accounting for dynamic persistence and change, especially insofar as they supply means of understanding the layering and corresponding multiplicity of institutions of distinct temporal profiles operating at any given moment in social life.

The worldwide exportation of the nation-state went hand in hand with the diffusion of the Western concept of religion, both of which are notably related to the expansion of the Westphalian order. Exploring the diffusion of the twin concepts of nation-state and religion intersects with two bodies of knowledge: nationalism and secularization. Combining them helps explain why and how religion and politics influence each other. Historical institutionalism and conceptual history are used to establish areas of politicization of religion in the qualitative phase of the research and to identify patterns in big data bases in the quantitative phase of the research. This approach is applied to the politicization of religion in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia.

In addition to providing an overview of the book and its methodological orientation, the introductory chapter highlights three key facets of constitutionalism in Pakistan. Firstly, it is through the consistent development of the judicial review of administrative action, even under military rule, that Pakistan’s superior courts have acquired the power to mediate inter-state tensions. Secondly, the courts’ increasing capacity to mediate state–society dialectics – arising out of the demands of various groups and classes on the periphery of the state – also had much of its basis in the judicial review of executive action. Thirdly, Pakistan’s courts strategically re-situated themselves from time to time and re-fashioned their role in accordance with fundamental shifts in constitutional politics, state structure and state-society dialectics charted in this book.

The chapter analyses the evolution of state-Salafi relations in Niger, Chad, and Uganda between the late 1980s and today. These three countries demobilized political and jihadi Salafism with the help of the organizational gatekeepers that these countries had created in the 1970s. Although the organizational gatekeepers experienced institutional change, they remained in place and undercut activist Salafism.

The chapter summaries all empirical findings and answers the two research questions at the heart of this study. It applies crisp-set qca (csqca) to identify necessary and sufficient condition for the two outcomes of interest. It discusses the relationship between political and jihadi Salafism.

The chapter analyses the historical evolution of state-Salafi relations in Mali, Mauritania, and Kenya between the 1950s and late 1980s. In these three countries critical junctures in the Islamic sphere remained absent. The chapter shows how post-independent governments supported Salafi activities. As a result the Salafi creed could spread unhindered.