The doctrine of attribution in international law has been defined, in large part, by the International Law Commission’s (ILC) provisions on attribution of conduct in the Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA). It is uncontroversial to note that despite the influence of the ILC’s rules on attribution, the regime of international responsibility remains underdeveloped. In addition to being underinclusive, the rules of attribution in ARSIWA are beginning to appear outdated. The central question, therefore, is whether the rules of attribution in ARSIWA are flexible enough to accommodate two disparate trends. On the one hand, we have witnessed an outsourcing of public functions to private actors in areas such as immigration, prison management, and education, whereby privatization has reduced state control and, consequently, potential state responsibility. On the other hand, there is a marked centralization of power in SOEs, some of which are now playing a global role as investors. This chapter assesses whether the default rules on attribution are flexible enough to manage both ends of the spectrum of state activity, which will be a crucial issue for regulators going forward.

The privatization of government functions has given rise to instrumental questions concerning the execution of these functions. Proponents often hail the efficiency of private institutions, while opponents often speak of the accountability of public institutions. This chapter challenges the instrumentalist terms of this debate. It establishes that there are principled, noninstrumentalist arguments against the privatization of certain goods. More particularly, it argues that there are goods that are “inherently public,” namely that they cannot be provided by private entities, even in principle.

The chapter also maintains that to count as an act of the state, the person who provides the good (the key case studies are inflicting criminal punishment and waging wars) must be a public official. To defend this latter position, the chapter develops an abstract account of public officials as agents who defer to the state’s judgments.

The typical arguments concerning privatization are instrumental, relying heavily on comparing the performance of a public functionary with that of its private counterpart. This chapter challenges this approach for leaving unaddressed other important consequences of shifting responsibilities to private entities. Privatization cuts off the link between processes of decision-making and the citizens and, therefore, erodes political engagement and its underlying notion of shared responsibility. Consequently, privatization undermines individuals’ public autonomy.

The effects of privatization are not restricted to the question of whether a public prison is better or worse qua prison than its private counterpart, or whether private forestry is better or worse qua forestry than its public counterpart. Stripping the state of its responsibilities erodes public responsibility, for privatization is not only the transformation of detention centers, trains, tax inquiry offices, forestry operations, and so on, considered one service at a time. It is also the transformation of our political system and public culture from ones characterized by robust shared responsibility and political engagement to ones characterized by fragmentation and sectarianism.

Chapter 3 identifies the numerous strategies the contemporary liberal states have pursued to navigate the cross-pressures engendered by the migration trilemma during the post-Cold War period, and especially since September 11th. Contesting scholarly claims that the liberal states cannot avert unwanted immigration, its main argument is that they have considerably reconciled the tensions inherent in the trilemma by enlisting and coopting non-central state actors at the intersection of human mobility and security. Specifically, they have forged bilateral and multilateral policy agreements and devolved many of their responsibilities for implementing immigration and human mobility policy to international, subnational and private sector actors. In pursuing this multifaceted course, the immigration policies of states have converged, and their burdens in managing their immigration-related responsibilities have been partially alleviated. But in doing so, the liberal norms inspiring their once steadfast commitments to maintaining relatively open borders and safeguarding citizen and immigrant rights have been compromised.

To fully understand the role of law in China’s capital market, one must first consider how modern firms and the capital market came to form and how their early emergence fit within the Party-state’s overall economic development plans.

The chapter presents the emergence of the capital market in China. It focuses on two key elements: (1) the rise of the large (public) firm and (2) the creation of the capital market as a platform for the offering and exchange of securities. Through these elements, the chapter looks at how the legal framework that governed firms in the early stages of market development was shaped by, and helped secure, the political–economy dynamics at that time.

An important feature of Iran’s political economy is the variety of opportunities it provides, through which individuals and groups can accrue economic benefits from and through the state. At the broadest level, the Iranian economy cannot be said to be in a healthy state. The Iranian economy is structurally unhealthy. But the economy’s maladies are products of, and also contributing factors to, means of personal enrichment for those with the right political connections. There are a number of areas to focus on, including the strong connections between the state and bazaari merchants; the perverse consequences of resource curses such as overreliance on oil and rampant corruption; the state’s efforts at various welfare schemes and the impulse toward statist economics; and the processes and consequences of pulling back from statism through privatization. All of these developments have combined to undermine the economy’s developmental potential. They have also coalesced to provide multiple means of patronage and clientelism in which the state plays a critical facilitating role. As such, Iran’s economy, diseased and underperforming as it is, provides important sources of support and resilience for the state.

The 1980s saw a revival of infrastructure as a theme in American politics. This reflected a decline in federal investment and inspired concerns about decline in the fate of America’s future. Soon after Ronald Reagan took office, politicians and experts took to the stage to make the case for renewed infrastructure investment. In the midst of our perennial debates over fiscal politics, many have looked to the New Deal as a source of inspiration, a reminder of the possibilities that lie in concerted government action in the public good. Infrastructure’s best centrist case as an object of public investment lies in economic growth and development, supplying a foundation or precursor to other activities that are considered valuable, such as innovation, trade, jobs, etc. social liberals will want to broaden the category of infrastructure in ways that fit within their vision of good government as an agent of advance. Fiscal conservatives, on the other hand, may worry that infrastructure is just a “gobbledygook” term for pork barrel, tax-and-spend politics, and a displacement of the private sector by government. The recent debate over President Biden’s infrastructure legislation reflects these dynamics.

This chapter draws a picture of ownership and control change of large Bulgarian companies after the collapse of communism in 1989. Post-communist privatization has fundamentally changed the ownership landscape. First, in 2018–2019 the state was the largest shareholder in only 9% of the top 100 companies (down from 42% in the mid-1990s). The state has virtually disappeared as a direct largest shareholder of listed companies. Nevertheless, the state still remained among the key ultimate owners among the top 20 companies. Second, foreign investors have become the largest shareholders in 46% of the top 100 companies (up from 31% in the mid-1990s) and in 11.7% of listed companies (up from 6.25% in the mid-1990s).Third, there was a remarkable increase in ownership concentration in listed companies and the percentage of listed companies with dispersed ownership has declined. The destruction of large Bulgarian firms, proxied by their exit rate, was not coupled with an entry of newly established private firms into the top 100 companies. There was no sustainable development of the domestic largest shareholders. The chapter discusses potential determinants explaining the observed ownership changes.

Fearing shortage of culturally significant fish, medieval societies reacted in several ways. In a culture of markets, scarce supply motivates sellers to demand and/or buyers to offer more for the commodity: anecdotes from the twelfth century and serial prices from the thirteenth indicate fish prices rising even past 1350. Ownership of the productive resource itself could capture some of those sellers’ gains, not to mention the prestige and power medieval society associated with landownership: elite acquisition of fishing rights had begun with early creation of private lordships, but by and after the twelfth century it also promised income from direct exploitation or from leasing operations to artisans (depriving local subsistence fishers). In contrast, relict and then emergent claimants to public authority could gain by regulating resource exploitation ‘for the public good’. From the 1200s onwards kings, territorial princes, and self-governing communes asserted control over fishing rights and activities, first on acknowledged public waters (large rivers, coastal waters) and eventually over practices and uses of private natural waters. The chapter explores grounds for regulating fisheries as a ‘public’ resource to allocate their value, settle disputes, ensure consumer safety, and occasionally to encourage what might now be called ‘sustainable’ uses within recognizable limits. Like the artisanal fisheries toward which they were directed, these cultural measures retained close ties between local natural ecosystems and consumers of fish.

Few political ethnographies have tracked everyday realities of citizenship before and after the Arab uprisings. This chapter explains the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the study, situating it in relation to the relevant works on Egypt and the region. It sets out the approach of studying the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools, situating the study within the sociology and anthropology of education. It identifies the key parameters for approaching lived citizenship in schools in terms of the focus on privatization and austerity on the one hand, and violence and discipline on the other. It charts how the research approaches the production of imagined citizenship in schools through analysis of textbook discourses, rituals and everyday student and teacher narratives.

The 2011 uprising is a watershed event in contemporary Egyptian history in terms of the unprecedented scale of mass protest and the historic changes that followed it. This chapter asks what changed in relation to the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools in the tumultuous months and years following the uprising. It outlines changes in the wider political, economic and social context and maps key changes in the educational sphere, presenting novel analysis on trends in teacher salaries and public spending on education. In analyzing the research with students, teachers and stakeholders from 2016 to 2018, it updates the discussion on the themes that are methodologically and conceptually developed across Chapters 1–6 in terms of informal privatization, permissiveness and violent punishment, and maps key changes to textbooks, rituals and student narratives relating to citizenship and belonging. In particular, it highlights trends of student contestation of violent and humiliating treatment and debates around the introduction of new pro-army song in school rituals and divergent textbook treatments of the Revolution and the legitimizing narratives of the regime.

Chapter 8 examines the survival of the undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus from the discovery of the Moreno Network in 1996 to the uncovering of La Línea in 2015. Specifically, it discusses the series of reforms implemented by the Arzú government in the aftermath of the Moreno Network revelations to curb customs fraud and contraband, including (1) the expulsions of high-ranking security officials implicated in the scheme, (2) the restructuring of Guatemala’s port system, and (3) the creation of a new fiscal apparatus in the form of the Superintendent of Tax Administration (SAT). The chapter then evaluates how the undermining rules in customs outlasted these sweeping reforms, illustrating how the wartime distributional coalition, while largely displaced from the state sphere, penetrated new semi- and extra-state spaces like political party channels and private port concessions.

This chapter demonstrates that the lower degree of and narrower scope of the perceived strategic value of labor-intensive, non-value-added sectors, represented by textiles, for national security and resource management, has shaped their decentralization beginning under Gorbachev’s perestroika. Mass privatization after Soviet breakdown further reenforced the private governance pattern dominant in apparel and clothing. The cross-time sector and company case studies disclose the interacting strategic value and sectoral logics and show apparel and clothing factories have shut down or privatized to former managers only to languish with antiquated equipment. Today, Russian textile and garment manufacturers are outcompeted by illegal imports from China and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Industrial and technical textile sectors, which incorporate oil and petrochemicals and higher technological intensity, in contrast, experience the state intervention from central and regional governments of decentralized governance in response to political and economic pressures, such as oil boom and bust cycles and Western sanctions in post-Crimea annexation. The central government has designated petrochemicals a critical input for chemical fiber processing and provides fiscal incentives to develop technical textiles. Local governments have worked with local and national oligarchs to revive factories and production lines, and courted foreign direct investment.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development contains a broad set of goals requiring unprecedented global commitment and cooperation between countries (United Nations, 2015d, 2015e). From the human rights perspective, the agenda reflects elements of international human rights law and offers critical opportunities to further advance the realization of human rights for all people everywhere without discrimination (OHCHR, n.d.-c). The challenge posed is to ensure that strategies and policies to implement the 2030 Agenda are effectively based on the established human rights framework. Goal 17 of the Agenda refers to strengthening the means of implementation and “revitalizing the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.” Several targets of Goal 17 aim at the full implementation of official development assistance by developed countries, reaching certain proportions of aid relative to gross national income.

Human rights have become a principle and a value that have increasingly gained the support of various segments of society. Human rights are often associated with democracy, the rule of law, the civilizing process and human dignity. They are also associated with the idea that everyone, anywhere and regardless of their citizenship status, has basic rights, which must be respected by others and the state (see, among others, Sen, 2004).

Beginning with an illustration of the potential and perils of engaging private operators to run prisons, this introductory chapters lays out the focus and argument of the book: the need to pursue a comparative analysis of the pros and cons of public, private, and public–private forms of service delivery, and the importance of government capability to successfully scrutinize and implement plural arrangements.