Voluntary Disruptions ― International Soft Law, Finance, and Power

From home mortgages to i-phones, basic elements of our daily lives depend on international economic markets. The astonishing complexity of these exchanges may seem ungoverned.

Yet the global economy remains deeply bound by rules. Far from the staid world of treaties and state-to-state diplomacy, economic governance increasingly relies on a different class of international market regulation - soft law - comprised of voluntary standards, best practices, and recommended guidance created by a motley assortment of international organizations.

Voluntary Disruptions argues that international soft law is deeply political, shaping the winners and losers of globalization. Some observers focus on soft law's potential to solve problems and coordinate market participants. Voluntary Disruptions widens the discussion, shifting attention to the ways soft law provides new political resources to some groups while not to others and alters the sites of contestation and the actors who participate in them. Highlighting two mechanisms - legitimacy claims and arena expansion - the book explains how soft law, typically viewed as limited by its voluntary nature, disrupts and transforms the politics of economic governance.

Using financial regulation as its laboratory, Voluntary Disruptions explains the remarkable pre-crisis alignment of US and European approaches to governing markets, the rise and prominence of transnational industry associations in the 1990s and 2000s, and the ambivalence of US reforms towards international market cooperation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Rethinking scholarly and policy approaches to international soft law, this volume answers enduring and pressing questions about global finance, International Relations, and power.

Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars.

The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

Abraham L. Newman, Associate Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Government Department, Georgetown University,Elliot Posner, Associate Professor of Political Science, Case Western Reserve University

Abraham L. Newman is Associate Professor in the Government Department and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He is the Director of the Mortara Center for International Studies and senior editor at International Studies Quarterly. His research focuses on the ways in which economic interdependence and globalization have transformed international politics. His publications include Protectors of Privacy: Regulating Personal Data in the Global Economy (Cornell University Press, 2008), and How Revolutionary was the Digital Revolution: National Responses, Market Transitions, and Global Technologies (co-edited wtih John Zysman, Stanford University Press, 2006). His work has appeared in a range of journals including Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Science, and World Politics.

Elliot Posner is Associate Professor of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University where he teaches courses on international relations, the international political economy, finance, the European Union, Sub-Saharan Africa and international non-governmental organizations. His research focuses on international cooperation and conflict, regulatory power and new market formation. His publications on the politics of finance explore the internal sources of the EU's external power, the changing terms of Transatlantic regulatory cooperation and the political relevance of transnational soft law. He is the author of The Origins of Europe's New Stock Markets (Harvard University Press, 2009), and articles and book chapters that appear in the European Journal of International Relations, Journal of European Public Policy, International Organization, the Review of International Political Economy, World Politics and edited volumes.