Liberalism's Global Mirror: Worldwide Contracting and ‘No Alternative’?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This short essay introduces a set of timely critiques of the power shifts in global contracting. The chapters range from investment disputes and carbon trading, commercial arbitration and private military companies to cotton trading and global value chains. In a global context of a ‘turn to market’ through large-scale privatizing of former state-controlled services, outsourcing government functions to private providers and the growing hunger to finance new initiatives through foreign direct investment, contracting has been consolidated as the dominant governance mechanism. Contracts govern investment flows, supply chains, land acquisition, infrastructure development and environmental governance, military activities and commercial arbitration. The triumphant rise of contract prompts urgent questions into the institutional and procedural framework in which the new world of ‘transnational private regulatory governance’ is embedded. Indeed, its promise of a brave new world ‘after the state’ sounds hollow. But, what guidance can we hope to gain from principles such as the Rule of Law or from nation-state bound experiences with ‘deliberative democracy’? As the aftershocks of Brexit continue to rock European political establishments, it becomes quite obvious how the ‘contracting of everything’ might have gone just too far – as long as a critical democratic-political discourse fails to reach out, integrate and empower and as long as today’s political institutional infrastructures continue to grow further and further apart from those under their care and who have suffered the most from the turn to market.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".