This chapter explores the role of law in organizational interaction. In contrast with recent work on international institutional law that seeks to overcome functionalism and make legal sense of interaction, this chapter argues that interaction among international organizations is a legally constituted phenomenon, in two specific senses. First, law constitutes the space of the interaction (that is, the ‘organizational ecosystem’). Second, law provides the background norms for organizational autonomy and the vocabulary for the decoupling of the organization’s practice and its formal goals. Such a decoupling through institutional law allows international organizations to flexibly interact with each other and adapt to external pressures. Thus, in its dual role, international law provides the building blocks of interaction, playing a crucial role before the need to ‘regulate’ interaction even appears.

The promise of global innovation lies in the unlikely combination of knowledge and information from different sources and locations. Companies that can scan the globe for fresh ideas and integrate knowledge from multiple subsidiaries around the world stand the best chance of generating innovative solutions. However, innovation is also one of the central arenas of geopolitical tensions. Governments aim to have a leg up in the innovation contest for national security and economic competitiveness. Consequently, when geopolitical tensions increase, governments strive to keep innovations at home and increase barriers to the cross-border flow of cutting-edge knowledge, technology, and information. Multiple technology standards further increase the challenges of cross-border knowledge integration. Companies withdraw or scale back foreign innovation efforts and the flow of ideas, talent, and resources slows. Proactive companies and managers strive to balance knowledge diversity with geopolitical risk, keep more sensitive projects at home, adopt operational strategies to have greater control over innovation, and differentiate between technologies.

This chapter begins by discussing how the internet of the future may encompass large chunks of the physical world and onboard most if not all economic and social activities. The concern that Huawei and other Chinese companies would have access to the control panel of the global technological system set in motion the ongoing technology wars between China and the United States and explains the new appeal of ‘decoupling’. What is decoupling? The strategy has been applied to the most sensitive advanced technologies such as chips. The goal of geopolitical competition is to preserve exclusive control over the sources of technological power and to ensure that access to those sources is denied to a rival. The theory of world building captures this reality by stressing the existence of sovereign actors no longer constrained by a system of shared rules, architects of the world order that are nevertheless profoundly global in their outlook. Chips play a major role in the new geopolitics. If straits and islands are the gates to the oceans, microchips are the gates to the virtual. They can be compared to the basic layer of a computer operating system.

The design and implementation of the French energy efficiency certificate provides an opportunity to test the hypothesis of the performativity of the economic theory associated with the cap-and-trade market-based instrument. The empirical study of its design and implementation, through interviews and regulatory analysis, reveals a progressive dynamic of decoupling from its initial principles, in particular the equivalence between the quantity of energy saved and the allocation of certificates. Recent adaptations of the instrument attempt to integrate an alternative definition of efficiency based on cost estimation and subsidy allocation. By focusing on calculation practices, this chapter contributes to the understanding of performative struggles and theory-practice decoupling associated with market-based instruments. The chapter identifies four conditions for theory-practice decoupling: competing theories of efficiency, attachment to the instrument, a new principle of action, and weak checks on conformity to theory.

After decades of exponential growth, China has transformed from a stagnant, impoverished autarky to the world’s second-largest economy highly integrated into global supply chains, and numerous Chinese firms have embarked on overseas business expansion on an unprecedented scale. Against that backdrop, many Chinese investors have ventured into the highly competitive, strategically important US market. Though the recent geopolitical confrontation between the two countries has hampered the investment flow, many large Chinese investors have been hesitant to withdraw from the US market. How do Chinese investors negotiate the omnipresent and consequential legal risks and opportunities in the United States? This question, which holds great practical, policy, and theoretical importance, has received scant scholarly attention. This chapter lays out the road map of the book that attempts to provide the answers.

The Introduction opens the book by presenting the key issues at stake and explaining the structure of the book. The purpose of this book is to advance the understanding on the macroeconomic fundamentals of decarbonisation. It identifies the major economic transformations and the roadblocks requiring policy intervention. It develops a macroeconomic policy agenda for decarbonisation that would achieve the climate goals of the international community.

The Trump administration’s four years in power were tumultuous and confrontational for US-China trade relations, and have put the Biden administration in a difficult position: It will either have to pick a new direction, or maintain the legacy it was left. US Trade Representative Katherine Tai has begun to lay out her vision for a US trade policy as it relates to China, but so far, it has been more words than actions. It appears that Tai and the administration have decided to stick with Trump’s Phase One agreement as the framework of its China trade policy rather than break from it in a significant way and to publicly put the onus on China to change its trade practices and see how China reacts. The practical result is that the status quo could stay in place for a while. However, the Biden administration may see this as the short- and long-term approach that works best in terms of domestic politics. As a result, although the administration’s statements could suggest tentative first steps on China trade issues, the relationship may end up standing still for a while.

The United States and China are the primary nodes of the multinodal world order. Together they are the middle third of the global economy, with the world’s biggest military budgets. Their parity makes rivalry inevitable because they are one another’s greatest counterpart. But their parity is asymmetric. China’s power relies on its demographic scale and on its Pacific Asian integration, while the US remains the center of the familiar global system that it created and it is the avatar of the developed world. While a Cold War is unlikely, the dangers posed by global rivalry are profound, ranging from nuclear war to failure to cooperate on global problems. The primary nodes also face asymmetric challenges. The US faces the challenge of adjusting to a central but not hegemonic global role. China faces the challenge of domestic tolerance and a mutually beneficial integration of Greater China and, more generally, of Pacific Asia. Beyond the primary nodes, regional reduction of uncertainties can contribute to the stabilization of world order. Cooperation founded on mutual respect is the prerequisite of successful global governance in a post-hegemonic world.

We need an alternative economic system founded on the physical constraints of the living Earth rather than on economic abstractions. To confront the neo-liberal paradigm at its core, we must build a society in which individual sufficiency coexists with public luxury, rather than one based on the paradigm of infinite growth.

This chapter lays out the physics of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). We start by describing the discovery of the CMB, the blackbody property of the radiation, and its basic properties like mean temperature and dipole. We then discuss the physics of the epoch of recombination when the CMB was generated, and derive key properties of the CMB anisotropy starting from basic principles. We continue to mathematically describe the CMB anisotropy, and outline ways in which it is measured from CMB maps and compared to theory and inflationary predictions. Along the way, we emphasize the statistical properties of the angular power spectrum of the CMB, and how they are used to confront measurements and theory. We end by discussing cutting-edge topics in CMB research, such as CMB polarization, Sunyaev--Zeldovich effect, and primordial non-Gaussianity.

Neutrinos have an important role in cosmology, and here we review them in some detail. We review the fascinating history of how neutrinos were first proposed then detected. We then mathematically describe neutrino oscillations. We describe decoupling of neutrinos from the thermal bath, point out the likely existence of the cosmic neutrino background, and discuss prospects for detecting it directly.

The chapter examines the onset of great-power competition between the rising power, China and the dominant power, the United States. It first discusses how Xi Jinping consolidated central control of foreign policy, the economy, and the military. The next section sketches out the main ideas and initiatives in Xi’s major-power diplomacy. The following section discusses how the long standing US engagement policy came to an abrupt end, ushering in a new phase of US-China peer competition. A further section teases out the key beliefs held by the Chinese leadership and policy elites on the emerging great-power struggle. The conclusion highlights how China mobilized and adjusted its diplomacy amid the Sino-US rivalry to secure its long-term strategic opportunity.