This book aims to enhance understanding of the interactions between the international and national rule of law. It demonstrates that the international rule of law is not merely about ensuring national compliance with international law. International law and institutions (eg, international human rights treaty-monitoring bodies and human rights courts) respond to national contestations and show deference to the national rule of law. While this might come at the expense of the certainty of international law, it suggests that the international rule of law can allow for flexibility, national diversity and pluralism. The essays in this volume are set against the background of increasing conflict between international and national legal norms. Moreover the book shows that international law and institutions do not always command blind national obedience to international law, but incorporate a process of adjustment and deference to national law and policies that are protected by the rule of law at the national level.

Case studies of metropolitan cities in nine African countries - from Egypt in the north to three in West and Central Africa, two in East Africa and three in Southern Africa - make up the empirical foundation of this publication. The interrelated themes addressed in these chapters - the national influence on urban development, the popular dynamics that shape urban development and the global currents on urban development - make up its framework. All authors and editors are African, as is the publisher. The only exception is Gran Therborn whose recent book, Cities of Power, served as motivation for this volume. Accordingly, the issue common to all case studies is the often conflictual powers that are exercised by national, global and popular forces in the development of these African cities. Rather than locating the case studies in an exclusively African historical context, the focus is on the trajectories of the postcolonial city (with the important exception of Addis Ababa with a non-colonial history that has granted it a special place in African consciousness). These trajectories enable comparisons with those of postcolonial cities on other continents. This, in turn, highlights the fact that Africa - today, the least urbanised continent on an increasingly urbanised globe - is in the thick of processes of large-scale urban transformation, illustrated in diverse ways by the case studies that make up the foundation of this publication. Short Description

State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.

Underscoring the demonstrable illegality of the transfer system imposed by the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA), this text describes in detail the complex ramifications of FIFA's rules in the lives of players, revealing how their fundamental rights are systematically denied.