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For decades, consumer law has been the stepchild of the legal discipline, neither public nor private law, not classic but postmodern, not ‘legal enough’, ‘too political’, in short, a discipline at the margins, suffering from the haut goût and striving to change society through law for the ‘better’. Just like Atreyu, Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, the Ghostbusters, Naruto Uzumaki, Dreamworks’ dragon trainer, and many others, consumer law is the underdog carrying the burden of saving the day. Times are changing. We are perhaps reaching the point at which the world comes to understand the real value of consumer law in a society that is dominated by and dependent on private consumption. Publishing houses and ever more numerous researchers from public and private law perspectives, working on national, European and international law are getting into what is no longer a new legal field. Now the time is ripe for a whole Handbook on Consumer Law Research which brings methodology to the fore. This first chapter pursues three aims: first, to embed consumer law research into the overall development of legal research since the rise of consumer law in the 1960s; secondly, to explain our choice to focus on the behavioural turn in consumer law research and present the range of contributions in this volume that engage with the upcoming strand of research; and thirdly, to explore how the recent attention to behavioural insights can be combined with a pre-existing body of doctrinal research and social legal research in consumer law, and outline avenues for further research.

Oh, I hear you: ‘Barnett, what are you trying to pull here? Isn’t this just a collection of reprints?’ Sure, the bulk of the book consists of reprints. But if you’ll allow me to explain, there’s much more to it than that. And besides, there’s merit in reprints. In this book, I put forth a critical view of the business case for corporate social responsibility.

Capabilities, both for civilian and military crisis management, have been a core concern of the EU since the birth of CSDP. Although the Member States operate under the principle of a ‘single set of forces’ many of the EU’s members often think first and foremost in terms of their own requirements for national security and defence. This introduces not only issues of subsidiarity, but also the likelihood of duplication of capabilities as well as significant gaps, such as strategic enablers. In spite of evident knowledge of the principal shortcomings, numerous attempts to address them have often proven frustrating. A number of initiatives since the second half of 2016 open the possibility of more joint development and procurement of often expensive platforms and equipment, aided by the prospect of European Commission funding. Against the potential of these initiatives the prospect of Brexit threatens to impose significant capability shortcomings on the EU at the very moment when the Union has moved security and defence to the fore of its attempt to reinvigorate the European project.

Though pathbreaking scholarship has placed collective action problems at the core of economic development, our knowledge is still incomplete about the sources of stable collective action. This chapter focuses on continuing questions surrounding the role of collective action in the shaping of government policy. To what extent do informal norms of cooperation allow citizens to act collectively to influence government? Organizations, particularly political parties, can solve citizen collective action problems. When do policy-based – programmatic – parties emerge that allow for collective action around policy issues? State capacity is most accurately seen as a quality of public sector organization: can public sector organizations mobilize public sector workers in the collective task of serving the public interest? However, governments take starkly different attitudes towards improving state capacity. What explains this variation? This chapter suggests that these questions should be at the core of future research on institutions and development.

International policing is on the move, but as the author of this chapter explains, it can never be analysed without taking the context of national policing into account. Despite national sovereignty still being solidly embedded, policing has adopted a strong cross-border turn, certainly given transnational challenges such as organized crime, terrorism and public order, but also given the strong steps towards institutionalization in the form of Interpol and Europol. Meanwhile, particularly in the European Union but also in other regions around the world, a wide variety of laws, rules and regulations have been adopted that set the standards for international police co-operation. In the meantime, new forms of more operationally oriented cross-border practices of police co-operation build on former constructions, such as the BeNeLux Treaty and the Cross-Channel Co-operation. This chapter provides a detailed insight into the evolution of international policing across the globe, and identifies a range of challenges such as the ‘implementation gap’, the wavering trust between jurisdictions, the controversy about privacy and human rights issues, and of course, the legitimacy of international policing as well as strategic orientation towards the future.