Loredana COSTINA - Legal Causes of Non-Governmental Organizations’ Lack of Performance [Cauzele juridice ale neperformanţei organizaţiilor neguvernamentale]

Adrian COROBANĂ - International Economic Sanctions and Avoidance Mechanisms: The Law and Economics of Primary and Secondary Regimes [Sancţiunile economice internaţionale şi mecanismele de evitare a acestora: o analiză juridico-economică a regimurilor primare şi secundare]

Emmanuel Olusegun STOBER - Reassessing Tariffs: Strategic Trade Theory and Modern Protectionism [Reevaluarea tarifelor: teoria comerţului strategic şi protecţionismul modern]

Radu CHIOTAN - Measuring Risk for FDI Research in MENA: A Transparent Protocol for Proxy Selection and Robustness

Revista ŒCONOMICA - Book Review: Peter Frankopan and the Unlikely Smoothness of the Silk Roads, Old and New

Articles on Issue Theme

The international rules-based order has long been narrated as a triumph of institutional reason over raw power, a grammar of restraint meant to civilize the conduct of states. Yet, seen more closely, it resembles a provisional syntax rather than a binding law: unequal at birth, elastic in use, and vulnerable to those empowered to speak in its name. As political authority concentrates in executive hands, rules increasingly function less as limits than as verbs – invoked, suspended, or overwritten according to circumstance. Generational shifts, democratic opacity, and the growing appeal of transactional certainty over normative ambiguity further thin the fabric of commitment. In this setting, order persists mainly as language, while practice drifts elsewhere. Executive decisions proliferate, decisive and unencumbered, even as the order they claim to uphold is quietly undone. What remains is a paradoxical scene in which rules are preserved through constant exception, and an order, once proclaimed universal, is not violated so much as carried out, to the point of its own execution.

THE “SUMMARY EXECUTION” OF THE INTERNATIONAL RULES-BASED ORDER BY “EXECUTIVE ORDERS” [“EXECUŢIA SUMARĂ” A ORDINII INTERNAŢIONALE BAZATE PE REGULI PRIN “ORDINE EXECUTIVE”]

Democracy is not just a set of institutions placed side by side or a procedure that is repeated every four years. At its core, it lives from the freedom of each person and from the conviction that all citizens have the same right to count in public life. And this “life” does not move on its own. It needs people to understand it, to maintain it, and to get involved in it, but not just formally.

Keywords: NGOs, legislative framework, civil society, performance, functional democracy

JEL: D71, H11, K40, L31, Z18

Legal Causes of Non-Governmental Organizations’ Lack of Performance [Cauzele juridice ale neperformanţei organizaţiilor neguvernamentale]

International economic sanctions represent, in theory, the main legal and economic instruments for correcting the behaviour of states in the international environment. How these sanctions come to have effects depends on a rather delicate mix of legal rules, economic interests, and geopolitical context. To capture this reality, the analysis starts from several case studies from trade, finance, and energy.

Keywords: international economic sanctions, secondary sanctions, sanctions evasion, international economics, international law

JEL: F13, F51, F52, G28, K33

International Economic Sanctions and Avoidance Mechanisms: The Law and Economics of Primary and Secondary Regimes [Sancţiunile economice internaţionale şi mecanismele de evitare a acestora: o analiză juridico-economică a regimurilor primare şi secundare]

This article reassesses the economic and strategic rationale of tariffs in the context of contemporary global trade. While traditional trade theory, grounded in comparative advantage, views tariffs as distortive and welfare-reducing, modern trade environments are shaped by oligopolistic competition, technological rivalry, global value chains, and geopolitical risk.

Keywords: strategic trade theory, tariffs, protectionism, trade policy, global value chains, industrial policy

JEL: F12, F13, F15, L52, O25

Reassessing Tariffs: Strategic Trade Theory and Modern Protectionism [Reevaluarea tarifelor: teoria comerţului strategic şi protecţionismul modern]

This article develops a transparent protocol for selecting and reporting geopolitical and political risk proxies in MENA-focused (Middle East and North Africa) foreign direct investment research. Risk measures are classified by conceptual coverage, temporal resolution, and data-generating process, with attention to measurement error, comparability, and interpretability trade-offs.

Keywords: foreign direct investment, Middle East and North Africa, geopolitical risk, political risk, risk measurement, proxy selection, robustness

JEL: C18, C52, D81, F21, F23

Measuring Risk for FDI Research in MENA: A Transparent Protocol for Proxy Selection and Robustness

In The Silk Roads and its sequel, The New Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan invites readers to reconsider global history and contemporary geopolitics from a deliberately shifted non-Westward vantage point. The Romanian editions published by Editura Trei make accessible a narrative project that seeks to re-center Eurasia as the primary engine of historical change, exchange, and power accumulation.

Book Review: Peter Frankopan and the Unlikely Smoothness of the Silk Roads, Old and New

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