This paper uses a game-theoretic framework to explain how collectivist values hamper societies’ efforts to elicit cooperation in inter-group games of prisoners’ dilemma (PD) and draws on the results of the analysis to interpret the meanings of three historical institutional reform episodes. Group-oriented values, widespread throughout non-western civilizations, can contribute to social cohesion...

Four decades on from the formation of Social Democratic Party, Ben Williams and Kevin Hickson explore how factionalism in-fighting have sculpted shape British party politics.

Classical Islamic law recognizes only natural persons; it does not grant standing to imagined, juristic persons. This article identifies self-reinforcing processes that kept Islamic law from developing a concept of legal personhood indigenously. Community building being central to Islam’s mission, the early promoters of Islam had no use for a concept liable to facilitate factionalism. In subseq...