The intersection of childhood and rulership has a long history. This chapter compares examples of child kingship across Europe before 1050 with cases between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It illustrates how structural developments in society, culture, politics and law brought greater political stability to a child’s rule during the central Middle Ages. Over this period, cultural attitudes towards violence were changing, practices of succession and inheritance were evolving, and ideas around marriage, illegitimacy and queenship were shifting. Such developments fundamentally altered the court environments into which royal children were born, the political context within which they succeeded, and the practicalities and precarities of their early experiences of rulership. This chapter examines aspects of violence, succession and queenship in turn before, in the fourth and final section, arguing for the need to revise claims of Germany’s exceptional ‘rejection’ of child kingship. While there are meaningful differences in how children were incorporated within systems and practices of kingship, this chapter suggests divergences between kingdoms should not be exaggerated.

Turning to more ceremonial, less habitual actions in which a young heir’s active participation could be vital, this chapter stresses the political community’s wider investment in children as political actors. Royal children were both enablers and facilitators of diplomacy rather than merely pawns in the diplomatic and political games of adults. Children’s participation could be decisive to acts of association and diplomacy, and thus vital to readying the realm for their succession and rule. The chapter first examines attempts to secure magnate loyalty to children through oaths of fidelity and performances of homage. The earliest stages of the male life cycle had unique attributes in regard to demonstrations of loyalty, and there were substantial benefits in securing oaths to children when they were so young. The chapter then turns to focus on children’s incorporation within performances of cross-kingdom diplomacy, an important aspect of children’s education. The final section foregrounds the chanson de geste Le couronnement de Louis to examine the importance of children’s dynamic contribution at coronation and the wider political community’s investment in boy kings.

The success of legal time is to be found in its exterior and standardized character. In this chapter, it argued on the basis of Heidegger and Bergson that such a perspective misses the peculiar characteristics of human time and does not relate well to processes. The first characteristic of human time is that it cannot be stopped. This does not only imply that time is finite, it also means that human time inevitably moves forward from birth to one’s inescapable death. Furthermore, human time cannot be traversed: in a human life, one cannot actually go back to the past or move forward to the future. A third characteristic of human time lies in its irreducible relationship with eternity. If one wants to eternally exclude someone, it is unclear how long this will actually last. Bergson furthermore reminds us that the reference to processes is always inadequate, it is qualitatively different from what it refers. We see this in the discussion of formal and material criteria used to refer to the process of migrants living within a certain territory. Two dominant approaches – jus domicilii and jus nexi – both ultimately fail to grasp such process.

This chapter deals with the German position on States and their organs. It is divided into five parts: territorial sovereignty; political independence; Statehood and recognition; organs of the State and their status; and State succession. The first part deals with the principles underpinning Germany’s delivery of humanitarian assistance; Germany’s view on the Kashmir conflict as an internal matter of India; Germany rebuking the United States for recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, Germany’s criticism of Russia’s passportisation in Ukraine, Germany’s position on Georgia’s territorial integrity regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two German court rulings on the legality of Kuwait Airline’s practice of not transporting Israeli citizens; Germany granting refugee status to two activists from Hong Kong; and a German court’s decision on the return of an Iraqi citizen in a criminal case and possible links to the principle of male captus. The second part, political independence, deals with Germany opposing Facebook’s Libra currency on grounds of State sovereignty and advocating regaining digital sovereignty; and the meeting of Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas with Joshua Wong. The third, statehood and recognition, focuses on Germany confirming its non-recognition of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

This chapter will first discuss the main subjects of international law and explain their principal features. Second, this chapter will zoom in on states, the traditional and principal actors in the international legal system. It will discuss the criteria for statehood under international law, the role that recognition plays in this respect, and explain how new states emerge. Finally, this chapter will turn to an analysis of the right to self-determination, a notion that plays an important role in the creation of states and is considered to be the most prominent right of one of the subjects of international law: peoples.

The chapter first considers the nature of ecological theory, then provides an overview of a series of different theoretical ideas in relation to ecosystem collapse and recovery. These include disturbance theory, succession, state-and-transition models, dynamical systems theory, planetary boundaries, critical loads, resilience, food webs, ecological networks and extinction cascades. A set of propositions are then presented that might provide a basis for understanding ecosystem collapse and recovery, based on these theories. These propositions are revisited in subsequent chapters, in light of the empirical evidence that is considered.

States commit via succession when new states have emerged and the prior state had already ratified to the treaty. Though often categorized into the same commitment as ratification, succession is a deliberate recommitment to human rights standards. Succession is a unique and rare form of treaty commitment only available to new states that have separated from other states. Succession states experience unique regime change often characterized by democratization. I argue that new states use succession as a means to seek legitimacy from the United Nations and other states. The increased attention paid to succession states also means accountability for compliance. As a result, states committing via succession have the motivation and accountability contributing to compliance. I examine the historic case of the Czech Republic and Slovakia and track human rights patterns following succession in the succession states versus ratification states. I find higher rates of human rights changes following succession, which aligns with these states experiencing regime transition and democratization. The finding supports my call to separate out commitment types from ratification.

In this chapter, I introduce the central claim of the manuscript – that the different types of treaty commitment need to be analyzed and considered as distinct when generating expectations of human rights behavior. The legal paths that states take concerning commitment to human rights treaties are consequential for how they engage with the law and human rights behavior. The chapter devotes attention to fine descriptive data analytics demonstrating a variety of differences across the four commitment actions.

Considers how Quintus captures his stance towards Homer through the presentation of family relationships. Harnessing the frequent collusion between generational and poetic succession (examined using Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ and very prevalent in silver Latin poetry), Quintus first depicts a series of failed rivalrous filial usurpations – Penthesilea, Ajax, Achilles, Memnon – and shows that they fail because of their violent antagonism. He then portrays the two most successful examples of succession – Neoptolemus and Athena – as characterised by impersonation, embodiment and necromantic possession. This contrast becomes a reading of Quintus’ own positive and assimilating approach to Homer. Becoming the poetic father thus becomes the surest way to achieve lasting renown.

This chapter begins by discussing the ways that kings tried to ensure that they would be succeeded by their sons, through designation or coronation in the father’s lifetime. Such strategies would also remove the danger of interregna, kingless gaps between reigns. Written rules of succession are also found, increasingly frequently in the later Middle Ages, a period that also saw the development of formal titles for the heir, such as Dauphin and Prince of Wales, although such titles did not in fact make the succession any more secure. Eventually it came to be commonly held that the heir succeeded immediately on the king’s death. Since kings’ sons were brought up to expect to rule, they sometimes became impatient waiting for their fathers to die and this could lead to armed conflict between father and son. The short life expectancy of the medieval period also meant that kings often died while their sons were young and hence decisions had to be made about whether to accept a minor king. Some systems, e.g. the Irish, excluded this possibility, but there are at least 90 medieval cases, when arrangements for some form of regency were necessary, with all the competitive politics it involved.

This chapter analyses the complex social position of the duke of Brittany as presented in the legal arguments for Jeanne’s succession in 1341, a document which has been completely overlooked by modern historians. It argues that the debate centred around the ambiguity of the ducal rank: did the duke legally have more in common with the nobles of Brittany than with the kings of France? In this framework there were two communities (to use the modern terminology) or bodies politic (the medieval) to which the duke could conceivably belong and where their primary responsibilities lay. While this was a learned view constructed for immediate advantage, the case reflected wider contemporary difficulties with parsing the internal stratification of the nobility and the inherent tension within the ducal role as a subordinate sovereign. These challenges were exacerbated because standards of divided succession influenced contemporary interpretations of status, overlaying questions of shared lordship over the different hierarchical layers. The blurring of these lines challenges the historiographical prioritization of the competitive centralization of power through the strict demarcation of ruler and ruled in the later Middle Ages.

State violence in early medieval China was characterized by bloody patrimonial politics that contributed to the high degree of political volatility of the period. Like other times in Chinese history, individual monarchs and dynasties came to power through force of arms and kept order by implementing Chinese legal-bureaucratic systems that legitimized violent punishments. The political instability of the early medieval period often can be traced to the informal, patrimonial political ties that intertwined the court, harem, bureaucracy and military. Males and females of the imperial family, eunuchs and generals became involved in the struggle to rule directly or place a puppet on the throne. Winners frequently killed rivals and their adherents. State violence appears to have been most intense during the periods of political division from 220 to 589 and 907 to 960 when “China” was separated into two or more states with relatively frequent internecine conflicts at courts, interstate wars and dynastic transitions via warfare or usurpation. The geographically unified Sui and Tang empires, lasting from 589 to 907, also were disrupted episodically by bloody conflicts at court and rebellions in the provinces.

Chapter 7 explores how Kenyatta’s presidential authority evolved after the stabilisation of his regime. It first analyses how the politicization of the land market was an exercise of regime-building, establishing a network of shared dependencies, allocating land to local political “big-men”. This is followed by an examination of the early years of the politics of succession. By 1965, the fragile alliance of convenience set up between Kenyatta and his main contenders, Oginga Odinga and Tom Mboya, was beginning to crack, while Kenyatta’s old age and fragile health revived the question of presidential succession. The government’s merciless repression against any form of opposition and dissidence culminated with the murder of Tom Mboya in 1969. Throughout these years, Kenyatta used the same strategy that had salvaged him during the “Release Kenyatta” campaign: preserving the status quo. He was left with the role of ruling over a divided political family, using his unrivalled access to state resources.

Chapter 8 covers the last decade of Kenyatta’s life and rule. As signs of Kenyatta’s age became more visible, the 1970s were not only marked by an increasingly tense struggle for succession, but also by a more acute “tribalisation” of politics. The assassination, in 1975, of the promising young Kikuyu leader J. M. Kariuki, whose dissident politics alarmed the government, signalled a clear descent into factionalism. This chapter shows that Kenyatta was unnerved by factional disputes and rising popular disaffection. Fears of a potential coup against his regime led him to tighten his control over state institutions. The succession of Daniel arap Moi upon Kenyatta’s death in 1978 confirmed that the core of Kenya’s post-colonial state was the president’s isolated status and unrivalled ambiguity, which is the central argument of this book. By expressing his preference for Moi as a potential successor, Kenyatta not only chose a non-Kikuyu, but an isolated political player, like himself ten years earlier. Far from preparing the ground for tribal inclusion in the top sphere of government, Kenyatta’s choice helped the institution of the president to prevail over a divided elite, to compensate for weak institutional ties through presidential favours, and to preserve parochial family interests.