In critiquing Prosperity, Paul Davies raises five objections. These are: (a) inclusion of social objectives in mandatory business purpose statements; (b) the assertion that the envisaged adoption of purpose statements is “embarrassingly simple”; (c) use of the law to shield directors from adverse reactions from their shareholders; (d) the entity and managerial conception of the company; and (e) regulatory or court approval of corporate purposes. These objections are contrary to what Prosperity is advocating – a strengthening not weakening of board accountability to shareholders; a proprietary not entity view in which firm objectives are aligned with, not divergent from, those of shareholders; and freedom of choice and plurality of purposes unconstrained by regulatory, court or government intervention. Davies erroneously believes that Prosperity seeks to promote communal or social objectives. On the contrary, purpose statements assist companies with making their commitments credible.  They are enabling not prescriptive or restrictive. They apply equally to private as well as communal or social objectives and they are potentially as significant in enhancing value for shareholders as other parties. Davies himself sets out how companies can make their purpose statements legally binding in an “embarrassingly simple” way without requiring any change to company law.

The ICC launched in 2002 to judge cases against individuals accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. It is unique among international institutions in this book in that it imposes its obligations upon individual persons rather than governments. This chapter shows the powers and limits on the authority of the ICC to punish people for large-scale atrocities. The practical power of the ICC is shaped by both the difficulty of apprehending people and the active work of those who wish to remain insulated from accountability.

This chapter brings to light the main conclusions of this work, while also presenting generalizable principles for future research to expand on. This part of the book contributes to the theoretical study of mediation and aims to encourage further first-level analysis approaches to the study of mediation and mediators. Most importantly, it clarifies the actual input of Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura to the mediation efforts in Syria. It leaves readers with a detailed record of what Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura have done in their roles as mediators in Syria and presents a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that shaped their decision-making. Outside the cases of these three mediators, it introduces a method by which to forensically identify a mediator’s fingerprints on the mediation process and charts a map to guide investigations into the decision-making processes of mediators. In doing so, it hopefully serves to encourage steps toward developing institutional mechanisms to evaluate the performance of these mediators – to hold them accountable for their successes and their failures.

In this chapter, I argue that international criminal law institutions must satisfy two criteria to justify their claim to legitimate authority. First, they need to ensure fair trials. But while fairness is a necessary condition for the legitimate authority of the international exercise of criminal justice, it is not a sufficient condition. Institutions need to answer the subordination complaint: When some rule, others are subordinated to their rule – and the point of legitimate institutions is to address how this fact can be reconciled with the equal status of persons. An adequate way to respond to the subordination complaint is to vest institutions with democratic procedures that ensure equal control over the coercive rule of an institution. In the final part of chapter five, I highlight two strategies that enable states and individuals to exercise equal control over the court. The first strategy involves a legislative assembly that deliberates and decides on questions of criminal justice and institutional design. The second strategy seeks to make judicial lawmaking, where it is inevitable, more accountable to the public.

This chapter turns to the third UN mediator in Syria, Staffan de Mistura, and has the same two objectives as the preceding case studies in this book – to delineate the mediator’s agency as a decision-maker and to elucidate the strategic dynamics behind his decision-making. It is split into two sections dedicated to each objective. The first section investigates the mediator’s input to the main mediation policies during the period studied. Of which there are six – the Aleppo Freeze, sanctioning military action against ISIS, the Geneva Consultations, the intra-Syrian Talks, the Astana Process, and the mediator’s resignation. Building on these findings, the section uncovers the dynamics behind the mediator’s decision-making using the categories of perceptions drawn from the contingency model. This analysis also helps produce more generalizable knowledge concerning associations between mediation perceptions and behaviors.

Chapter 8 adds to a clarification of the confusion about CBI by discussing the need for transparency and accountability in light of a growing – mainly political science driven – literature on the perceived democratic deficit of technocratic policy solutions. We show that this literature overlooks important aspects of CBI.

Social workers make decisions every day involving the protection of children and/or adults who are at risk of, or are experiencing, abuse and neglect, exercising power and authority derived from law. Social workers must act within the law: “doing things right.” Accountable, legally literate practice additionally includes standards from administrative law when statutory duties are used. However, decision-making frequently also raises ethical dilemmas, including whether, when, and how to intervene in people’s lives. Practice must, therefore, be ethically literate: “doing right things.” Human rights, equality, and social justice issues will also feature in social work decision-making: “right thinking.” This chapter presents a framework for social worker decision-making that is legally and ethically, but also emotionally, relationally, organizationally and knowledge, literate. It proposes that this framework is transferable across the different jurisdictions within which social workers practice, and that it helps social workers to make good as well as lawful decisions.

Chapter 8 reviews the primary benefits, costs, and limitations of participatory technologies for nondemocracies. It then addresses how participatory technologies may contribute to democratic erosion and explores the broader implications of this study for the understanding of authoritarian regimes.

Building upon the analysis of the previous chapter, this final critical chapter examines theories of state creation focused upon the protection of human rights and the provision of representative government. Both approaches are examined through the lens of governmental legitimacy, and both are finally dismissed as implausible reconstructions of the relevant legal practice. In the course of this argument, significant attention is given to whether the protection of human rights and the provision of representative government are sufficient to render contemporary governments legitimate, to which a negative answer is ultimately given. In particular, neither the egalitarian credentials of representative government nor its facilitation of popular accountability are as normatively conclusive as many 'democratic statehood' theorists suggest.

How does the cloak of immunity protecting foreign public officials under international law enable their impunity before foreign courts for the crimes they committed for private gain? This was the question with which the book commenced. In answering it, an interdisciplinary attempt was made to come to grips with the structural injustices created by international rules of immunity in preventing well-resourced and internationally protected political elites from accountability for trafficking in persons, corruption and money laundering, and drug trafficking. The ways in which these crimes are perpetrated by political elites constitute an advanced form of criminality in which the perpetrators abuse their authority and personal privileges as public officials and, in so doing, disguise misconduct in the official mandate and even under the pretense of law-abiding behavior. These are the ultimate economic crimes that occur at the nexus of power, privilege, and impunity.

What has allowed inequalities in material resources to mount in advanced democracies? This chapter considers the role of media reporting on the economy in weakening accountability mechanisms that might otherwise have incentivized governments to pursue more equal outcomes. Building on prior work on the United States, we investigate how journalistic depictions of the economy relate to real distributional developments across OECD countries. Using sentiment analysis of economic news content, we demonstrate that the evaluative content of the economic news strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the very rich and that good (bad) economic news is more common in periods of rising (falling) income shares at the top. We then propose and test an explanation in which pro-rich biases in news tone arise from a journalistic focus on the performance of the economy in the aggregate, while aggregate growth is itself positively correlated with relative gains for the rich. The chapter’s findings suggest that the democratic politics of inequality may be shaped in important ways by the skewed nature of the informational environment within which citizens form economic evaluations.