This chapter aims to redescribe the IPCC through the analytical framework of the book by identifying the actors, activities and forms of authority that shape the organisation and its assessment practice. Reviewing existing studies of the IPCC, the chapter begins by identifying two central concerns within this scholarship: first, the relationship between science and politics and second, the asymmetries between developed and developing country participation. The chapter contributes to this literature by using the framework of the book to identify the IPCC as five distinct units: the panel, the bureau, the technical support units (TSUs), the secretariat and the authors. This identifies other forms of authority that matter alongside scientific and political forms, most importantly the administrative, as found within the TSUs. Describing the historical emergence of the social order over thirty years and six assessment cycles reveals the relationship between economic capital and meaningful participation. It requires economic and human resources to undertake IPCC activities, and it through this investment individual actors and member government becomes meaningful and authoritative participants, with knowledge of and the symbolic power to write the meaning of climate change.

I open the book with the political struggle that took place between parties at COP24, over whether the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C should be noted or welcomed. This provides the context for exploring the IPCC as a central site in and producer of climate politics. In the chapter, I take the reader back to where this study began, with the question, who has the power to define climate change for collective response and what constitutes this power? The answer the book offers is the practice of writing. The actors, activities and forms of authority framework provides the analytical framework for exploring the asymmetries in power to effect how climate change is written. This approach has developed from interviews, observation and extensive data collection from IPCC documentation. The resulting book takes the reader on a journey into the intricate details of writing an assessment, the social order through which it is written and how climate change is known and acted upon through the process.

This chapter describes the journey that the scientific assessment travels from author nomination through to the drafting and reviewing of the emerging report, and explores the social scientific order that structures and imprints on the IPCC’s writing of climate change through the process. It is in the initial stages of the scientific assessment, in the government nomination and author selection processes, that asymmetries in global knowledge of climate change and their effects become apparent. While developed countries have institutionalised processes for identifying and nominating experts, the majority of developing countries do not submit any author nominations. Once compiled, it is scientific conventions and measures of authority that are used to select and appoint the expertise necessary to fulfil the government approved outline of the report. However, when these activities are situated in broader patterns and practices of knowledge production, it becomes apparent that these reproduce the structures and exclusions of the existing global knowledge economy. These asymmetries are also apparent in the order of relations in the author teams and the submission of government review comments, which reduces the space for more diverse understandings and knowledges of climate change that are relevant to and reflect the interests and needs of all IPCC member governments. The IPCC has attempted to address these asymmetries through selection criteria and other mechanisms to shape the social order of authorship, which to date have proven more successful in broadening gender representation than ensuring the full participation of developing country authors in the assessment.

Authority means the ability to affect others’ behavior without applying direct force. Its traces, noted among chimpanzees, develop among the “talking apes.” Human tribes may develop shamans even earlier than full-time chiefs. The advent of agriculture increased population density, enabling ambitious chiefs to have more sway over villagers than they could over sparse hunters: Land tillers are easy to locate and cannot abandon their fields even when hard pressed. A population density of five persons per square kilometer may be the threshold for state formation. Formation of the first states witnessed ferociousness rare in the present humans – or chimpanzees. Tool making shifted gatherers to hunting, and hunting skills may have selected for the most ferocious genes. Agriculture might have started an opposite process of self-taming that still continues, but meanwhile tribal freewheeling turned into utter regimentation, as if the state were the ruler’s household (oikos) and other people his slaves. This human self-domestication reached its fullest extent when the advent of money allowed humans to be sold and bought.

Finally, Chapter 7 outlines the effect of the martyr’s performance. Interrogating the discourses surrounding martyrdom, I show how the crises faced were perceived as a moment when the community and its foundations will either be revitalized or lost forever. In response, cries that members retain their traditional identity are linked with affirmations of loyalty to the community and its cosmological foundations. I argue martyrdoms are performed in service to what I term sovereign imaginaries: coherent visions of cosmic order and authority that legitimate acts of killing and being killed. In these contexts, multiple authorities converge on bodies; violence is used by political institutions to encourage obedience, but martyrs show that such measures cannot force individual action. A decision must be made by each individual as to which imaginary to give form in their body. I use this insight to analyze the place of martyrdom within sovereign constructions, engaging the frame of political theology and decentering the central concern with a decision by a sovereign leader to the decision of individuals whether or not to recognize authority.

In this chapter, I discuss in what sense and to what extent institutions have political authority. I take institutions with legitimate authority to be justified in wielding political power, where this political power is backed by the threat of coercion. Against the position that international institutions are not coercive, I claim that applying an adequate conception of coercion – which takes the concept of enforcement as paradigmatic for coercion, rather than the concept of pressure – enables us to understand some international institutions as coercive. It also lays open the assumption that a single conception of authority applied to all international institutions misconceives the diversity in aims and purposes of international institutions. Institutions that coordinate morally mandatory aims and institutions that coordinate mutual advantage can both be plausibly understood as coercive, even though their authority differs in scope and in what standards they must satisfy. Finally, I discuss whether the standard of state consent is appropriate for international institutions: while it is plausible for institutions that coordinate mutual advantage, it is implausible as a standard of legitimacy for institutions that coordinate morally mandatory aims – such as institutions of international criminal justice.

In Chapter 4, I offer a new theory of citizen power. Every adult male citizen would have been free, but this also made him kurios, or empowered, as opposed to ceding his power to a slave master. When substantivized, kurios indicated a male citizen’s institutionalized role as the head of a household. The lens of the household kurios generates an understanding of citizen power that encompasses both private and public domains. Not simply power as domination, kurios also indicated a shared power to act. As a conceptual metaphor, kurios was applied to the political sphere and structured thought across these different domains. Thus, qualities of the term kurios in its original domain, the household, corresponded systemically in the applied domain, the city. The laws and the corporate citizen body, too, were understood as kurioi. While there may be competing claims to power, the identification of the citizen as sharing in power with and through the laws and the dēmos is distinct from the modern conception of the individual versus the state. The negotiation of power in this way has repercussions for debates regarding sovereignty and the rule of law.

The conservative side of the quest for true Christianity – what traditionalists call the “rule of faith” – can also be organized in terms of doctrine, culture, and politics. The second chapter begins by looking at the doctrinal quest, which focuses on the retrieval of “historic Christianity.” John Henry Newman, Karl Barth, and C. S. Lewis represent key moments in the rise of retrievalism among Protestants.

Chapter 1 uses the Middle English Charters of Christ to outline a medieval theory of money as debt. The charter lyrics pretend to be deeds, grants, or writs by which Christ cancels the debt owed to God by sinners, or, alternatively, bequeaths the kingdom of heaven to the faithful. In exchange for the remission or the inheritance, the charter stipulates that humankind owes a “rent” to Christ of love and the regular observance of the sacrament of penance. The form of the charter lyrics imitates the form of legal documents, using the verbal formulae and visual markers designed to ensure legal and documentary authenticity as a kind of spiritual guarantee: the lyrics are sincere forgeries. I argue that the kind of belief at work in this act of forgery is a monetary belief. The lyrics function as close analogues to money in that they measure debt and depend for their value on the creditor’s right to repayment. At the same time, like money, they depend for their operation on the community’s active willingness to participate in a shared fiction.

This chapter investigates how digitization changes the internal organization of firms. Gig economy platforms and freelancing agencies are rapidly taking over market share changing our very definition of a “firm,” whereas those who still work for traditional firms increasingly rely on virtual tools and external digital platforms to coordinate and communicate. Similarly, many of the firm’s other production activities may be outsourced to external providers, including inputs, manufacturing, assembly, logistics, marketing, and even R&D. We explore the emerging nature of the firm if much of its activities are carried out by other organizations, and pinpoint the key characteristics that determine what activities firms may want to continue in-house and which activities they can conveniently use digital markets and platforms to pursue.

John Milton argues that liberty of conscience requires the freedom to express one’s innermost commitments to others, specifically in speech and writing. Hypocritical conformity robs individuals of crucial opportunities to foster political capacities of citizenship, specifically the skill of independent judgment. Milton hints at an intuition that other early modern figures will later foreground – that hypocritical conformity to the state religion hardens dissenters and makes them incapable of being judicious political citizens. If individuals live in a political society that does not afford them liberty of conscience, they will slowly lose the capability to exercise their conscience over time. This freedom requires a robust view of freedom and agency in the public sphere, since it implies far more than an inward freedom of conviction. Conscience must be cultivated independently of political and ecclesiastical authorities and requires confrontation with other individuals in the public sphere, implying the open exchange of ideas and the freedom to express one’s ideas publicly in writing or speech. Milton insists that the circulation of ideas in print allows for an extended opportunity for individuals to exercise their conscience, as the written word persists over time longer than speech, which dissipates in the immediate moment, only to be recounted by witnesses. Liberty of conscience is so crucial to Milton’s understanding of freedom that he describes it as the highest liberty above all liberties, even justifying other political freedoms.

The author argues that while State consent does contribute to international law’s legitimacy, it does not do so by providing a justification for it. States are not bound to obey international law because they have chosen to submit to its authority. Rather, international law provides them with a reason for action, and indeed they have a moral duty to obey it, if and only if they will do better at realizing justice if they act as the law directs them to act than if they act on their own judgment. As a means for crafting international law, State consent is, according to the author, valuable insofar as it yields international legal norms that satisfy this condition. He argues, that in a few cases, it may also constitute an intrinsically valuable expression of trust in the international political community or an international institution that exercises political authority.

In this chapter, I lay out a theory cataloguing the conditions under which international courts may be expected to issue audacious rulings. This theoretical framework relies on previous literature and insights gathered from interviews with experts in and around the Court. The necessary condition for audacious courts is a wide discretionary space within which they may act without fearing repercussions from states. Yet, such a wide discretionary space is not always given; when it is given, states might still attempt to influence courts through direct or indirect means. Such means include closing down courts’ discretionary space and widespread negative feedback, as well as related threats. International courts, in turn, are compelled to realign their priorities to react to or pre-empt such measures. This is a form of trade-off whereby courts adjust their behaviour to ensure continued access to resources and to preserve their reputation and public image. The chapter also introduces additional factors that increase the likelihood of audacious rulings (i.e., proposed new understandings’ congruence with changing societal needs, legal developments external to the regime, and civil society campaigns).

This chapter shows how the push for profit and dominance, and the dynamics of slavery, affected white southerners’ dealings with elderly “masters.” As enslavers aged, they could be forced to fight against the rising generation who looked at them and saw dependency and submissiveness, instead of autonomy and mastery. These traits – and general binaries of power/powerlessness – were understood as bound up with the racializing discourse of slavery and the gendered dynamics of patriarchy. Elderly enslavers – both men and women – sometimes came to believe that advanced age was a relation of powerlessness that marked them as closer to enslaved than enslaver and which served to unsettle existing power relations in the community. Those who fought against such depictions confronted communal perceptions of their inability to enact mastery, and these battles had particular emotional effects. Cross-cultural scholarship argues that communal assumptions of incapacity can be humiliating, and this chapter emphasizes how aged enslavers grappled with these perceptions. These old slavers are not objects of pity, but their experiences reveal the culture of exploitation that drove antebellum slavery.