This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

Chapter 5 considers the surveillance of potential terrorists and their arrest, including the force that may be employed to do so. Once in custody, criminal suspects should be interviewed without the threat or use of physical coercion in order to gather evidence to decide whether or not it is right to engage a prosecution for terrorism (or other criminal offences). In certain circumstances, control orders or similar judicial decisions may limit the actions at large of an individual suspect with a view to protecting the public. Most controversial of all, preventive detention by the State may sometimes be made where an individual has been convicted of no crime and is not being held on remand with a view to future prosecution. The chapter addresses these issues in turn considering the treatment of terrorist suspects in accordance with fundamental human rights.

The debate about whether state or non-state players have primacy has been a major preoccupation for International Relations researchers. This chapter argues the key is not so much to determine which players are dominant, but how they interact to produce the prevailing order. The 1985 book Bringing the State Back In declared the return of the state for international politics and political economy (Evans et al. 1985). This chapter argues instead for bringing state–society relations ‘back in’ to the centre of what makes international relations.

This chapter explains the legal and political features of the United Nations. It begins with a short introduction to the UN Charter, which shows the framework of international law that defines, limits and empowers the organisation. It then puts these into a more practical setting, which emphasises how the United Nations is at the same time an actor, a forum and a resource for governments.

While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations said of the term ‘national interest’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world’s population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O’Callaghan 2002: 202–13). Notwithstanding this confusion, nationalism is typically characterised as both an important form of cultural identity and a pervasive political ideology affirming that territorial communities called nations are necessary for human flourishing and that each nation should therefore be accorded a degree of autonomy in determining its own affairs (Woods et al. 2020: 813).

This chapter examines the rise and growth of human rights. First, it discusses the historical development of human rights. Second, it outlines how human rights are understood today. Third, it explains how the liberal universalism that lies behind human rights has come up against cultural resistance. Finally, the chapter touches on some challenges that lie ahead in the struggle for human rights.

The essay examines the communities and workers most impacted by acute climate disasters, within the context of business’s role in human rights, stakeholder well-being, and resilience, featuring illustrative examples from Japan and the United States. The disproportionate impact of climate change on the poor and vulnerable is clear, though the role of disaster “first responders” and essential workers is largely missing from academic discourse and policy solutions. Despite distinct contexts, nuclear clean-up crews, and those who rebuild after extreme weather have commonalities. Workers are largely transient, and underpaid, and often work without legal protections. These considerations are inextricably linked to business with its tremendous potential for impact. The role of business in climate change, indicted as much of the problem’s genesis and hailed as the source of innovative solutions, is clear. Its responsibilities to these workers and their communities, reflecting a stakeholder conception of business, are significant. The toll of environmental violence and the human rights of those who clean our climate messes must be part of our discourse and our solutions.

The chapter examines how the radical Right’s counter-hegemonic struggle relates to other struggles for power in contemporary world politics and attacks on the so-called liberal international order (LIO). Drawing on recent literature on struggles for recognition, we show how the radical Right has built powerful transversal, global alliances based on a logic and discourse of difference and diversity rather than claims to Western superiority. We illustrate this through an analysis of an emerging global alliance in defence of the ‘natural family’. The radical Right’s civilisationalism and calls for multipolarity also enable complex, strategic convergences with illiberal states such as China and Russia, as well as states and people in the Global South. The multi-polar, civilisational world order envisioned by the radical Right is not anti-hierarchical and inclusive, but legitimises new differences and new forms of exclusion through its claims to cultural diversity. It is a more sovereigntist vision of the world in which exclusionary illiberal forces would be able to operate with fewer international constraints.

Young people are increasingly impacted by the effects of the climate crisis, which are causing significant mental health harms. They are aware that government policies and decision-making have furthered reliance on fossil fuels, even in the face of the known dangers of climate change. To protect their human rights and future well-being, young people are turning to courts to hold their governments accountable for protecting their rights to a life-sustaining climate. Some courts around the world are granting young people access to seek remedies, while in other places, including the United States, such access is still denied. While access to justice is vital, young people have yet to see courts use the best available climate science as the basis for defining and protecting their rights. This article explores the obstacles young people face today in seeking and obtaining legal remedies, identifies human rights that are implicated by the climate crisis, and discusses why access to courts is a crucial aspect of the quest for a legally binding, science-based legal remedy for climate change that protects the rights of young people.

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.

By 1977–78, the Horn of Africa became a key area of Soviet–American rivalry, with both superpowers supporting rival regimes. Both the Soviets and the Americans wanted their clients to embrace specific legitimating discourses, such as human rights or Marxism-Leninism, establishing patterns of deference, recognition, and legitimation. By the late 1970s, China concluded that involvement in Africa was not worth the cost and retreated, while the Soviets continued despite the costs. Driven by inertia of proletarian internationalism, Moscow sought involvement in faraway struggles, seeking recognition as the leader of revolutionary forces. As before, the Soviets failed to see the contradiction between detente with the United States and supporting third world revolutions. Meanwhile, in the late 1970s, the Cold War was reshaped by China's transformation under Deng Xiaoping, who shifted focus from revolution to development. This strategic pivot led China to lean toward America, which the United States welcomed to contain the Soviet threat. Despite being based on tactical choices rather than shared values, this alignment deeply worried Soviet leaders.

In this chapter, I discuss how and why the sovereignty of states can be pierced. I presuppose that persons have basic human rights independently of their membership in any political community and that we all share a duty to enforce those rights for everyone. Normally, we discharge this duty through a system of just states in a moral division of labour. A state’s legitimate power over its people and territory depends on its performance in protecting those rights. But when states fail to protect the fundamental human rights of their citizens, not only is outside interference permissible, but the duty to preserve humankind falls back to everyone. In that situation, we all have an equal right to punish perpetrators of human rights crimes. Finally, I turn back to Locke to argue that since we are all equals in the state of nature, our natural executive right must be exercised competitively. But because such competitive punishment is incompatible with our equal status as moral authorities, we have reason to leave the state of nature and submit to an impartial institution that exercises the right on our behalf.