At the outset, this Chapter will show that officials from the United States resolve the most important insular matters not solely undemocratically but especially taking U.S. interests into account. It will affirm that they may have thus contributed to the territorial socio-economic ails, which have, in turn, fueled the current debt debacle. From this perspective, the United States should strive to democratize the dependency. It may advance such democratization outside rather than inside the Union in light of Congressional or on-site opposition to the latter option.

The cogitation will contemplate and ultimately reject the contention that the ex-isting arrangement violates individual civil rights or that Puerto Rico must become a state in order to vindicate them. It will stress that no such violation transpires since the treatment of Puerto Ricans does not differ from that of their fellow U.S. citizens. Specifically, anyone bearing the citizenship of the United States can exercise all the guaranties in question if she resides on the mainland (or Hawaii) yet not on the island (or any other territory, or abroad).

The discussion will then establish that the extant regime encroaches not upon the islanders’ personal entitlements but instead upon their collective self-determination. Ergo, vindication may consist in permitting the island to rule itself just as much as in admitting it into the federation. From this standpoint, the U.S. political establish-ment could simply amend the 1950 statute presently in force and pursue more suc-cessfully the same goal: namely, granting the dependency “self-governance” as an “as-sociated free state.” Within this wide framework, the association could flexibly develop over time toward either more or less cooperation between the parties.

During the continent’s colonization, the monarchical mandate directed specifical-ly for the colonies seemingly strove to safeguard the natives and to shield them from exploitation. It purported to conserve their customs, traditions, or institutions, pro-vided that they accepted the empire’s sovereignty and religion. Apparently, this well-intentioned disposition mostly came to naught. The imperial emissaries inexorably devastated countless cultures and civilizations.

Ostensibly, the winds of independence brought with them a dissimilar, liberal approach to aboriginal affairs. They carried it to constitutional, statutory, and regu-latory standards. It amounted to granting the victimized collectivity’s members civil and political liberty equivalent to that of their fellow citizens. Reflecting France’s rev-olutionary ideology, the fresh regimen welcomed each one of them individually into the republic yet none of their respective subgroups.

Worldwide, a clamor against the underlying proceduralist paradigm seems to have resounded relatively recently. Partly, it may have cropped up internally as a re-sult of the politicized and militarized mobilization of native communities along Mexi-can, Ecuadorian, or Bolivian latitudes and beyond. However, transnational factors, like the advent of a third generation of collective entitlements for minorities in the context of the human-rights revolution, may have played a role too.

dated conception of international law that refuses to die lies at the heart of today’s global refugee crisis. It posits states as sovereignly impervious and self-contained units and as the only apposite actors on the world stage. Efforts to incentivize countries generally to welcome more people seeking refuge and specifically to adopt fair standards of entry crash against this still entrenched outlook. Activists and practitioners must simultaneously debunk the prevailing standpoint and, against all odds, construct an alternative. The latter desperately needs definition and elaboration. As a whole, it must re-imagine the planet as inclusive of the traditionally excluded: such as nongovernmental organizations; non-organized groups; societal communities; persons of all races, ethnicities, genders, and religions; animals; plants; minerals; and so forth. As a most elemental part of this narrative, self-determining and solely partially sovereign nations may neither do as they please within or at their borders nor expect to be left alone in so doing. Instead, they must honor their responsibilities to a wide array of private and public parties, both at home and abroad, while acting autonomously and resisting heteronomy or domination.

Chapter 4 presents international wildlife law as an institutional governance system relevant to local responses to human–wildlife conflict. It finds that there is a lack of any real ‘conflict’ language within the framework and this limits the ability of international law to deal with the problem at the outset. Further, the value orientations discussed within Chapters 2 and 3 are all present in international wildlife law to some extent and so the framework has the same conflict of values that are present in situations of human–wildlife conflict. The chapter traces the development of ‘dominance’ in international law and finds that there are specific principles and legal developments that continue to prevent a positive relationship that is beneficial to both people and wildlife. In addition, the underlying constraints of capitalism, neo-liberalism and sustainable development are discussed. Finally, this part posits that the failure of international law to implement a meaningful interpretation of intrinsic value and animal welfare has meant that such language has not been able to minimise the damage done by the dominant framework. The chapter concludes with suggestions for eco-vulnerability principles to be incorporated into international law.

In the first empirical chapter, I outline how different subnational governance arrangements, rooted in colonial state building and postcolonial revisions to state structures, shape the patterns of violence in Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi districts. It begins weather discussion of the relationships between state authority and violence, and introduces the key typology of sovereignty-contesting violence (SCV) and sovereignty-neutral violence (SNV). It then surveys the disparate literatures on the various forms of political violence in South Asian countries, suggesting that this typology can provide a way of bridging the divides between these literatures. The chapter then lays out patterns and qualitative examples of these two different forms of violence in the three country. It concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the patchwork state framework in understanding rebellion in South Asia.

Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub both use family narratives to explore ontological and political relationships. In Los informantes, this chapter demonstrates that the father and son embody Nancy’s notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’ respectively. Their weaknesses reveal weaknesses of such systems of governance, which Vásquez examines in relation to the historic and contemporary Colombian political context. It is through tactile associations and ‘sharing’ emblematized in the character of a physiotherapist, that the possibility of a ‘horizontal’ politics of ‘interdependence’ is explored. Likewise, in Diário da Queda, a lack of touch and familial intimacy frustrates the happiness of a father and son who are the second and third generation, born to a Holocaust survivor who moved to Brazil. This chapter tackles the novel’s radical critique of Holocaust memory used to bind together a Jewish ‘operative’ community, and to justify violence in the present.

This essay ponders how scholars can both pay attention to the specificities of racial formation in any period of what is sometimes called “American” history and also think about race at any time of that history as of our own contemporary moment. It begins by analyzing how the idea of transformable race informs late eighteenth-century American literature and how scholars have expanded our study of natural historical discourses in early America. After outlining drawbacks to this kind of tight historical focus, the essay engages how we might think about race in the antebellum United States more diachronically, as more of a piece with our own present moment. Highlighting the work of writers, artists, and scholars who are thinking about the moment of slavery and settler colonialism as our own moment, the essay turns to considering the work of William Apess alongside contemporary work of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to enact sovereignty and to protect their land and, thus, to conjecture about what we might learn when we read what we generally call “early American literature” as literature both of its own time and our own.

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).

Perhaps due to the influence of the great man myth of history, the Constitution of the United States of America is rarely named as participating in the shaping of the just war tradition, let alone being a just war document. Yet the concerns of war and just war thinking pervade the original document and the Bill of Rights as well as and some of its later amendments and are visible not only in the story of its creation but, even more significantly, in its rhetoric. Moreover, even as it and other constitutions are the primary expression of modern legal thought, it manifests a particular way of doing just war thinking that sits uncomfortably within modern just war theory. The way it inscribes sovereignty – at both personal and national levels – while diffusing authority exacerbates the wicked problems of climate-shaped conflicts, especially those relating to nonstate actors and global inequities.

The chapter reconstructs Jacob Grimm’s political thought in the 1840s when he emerged as a leader of the new association of Germanists and a prominent delegate in the first German national parliament. Speaking in different venues, Grimm declared his commitment to national unity and claimed it was supported by disciplinary knowledge of language, literature, law, and myth. In particular, he asserted that the linguistic scholar could demarcate national collectives on the basis of verifiable grammatical knowledge and by so doing provide states with a sound, even scientific foundation. The chapter analyzes how Grimm used research findings about the distinctiveness of different Germanic languages to suggest authoritative answers to questions about units of legitimate rule in the post-revolutionary era. Grimm was not a radical and did not wish to subvert monarchy, but he insisted on the coincidence of royal rule with a national homeland, the outlines of which were best traced by the philologist.

The chapter examines Jacob Grimm’s political biography and presents his long government service in German principalities, punctuated by dramatic displays of public political commitment. Faced with the conflict between rigid, patriarchal rule by monarchs to whom he was often tied as a civil servant and his own vision of the nation as a natural community of love, Grimm hoped for the eventual appearance of a loving king genuinely attached to one national people. The resulting harmony between the people and the king would, Grimm believed, resolve a key political tension of his day, namely the one between princely sovereignty and popular influence. The chapter also reconstructs the curiously thin nature of Grimm’s political beliefs. While he was confident and at times strident in debates over the territorial shape of the nation, he was less vocal on other, domestic political issues, including discussions of rights and the distribution of vital goods in a society increasingly dominated by the so-called social question. In these areas, his nationalism provided no guidance. Grimm concentrated on one dimension of political legitimacy – national self-determination – and had little to say about other aspects of governance.

The concluding chapter draws out the broader implications of the research for our understanding of the present-day Arctic and offers new insights into the dominating ‘man-versus-nature’ trope that has become a standard mode of viewing the Arctic. Even expedition leaders and authors of narratives noted the trend in nineteenth-century media for magnifying the dangers of Arctic travel. The appropriation of the story of Franklin, and the search parties that followed, into popular culture has evolved from the first-hand records of expedition members who went to the Arctic. Yet these records were transformed into commodities before they reached the public eye, often concealing an Arctic that was local, intimate, and familiar. This local Arctic was fertile ground for the production of culture, with expedition members from all ranks partaking in representation. Moreover, the Arctic was exploited for humorous ends, with expedition members mining the incongruous nature of their situation. The narratives, prints, and panoramas that reached the metropolitan audience, however, displayed an icy, threatening world, a scene that still reverberates in the popular imagination today.

This chapter begins by introducing a number of foundational concepts, which serve as the starting point in the field of public international law. Section 1 of this chapter begins with the notion that states are sovereign equals, which must consent to be bound by nternational law. This section also introduces the critical distinction that international law makes between states and “non-state actors.” Section 2 of this chapter discusses the inevitable comparison of public international law with domestic legal systems, and the significant limitations of this analogy as a means for understanding the field of public international law. Section 3 concludes by explaining this book’s overarching structure, as well as the approach of this book to the introduction of public international law.

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.