This chapter considers how histories of world systems, specifically global capitalism, are narrated in Salman Rushdie’s fiction. From capitalism’s emergence in The Enchantress of Florence, and the novel’s narration of early modern Mughal and Florentine world systems, through to Midnight’s Children’s depiction of India’s independence and the incipient rise of uneven neoliberal property speculation in Bombay, and The Golden House’s depiction of transnational elites and Bombay money laundering, this chapter maps Rushdie’s shifting representation of the world system, including the failures of the ‘optimism disease’ of postcolonial India and early modern global secular humanism, and how forms like magic realism and cinematic realism limn the emergence of neoliberalism and constellate the end of US hegemony.

This chapter critically engages with relevant legal consciousness literature and develops the conceptual framework of the book. It examines three accounts of law in everyday life – hegemony, alienation, and empowerment – and demonstrates their limitations in explaining the mixed, paradoxical effects of law observed through the experiences of interviewed workers and residents in Vietnam. The ethnographic approach adopted in this research foregrounds the complex nature of individuals’ life circumstances and their decision-making. The concept of precarity as applied in this book consists of three main components: Precarity as a phenomenon and result of the broader neoliberal economic structure, precarity as multifaceted and variegated individual experiences, and precarity as a ground of resistance. This chapter develops a three-pronged process that underpins the mutually reinforcing relationship between precarity and law, and identifies some of the factors that make a socialist country like Vietnam a suitable setting to explore such a relationship.

In their opposition to American imperialism, radicals pursued many actions. They synchronized protests, helped deserting GIs find safety, strengthened ties with Vietnamese revolutionaries, put the United States on trial for genocide, and even organized international brigades to fight in Vietnam. But at this stage, they prioritized the ideological struggle, which was precisely what Vietnamese officials themselves sought most from their comrades in this part of the world. Indeed, Vietnamese revolutionaries believed that the war would be fought not only in the jungles of Vietnam but on the terrain of ideas. Collaborating closely with Vietnamese communists, radicals in the North Atlantic radicalized the discourse around the war. In fact, by the end of 1967, the general antiwar struggle grew far more radical. Radicals defined the enemy as imperialism, coded their internationalism as anti-imperialism, and revived the Leninist problematic of self-determination. This approach to internationalism became so popular that even those who did not consider themselves radicals adopted some of its core elements. By the late 1960s, anti-imperialism was beating out its many internationalist rivals – such as individualist human rights – to become the dominant way in which activists in the North Atlantic imagined international change.

The aims of this chapter are, first, to track the development of the notion of the material constitution in selected authors associated with Western Marxism and, second, to explain its intermittent presence in the Marxist canon. The chapter focuses on four turning points in the social and intellectual history of the material constitution: its Marxist origins in the second half of the nineteenth century (Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, who coined the term); the crucial years of the Soviet revolution and the First World War (Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg); the interwar period (Antonio Gramsci); and the tail end of the twentieth century (Étienne Balibar and Antonio Negri). At each turning point, a certain slack between the concrete constitutional order and the codified or written constitution has pushed scholars to revisit the material constitution. Although the chapter registers the decline of interest in the material constitution after the Second World War, it also underscores that the series of crises over the last two decades have again pushed the notion to the centre stage of constitutional enquiry. The chapter thus highlights the insight offered by these authors for understanding the material constitution in the twenty-first century.

Mongolia’s recent transition to a mineral exporting economy has much to tell us about the relationship between economic change and constitutional transformation. It reveals how the legal construction of markets invite a bevy of transnational economic and legal ‘actors, norms and processes’ which interact with the national constitution. Natural resource extraction, in particular, is charged with the potential to catalyse material constitutional change within the state, by virtue of its profound socio-environmental impacts, the generation of new conflicts over resource control within the state and the exposure of national institutions to transnational investment norms within the context of volatile global commodity markets.

Chapter 6 concludes the book with a discussion of the future of Xinjiang as well as the implications for both China and US foreign policy. Given the ongoing US presence in Afghanistan, the complexities of US relations with Pakistan, and the increasing presence of Chinese nationals around the globe, it is easy to imagine how a seemingly manageable precipitating event could lead to outsized effects.

After at least two decades of the proliferation of narconarratives mediated by the official discourse of “drug cartels,” an emerging current of writers, filmmakers, and journalists have renewed a critical approach to state violence and its implications beyond typical assumptions about organized crime. From the thousands of killings of the so-called war on drugs to the forced disappearance of forty-three students in the state of Guerrero in 2014, this counterhegemonic critique aims to rethink – and, more importantly, to reimagine – the most pressing events of violence as the result of social strategies of control and exploitation promoted by state structures and geopolitics. This essay proposes to analyze the politicized imagination intersecting state violence and drug trafficking that deliberately leaves behind the habitual hegemonic narconarratives to articulate instead a critical understanding of the criminal networks as by-products of official power. Along with the analysis of key works of fiction, film, and journalistic investigations, I will engage debates on state violence and neoliberalism in the age of permanent national security crises.

Following the Civil War, the United States exerted its diplomatic, economic, and military leverage to pursue economic and political interests in Latin America, as it believed that what was good for business was good for the country. The emphasis on national security had not disappeared, but the threats to U.S. borders were less dire than in the past as European countries were generally easing themselves out of the region. Latin American leaders had neither the unified political support nor the military strength required to counter U.S. influence. While certain Latin American policy makers resisted U.S. hegemony, both politically and militarily, others welcomed it. Political and economic elites out of power appealed to the United States for assistance because they believed it could provide stability and wealth. The United States stepped neatly and easily into this political maelstrom. The chapter concludes at the turn of the twentieth century, when the era of intervention began in earnest.

The U.S.–Latin American relationship has never been easy. A combination of wars, invasions, occupations, mutual suspicion (and occasionally open dislike and insults), dictatorships, and/or differences in ideology represents a consistent obstacle to strong national friendships. However, relations have not always been negative. Periodically, Latin American political leaders have worked closely with the U.S. government in a spirit of partnership, and the United States has also periodically offered new initiatives and shown a willingness to establish a positive and friendly relationship. How, then, can we make sense of it all? This book has three intertwined purposes, focusing on theory, political history, and research. It examines four prominent approaches to international relations: realism, dependency theory, autonomy, and liberal institutionalism. However, there is no perfect theory, and the strengths and weaknesses of each are discussed. Students are strongly encouraged to engage different theories of international relations in the light of empirical evidence. Resources are also offered for further study of chapter topics.

This second part delves into concrete cases of conflicts between environmental protection and human rights decided by regional human rights courts. Instead of focusing on the outcomes of each case, the analysis attends to the legal reasoning and justifications articulated by judges when decisions are reached, and courts come to a resolution of adversarial argumentations. How do regional human rights courts balance individual or collective human rights against the interest in environmental protection, when environmental protection and human rights collide? What emerges is a process where parties counter legal indeterminacy by granting weight to specific legal, political and normative goals in an idiom of universality – namely through justifications in the name of ‘universal interests’ or ‘universal truth claims’. Two strategies of ‘universal justification’ are induced from the cases. First, conflicts between environmental protection and human rights tend to be solved though a ‘universalisation strategy’ that rests on an invocation of the ‘general interest’. Second, a ‘universalisation strategy’ is visible when courts settle disputes by relying on the ‘objectivity’ and ‘authority’ provided by scientific or human rights experts. New argumentative dynamics are induced from a critical case-law analysis that reveals particular understandings of the human–environment relation, which engenders specific world-making effects.

We show the absence of bellicist pressures during “Phase II.” Between the fourth and eighth centuries specifically, there was only one war involving Korea, Japan, and China: the Korean War of Unification from 660-668. Most importantly, during the fourth to sixth centuries, China was divided and posed no military threat to the peninsula or Japan. Indeed, centuries of initial state formation in both Korea and Japan occurred without any threat from China at all and without any war between these countries. The one war between Korea, Japan, and China during the four centuries under consideration here was the Korean war of unification, 660–668. This evolution of the East Asian world marked the emergence of political units in Korea and Japan that would endure until the modern era. Neither China nor Japan had territorial ambitions on the peninsula. There is almost nothing in the historical record to link state formation with this war. Silla did not expand further than the peninsula, and China and Japan before and after the Korean Unification war had quite clear boundaries that did not include continental expansion.

How and why do the Jordanian police still have recourse to customary tribal traditions to impose social order on the population despite the fact that the regime has, overall, reduced its reliance on, and patronage for, East Bank ‘tribal’ figures? Using the example of ‘blood crimes’ (offences in which an individual is injured or killed), this chapter explores how the state, through the police, insinuates itself into various traditional dispute management practices and adapts them to contemporary needs. The chapter evaluates the relative importance of the police, administrative governors and other societal figures, including tribal notables and local headmen (mukhātir), in dealing with cases including assault, fatal traffic accidents and murder. It also considers the various reasons why, on the whole, different components of the population comply with these practices, thereby buying into contemporary forms of ʿashāʾiriyya, whilst highlighting instances of resistance.

The everyday policing of common offences tells us a great deal about what kind of social order a states promote. Yet, this introductory chapter argues that while the ‘high-policing’ of behaviours deemed to threaten regime security in the Middle East has attracted scholarly attention, the ‘low-policing’ of more mundane, interpersonal disputes and citizens’ grievances has been largely overlooked. In a bid to address that deficit, this book studies the development of the state’s civil police agency, the Jordanian Public Security Directorate, since the formation of the modern state, and, drawing on legal anthropology as well as political science, focuses on how it manages certain kinds of common disputes in coordination and/or competition with other societal actors. The introduction emphasises the book’s key message, that rather than being primarily concerned with law enforcement, the police are preoccupied with order. In the Jordanian context, the type of order they promote is heavily influenced by tribal traditions, which have more recently been merged with conceptions of civic duty and neoliberal prerogatives. The chapter also affirms the importance of challenging binaries between ‘coercive’ and ‘consensual’ policing, by showing that in pursuit of hegemony, the police have recourse to varied strategies of power.

Chapter 2 investigates Macbeth as representative of the next stage of Shakespeare’s political thinking in the tragic period, focusing on issues of power specifically to reveal the version of instrumental reason (or power for power’s sake) Shakespeare explores in this dark play. This includes the play’s implied conception of the political and its relation to dramatic structure. In the specific case of Macbeth, the form of politics is best described using Simone Weil’s 1940s anti-war essay “The lliad, or the Poem of Force” to define the issues involved, seeing the play as an anatomy of political force manifesting like The Iliad the destructive effects on both its agents and its victims of the deadly instrumental politics of warfare. In this analysis, Macbeth emerges as a consummate man of force parallel to Homer’s Achilles as described by Weil, while Lady Macbeth is a figure sharing his commitment to force but constrained by her society’s patriarchal structure and values to a publicly subordinate (though privately powerful) role. The Macbeths’ political actions enable the introduction of modern autotelic instrumental power to a fictional and temporally complex Scotland.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the main insights of labor regimes scholarship, including its focus on questions of labor control and its use of the neo-Gramscian distinction between consensual and coercive mechanisms of labor control. It then explains the analytic limits of this consent–coercion dichotomy when analyzing labor regime dynamics in peripheral regions of world capitalism. It then develops an ideal-typical framework intended to understand the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist in peripheral locations of the world market, distinguishing “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes from regimes marked by “crises of labor control” or “counter-hegemony.” It then draws from insights from world-systems scholarships on the social precarity of fully proletarianized labor systems and on the core–periphery dynamics of global commodity chains to explain how the convergence of processes of peripheralization and proletarianization, or peripheral proletarianization, has a particularly destabilizing impact on local labor regimes. It ends with a discussion of how both processes of proletarianization and peripheralization are impacted by larger structural and institutional dynamics associated with the rise and decline of US world hegemony.