Distance is a central concern for global historians. It is a physical and external condition of social life that global processes bridge. Exchanges, encounters and conflicts between strangers are common themes of global historians. Distance is also a cultural and conceptual condition, one that defines relations between strangers far – and near. Mobility and the advent of new modes of transportation and communications had ambiguous effects of closing the gap between strangers while heightening social distances, the need to explain them and policies to redress them.

Peripheral-patronage states have several ways in which they can respond to the bind outlined in Chapter 2. These strategies – recruiting, concealing and insulating – are usually selected according to the state’s possession or lack of domestic capacity and autonomy from outside interference. Some states fail to strategize, finding themselves in the unusual position of being granted autonomy, but lacking the capacity to use the space it provides. Concealing, which involves an invitation of outside scrutiny with the intent to manage the process that follows, is the most interesting strategy because, when successful, it can erode the international norms its users invoke. Successful concealing is possible when the concealing state is both illegible to outsiders and capitalizes on an asymmetrically interdependent relationship with its larger partner in which each has the capacity to harm the other’s reputation. As a result, the concealing state receives the larger actor’s seal of approval for conduct that actually undermines the latter’s chosen norm.

This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of the notion of social justice during the Enlightenment before surveying the volume’s achievement in historicizing twentieth-century European proposals. Social justice presupposed the invention of the “social,” in and through the insight into informal cultural and institutional ordering. And while social justice was coined earlier in the nineteenth century, the concept became unavoidable later in the century as both left liberals and Roman Catholics responded to individuals and laissez-faire, in part by innovating a new ‘social science’. This chapter concludes by speculating about the future trajectory of claims on the notion of social justice.

The theory of law put forward in this book is founded on the idea of interdependence. Interdependence generates goods taking the form of a community. In law a community involves common legal obligations pertaining to goods. The WTO Agreement establishes a “club good.” Its essence is the equality of opportunity for economic operators in members’ markets. These legal arrangements have given rise to enormous networks of global supply and value chains. At the same time, however, they have generated unease at de-industrialization and exposed critical vulnerabilities. Whereas at the time of the WTO’s founding in 1995 the unconditional interdependence called for in the WTO Agreement might have been regarded as beneficial, today it is seen as less so. Consequently, the club good of the organization appears to be splintering into individual goods composed of specific trading relationships. Consequently, support for the organization and its dispute settlement system has ebbed. Nevertheless, there appears to be recognition of residual worth in the WTO Agreement and its dispute settlement system, which may continue to serve as a locus for transformative solutions.

Criticism is often made that the WTO Agreement has the potential to undermine human rights and accentuates the disruptive effects of globalization. Nevertheless, justice in sovereign terms is different from justice in human terms. This difference is perhaps best illustrated by means of a theory. This book puts forward such a theory. The theory posits that law does justice in order to sustain the good of the community. Justice in relation to the good can be thought about either according to the good’s distribution ex ante or its correction ex post after injury. The metric of distributive justice is equality, whereas the metric of corrective justice is fairness, or what is appropriate. This dualism is exhibited in thinking about WTO arrangements and is replicated in WTO law. In one mode WTO law is about the attainment of equality by means of obligations. In a second mode WTO law is about the attainment of fairness by means of rights. The two modes of law interact over time. Ultimately, they depend upon each other to generate a third, overarching structure in the form of interdependent obligations and rights manifested in a sui generis legal system.

A farewell is given to something that is leaving. After thousands of years of freedom for nations to go to war, new proximity, interdependence, risks of nuclear war have led them to exercise restraints and to commit themselves to the UN Charter and the requirement to abandon interstate uses of force. This book concludes that while states will continue as always to compete, the great powers are saying farewell to direct interstate wars. For over 75 years there have been no wars between them and no nuclear weapon has been used. The Charter as rule-based international order has often been violated and the veto has often stood in the way of action. Yet, the General Assembly has asserted the order and declared that it does not recognize illegal annexations. The nuclear arsenals remain and pose existential risks to humanity. At the same time, the fear that they would be used in second strikes makes it implausible that any nuclear-armed states would initiate hostilities that could risk leading to nuclear war. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is seen as out of tune with the twenty-first century – an aberration. The growing interdependence of states is creating restraints against causing ruptures and, at the same time, enables states to use crippling economic measures as substitutes for the use of force. In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis shocked the parties and prompted them to use diplomacy to avert the acute risk of nuclear war. Today, one may speculate if the war in Ukraine and threats to the human environment might shock nations to turn to diplomacy and disarmament and switch to the defence of the threatened human environment a major part of the some 2 trillion dollars that they now spend annually to defend themselves against each other. For this to become reality, an engaged public mind would be as important as it was against slavery and nuclear weapons.

Peace between states is commonly the result of mutual interests in cooperation and lack of incentives to use force. However, there are also disincentives to the use of force, and several will be discussed in following chapters. This chapter gives an overview and points to the foreseeable losses of lives and resources as the most widely recognized disincentive. Where a potential adversary has strong military force, there is a disincentive to initiate the use of force. When both sides have nuclear weapons, we speak of a mutual deterrence and the risk of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Today, the mutual economic dependence of states (MED) may also make ruptures of relations so painful as to be a disincentive to the use of force. Past failures of the use of force should – but do not always – create disincentives. Legal norms, notably the UN Charter, prohibiting the use of force constitute disincentives, but the effectiveness is hard to verify. The same may be said of public opinion.

This chapter argues that protecting rights in a constitutional democracy is a collaborative enterprise between all three branches of government, where each branch has a distinct but complementary role to play, whilst working together with the other branches in the constitutional scheme. At the heart of the chapter is a collaborative conception of the separation of powers, where the branches are situated within a heterarchical relationship of reciprocity, recognition, and respect. Grounded in the key values of comity, collaboration, and conflict management, this chapter sketches out the contours of the collaborative constitution. Instead of a conflictual dynamic of ’constitutional showdowns’, the chapter marks out a preference for ’constitutional slowdowns’. Whilst accepting the inevitability and, indeed, the legitimacy of constitutional counterbalancing and tension between the branches of government, the collaborative constitution attends to the collaborative norms which frame and shape the interaction between the branches in a well-functioning constitutional order.

This chapter introduces the interdisciplinary field of relationship science. It describes the human drive for belonging, including the biological underpinning of sociality and the harmful consequences of social isolation and social exclusion. It also defines romantic relationships and the characteristics that differentiate romantic relationships from other close relationships (high interdependence, high intimate knowledge, high commitment). In addition to emphasizing the core commonalities across romantic relationships, this chapter explores the many ways in which romantic relationships are diverse (e.g., structure, exclusivity, composition, duration, motives). Finally, this chapter highlights the critical importance of close relationships for individual health and well-being as well, as for society more broadly.

Chapter 4 explains how in traditional liberalism, autonomy as the ability to reason has been recognised as the foundation for personhood, thereby excluding adults with cognitive disability. Interpretations of Article 12 that require the abolition of decision-making by substitutes refashion autonomy from being marked by rationality and independence to being marked by shared personhood and interdependence so as to include adults with cognitive disability. I argue that these refashionings ultimately fail because despite avowals to the contrary, they perpetuate the privileging of rationality and of the bounded, independent individual. They also fail to recognise the interdependency of Article 12 with other rights in the CRPD, especially socio-economic rights. I argue that a concept of autonomy as achievement, as the development of autonomy competencies, as demanding the availability of a range of options and as demanding recognition of the indivisibility of human rights is the autonomy underpinning Article 12 and the CRPD.

Chapter 5 proposes an interpretation of Article 12 that allows for decision-making by substitutes as a last resort through relocating personhood from recognition of autonomy to recognition of dignity. It settles on a concept of dignity as inherent, as a legal principle (not a right) that underpins human rights and the CRPD, and as having five dimensions. The first dimension recognises the equal worth or value of all human beings. The second recognises autonomy as an important component of dignity for people who have autonomy but seeks to position autonomy as only one very valuable good amongst others. The third recognises dignity as reflexive and acknowledging the interdependent, interpersonal and social nature of being human. The fourth recognises personhood as embodied and particular, thereby acknowledging the residual impacts of impairment and the materiality of our lives. The fifth dimension demands an understanding of rights as interdependent and indivisible.

Chapter 3 explains the principle of the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights (‘the principle of indivisibility) as recognising: (a) the equal importance of economic, social and cultural rights with civil and political rights, and (b) the interdependence of rights within and across categories. It explains how the privileging of civil and political rights, including the right to legal capacity, erroneously frames state restraint as always rights-affirming; such framing, in turn, demands the abolition of decision-making by substitutes. It argues that depending on how an adult with cognitive disability is contingently situated even after all supports are provided, they may require a decision to be made by a substitute to fulfil an immediate socio-economic need and to claim their human rights. It argues that Article 12, in requiring supports for legal capacity, is a ‘hybrid’ civil and political and socio-economic right, illustrating and driving the principle of indivisibility in the CRPD.

This chapter opens the third part of the book in which a new theoretical account called collective equality is offered. At the core of collective equality, we find a recognition of the centrality of collectives and their equal relations as the primary pillar of justice and peace. Deeply divided places riven by ethno-national conflicts are characterized not only by national divide, but most often by practices of discrimination, political exclusion, and domination of one ethno-national group over the other(s). While the national divide itself is unlikely to disappear in such places, the way in which the ethno-national “border” is managed, or in other words how the groups and their members relate and interact, can dramatically change. Alongside liberal multiculturalism and liberal nationalism, collective equality introduces the paradigm of equality between the national groups that occupy a specific territory. In the realities of conflict-riven places, this new paradigm must respond to concerns that lay at the root of contemporary conflicts – the objection to or fear of foreign domination – common to both national minorities and national majorities caught in an “intimate conflict.”

This chapter surveys the rapid growth of globe-spanning organizations and institutions over the past 120 years – from the League of Nations to the UN to today’s International Criminal Court and European Union. Spurred by the world wars, economic crises, and environmental disasters of the twentieth century, humanity has already come much farther than most people realize in building innovative instruments of global concertation and crisis management. Therefore, the pathways of constructive change that lie ahead of us can best be understood as continuations and extensions of the remarkable gains already achieved. Four institutions – OECD, UN, NATO, and EU – exemplify distinct levels of rising integration across national boundaries. Institutions such as International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) have offered powerful new pathways for citizens’ concerted action beyond borders. The recently-adopted UN doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) reflects a newfound legitimacy of cross-border ethical obligations and proactive interventions to halt large-scale humanitarian disasters.

This chapter starts by observing that public responsibility is still understood in very different ways throughout the world, depending largely on the political, social and cultural background of each State. The Chinese, Middle Eastern, African and Central European examples presented bear witness to this reality, and in particular to the close link between the development of public responsibility and the emancipation of the individual from the State and the collectivity. The great diversity of national and supranational practices on a world-wide scale – in a context marked by global challenges and by the still essential role of the Nation-State framework – makes a comparative legal approach essential, not only to prevent unwarranted standardization, but also to bridge differences and ‘further compatibility’.