In China, corporate management and business transactions often relegate the legal system to a more peripheral role. Chinese companies then encounter formidable institutional obstacles when operating in developed countries with robust, strict, and complex legal systems. Obviously, nowhere else are the hurdles as high as in the United States. How then do Chinese investors negotiate the omnipresent legal risks? This chapter begins with an overview of China’s outbound direct investment in the United States. It then introduces research questions ranging from the role of in-house legal counsel in Chinese companies to their legal responses to unfair treatment by the US government. Next, this chapter selectively summarizes and critically reviews the existing literature pertinent to the interactions between multinational companies and the complex US legal system. From this, I formulate a comprehensive theoretical framework predicated on dual institutional influence, which will be applied consistently throughout the book. The chapter concludes with a description of the research methodology.

This chapter recapitulates the dual institutional framework and the empirical findings of this book. It then discusses how the findings contribute to ongoing policy and theoretical debates.

This chapter provides a general overview of the market and institutional environments existing in emerging economies. Despite the divergences existing across jurisdictions, this chapter shows that most emerging economies share some common features, including the existence of an institutional environment that generally comprises inefficient judicial systems, high levels of corruption, low levels of protection of property rights, and a weak rule of law. Other features commonly found in emerging economies include the existence of underdeveloped financial systems and the prevalence of micro- and small enterprises and large controlled firms. This chapter, and therefore the understanding of the market and institutional environments existing in emerging economies, will provide the basis for the understanding of the insolvency framework for emerging economies suggested in this book.

The chapter answers the question ‘Why has the rule of law become so fragile?’ as set up by the 2023 Nine Dots Prize competition. It shows how the liberal narrative of the rule of law is built on repressing the political elements of the legal system. Using Jungian psychoanalysis to analyse the crises of the rule of law, the author shows that the more we repress democratic politics from the legal system, the more the politics will strike back as ‘shadow’ in a distorted, anti-democratic form. The chapter also deepens the analysis of how DWE works politically with anger, preventing it from turning into ‘free-floating rage’ that can be exploited by authoritarian populism. It introduces the notion of ‘critical feeling’ to complement ‘critical thinking’ in contemporary academia.

The chapter explains the legal and political strategy of DWE, showing how the movement managed to organise and win a referendum to expropriate corporate landlords. It shows how the movement employs popular anger as a source of energy to transform the system towards the common good. It explains the concept of legal fiction and shows how it can influence reality. It also explains the methodology and challenges of action research.

This chapter considers how and in what contexts the reasonable person standard was applied by the selected colonial courts of the British Empire. The key question is whether the reasonable person imported from England remained English in substance – whether it continued to resemble a man on the Clapham omnibus – or the courts tailored the standard to the specific circumstances before them. As the first section shows, there are many cases in which the reasonable person was equated with an Englishman. This suggests that the standard was static in nature. However, the second section of the chapter complicates this conclusion by introducing numerous cases and settings in which the standard was adapted to specific, local contexts – sometimes so successfully that local variants of it developed. Drawing together the first two sections, the final part considers the nexus between a standard’s resemblance to the people to whom it is applied and the authority of law.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

This chapter explains the motivation for the study. A stark reality is that states often fail to provide justice in many communities enduring criminal group violence. Deaths from criminal group violence roughly equal deaths from war between states, intrastate conflict (namely, civil war and insurgency), and terrorism combined. Moreover, criminal group affiliates who engage in the violence do so with near impunity in many communities. Criminal groups’ ability to escape accountability means that these communities face what I term vacuums of justice. The chapter goes on to argue that justice provision is a core responsibility of the state and, by failing in this regard, states shirk one of their raisons d’être (reasons for existence) under the social contract. The chapter’s final section explains the link between justice provision and cooperation with the police, positing that the police’s reliance on information from witnesses often makes cooperation a necessary albeit insufficient linchpin for justice provision.

The Introduction previews cycles of silence theory, which seeks to explain how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. The Introduction focuses on laying out the book’s central contributions. Theoretically, the book provides a new explanation for how criminal groups prevent cooperation with the police, highlighting the role of their violence in suppressing perceived norms favoring cooperation. The theory speaks to the political science literatures on state-building, political conflict, and criminal governance as well as literatures from other social science disciplines including criminology. Methodologically, the study bridges research divides between the Global North and Global South by testing the theory in both regions. The study also employs realistic survey experiments including a virtual reality–based survey experiment. Finally, the Introduction puts the study into perspective: While the book’s focus may be centered around the effect of violence, the violence should not be interpreted as a defining feature of communities that endure criminal groups.

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.

Police use of facial recognition technologies is on the rise across Europe and beyond. Public authorities state that these powerful algorithmic systems could play a major role in assisting to prevent terrorism, reduce crime, and to safeguard vulnerable persons. There is also an international consensus that these systems pose serious risks to the rule of law and several human rights, including the right to private life, as guaranteed under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The world’s first case examining the legality of a facial recognition system deployed by police, Bridges v South Wales Police, thus remains an important precedent for policymakers, courts, and scholars worldwide. This chapter focusses on the role and influence of the right to private life, as enshrined in Article 8 ECHR, and the relevant case law of the European Court of Human Rights, in the ‘lawfulness’ assessment of the police use of live facial recognition in Bridges. A framework that the Court of Appeal for England and Wales held was ‘not in accordance with the law’ and therefore in breach of Article 8 ECHR. The analysis also considers the emerging policy discourse prompted by Bridges in the United Kingdom surrounding the need for new legislation, a significant shift away from the current AI governance approach of combining new ethical standards with existing law.