The Introduction traces the main themes of the volume: boundaries and networks, religious innovation, and violence as an agent of societal change. It offers a tribute to the inspirational scholarship and intellectual influence of Brent Shaw. An analysis of the Demna mosaic from Cap Bon in North Africa is used as an example of the types of overlapping topics that inspired Brent Shaw and this volume.

We have seen thus far that the intellectual underpinning of the 1990 Act (as amended) - the embryo’s rather vague ‘special status’ - has not changed since the Act’s inception. Moreover, we have seen that any attempts change the intellectual basis of the Act, for example the 2008 Act, have been cautious at best. Thus, as a way of mapping the landscape to date, and also of clearing a path towards novel approaches to regulating the embryo, this chapter undertakes two important tasks: (1) an academic analysis of the caution mentioned above - a fade from discourse - which has only intensified the confusion surrounding the ‘special’ legal status of the embryo; and (2) an exploration of some of the ways in which the unclear nature, source, and extent of the legal status of the embryo could be clarified by exploring two key normative legal tools that are often employed to provide certainty: binding objects within a regulatory space, and drawing boundaries. Ultimately, this chapter posits that the root of the vague nature of the embryo’s ‘special status’ is a prevailing uncertainty regarding how we ought to treat embryos in vitro, because, by its very nature, it does not easily fit into normative social, moral or legal categories.

This chapter explores the gulf that existed in British India between theories of linear boundaries and unitary sovereign territory on the one hand, and precarious practices of bordering on the other. It analyses three distinct periods of bordering common to the northwest and northeast frontiers. In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial officials sought to instantiate partially porous borders that would provide security while allowing themselves freedom of action in frontier regions. The limitations of these schemes led to a widespread flurry of bordering in the 1860s and 1870s led by administrators ‘on the spot’. Much of this activity contradicted orders from superiors, and took the form of breaking existing boundaries as well as instantiating new ones. A third period, around the turn of the twentieth century, saw heightened attention to international boundaries. These borders remained fragmented and limited. They also had disruptive effects on internal boundaries, reopening questions over where the frontier began.

The Islamic empires, and specifically the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, were not antithetical to the Westphalian principles of international order. The claim of Islamic and Ottoman incompatibility had more to do with European colonial ambitions. Altering their universalist claims, Ottoman rulers engaged in significant adjustments to Western principles of international diplomacy and international relations. Studying the Islamic world provides insights into how a regional order might be based on a shared collective identity rather than on material dominance by a hegemonic power. The Ottoman Empire provides a perfect case to examine adjustment at the peak of Western imperial expansion and confrontation with the West.

How will political sociology help us discern and analyze such changes now and in the next few decades? The future of politics is as uncertain as ever, but a brief overview of the history of political sociology may offer some clues to the theoretical challenges and opportunities ahead. For convenience, we divide the recent history of political sociology into three periods, suggesting that the field is now entering a fourth period with an expanding focus.

In the 1990s, the idea that culture had a role to play in political sociology was relatively novel. Identifying sociologists who fit this emerging interdisciplinary subfield posed a challenge. Today, it is difficult to imagine a sociologist, or even a political scientist, who would argue against the importance of culture to politics. It has become de rigueur to acknowledge culture in political analysis. If anything, the field of politics and culture borders on oversubscription. Methodological issues that dominated early syntheses (Berezin 1994, 1997b) remain salient. These include epistemological discussions of culture as an explanatory factor in social analysis (e.g., Berezin 2014a; Wagner-Pacifici 2017) distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methodology (Goertz and Mahoney 2012).

Geneviève Cartier introduces cities ‘as both subjects and agents on the international stage’. Traditionally seen as creatures of domestic law alone, cities are increasingly actively engaged in what is sometimes called ‘local foreign policy’. The legal boundary crossings implicated in such local/foreign action require a form of ‘normative mediation’ between the different fields of law involved: local government, constitutional, and international. She develops a double-facing conception of administrative law in which these boundaries do not disappear but are revealed to be ‘more porous than is usually assumed’. The resulting processes of normative travel and transfer, as in several of the other double-facing analyses in this volume, go in two directions. External norms and practices affect the content of domestic understandings of city power, while cities rely on their traditional status in domestic law to shape their actions on the international stage.

Asha Kaushal takes as her subjects the relationships between immigration law and constitutional law, and between external and internal sovereignty. Kaushal focuses in particular on the importance of immigration to the constitution of ‘the people’. As she writes: ‘Immigration is both an external objective of the constitutional order and a modifier of that order’. Her chapter approaches these connections between outward projection and inward constitution by way of a conceptual and historical exploration of the relationship between citizenship and constituent power. These concepts, it turns out, surprisingly, are not often discussed in the same frame. Kaushal details what she calls the ‘division of labour between immigration law and constitutional law’ and the foundational role of the internal/external distinction in that division, through a rich historical overview ranging from Emer de Vattel’s public international law to modern Canadian judicial decisions on the Charter’s demands in the context of immigration law.

Helmut Philipp Aust’s topic is the connection between foreign relations law and domestic conceptions of democracy, and in particular the question of ‘who gets to decide on the international commitments of a state?’. Populism and a broader inward–turn in the politics of many Western states, Aust writes, mean that ‘there is a growing level of discontent with the way that the external sphere is impacting on the internal’. These changing perceptions of ’the international’ filter through into different conceptions of foreign relations law, which, in turn, affect the ability of states to cooperate internationally. The chapter presents two variants of foreign relations law – a ’closed’ version prevalent in the USA, and a German version traditionally more open to international cooperation. Through a comparative analysis, Aust shows how the openness to international cooperation that was long seen to lie at the heart of the German Basic Law, is coming under increasing pressure.

Jacco Bomhoff is principally concerned with the character of constitutionally salient boundaries. In its first part, this chapter explores the contrast between, on the one hand, recognition of the legally mediated character of borders and jurisdictional boundaries in critical scholarship, and, on the other hand, unquestioning determinations of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in judicial practice. The second part of this chapter, then, approaches the question of the character and effects of constitutional boundaries by way of a case study on mobility. Mobility, in its many different forms – its restriction and its excesses, for individuals and for corporations – lies at the heart of many pressing contemporary challenges. The legal treatment of mobility, however, is fragmented across many different specialised fields – from immigration law, to tax law, to international arbitration – in which constitutionalist concerns are rarely central. The chapter aims to address this lacuna by sketching the contours of an ‘outward-facing constitutionalism’ which could provide the conceptual and normative means to scrutinise the constitutional implications of the regulation of ‘access’ and ‘exit’ for both individuals and corporate actors.

Audrey Macklin engages with Canadian case law on the ‘deportability’ of non-citizen residents, as a case study on how the protection offered by constitutional rights guarantees is undermined in the field of immigration law. This project, she emphasizes, ‘is not a “whodunit” – everyone knows the culprit is sovereignty, conventionally understood’. The question to be explored, rather is how this conception of sovereignty and its exclusionary effects are ‘operationalized in a modern constitution, and at what cost’. Macklin explores this operationalization of sovereignty in the case law on the state’s right to exclude. The guiding image for Macklin’s investigation is not so much the two-faced image of Janus, but, following the sociologist Didier Bigo, the metaphor of the ‘Mobius strip’ – ‘a rectangular ribbon that has been twisted and then joined’. Whether any claim for constitutional protection raises what Macklin calls an ‘inside problem’ for a constitutional order, is a matter of perspective. Importantly, this alternative metaphor does not deny the existence of insides and outsides: ‘it does not contemplate a borderless world, but rather one where borders are relational and perspectival [&] dynamic and contingent, but no less real’.

In the fifth chapter I discuss the more problematic ramifications of imagining “Natural Orissa” as a homogenous historical homeland. By 1924, the colonial government had begun earnestly discussing the formation of a separate province of Odisha, and in 1931 the Orissa Boundary Commission was established to delineate the territorial scope of the new province. The formation of a geographical Odisha involved several contradictions that had to be resolved. Perhaps the most significance was the presence of the many “tribal” (non-Odia-speaking, adivasi) communities, whose members comprised about one-fourth of the population of the proposed Odisha province. Through a reading of memoranda sent by various public organizations to the Orissa Boundary Commission I trace the developing justifications for the inclusion of adivasi communities into Odisha. Unsurprisingly, these justifications were largely based on claims about the exceptional ability of the “ancient” Odia community to absorb non-Odia populations into its fold. Couched in religious rhetoric, the memoranda display a paternalist civilizing discourse in which Odia-speaking people were presented as benevolent civilizers of the tribal communities. Such discourses were largely successful, as the diverse inhabitants of the region were subsumed into the emerging Odia political identity without being offered social parity.

This chapter describes the growing imperative in nineteenth-century India to carve out geographically distinct social-linguistic zones where only one Indian language could officiate. By doing a transnational history of the shifting understanding of the sociopolitical role of popular mother tongues, I show how the use of “vernacular” as a common epithet for some Indian languages came to imbue these tongues with meanings that drew from European debates on language and freedom. Once Britain colonized India, major Indian languages came to be called vernacular. The “vernacular” in its Indian career was an underdeveloped mother tongue whose recuperation and use in education, revenue, and judicial administration was thought to be crucial to liberal governance. Through a history of successive colonial policy decisions to use vernaculars in education and governance in India as well as the concomitant local debates about boundaries between the geographical domains of Indian languages such as the Odia/Bengali debate of the 1860s and 1870s, I illustrate the peculiar politics of colonial vernacularization. The very processes of insistent localization and denigration of Indian languages created the conditions of possibility of the simultaneous empowerment of these languages as languages of state. To be vernacular was to be both popular and elite in regional India.