By the 1970s, the National Party (NP) maintained its social contract with conservative white labour and commitment to the protection of white working-class interests that had brought it to power in 1948. Yet as the decade brought economic and political turmoil, the NP defied working-class interests by moving to reform the race-based labour dispensation. Going beyond conventional historical explanations, the chapter argues that this shift was not simply a function of the changing nature of the NP’s support base and priorities. Rather, the move towards reform marked important changes in the local political imaginary and mirrored global shifts in the relations between states, labour, and capital in this period. This chapter employs parliamentary debates, media reports and sources from the secretive Afrikaner Broederbond to examine the changing politics surrounding white labour amid the 1970s’ emerging crisis. It demonstrates that the plight and power of white labour were central preoccupations shaping the political elite’s response to the crisis. Observing widespread labour unrest in countries including Britain, they were adamant that trade unions such as the Mineworkers’ Union be made subservient to the ‘national interest’. This saw the NP abandon its long-standing commitment to the protection of white workers.

In 1977, the NP appointed the Wiehahn Commission to investigate the reform of the apartheid labour legislation. This chapter represents the first extensive utilisation of the Commission’s documentation for historical research, providing new insights into issues of race, labour, and citizenship in the late apartheid state. It shows that white organised labour was at the forefront of the investigation, with unions testifying before and workers’ representatives serving on the Commission. Exposing the limitations of existing race-focused scholarship which views white labour as homogeneous and reform as a ‘scheme’ to safeguard white supremacy, it shows that reform was not in the interest of lesser-skilled whites whose position relied on the rightlessness of black labour. Granting industrial citizenship to Africans undermined the established convergence between rights and race. While the redesign of labour relations had little impact on middle-class and elite whites, for white workers it marked the beginning of the long transition: more than a decade before the end of apartheid, labour reform amounted to the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness and initiated the dismantling of white workers’ racially privileged citizenship.

Property leaves very few people indifferent – it usually has either friends or foes. Friends of property tend to celebrate property’s many contributions to our collective, notably economic, goals. They also highlight property’s role as a bulwark of personal independence. Property’s foes are not very impressed. They insist that, for the vast majority of people, property actually generates and perpetuates inequality and dependence. Some critics resist reconstructive efforts and see these grave defects as perpetual, concluding that property needs to be uprooted rather than reformed.

The IMF addressed fossil fuel subsidies along two strands, both recently increasing in importance. The first strand focused on the lack of a carbon price and on solving this problem from the perspective of neoclassical economics, the second on countries which had had fiscal problems exacerbated by fossil fuel subsidies, and which were induced to reform these subsidies. The IMF’s institutional worldview based on neoclassical economics was the key factor shaping its approach. The second strand had considerable influence on fossil fuel subsidy reform in countries under IMF programs such as Indonesia, whereas the first strand had an impact on the public debate in countries including the UK and Denmark.

Millán Brusslan focuses upon what was unique about Schlegel’s philosophical lens, a lens uniquely suited to capturing social injustice. She undertakes an examination of the roots of Schlegel’s philosophical pluralism and his project of blending philosophy and poetry. She argues that Schlegel’s push to blend disciplines was part of a project to reform our approach to truth, a topic explored in the first and second sections of the paper. The new philosophical lens developed by Schlegel allowed him to see what other thinkers overlooked and to address urgent social issues that needed attention, especially the exclusion of women from philosophy. The reforming spirit of Schlegel’s thought is most systematically developed in an essay on Kant’s Perpetual Peace, and so in the third and fourth sections, Kant’s essay and Schlegel’s critique of it are analyzed to highlight the political implications of Schlegel’s thought.

This chapter sets up theoretical framework for the entire book. The effectiveness of China’s own development and its engagements in Africa cannot be plausibly explained by the existing theories on the China Model. Researchers’ efforts to define tenets and patterns of “Beijing Consensus” all fail to grasp the dynamic complexity in practice. By analyzing the implication of Chinese pragmatism in the market reform, this chapter points out that the essence of modern development, in the form of industrial capitalism, lies in shifting from traditional cultural and religious values to the pursuit of sustainable productivity growth. The change of societal targets requires comprehensive sociopolitical transformation to enable sophisticated division of labor and massive market distribution. However, the simultaneous changes of numerous factors in a society tend to create a chicken-egg dilemma, hindering smooth structural transformation. China was able to escape this trap by having the whole country experiment flexibly and gradually to achieve synergism of development. The coevolutionary pragmatism has also been adopted in China’s cooperation with Africa. Aiming at achieving overall economic growth for partners, Chinese government and enterprises do not stick to definite models, but have open attitude to promote commercial practices in Africa’s diverse conditions.

Samuli Seppänen examines the issue of Chinese Communist Party rules in the organisation of the Party-state and their relationship to the overall rule-of-law system. His focus is on scholarly arguments that centre around how we are to understand ways in which the Party governs itself and society. A curious twist in rule-of-law ideology has emerged: recent institutional reforms developed under the banner of rule of law have coincided with equally prominent efforts to establish a ‘rational’ system of intraparty regulations within the Party. But why continue to promote law-based governance while seemingly working to undermine that governance through the expansion of a Party disciplinary and supervision regime? These moves have prompted some scholars to take on a ‘commonsense’ approach: to assume, following an instrumentalist tradition, that the ‘political’ and the ‘legal’ are not necessarily in tension with each other since they both sit under a system of ‘rule by regulations’. Seppänen problematises the commonsense narrative by describing an alternative way of understanding ‘the political’ in China.

This chapter considers sentiment and sensation as intertwined subgenres of early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It argues that understanding how sentimental forms harness ideas about end times to advocate for change in the first half of the century requires acknowledging how both sentiment and sensation stage dramatic, tension-filled moments. After reviewing recent scholarship on intersections between sentiment and terror and the complex religiosity of nineteenth-century sentimental traditions, the chapter turns to George Lippard’s 1845 novel The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall to illustrate how relationships between fiction, visuality, and theater and performance culture function to create apocalyptic spectacle. Discourses of spectatorship in a sensational novel such as Lippard’s and in a sentimental novel such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) are central to tensions between faith and doubt in an era characterized by both reform movements and vibrant visual and performance cultures.

Chapter 1 develops a theoretical framework for understanding the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in democracies, distinguishing between authoritarian and democratic coercion. Under authoritarian rule, the primary purpose of coercion is to keep the leader in power, and it is deployed with few constraints. In democracies, where governments must place checks on their own power, coercion ought to be deployed primarily to provide security for the citizenry rather than to serve the interests of the leader, constrained by the rule of law, and subject to external accountability. I disaggregate coercion along three dimensions: the extent to which coercion is governed by law or is applied arbitrarily; the strength of external accountability mechanisms; and whether coercion primarily serves leaders’ interests or to protect citizens. I demonstrate that police reform to promote democratic coercion has been relatively rare in democratic Latin America, even as rising crime and violence made security a salient electoral issue. I assess the problem posed by the endurance of authoritarian coercion for democracies and situate this institutional persistence within the structural power of the police, which leads politicians to engage in accommodation with the police, an exchange relationship that creates entrenched interests that favor institutional persistence.

The institutional complementarities of that marked Brazil’s political economy between 1985 and 2018 period were placed under considerable strain by the recession, fiscal crisis, corruption investigations, and political upheaval that culminated in the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. An open question was whether the multiple and overlapping crises of the 2010s would destabilize the institutional equilibrium that had prevailed over the previous generation. To evaluate this question, this chapter summarizes the contributions of this manuscript to our understanding of Brazil’s political economy under democracy. It then describes how past reform efforts failed to move the political economy away from the status quo equilibrium, and the ways in which institutional complementarities shaped the pace and scope of change. It concludes with an evaluation of the “stress test” posed by the Bolsonaro administration, pointing to the importance of changes in the political realm for resolving Brazil’s long-term economic developmental challenge.

Since antiquity, arbitration has been well known in the Italian peninsula.1 Basic rules of arbitration are today spelled out in the Italian civil procedure code (hereinafter CCP). The code was enacted in 1940, but has, since then, undergone radical changes, including a comprehensive reform in 2006.2 Despite the fact that current rules are largely in line with those of other countries and with international legal standards, Italy is generally perceived, by insiders and outsiders alike, as a nonfriendly arbitration country.3

International investment law and arbitration has a long history dating back to the nineteenth century. It has since developed and adapted following the political and societal forces at work both domestically and internationally. The balance between the interests of developing States and developed States and, more fundamentally, between public and private interests have played a key role in this process. It can be seen that the balance struck between these interests at different periods of time explains to a large extent the evolutive features of this field of law. This holds true with regards to the set of rules governing both the relations of foreign investors with the States in which they invest and the settlement of the disputes between them.

To make sense of this evolution and for the purpose of contextualising the analysis of international investment law and arbitration provided in the textbook, Chapter 1 distinguishes between three key stages in its history and analyses the respective societal context and legal features pertaining to each. These stages are: (1) the origin of international investment law and arbitration; (2) its emergence as a proper field of international law; and (3) the rise and then crisis this field of law has known since the 1990s.

By way of context to the detailed analysis of investor–State arbitration conducted in Part III of the textbook, Chapter 10 examines in turn the types of investment-related disputes that can arise and the various dispute settlement mechanisms that can be availed of to settle such disputes. For the types of investment-related disputes, it distinguishes between the different types of State–State disputes and investor–State disputes. For the purpose of examining dispute settlement mechanisms, a distinction is made between the mechanisms made available in international investment agreements (IIAs) to settle investment-related disputes and those that have been used prior to or in parallel to the development of IIA practice to settle ‘single’ disputes or ‘sets’ of disputes. Specific attention is paid to the mechanisms that have been established or contemplated in the 2010s to replace investor–State arbitration in the settlement of investor–State disputes as a reaction to the criticism formulated across civil society against the latter.

In the past four years, Argentina embarked on a significant modernisation of its arbitration law, including the aspect of judicial control over arbitration. This is important to practising lawyers, courts and scholars, given that the legislative reform has provided better defined parameters to assess courts’ intervention in arbitration. Indeed, court’s intervention may manifest itself as a valid implementation of court’s powers of control over arbitration or, in its negative aspect, as definite undue interference with arbitration. The latter would now be undoubtedly in violation of the current applicable law on arbitration, which presently sets forth the principle of minimal court intervention in support of arbitration or to control that due process is respected and there is no violation of public policy.

Property and social privilege are two of the most enduring forms of authority, and families often jealously guard the control and transfer of these sources of influence. This chapter explains the social conventions around the Hindu extended family (encompassing control of property, social alliances, and the politics of mobility and public voice) that govern the intrahousehold distribution of power. After exploring how they have been constructed, I study the unintended consequences of multiple attempts during British colonial rule to legislate gender-equalizing social reforms. The British attempted to homogenize diverse religious, spiritual, and pragmatic traditions into a single code with a tiny elite of highly educated Brahman men at the top. Comfortably, the elite’s sense of “tradition” looked much like the male British colonial ideal of “classical patriarchy” in terms of control of property and social authority. Ironically, this British-Brahman imposition has become integral to India’s legal code. The chapter next details the changes to the ecosystem of norms around women’s traditional property rights, and their enforcement, from independence to contemporary India. Where relevant, I include insights from my field research about the continuity of familial expectations around what it means to be a “good” Hindu son or daughter.