This chapter deals with the German position on States and their organs. It is divided into five parts: territorial sovereignty; political independence; Statehood and recognition; organs of the State and their status; and State succession. The first part deals with the principles underpinning Germany’s delivery of humanitarian assistance; Germany’s view on the Kashmir conflict as an internal matter of India; Germany rebuking the United States for recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, Germany’s criticism of Russia’s passportisation in Ukraine, Germany’s position on Georgia’s territorial integrity regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two German court rulings on the legality of Kuwait Airline’s practice of not transporting Israeli citizens; Germany granting refugee status to two activists from Hong Kong; and a German court’s decision on the return of an Iraqi citizen in a criminal case and possible links to the principle of male captus. The second part, political independence, deals with Germany opposing Facebook’s Libra currency on grounds of State sovereignty and advocating regaining digital sovereignty; and the meeting of Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas with Joshua Wong. The third, statehood and recognition, focuses on Germany confirming its non-recognition of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

Perhaps due to the influence of the great man myth of history, the Constitution of the United States of America is rarely named as participating in the shaping of the just war tradition, let alone being a just war document. Yet the concerns of war and just war thinking pervade the original document and the Bill of Rights as well as and some of its later amendments and are visible not only in the story of its creation but, even more significantly, in its rhetoric. Moreover, even as it and other constitutions are the primary expression of modern legal thought, it manifests a particular way of doing just war thinking that sits uncomfortably within modern just war theory. The way it inscribes sovereignty – at both personal and national levels – while diffusing authority exacerbates the wicked problems of climate-shaped conflicts, especially those relating to nonstate actors and global inequities.

Legitimation is spatialized, in its invocation and reproduction of hierarchies as well as the claiming of particular domains. This chapter examines two spatialized practices: extensity as the projection of scale and depth, and territoriality as the demarcation of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. It looks firstly at lateral legitimation across Bagamoyo district in these spatialized forms. While extensity is the predominant dynamic in this field, mimicking the architecture of the Tanzanian state, there are also territorial practices, especially when angled downward to the hallowed ‘community’. Second, the chapter examines NGO extensity at the outreaches of Bagamoyo’s ‘sovereign borders’ in underserved Kibindu, where developmental activity was solicited and there proved considerable ‘space to govern’. In this context, territoriality fell away as a basis for legitimation and instead Bagamoyo’s most extensive NGO served to ‘co-produce’ the state. However, the situation was strongly reversed in urbanizing Kiharaka, wherein NGO territoriality through explicit practices of inclusion and exclusion found traction. In the divergent contexts of Kibindu and Kiharaka, extensity and territoriality therefore proved to be competing forms of spatial power.

Voluntarism, and its associated virtue, has long been a legitimation device in the construction of public authority. It has been theorized, at least in Western political philosophy, as a counterweight to the excesses of big government or big business. In some studies in Africa, voluntarism has been married to instrumentalist accounts of doing politics. This chapter highlights the nuanced complexities in invoking voluntarism, its ideational and material components, and the multifaceted opportunities and obligations it affords. It demonstrates continuity between government and non-government around the production of this form of authority. However, legitimation is a practice negotiated by its ‘publics’. In this case, this comprises volunteers who must negotiate the vertical, often extractive pressures from external actors of their physical and emotional labours as well as lateral contestation by peers of their own authority to act in the interests of Others. This chapter explores the material and ideational legitimation that volunteer networks afford non-governmental organizations as well as the negotiation and contestation of voluntarism’s work on the part of volunteers themselves.

One of the starkest legitimation practices lies in how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) positioned themselves vis-à-vis the organs of the state and vice versa. There is no more enduring division in political science than that posited between ‘state’ and ‘society’: a divide that is blurred in practice but remains ideationally pertinent in Tanzania’s political landscape. NGOs work the state–society ideational divide and garner capital from both. This chapter maps the use of state relations but also ‘state-like practices’ by Bagamoyo’s two international NGOs. One was heavily aligned with government practices to the point of mimicry and indeed co-extended with and co-produced the state. This worked to great effect in some cases and to abject failure in others. The other international NGO, by contrast, was increasingly distant from and antagonistic to local and national government, meaning its fortunes were precisely reversed. In both cases, however, positionalities were not fixed. Both NGOs varied their stances towards local government when expedient, highlighting how legitimation is continually recalibrated. Positionality vis-à-vis the state is thus fluid and ambiguous but remains strategic and deliberately visible, in crafting the space to govern.

Human rights have become a principle and a value that have increasingly gained the support of various segments of society. Human rights are often associated with democracy, the rule of law, the civilizing process and human dignity. They are also associated with the idea that everyone, anywhere and regardless of their citizenship status, has basic rights, which must be respected by others and the state (see, among others, Sen, 2004).

The chapter examines institutional investor stewardship in Malaysia from three perspectives: the code, its context and challenges. It outlines the history and background of Malaysian institutional investor stewardship, culminating in the Malaysian Code for Institutional Investors (MCII). The chapter then analyses the MCII stewardship principles and its oversight in detail. A subsequent section of the chapter appraises the Malaysian stewardship journey by evaluating the adoption of the MCII by asset owners and asset managers through a review of their compliance statements. The chapter further sets out the broader context which these institutional investors operate within. It highlights the prevalence of Government Linked Investment Companies (GLICs) and Government Linked Companies (GLCs), which are arguably a result of Malaysia’s characterisation as an emerging economy and a developmental state. The chapter notes that the impetus for the MCII was driven by industry in accordance with the Corporate Governance Blueprint. However, what constitutes industry in Malaysia is inextricably linked to the state via its ownership and control of GLICs and GLCs. Therefore, apart from concerns about the quality of stewardship statements and ownership engagement, structural issues such as the breadth and depth of state ownership and control of institutional investors challenge effective stewardship practice.

This opening chapter raises the research questions that motivate this book. It briefly introduces the state of mineral exploration in China and the ensuing impacts on the Chinese economy and society and pinpoints the puzzling existence of a contained resource curse in China. After critically reviewing the existing debate on the resource curse, it proposes an original theory about how mineral resources affect state–capital–labor relations, which can explain the empirical observations in China. This chapter lays out the roadmap of the whole book and explains the research methods and data sources for the empirical analysis in the following chapters.

This introductory chapter outlines the problem of social order and the main argument of the book: that the question of what holds complex and diverse societies together has become – and has remained – a philosophical puzzle in modern political science, a presupposition that has been built into our concepts, theories, and normative commitments. Having outlined the argument, the contents and the structure of the book, the chapter then provides a short background for the problem of social order in political science. The chapter recalls how this problem emerged as such in modern social and political discourse in the evolution of the modern concepts of state, nation, and society and discusses how the relations among these concepts provided nineteenth-century political thought with a solution to the problem of social order predicated on a fusion of nationality and statehood.

This chapter describes and analyzes how British pluralists in the early twentieth century critiqued the fusion of nationality and statehood that had hitherto provided a conceptual foundation for political science, and how their critique exposed the discipline to the problem of social order. The chapter also treats the contemporary critical reception of British pluralism in America.

This chapter considers two strands of research that emerged from the literature on power: first, a renewed theoretical and empirical interest in the role of state institutions in political life; second, a normative preference for, and theorizing of, participation. Both, the chapter shows, ended up restating the problem of social order.

The rural economy will predominate in almost any preindustrial society – perhaps particularly so in China. No barriers comparable to medieval Europe’s guild rules made large sectors into urban monopolies; and though China was probably the world’s most urbanized large society c. 1200, and perhaps still as urban as Europe in the late 1600s, much of its elite lived in the countryside rather than in cities or fortified castles (especially between roughly 1100 and 1550). Moreover, the property systems prevailing in China’s most commercialized areas created incentives for most nonelite families to remain in the countryside, transferring labor not needed for farming to handicrafts without moving to town. The result was a highly diversified rural economy and cities that, though often quite large, were much smaller than the rural surplus could have supported.