The treatment of North American Indigenous nations as domestic rather than foreign nations is deeply woven into the political-legal fabric of the United States. Even before the United States could exert any real authority in vast regions of Native North America, US officials fancifully defined the independent Indigenous nations whose territories they sought to expropriate as falling under the preeminent sovereignty of the United States. The customary exclusion of US–Indigenous relations from the history of American foreign relations reflected and reinforced this imperial project. Of course, Indigenous nations were, and are, sovereign peoples. This chapter provides a roadmap for those endeavoring to narrate histories that more accurately reflect the nation-to-nation dynamics of US–Indigenous relations. Drawing on the work of Native American and borderlands historians, along with those of Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars more broadly, it offers guidance on how to engage with frameworks such as settler colonialism and methodologies such as ethnohistory to contribute to building a critical and ethical body of work that explicitly frames US–Indigenous relations as international rather than domestic history.

The geologic as an archive foments the naturalization of human conflict in African literature. African literature makes certain relations a natural property of the geological character of the land. It makes it impossible to think of social and political alterations without reflecting violent eruptions. Geological structures not only are presented as arenas for human activities but naturalize human perception and anti-colonial conflict mirrored through landscapes, which in turn become caches of resilient memories, rallying points for the imagination of new futures and struggles, and prompts and symbols of new archives. In the texts selected for study, geological metaphors allow a writer such as Geoffrey Ndhlala to locate individuals and societies in terms of larger patterns, such as strangers and hosts, and to relativize them. A contrast is also established between sedentary valley people, such as in The River Between, whose horizons are dangerously restricted, and walkers and travelers, such as in Cry, the Beloved Country and Long Walk to Freedom, who achieve a larger picture. These contrasts and comparisons are not meant to be exhaustive but are illustrative of how the geologic is deployed as shared politics and archives.

This chapter conceptualizes deference as an international court’s acceptance of the state’s exercise of authority. It presents a method for measuring deference that combines case outcomes, interpretation, and remedial orders. The chapter introduces a novel theoretical account of deference. This explanation centers on a court’s strategic space, or the range of possible decisions that will satisfy a court’s legal and political imperatives, and argues that two political factors determine this strategic space: formal independence and political fragmentation. The former concerns the formal rules that safeguard independence while the latter refers to the heterogeneity of states’ preferences. These two constraints affect deference by way of their impact on a court’s legitimacy and the feasibility and credibility of state resistance. The theoretical account also considers the role of persuasive argumentation, public legitimation, and past resistance. This explanation is distinguished from accounts that emphasize judicial support networks and political norms and legal culture.

The elementary but necessary observation is made that memory is required to perceive events in time in relation to each other. The implication is that some type of forgetting must be involved when events fail to form a relation and are perceived as just being one thing happening after another. Memory and forgetting are first examined in terms of traditional psychological metaphor, that memories are contained within memory buffers. While Gestalt certainly involves memory, it does not seem to operate in terms of stored memories. A larger conception of memory is required, and this is provided by examining physical systems that embody memory without encoding or storing anything. Several examples of both deterministic and stochastic physical systems that embody memory are offered that broaden the scope of what can be a memory system.

This chapter explores the debate about the post-1890s expansion of the United States. Taking as a starting point the creation of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in the 1960s, the chapter suggests that the Left has shaped our field’s discourse since that transformative decade. What constitutes and orients this intellectual movement has, however, changed over time: from the New Left, to the Cultural Left, to the Millennial Left. None of these three organic traditions regarded itself as a rigid School of Thought. Nevertheless, these three manifestations denaturalized, in turn, capitalism, nationalism, and liberalism by presenting each “-ism” as a synonym for US imperial power. Collectively, these three Left Turns have inspired field-defining debates about military power, free trade, cultural hegemony, and legal exception. The discussions have shaped the questions, methodologies, and interpretive tendencies of US foreign relations history. Rather than judging the cumulative effects of this six-decade debate, this chapter illuminates its often unappreciated genealogy. Hopefully, thinking historically about the historiography of US foreign relations history can suggest generative vistas for the future.

An enduring sense of deep historical time continues to anchor and guide writing by African novelists, no less so as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century. One of the most powerful of such fictions lately is the debut novel by South African writer Mphuthumi Ntabeni, whose The Broken River Tent plays out as a psychic drama in which Maqoma, the nineteenth-century Xhosa chief who fought the British as they tried to settle the Cape Colony, is in dialogue with Phila, a young South African negotiating the disappointments of his country after the demise of apartheid. Ntabeni is in touch, imaginatively, with a long line of historical novelists which begins with such iconic figures as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje, who in the early twentieth century revisited historical episodes of 100 years previously. While The Broken River Tent follows Chinua Achebe’s example in taking some reference points from European modernism, it does so without interpreting the colonial encounter through the paradigm of classical tragedy. Instead, following a recent revival of the militancy of South Africa’s Black Consciousness era, Ntabeni’s invocation of Maqoma implies a renewed emphasis on anti-(neo)colonial vigilance.

Law’s governance seemingly faces an uncertain future. In one direction, the alternative to law’s governance is a dangerous state of disorder and, potentially, existential threats to humanity. That is not the direction in which we should be going, and we do not want our escalating discontent with law’s governance to give it any assistance. Law’s governance is already held in contempt by many. In the other direction, if we pursue technological solutions to the imperfections in law’s governance, there is a risk that we diminish the importance of humans and their agency. If any community is contemplating transition to governance by technology, it needs to start its impact assessment with the question of whether the new tools are compatible with sustaining the foundational conditions themselves.

This chapter introduces the Rashomon effect – a cinematic reference – to illustrate the power of perspectivism. We extensively present details of the UK Post Office case concerning their attempts to deny defects in software provided by Fujitsu.

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution and current dynamics in international administrative law, emphasizing the unprecedented growth in international administrative tribunals (IATs) over the past three decades. The introduction outlines the structural, quantitative, and qualitative changes reshaping this field, including the expansion in the use of non-staff personnel and the increase in the importance of human rights within international administrative law. The chapter highlights IATs’ convergence on common issues across diverse institutions, and explains the study’s approach and methodology, focussing on jurisprudential commonalities and the emergence of shared procedural standards across tribunals.

This chapter analyses the public and private governance structure of the EU AI Act (AIA) and its associated ecosystem of compliance and conformity. Firstly, the interaction of public and private governance in the making of AI law meant to concretise the rules in the AIA is analysed. Secondly, the focus shifts to the interaction of public and private governance in the Act’s enforcement through compliance, conformity and public authorities. Thirdly, it is argued that the EU legislature has neither fully developed public private governance nor the interaction between the two. As a result, there are many gaps in the involvement of civil society in compliance, conformity and enforcement of private regulations, in particular harmonized technical standards, Codes of Practice and Codes of Conduct. Moreover, the extreme complexity of the AIA’s governance structure is likely to trigger litigation between AI providers and deployers and the competent surveillance authorities, or more generally in B2B and B2C relations.

This chapter explores the significance of Lagos as a repository of memory for Nigerian writers. It brings works of contemporary writers such as Sefi Atta and Teju Cole in conversation with older representations of Lagos. While the more recent novels destabilize earlier binaries, they institute other dualities through their relationship to time. The chapter pays attention to how versions of Lagos – past and present – are contrasted to make the cityscape a template for measuring temporal effects. Crucially, the nation-state is the point of reference and the ultimate objective of progress. Lagos is no longer measured against the village but situated in transnational competition with European and American cities where Nigerians commute in person or imaginatively. Through a comparative and diachronic reading, the chapter offers an archive of Lagos representation while arguing that the authorial emphasis on national time as homogeneous often rests on a corresponding de-emphasis of the subaltern times signaled by narrative polyphony.

This case highlights how colorblindness connects with the critique of liberalism by emphasizing individualism and the notion that ignoring race will lead to equality, which overlooks the systemic inequalities and historical injustices that shape social dynamics. This approach promotes a false understanding of justice, resisting the structural changes needed to address the true root causes of racial disparities, ultimately maintaining the status quo rather than fostering true equity. Refuting color-blindness is needed in order to address issues of racism on a systems level.