Foreignness is generally viewed as a liability for the multinational enterprise, negatively affecting strategic fit and the successful transfer of firm assets abroad. Using semiotics – the study of how language systems convey meaning – and the Walt Disney Company’s experiences in internationalization, this chapter provides an illustrative example of a focal transcultural ethnography which develops the notion of semantic fit as a necessary complement to strategic fit and formalizes a conceptual model of recontextualization – the process by which firm assets take on new meanings in distinct cultural environments.

Clare Johnson provides a careful discussion of the “other” six sacraments that the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church celebrate. Relying on the liturgical books themselves, she investigates their biblical roots, the logic behind their coherence, and their theological significance.

Chapter 4 uses assemblage theory, which is an anti-colonialist theory of social and spatial construction that has traction in the Global South, to show how urban inequalities become assembled, disassembled, and reassembled over time and yet how grassroots activism for social and environmental justice and for community resilience can change the form and functions of cities. Buchanan arose at a time when the role of urban planning in the US cities was growing but largely conceived as the top–down imposition of order and dominant values on urban space. However, we are increasingly aware of just how contested and evolving the practice of urban planning and urban development are. Case studies of green gentrification from Los Angeles, California and Accra, Ghana illustrate the competing ideological perspectives on resilience in cities and the potential for and yet tentativeness of progress towards social justice in urban planning. The chapter explores the connections of racism in American land use with colonialism in the Global South, and the commonalities in the experiences of grassroots social-justice movements across cities worldwide.

Antimicrobial resistance is a multidisciplinary issue that has been high in the global agenda since the 2015 WHO Global Action Plan (GAP) and the 2016 UNGA Declaration. The Quadripartite Coalition has set up a consolidated global governance structure to coordinate AMR responses, including a Global Leaders Group, an Independent Panel of Experts and a stakeholders’ platform. At the national level, countries have set up more or less formal mechanisms to coordinate AMR management, develop and implement National Action Plans.

This chapter will draw on these pilot experiences to identify options for broader One Health governance and regulation. The chapter will examine global and regional governance and regulation of AMR – focusing on the EU as a case study – to explore possible applications to other priority areas such as zoonotic diseases.

Chapter 5 traces the history of a number of existing UN mechanisms which represent the interests of particular vulnerable groups in the international system (persons with disabilities, women, and children). The aim of this analysis is to see what types of normative discourses have found traction and led to the development of institutions to represent these vulnerable groups, in order to ascertain the type of normative arguments that would gain support in arguing for international institutions to represent future generations. An important lesson from the case studies is that a normative discourse in which development concerns feature prominently, has been a common thread running through the history of these UN mechanisms. The chapter analyses the differences and similarities between arguments which justify the institutions which have been put in place to represent these vulnerable groups, with arguments used to justify institutions to represent future generations.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, member states of the World Health Organisation (WHO) agreed to ‘draft and negotiate a WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’ (Pandemic Treaty).

Proposals for a Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) System were included from the earliest drafts of the Pandemic Treaty. Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) is a transactional mechanism with its origins in international environmental law, where access to genetic resources for use in research and development is provided in exchange for a share of the benefits associated with their use. The purpose is to generate benefits that can be channelled into environmental conservation and sustainable use activities in countries where the genetic resources originate.

The PABS System could be a mechanism for incorporating One Health considerations into the Pandemic Treaty, but this will depend on its design and implementation. This chapter analyses the proposed PABS System in the Pandemic Treaty negotiating texts to determine whether it constitutes a genuine attempt to apply a One Health approach to pathogen ABS.

In the technological wave of the twenty-first century, artificial intelligence (AI), as a transformative technology, is rapidly reshaping our society, economy, and daily life. Since the concept of AI was first proposed, this field has experienced many technological innovations and application expansions. Artificial intelligence has experienced three booms in the past half century and has developed rapidly. In the 1960s, marked by the Turing test, the application of knowledge reasoning systems and other technologies set off the first boom. Computer scientists at that time began to explore how to let computers simulate human intelligence. Early AI research focused on rule systems and logical reasoning. The rise of expert systems and artificial neural networks brought a second wave of enthusiasm (McDermott, 1982). The third boom is marked by deep learning and big data, especially the widespread application of artificial intelligence-generated content represented by ChatGPT. During this period, AI technology shifted from traditional rule systems to methods that relied on algorithms to learn patterns from data. The rise of deep learning enabled AI to achieve significant breakthroughs in areas such as image recognition and natural language processing.

Companies can innovate their business models to increase nonoperational profits, which helps reduce their sensitivity to supply–demand mismatches. Such companies have different supply chain priorities. Instead of focusing on perfectly matching supply with demand, they aim to improve cash flow management and reduce the cash conversion cycle. They can also benefit from supply chain finance solutions to offset the negative impact of their strategies on supply chain partners. This chapter presents an in-depth analysis of innovative business development with a focus on (1) inventory financing, (2) inventory securitization, (3) vendor-put insurance, (4) reverse factoring, (5) dynamic discounting, and (6) the letter of credit.

This chapter investigates how advantaged group members perpetuate and deepen inequality, setting the stage for Chapter 4, which addresses their actions to reduce inequality in solidarity with disadvantaged groups. The chapter begins by discussing various forms of material, symbolic and systemic advantages that benefit advantaged groups. It then explores the psychological mechanisms that enable these groups to deny their privilege and engage in competitive victimhood, positioning themselves as aggrieved to justify their entitlement to discriminatory and repressive tactics. Further, this chapter also addresses more extreme manifestations of these behaviours, such as repression, hate crimes, genocide, and colonisation. The psychological processes that sustain these actions, including diffusion of responsibility, system justification, and desensitisation, are discussed. The chapter also considers the intersectional nature of privilege, highlighting how different identities, such as gender and economic status, influence the experience of advantage and perpetration of discrimination and violence.

This chapter explores the question of whether the epistemology of the secret of international law and the necessities it puts in place can be resisted. No definite answer to that question is sought here and only tentative reflections on the possibility of resisting the epistemology of the secret are provided in the following paragraphs. This chapter proceeds as follows. This chapter starts by elaborating on why it matters to spare no effort to resist the epistemology of the secret and rein in its consequences. The chapter then recalls that a mere termination or discontinuation of the epistemology of the secret, of its necessities, and of all the literary, hermeneutical, critical, economic, and ideological attitudes it entails is an impossibility. Resistance, it is subsequently argued, can only take the form of an act of obnubilation, a notion whose concrete implications for international legal thought and practice are subsequently spelled out.