Chapter 3 presents a grandmother’s perspective on child rearing and cultural values in the household of two second-generation Chinese immigrant children. It explores the distribution of childcare responsibilities across generations, the values imparted to and instilled in the children, and the management of caring and teaching across languages at home. Drawing upon both narratives and recorded and transcribed interactions, it examines the family’s use of both Chinese and English during a range of recurrent speech events, such as having dinner, reading stories before bed, and doing homework after school.

Chapter 4 depicts a US elementary school that a second-generation Chinese immigrant child attends. It explores the school’s multicultural ideology and monolingual ethos from the child’s kindergarten teacher’s viewpoint. It further explores how this child’s family language ideology and policy are shaped by his first-generation immigrant parents’ own language limitations in the U.S. and their comparative views on Chinese versus American communicative styles. Through observation and narrated stories, this chapter brings the reader to the child’s elementary-school classroom, his school’s field day and international day, and his parents’ workplaces. It presents a case where not only do the parents fully support the English-only policy and practice at school, but they also are ready and willing to deliberately shift to greater use of English at home, based on their careful cost–benefit assessment of the consequences of the language shift for their family.

Chapter 8 concludes the book with a recapitulation of how the serial narrative ethnographic method sheds light on theories of language shift and cultural adaptation in general; a consideration of some alternative lenses through which to conceptualize the heritage language repertoire; and a dialectical, dialogical, and ecological take on language shift. It ends with projections regarding the trajectory of the heritage language repertoire; a call for shifts from a focus on discrete heritage languages to heritage linguistic repertoires and from static to dynamic views of diaspora with social justice and multilingualism at the core; and a reminder that heritage languages are not static relics but living narratives that evolve in response to tradition, adaptation, and the interplay between the past and the future.

The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

Chapter 5 tackles the question of the applicability of belligerent reprisals in non-international armed conflict. After assessing the merits and difficulties associated with previous reflections on the topic, it devises a new methodology to approach the issue. Then, it puts the notion of belligerent reprisals in relation with the two features of inequality of status between States and non-State armed groups, and equality of rights and obligations for parties to non-international armed conflicts. A careful reading of the travaux préparatoires of Additional Protocol II to the 1949 Geneva Conventions upholds an interpretation that links belligerent reprisals with the latter principle, and that places reciprocity at the basis of both the applicability and the purpose of the measure in non-international armed conflicts. The chapter concludes with the impact of this formalization on such key questions as the requirement of imputability to a State of the original IHL violation and the actual features of the principle of equality. It suggests that the focus be shifted to the idea of equilibrium of rights and obligations, and that belligerent reprisals be seen as a key enabler of it.

Chapter 3 highlights several instances of State practice where the reciprocity paradigm continues to influence belligerent reprisals. Its bearing emerges from those formalizations of the mechanism that stress the purpose of restoring the balance in rights and obligations unduly disturbed by a breach of the laws of armed conflict. The chapter will first retrace this interest in several positions expressed by States before, during, and in the aftermath of the Geneva Diplomatic Conference that led to the adoption of the 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. It will then focus on the provisions of military manuals, with a particular focus on US practice and the latest Department of Defense Law of War Manual. Finally, it will provide an extensive and, under many respects, unprecedented analysis of the Italian case-law on World War II atrocities: this judicial practice, which has been revived only recently, has brought to the fore several elements that are strongly associated with reciprocity. The chapter will thus highlight notable examples in which the reciprocity paradigm contributes to defining the purpose and function of belligerent reprisals.

The Afterword turns to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to reflect upon the broader significance of Shakespeare’s negativity in inspiring our literary and political imaginaries. To break from tragic law, to experience freedom, is to suffer the fear and trembling of becoming something other. It is to experience a transformative mode of thought that opens us imaginatively to what is not – but might be. The negative – this “not” – alienates the divinity of the moment, be it the divine right of kings or more contemporary mystifications of power, and offers a perspective that is in some sense from “beyond”. Negative theology, too, reaches for “something more” as the locus of value and meaning, as the judge of what is. That is why it has a radical political potential. What we usually take “being” to be does not exhaust Being. This is something that negative theology, philosophy, and poetry have always told us. The negative brings us beyond ourselves. Beyond, also, the confines of our own political worldviews, often dominated by modern versions of appropriation and calculation. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our political philosophies.

Julius Caesar presents the theatrical creation of “the spirit of Caesar”. The chapter turns to Hobbes to help articulate how Shakespeare captures the role of the popular imaginary in the generation of the sovereign spirit, the Leviathan that subsumes the raucous multitude. Negation is here central. First, the spirit of Caesar is raised in and through his sacrificial death. Second, we see the power of the people (deciding Rome’s fate) as it is not seen, as it is lost, as it is given away to Antony’s manipulative theatricality and all the future Caesars. The play’s conclusion also reveals what haunts monarchical sovereignty: “a man”. Brutus is negated, but the negation, like Caesar’s before him, raises him to spiritual status. The spirit of Brutus becomes an imaginary rival to the victorious spirit of Caesar. It raises a haunting republican “what if”, a spectral, negative carrier of justice or the common good. Brutus becomes our spirit in the second circle of the audience. The audience is constituted as an alternate crowd, an overarching seat of judgment, able to see the potentially radical implications of this sceptical play: that supposedly divinely ordained sovereignty is an imaginative creation of the theatrical crowd.

In Chapter 4, the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) serves as a case-study to test (and ultimately refute) a purely enforcement-based formalization of belligerent reprisals. In the field of chemical warfare, reciprocity and enforcement are shown to converge (rather than exclude each other) in the operationalization of belligerent reprisals. Reciprocity is seen as inspiring both the purposes associated with the measure (restoring the balance of rights and obligations and countering unlawful military advantage) and the specific traits that it would take (in-kind breach). In the "war of the cities", belligerents resorted to reprisals with purposes that cannot be encapsulated in the enforcement paradigm. These included the function of ensuring equality of opportunities (as a form of negative reciprocity) and that of strengthening, enacting and agreeing on new standards of conduct when the specific content of applicable rules was not clear or settled (as an aspect of positive reciprocity). As a result, belligerent reprisals appear as a highly flexible tool by which parties to an armed conflict bargain, approve or refuse, and police the concrete legal framework governing wartime interactions.

Chapter 1 places the institution of belligerent reprisals in relation with the two conceptual frameworks of reciprocity and enforcement. First, it sketches the trajectories by which international law has approached the phenomenon of belligerent reprisals, identifying extant prohibitions and clarifying the requirements for their lawful adoption. After recalling outstanding questions in the international regulation of the mechanism, it describes the two paradigms that legal theory could draw from to conceptualize belligerent reprisals. On the one hand stands reciprocity, as embodied chiefly in the termination or suspension of the operation of a treaty as a consequence of its breach; on the other, the paradigm of enforcement as manifested in countermeasures. Having described their main tenets, the chapter shows how these two blueprints, despite co-existing in the early theories on belligerent reprisals, have come to be seen as mutually exclusive, thereby offering two clearly distinct alternatives for the following formalization of the purpose and function of the mechanism.