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The Northwest Europeans were latecomers to Atlantic slavery and had to make do with second-best trading locations. It was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic growth of the English and Dutch that allowed them to break into the Iberian Atlantic system rather than the two countries needing the slave trade to stimulate their economic development. Northwest Europeans never broached the Portuguese strongholds of Guinea-Bissau and Angola as slave-supply centers and were able to use Brazilian gold to hold their own in the Bight of Benin. And the British and the Dutch sold many of the slaves that they did buy to the Spanish Americas. The British made repeated unsuccessful attempts to break into the Brazilian market. The traffic was widely supported in most European countries, given that preparation for a successful voyage absorbed a large labor force and many thousands of investors.
How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?
In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?
Britain remained the world’s superpower in 1931, so how did it lose its Empire, become dependent upon the USA and reimagine itself as a European nation by 1976 and how did Briton’s respond?
The preliminary reference procedure is a crucial tool for EU law enforcement. Yet, its usage varies greatly across the Member States. This paper deals with a notable case in which EU justice has not been mobilized: Greece. Until 2023, Greek judges had not made any preliminary references in the migration and asylum fields, despite significant migrant flows. This study investigates why Greece, with its critical migration challenges, became a zero-reference case.
Drawing on empirical and doctrinal research, this paper tests two main hypotheses. The first hypothesis, derived from the “judicial empowerment thesis,” suggests that Greek judges may have been hesitant to refer cases due to political or institutional factors. The second hypothesis, based on scholarship highlighting the role of lawyers and civil society in promoting EU litigation, predicts that the absence of references reflects a lack of activist lawyers, skills, or resources.
The findings challenge common assumptions, revealing that Greek judges are not inherently reluctant to refer cases. Instead, obstacles to access to justice and civil society’s attitudes help understand the absence of references. Going beyond judges, this paper explores how perceptions among migrant supporters, their legal consciousness, and traditional modes of action contribute to the lack of pressure for preliminary references.
This research contributes to understanding the complexities surrounding judicial dialogue and enforcement of EU law. It offers insights into how the interplay of institutional, legal, and social factors shapes legal mobilization and strategic litigation.
Why does religion continue to emerge as a flashpoint in the age of secularization? Although models of religious resurgence suggest that religious cleavages are more prominent in the modern era, other models continue to show declining religious involvement. What is needed is a theory that can observe both resurgence and secularization at the same time. I argue that globalization—and the flow of people across borders, in particular—provokes a religious backlash at the societal level due to its secularizing effects. As the public is exposed to new and diverse religious traditions, religiosity declines; as a result, however, religious practitioners become more aggressive toward other religious groups. I test this theory using data on globalization, religious discrimination, and religious practice. I find that types of globalization dealing with the flow of people and information across borders have an outsize effect on societal religious discrimination, or SRD. This effect, however, is contingent on a decline in religious practice. This study suggests that religious resurgence can take place in secularizing environments, and that both resurgence and secularization share root causes.
Strategic litigation plays a crucial role in advancing human rights in the digital age, particularly in cases where data subjects, such as migrants and protection seekers, experience significant power imbalances. In this Article, we consider strategic litigation as part of broader legal mobilization efforts. Although some emerging studies have examined contestation against digital rights and migrant rights separately using legal mobilization frameworks, scholarship on legal mobilization concerning the use of automated systems on migrants and asylum seekers is scarce. This Article aims to address this gap by investigating the extent to which EU law empowers strategic litigants working at the intersection of technology and migration. Through an analysis of five specific cases of contestation and in-depth interviews, we explore how EU data protection law is leveraged to protect the digital rights of migrants and asylum seekers. This analysis takes a socio-legal perspective, analyzing the opportunities presented by EU data protection law and how civil society organizations (CSOs) utilize them in practice. Our findings reveal that the pre-litigation phase is particularly onerous for strategic litigants in this field, requiring a considerable investment of resources and time before even reaching the litigation stage. We illustrate this phase as akin to “climbing a wall,” characterized by numerous hurdles that CSOs face and the strategies they employ to overcome them.
In 2020, amid aggressive and inflammatory political discourse and an unprecedented wave of violent attacks against migration Non-Governmental Organizations and their staff, the Greek Government sought to establish a new legal framework for the registration of Non-Governmental Organizations active in the fields of international protection, migration and social inclusion, and their members. This Article aims at providing an overview of the EU-law based litigation brought by Greek Civil Society organizations to challenge the new framework for breaching fundamental rights, and at exploring its effects beyond the Court proceedings. This Article concludes that, counterintuitively, the existence of pending litigation against the Regulation establishing the NGO Registries hampered advocacy on this issue with the European Commission.
‘Every year Ireland becomes more and more Americanized’, or so the famed journalist W. T. Stead believed at the turn of the twentieth century. But what did people understand by ‘Americanisation’ and who was doing the Americanising? The term was not uncommon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, used by a range of political figures, writers and commentators, typically with reference to mass migration. At the time of Stead’s comment nearly two million Irish-born people resided in the United States. Through their communications and return journeys to Ireland, emigrants became the primary image-makers of America in Ireland, making distinctive interventions in the development of political ideas and organisational models in Ireland. This chapter examines perceptions of the impact of the United States, and Irish America, on Irish politics and how different American influences were welcomed, withstood, filtered, and were in competition with each other in the period from the end of the Great Famine to the 1920s. They made significant contributions to different types of political activity in Ireland, but they were always entangled with a range of other transnational influences.
This article explores the reception of American popular visual culture in Ireland. The role Irish Americans played in the development of blackface is discussed, highlighting how blackface was used by the Irish to distance themselves from African Americans, thus helping their integration into (white) American society. Reception of blackface in Ireland is also explored. Consideration is then given to various technological visual media, notably large-scale panorama paintings, which offered American scenes of interest to Irish emigrants, and the cinema, which became so pervasive by the Great War that American cinema, especially, had eclipsed all other entertainments. The article then outlines the contributions made to Irish film by reverse migrants, who produced the first realist representations on film of Irish history and culture during 1910–14. The last section focuses on the ideological resistance by Catholics and nationalists alike to American cinema, which was deemed immoral and undermined the Catholic-nationalist project. This led in 1923 to the introduction of the first piece of media legislation in independent Ireland that severely restricted what could be shown in Irish cinemas. Notwithstanding this cultural protectionist measure, American cinema remained hugely popular in Ireland.
This chapter discusses the first anatomically modern humans in the Caucasus (~40,000 YBP); Early Upper Paleolithic sites; the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition; local Aurignacian industries; population dynamics during the Last Glacial Maximum; the Epipaleolithic of the Caucasus; early food production at Chokh; Upper Paleolithic to Neolithic cultural continuity; and the transition to food production.
In this presidential address I offer a critical examination of how Africa was misrepresented in the Global North’s imaginations and media reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such biased imaginings of Africa as a site of inevitable catastrophe account for the racialized under-accounting of the history of African scientists’ pioneering success in biomedical research and with epidemics. The global archives of COVID-19 pandemics must acknowledge these scientists, as well as the humanistic contributions of African artists who collaborated with health experts and produced poetic/musical performances in local and world languages to tackle biomedical and social pandemics.
Forecasting international migration is a challenge that, despite its political and policy salience, has seen a limited success so far. In this proof-of-concept paper, we employ a range of macroeconomic data to represent different drivers of migration. We also take into account the relatively consistent set of migration policies within the European Common Market, with its constituent freedom of movement of labour. Using panel vector autoregressive (VAR) models for mixed-frequency data, we forecast migration in the short- and long-term horizons for 26 of the 32 countries within the Common Market. We demonstrate how the methodology can be used to assess the possible responses of other macroeconomic variables to unforeseen migration events—and vice versa. Our results indicate reasonable in-sample performance of migration forecasts, especially in the short term, although with varying levels of accuracy. They also underline the need for taking country-specific factors into account when constructing forecasting models, with different variables being important across the regions of Europe. For the longer term, the proposed methods, despite high prediction errors, can still be useful as tools for setting coherent migration scenarios and analysing responses to exogenous shocks.
This chapter identifies striking convergences between the juridical techniques used in migration control and under colonial rule. These include strategic manipulations of jurisdiction, a legal system based on racialized status categories, normalization of a state of exception, and racialized determinations of culpability. Border externalization and extraterritorialization, reconsidered alongside the colonial practice of manipulating jurisdiction, should be understood as a juridical tactic that aims to evade responsibility for the state violence wielded against racialized migrants. On the basis of a comparative analyses of colonial and migratory juridical regimes, the chapter underscores the key role that law plays in maintaining and justifying racial domination in these two different contexts. The juridical regime in both can be best described as one of “lawful lawlessness,” to borrow a phrase introduced by Austin Sarat and Nassar Hussain, as the lines between “lawful” and “lawless” increasingly blur when law is put in the service of racial domination. To examine this blurring, the chapter turns to the 2020 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, which condoned the Spanish pushback operations and blamed migrants from “sub-Saharan Africa” for their “culpable” conduct.
This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.
This chapter continues the discussion of the relation between liberty and democracy. It then shifts to a discussion of "sites of unfreedom" as in the case of prisoners, immigrants and refugees, and trafficked persons in order to illustrate the value of the concept of liberty defended in the book.
What is territoriality, if we consider it from a maritime, rather than landed perspective? And how should borders be reconsidered, if we assume that the nonsovereign space of world seas is constitutive of politics, rather than exceptional to it? To answer this question, this chapter adopts a processual approach to international legal theory and outlines a vast trajectory. Sources from antiquity display an imagination of maritime spaces as an exteriority in relations to politics. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical international lawyers formulated an international law of the sea that sought global applicability. This was what is called here “the first internalization” of the sea. A second internalization is currently underway, in which a central tenet of the first, freedom of movement at sea, is now being questioned. It is argued in this chapter that if we are to understand territoriality, we must reject the premise of universal territoriality and understand it (also) from the position of nonterritoriality which is offered to us by the sea. In other words, the two internalizations are crucial for a processual understanding of territoriality. The chapter concludes with reflections on how traces of exteriority, beyond both internalizations, can be utilized for the purpose of political action.
This chapter explores arguments for assistance and asylum (nonrefoulement) that those who are driven by climate to cross international borders can and should claim. It seeks to amend the standards developed by the Model International Mobility Convention and it draws upon the jurisprudence of the Teitiota Case and other recent cases that probe claims for asylum based on climate necessity. It addresses the 2022 Torres Straits Island Case and the significant additional protections it recognizes under international human rights law. It concludes that relying on general human rights conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is not adequate and that a special convention focused on climate refugees is required along the lines of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which specifically addressed those facing “persecution” on grounds of “race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.”
The end of free movement and the introduction of the post-Brexit migration system represent the most important changes to the UK migration system in half a century. Coinciding with the aftereffects of the pandemic, the result has been very large changes both to the numbers of those coming for work and study, and to their composition, both in terms of countries of origin and in the sectors and occupations of new migrants. It has also resulted in a political backlash, resulting in significant further changes to the system announced in December 2023. I discuss the evidence to date of the impact of recent migration trends on the UK economy and labour market, distinguishing between different sectors.