This chapter describes how the East African Court of Justice is rooted in colonial legacies, which affect regional political norms and legal culture. It shows the EACJ’s decisions are characterized by substantial deference, frequently ruling in favor of states and relying extensively on restrictive interpretation. Less deference, however, is observed through the Court’s remedial orders. The chapter draws linkages between the EACJ’s deference and its pervasive political constraints. Namely, the EACJ’s strategic space is narrowed by weak formal independence and moderate political fragmentation. These two factors combine to undermine the Court’s legitimacy and imply that state resistance is feasible and credible. A significant episode of prior resistance also suggests states could execute future resistance. To the extent the Court does not defer, the chapter reveals how persuasive argumentation and public legitimation facilitate nondeference. Last, the chapter illustrates how the Court’s support networks insufficiently account for its substantial deference.

Chapter 6 argues that Milton’s priorities in Paradise Regained are moral rather than Christological or political. The chapter applies this thesis to some enduring critical questions around the poem: the question of the Son’s identity, the purpose of the temptation, and the nature of the poem’s outcome; lastly it shows how Satan is like a Washington lobbyist. The consequence of this reading is to make Paradise Regained appear at once simpler and more demanding. The poem makes strenuous moral demands upon its readers, not because its messages are esoteric but because it calls them to follow the example of the Son.

Chapter 6 examines the Sectarians’ portrait of the end-time destruction of its enemies. The depictions of eschatological violence offer insights into how the Sectarians responded to their present overmatched position while simultaneously affirming their special status. Sectarian texts imagine an imminent end of days that would usher in a period in which all of its enemies – both foreigners and other Jews – would be vanquished in the end-time battle.

Chapter 3 highlights the centrality of Spain in the development of a particular kind of ‘professional revolutionary’ deployed by the Comintern in the late 1930s and 1940s. It focuses on the life of the Italian communist Ilio Barontini and follows his long militancy within the anti-fascist front. Barontini, unlike most Europeans of his generation, had been confronted with violent fascism since the early 1920s. Nevertheless, the Spanish Civil War marks a watershed in his life, as it was in Spain that he refined his skills as a fighter. But Spain influenced Barontini’s trajectory in a political sense, too, as it was during the period of intense fighting at Guadalajara in early 1937 that fellow volunteers in the Italian brigade began to discuss the need to bring the anti-fascist fight to the colonial front as well. In the following years, Barontini went both to fight and to train new recruits in Ethiopia, France, and Italy. In this way, the chapter offers a glimpse of one way in which anti-fascism and anti-imperialism connected in this period.

A new theoretical framework is required to expose how the underlying political economic systems function and drive deforestation. The hypotheses and case studies are presented while situating deforesting processes in the international system and its many subsystems, which are composed of partially interlinked sectors that often compete for the same land areas. This is a detailed political economic analysis, based on regionally situated world-ecological analyses, which consider the power that different sectors have in causing the loss of forests, such as Brazilian ranching speculation, Amazonian gold mining, and Finnish pulp and energywood forestry. The chapter contends that there is a need to cultivate a deeper, comparative, and global crises-situated understanding of the role these forces have in driving deforesting. One must also understand the local-level enabling factors and the role of resistance. Insights are woven together from several disciplines and approaches such as political ecology and world-ecology into a new conceptual framework that can be widely applied to explain global development dynamics, beyond the specific application to deforestation.

Peru’s Amazon is the site of a violent and fast-moving gold-mining rush, which has caused divides within Indigenous communities and devastating environmental impacts from the mercury used in gold extractivism. There has been a massive increase in illegal or informal gold mining, especially in Peru’s Madre de Dios province. Tens of thousands of miners operate on rafts in the rivers or dig for gold by increasingly mechanized means. In Madre de Dios there is a gold-mining RDPE that explains the bulk of land and forest use. In addition to an exploration of the dynamics of gold extractivism, this chapter also assesses the conflicts and resistance at play in this context. Indigenous communities, especially in the Amazon, are currently facing huge extractivist pressures, which has started to polarize many communities and change their relationship with the extractivist phenomena. Some community members have started to extract gold illegally and destructively, while most resist these temptations, invoking nonmodernist cosmologies and understandings that place barriers to extractivist expansions.

This chapter explores how the ranching-grabbing RDPE is supported by moral economic changes, which in this context is veneration for the cowboy lifestyle and scorn of traditional/Indigenous livelihoods. The cowboy lifestyle is often seen in a positive light, despite the violence that accompanies forest removal. These changes in the moral economy help to explain how locals increasingly welcome ranching-land speculation, even inside multiple-use conservation areas. Another key factor in deforestation processes are the policies and infrastructure investment decisions made at the federal and state level, which render large areas available for appropriation. These problems are also international, as groups expanding deforestation are still often funded by international banks, creating investment lock-in, as investors are more interested in preserving returns on investments than curbing illegalities. Simultaneously, there is a wide variety of activists in local communities who are resisting these extractivist pushes. The chapter examines where and how Indigenous peoples/forest-dwellers successfully resist land grabbing and clearcutting on their lands.

There is a long history of forest activism in Finland, including both contentious protest like blockades and more conventional actions like negotiation. There is a new generation of activists stemming from Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups, who have extended occupations beyond logging sites to company headquarters and pulp mill entrances. This chapter focuses on this latest generation of resistance and the ways those involved have approached forestry activism in Finland. The protests against state-sponsored logging in different parts of Finland are used as examples to unpack the current contentious politics of forests and especially the sentiments of these rising youth activists. The overall actions of several Finnish forest movements since the 1980s have contributed to more and more people starting to defend forests, questioning the forest industry’s story that clearcutting is a sustainable way to interact with the forest. This chapter is based on extensive interviews with experts and activists and the author’s lived experiences and many years of ethnography in Finnish forests, especially in the most heavily logged forestry frontiers in the southeastern part of the country.

This chapter uses two narratives of legalities to capture distinctive profiles of juristocratic reckoning. The first narrative centers on a legality brimming with connotative power. Instead of relying on the direct, instrumental power of human rights, a group of Burmese activists draws upon the capacity of rights to change the way they feel about themselves and generate the momentum to inspire, encourage, and rally others to take up collective political action. Although their country has once more descended into widespread insurrections, some of these activists still carry hope for human rights as they fight back or flee into exile again. The second account is about “governing through contagion,” a legality afflicting state centralization over strategies of control of infectious diseases. The Singaporean state’s strategies to regulate contagion grew out of earlier epidemics and global circulations of capital, violence, and ideas and mutated according to the entanglements of relationships among humans, animals, microorganisms, and technologies. As humans comply with, resist, or otherwise interact with strategies of control, these relationships produce “inter/dysconnectedness” that expose, perhaps exacerbate, existing injustices. Although the two narratives reflect divergent experiences with law, both illustrate a nonlinear worldview, one in which human societies, law, legalities, and thus juristocratic reckonings develop cyclically and chronologically. In one narrative this chapter offers three coexisting perspectives on juristocratic reckoning that transcend the editors’ suggestions; in the other account it shows that a more expansive chronology and cast of actors can shape the way we understand moments of law as juristocratic reckoning. What we make of a moment of law depends on where we look for legalities, where we situate it, and how we appreciate their highs and lows.

Chapter 4 explores how fiscal policy and questions of national security play on stage. Fiscal concerns pervade Shakespeare’s history plays. All of his sovereigns wrestle with the need to fund security in the face of ongoing domestic and international threats, and all of them have to confront ongoing fiscal discontent. This chapter shows how security dilemmas are at the heart of controversies that drive English history as Shakespeare understands it. Rulers’ ongoing efforts to cover the expenses associated with implementing security coupled with subjects’ resentment at having to pay for their sovereign’s decisions opens up the terms of security and collective wellbeing for collective scrutiny. By depicting a multiplicity of voices and perspectives on collective existence, Shakespeare foregrounds fiscal controversies and the alternative visions of security and collective life such controversies prompt. These plays immerse theatergoers in an underdetermined world defined by antagonism, conflict, geopolitical struggle, and political inventiveness.

I detail the impacts of US imperialism on both the structural and interpersonal levels and how these memories live in the bodies of migrants. I discuss Comandante Susana’s unearthed archive, which was found by a campesino farmer in a corn field in 2015. That archive contained the intimate letters of Domitila, the woman whose story opened the book. I show how history can be a tool to connect with movement ancestors, heal historical trauma, and reawaken a radical imagination to organize powerful social movements. I underscore the necessity of revolutionary feminism in our current historical moment. I conclude with a discussion of the larger political lessons of the Salvadoran revolution and its current-day political relevance. In an era of state violence and despair, we have much to learn from Salvadoran women who waged revolution.

This chapter explores material language practices and their interaction with language ideologies. It investigates how oral, literal, and digital forms co-constitute discourses of normativity and prestige. Through observations of literacy practices, teaching, media, and participants’ reflections, the chapter studies materialisations of language and their ideological implications. The dominance of English writing in formal and institutional contexts contrasts with the variable use of oral Kriol, which resists standardisation. Efforts by the National Kriol Council to create a standardised orthography reveal tensions between fostering linguistic legitimacy and maintaining the anti-standard nature of Kriol. Digital communication amplifies these dynamics, bringing to the fore non-standardised writing that reflects local linguistic realities. Kriol’s oral and multimodal characteristics, perceived as spontaneous, creative, and resistant to disciplinary norms, challenge Western-centric ideologies that prioritise fixed standards. This shows that material language practices are culturally specific. A consideration of the role of materiality in language ideologies challenges universalised epistemologies.

The arrival of the 93rd Infantry Division in Huachuca necessitated the implementation of a specific racial regime. This was unprecedented, since no other all-black post existed in the country, but largely inspired by the “separate but equal” doctrine. It was applied both during and outside training, and was based on the separation of places along the color line, the matching of military and racial hierarchies, and the disproportionate repression of insubordination.