The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.

This chapter engages with Bowen’s writings of the Second World War. It explores how these texts responded to the narratives, myths, and lies fed to Britons to maintain wartime morale and to aid the transformation, in the immediate post-war period, of traumatic and discontinuous experiences into palatable histories. The chapter begins with Bowen’s wartime autobiographical works, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters (1942), both of which register anxieties about how personal experiences and recollections may be disputed by the assertions of historical accounts. These works are then discussed in relation to comparable concerns which emerged in the final months of the Second World War, once news of the Holocaust began to challenge both narratives which had stressed the terrible conditions endured in Britain and the scepticism many civilians had professed about reports of Nazi atrocities. Central to this argument is a reading of Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949): a post-war novel that links the painful forms of retrospective censure suffered by its heroine to questions circulating in this period about personal responsibility and the limits of judgement.

This chapter develops a critique of the “safe third country” concept, its legality, and its implications for understanding the nature and purpose of international refugee law. It does so, in part, on a different plane of analysis than has predominated the literature thus far. While most scholars have criticized the safe third country concept as undermining individual rights protection, this author argues that it is implicated in a preceding and more foundational harm: It deforms the possibility of democratic responsibility. We would do well to see the violations of refugee rights in question as more than privatized harms inflicted on an individual. They are relational and structural wrongs that concern the objective relationships guaranteed by domestic constitutional and administrative law. Perceiving this harm illuminates not only how the safe third country concept has corrupted international refugee law, but also why international human rights should be understood, more broadly, to protect the political agency of democratic citizens. This conclusion yields an important analytic shift, in which we see commitments to international human rights and humanitarian ideals to align, constructively and in new form, with the public integrity of democratic states.

Despite R. G. Collingwood’s relation to British Idealism, a close reading of his subtle descriptions of imagination and expression reveals important points of contact with the phenomenological tradition. In the first section, I bring together Collingwood’s exploration of the role of imagination in art with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of intentionality and expression. This provides insights into both thinkers’ attempts to describe lived experience and action, highlighting important aspects of their work overlooked by readers. In the second section, I explore how Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both describe communication as an open and evolving movement of understanding that does not fall back upon a supposedly isolated consciousnesses, thereby eluding the threat of solipsism. In the third section, I outline the connection between Husserl’s identification of a “crisis” in the European sciences and Collingwood’s invocation against what he calls the “corruption of consciousness,” a particularly modern shirking of our responsibilities as expressive and active members of the community.

Chapter 10 provides an overview of the role and functions of private enforcement within regulatory regimes and the availability of redress. It draws attention to different ‘models of legal responsibility’ upon which regulatory regimes rely in allocating and distributing legal rights and duties between those who are subject to regulation and those whom regulation is intended to protect (‘regulatory beneficiaries’). This chapter is the most legally focused chapter in the volume, selectively highlighting several features of the institutional and enforcement context in which regulation occurs. Examples are private litigation, collective redress mechanisms, the role of courts as authoritative and final interpreters of the law and ‘alternative’ avenues for redress.

Knowledge of the molecular and physiological mechanisms of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) is no longer confined to the lab. Rather, DOHaD is part of a scattered landscape of policy initiatives, including political discourses, programmatic statements, and public health measures. This chapter examines what could be called the ‘moral paradox’ of DOHaD in policymaking; that is, the idea that while the scope, foundations, and practical implications of DOHaD research call for structural interventions addressing social determinants of health over the lifecourse, messages can boil down to simplistic claims of individual responsibility addressed to parents and gestating bodies. The chapter draws from a systematic literature review to document claims towards individual responsibilities in DOHaD publications. It shows that scientists rarely make any straightforward argument in favour of individual responsibilities for health. The ‘moral paradox’ of DOHaD arises from an ambiguous stance on the pragmatic possibilities of health promotion strategies inspired by DOHaD knowledge, which mixes up the current practical possibilities of the field with its policy framing, opportunities, and political ambitions. The chapter concludes that a greater awareness of these moral idiosyncrasies in DOHaD research may help the field embrace a social justice framing.

Much of norm research that focuses on actors’ behaviour in relation to a norm refers either to behaviour in accordance with a norm (e.g., appropriateness or compliance) or to behaviour that constitutes critical engagement or even rejection with a norm (e.g., contestation or norm violation). What remains unchartered by these approaches is behaviour that not only is in accordance with a norm but also goes in some way beyond the expected behaviour. We suggest calling this ‘responsible behaviour’. Based on constructivist norms research and research on responsibility in world politics, we develop a conceptualisation that allows to better understand such behaviour. To substantiate our understanding of norm-related behaviour, we develop a typology of four ideal types: appropriate, responsible, inappropriate, and irresponsible behaviour. We then zoom into responsible behaviour and identify three configurations of responsible behaviour. First, over fulfilment of a norm by an actor; second, actors previously not addressed by the norm nevertheless decide to act accordingly to the norm; third, norm generative behaviour. Finally, we illustrate these three configurations with different examples from the realm of global politics, looking at diverse actors such as municipal governments and armed non-state actors, studying different norms and norm types in various situations.

Pursuing German and Japanese war criminals and gaining compensation for survivors were high on the agenda of the victorious Allies after 1945. Enthusiasm, however, waned considerably and unforgivably in the context of the Cold War and partial restoration of pre-war elite networks. Long-term continuities in business–government networks in the coordinated economies of Germany and Japan meant that some of those who had been charged with war crimes – and/or those whose wealth derived at least in part from activities associated with the war – figured prominently in major post-war scandals. Over time, however, those directly tainted with pre-1945 crimes and practices begin to retire and die off. Moreover, the export orientation of both countries, combined with other aspects of the globalisation of business, finance, and markets, also changed the composition and dynamics of elite networks. This happened more rapidly and thoroughly in Germany than in Japan, owing to Germany’s greater dependence on exports; its central role in the European Union; and its greater openness to foreign imports and investment. German corporate governance therefore experienced more far-reaching reform than its Japanese counterpart. For many of the same reasons, Germany has made greater strides towards coming to terms with its pre-1945 past than Japan.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

The chapter views automatism in the light of the Victorian emphasis on the value of free will and individual responsibility. Daily life involved repeated practical synthesis of contradictory judgments about the determined, or automatic, and moral sources of action. Criminal court cases in which there was a defense of insanity exemplified the issues at stake in relating the disordered brain and the moral will. In the Victorian period, medical experts began to play a large part in legal judgments about insanity and criminal responsibility, and they articulated evidence for the involuntary, or automatic, form of insane actions. Public interest in these issues preceded and informed debate about automatism in philosophy and science. The chapter uses a spectacular 1854 case of multiple child murder by the children’s mother to shape discussion of the wider issues. The case both shows the complexity of social issues touching on automatism and offers insight into the imagination that accompanied Victorian fears about automatism replacing free will.

Daoist philosophy takes as axiomatic that the constant transformation of things in the world is not to be deprecated, but rather celebrated as the basis for the mutual flourishing of the myriad things. This view contains both cyclical and linear conceptions of time and is predicated on a view of a porous body that does not simply occupy blank space or time, but rather is transformed by and also transforms space and time. The porosity and pliability of our cosmos suggests that we should value what is soft and weak rather than what is conventionally hard and strong. This leads to the formulation of an ethic of “plasticity” that governs our responsible engagement with our planetary context.