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.

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.

Here we lay the ground and define the parameters of this project. Definitions of strategy are discussed, giving the rationale for the one chosen to guide our work: Kimberly Kagan’s definition that sees evidence of strategy where prioritisation and choices about means of pursuing political aims at the level of the state (or higher social entity) have been made. This allows us to identify strategic decision making even when no documents have survived that contain explicit articulations of such reasoning.

The current context of regressive border regimes challenges critical theory’s commitments. Can we still take recent legal and political practices as starting points for reimagining political norms and institutions based on a reconstruction of hidden emancipatory potentials? The chapter argues that critical border theory could benefit from recentering the idea of political representation, and especially from building on insights of the recent constructivist turn in representation theory. Understanding political representation as shape-shifting and constituency-mobilizing changes long-held assumptions about the spaces, subjects, and demands articulated in border politics. While this representative perspective has diagnostic advantages, it is unable to criticize the legitimacy of existing border regimes owing to its thin normative assumptions. Reconstructive approaches to border politics should therefore use the diagnostic tools of the recent representation scholarship without committing to their limited critical potential

One can divide sources regarding Byzantine strategy into three main categories: sources dedicated to the exposition of strategy, tactics and logistics, i.e. military manuals and administrative documents;' Byzantine historical narratives; and non-Byzantine historical accounts written in various dialects such as Slavic, Arabic and Armenian. Still, there is an ongoing debate whether military manuals reflected current tactical and strategic practise. Equally uncertain is the extent to which Byzantine historians employed military manuals or idealised biographies as models in order to present favoured figures in an ideal light. The emperor was usually the one who set priorities and objectives, assisted by advisers as well as by treatises on strategy and logistics. Sometimes, however, high-ranking military officers, the strategoi, local commanders who executed military and political authority over their districts, also took the initiative to undertake operations. The Byzantines faced various peoples: Slavic and Turkish peoples and polities threatened and occupied its Balkan frontier; Arabs, Turks and Armenians dominated the eastern frontier (Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia and Armenia), and the Normans, Crusaders and various pirates threatened Greece, Thrace and the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Gulf. The objectives of the Byzantines varied according to the period. Defence and survival were among the dominant ones; others included retaliation, devastation of the enemy’s potential through raiding and acquisition of booty, marching deep and showing the flag in order to achieve more favourable treaties, the reconquest of lost key cities and fortresses, and, rarely, the total elimination of enemy polities. The Byzantines relied greatly on money and diplomacy to achieve their goals. When these were not enough, they would mobilise their army and navy comprising indigenous professional and semi-professional troops, as well as foreign and allied troops. The main priority in terms of strategy was to conduct military operations, as far as possible, on only one front at a time. The latter was chosen with various goals in mind: the control of major cities, fortresses, routes and mountain passes; the establishment of a client ruler; acquiring of a quick victory in order to enhance the emperor’s image; and acquiring an acknowledgement of the emperor’s overlordship in order to adhere to Byzantine political ideology which saw the emperor as the supreme ruler of the world and the legitimate claimant to the Roman Empire. It is interesting to note that religion seems to have played a lesser role than realpolitik and political ideology. When fighting their wars, the Byzantines mostly adhered to the advice found in military treatises, but there were also occasions when the neglect of such matters brought devastating defeats.

This chapter argues that freedom requires certain modes of social recognition of the status and activities of free persons. I explain this claim and contrast it with similar views of thinkers such as Axel Honneth.

Chapter 17 discusses China’s Criminal Procedure Law, which provides a general cooperation obligation for all relevant entities, including service providers. As collecting data from service providers has become increasingly important in criminal investigations, the past decade has witnessed a certain number of laws, regulations and explanatory documents adopted to specify service providers’ cooperation obligations. This chapter systematically studies these provisions and summarizes the rich content of service providers’ cooperation obligations relating to collection of historical and real-time data in criminal investigations as well as in their daily operation. It also discusses future improvements to the current legislations, namely more protection of sensitive data, due process in evidence collection and criminal liability for service providers when cooperation obligations cannot be fulfilled. Based on China’s position of respecting data sovereignty, China requires data to be stored locally. Foreign LEAs can obtain data from Chinese service providers only via mutual legal assistance, and service providers in China are prohibited from providing data directly to foreign LEAs.

This introductory chapter articulates the main thesis and summarizes the arguments that support it. It lays out the reasons that the thesis is important, describes what the book adds to the existing literature, explains some critical terms and concepts, and adds necessary disclaimers.

The homeowners’ movements in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen differ by both the scope of their property rights claims and the concomitant ways in which they claim those rights. The leading homeowners in Beijing are political entrepreneurs, devoting themselves more to systemic change and even Chinese democracy than to the self-governance of their individual neighborhoods. The leading homeowners in Shenzhen are social entrepreneurs who navigate through the social, legal, and bureaucratic maze to claim absolute homeownership sovereignty. The defining characteristic of homeowners in Shanghai is respect for laws and rules.

Warfare did not evolve in a linear fashion. This is most obvious on the physical level: the weapons and armies of polities across time and space have fluctuated in sophistication, so that early European medieval armies had more in common with ancient Israelite or Greek contingents than with the Roman war machinery, and, up to the nineteenth century or even the twentieth, raiding warfare in some parts of Africa or the islands of south-east Asia was akin to patterns of pre-Columbian warfare in the Americas, prehistoric warfare in Europe and ghazis and booty expeditions in Europe and around the Mediterranean. Where warfare’s aims went beyond mere raiding, for much of world history, the paucity or even absence of relevant sources has made it difficult to reconstruct political–strategic aims. We also encounter vast varieties conditioned in part by hard factors such as climate, geography and resources. We have encountered and possibly not always avoided the danger of squeezing cultural differences into a Procrustean bed of Western concepts and languages. Yet some striking patterns have emerged. Not only Indo-European cultures, but also Mongols and Chinese, came up with a strategic aim of establishing a universal monarchy, or defending against the imposition of such an overlordship. The forming of alliances for common strategic purposes and the defence of allies or clients is another widespread pattern, strategic co-operation counterbalancing long-term hostilities. The distinction between client states and allies was often blurred. Non-kinetic tools of strategy were also employed widely, from giving gifts, to tribute payments (again a distinction often difficult to make), to marriages to confirm peace treaties or cement alliances. And most cultures seem to have had some rules or code of honour with regard to the conduct of war which in many contexts imposed limits on the pursuit of strategic aims.

Chapter 1 walks the reader through the fascinating history and evolution of RFID technology from the early days of radio transmissions in the nineteenth century to today’s internet of things.

Chapter 14, Aqnxiety within Germany at climax (July 11 - July 23). In this chapter tension reaches its climax as the Darmstädter und Nationalbank (Danatbank) fails on July 13. Without help from outside of Germany, the German government declares a bank holiday and introduces exchange controls, effectively ending the gold standard in Germany. The New York Fed and Harrison declines to intervene and the BIS does not have the resources or the inclination to intervene. Norman’s position that the situation goes back to the Versaille Peace agreement and is now a matter for governments strengthens. A conference in London is unable to come up with new solutions and meanwhile sterling comes under pressure. The fear of contagion beginning in early May is now a reality.