Unlike many core human rights treaties, the Statelessness Conventions are among the most poorly ratified in the world. Orthodox scholarship on human rights treaties primarily focuses on post-ratification implementation and their impact on state conduct. While it is important to examine post-ratification compliance, understanding why states agree to ratify human rights treaties is as crucial. Ratification nudges states towards better human rights practices and serves as a gateway for the implementation of international norms. This chapter addresses this gap in scholarship by examining the ratification status of the Statelessness Conventions and the ratification process of the 1954 Statelessness Convention, together with key actors and their influence, by the Philippines, Southeast Asia’s first State Party to the treaty, and its subsequent accession to the 1961 Reduction of Statelessness Convention. Both rationalist and non-rationalist explanations account for ratifications. While rational explanations push states to ratify treaties, socializing liberal and constructivist-oriented explanations, for example, also drive states to commit to treaties. Multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival orientations should therefore inform how and why ratification or accession campaigns should be undertaken, and perhaps, even how treaties themselves should be designed. This analysis serves as a basis for broader theoretical reflections on persuading states to ratify human rights treaties.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s critical engagement with thinkers from his own era. It notes that Schopenhauer often focused his scrutiny of Kant and Hegel on their political arguments. In the former case, Schopenhauer claimed that Kant’s moral theory was in fact a concealed political theory. In the latter case, he claimed that Hegel’s philosophy of the state conflated politics, religion, and morality for the purpose of serving the Prussian state. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s reputation as an apolitical thinker is misleading since his elaborate criticisms of Kant and Hegel are partly generated by his conception of politics. It also argues that Schopenhauer’s demystifying critique of statehood in German Idealism places him in a position similar to the radical Young Hegelians, including the early Marx. Yet while the young Marx attacked the bourgeois vision of state rule over a market society composed of atomized, competitive individuals, Schopenhauer affirmed it.

At the end of the sixteenth century, when Akbar's chief historian and theoretician of Mughal power, Abul Fazl, compiled a list of nobles in The Institutes of Akbar (Ain-i Akbari), he maintained a studious silence on the details of their lives. He gave only their names and numerical rank, arranged in descending order from 10,000 to 200. Conscious of breaking with earlier imperial histories, which contained ample details of the lives of the nobility, he explained, “It does not suit the encomiast of the king to praise others.” Besides, he continued, he would be constrained by court politics, to “mention that which is worthy of praise, and to keep silent on that which cannot be approved.” His point was that only the emperor, who alone stood above the fray, could judge his subjects. Akbar's mansabdari system, and its imperial ranking, should be the sole way to assess Mughal nobles.

The mansabdari system heralded the centralization of power in the hands of the Mughal emperor. The independence of nobles was curtailed by restricting intergenerational transfer of power and discouraging a sustained association between the nobility and land. Under the mansabdari system, the numerical rank assigned to each noble was tied to status, military responsibilities, and emoluments. This rank, its conferment and withdrawal, augmentation and reduction, was at the sole discretion of the emperor. A noble could not pass on his rank, position, or wealth to his descendants. After his death, these perquisites were resumed by the court. A noble's son could progress within the mansabdari system only at the pleasure of the emperor. This was not considered arbitrary power. Rather, Akbar presented himself as possessing unmatched discernment, which enabled him to select the right officials to maintain order in his empire. For nobles, and their sons, this meant that birthright alone could not guarantee individual or intergenerational success. One had to distinguish oneself as an individual.

In the mansabdari system, the nobility was not paid directly from imperial coffers. It received rights to collect taxes from specific lands. These revenue assignments were determined by the imperial bureaucracy. They were often non-contiguous and frequently rotated. Many a time, they did not correspond to a noble's traditional base of power, discouraging territorially consolidated opposition against the court.

Introduction

Sunitha, a hijra in her forties, had invited me to her home, where she lives with three other hijras, for Makara Sankranti, the harvest festival. We sat together on a large blanket she had spread on the light yellow and orange tile floor in her sparkling-clean living room while her housemates—none of whom was her guru—prepared food in the adjacent kitchen. But despite having a nonresidential guru, Sunitha spoke in glowing terms about the guru–chela relationship. “The guru will give to the next generation,” she said, “and the guru is next only to our parents in status.” For Sunitha, the guru–chela relationship incorporates social reciprocity, generational continuity, and the respect for elders traditionally emphasized in both hijra and cishet family relationships. As a guru, she explained,

Sunitha was not alone in describing the guru–chela relationship in a highly idealized manner, similar to how people in cishet families speak about their family relationships. When speaking of her hijra family, she and other older gurus I talked to drew on idealized discourses most commonly used to describe non-hijra families. Such discourses emphasize positive emotions associated with ideal families while covering up the more practical aspects of being part of a family, such as financial and social interdependence—aspects that chelas and younger GNC people are keen to emphasize.

For Sunitha, the financial obligations between gurus and chelas that younger GNC people see as restrictive serve a crucial role in guru–chela relationships. It is essential for chelas to give part of their daily earnings to their gurus because, she explained, “a chela has to take care of her guru. That is the culture. If not, how can the relationship between guru and chela exist? It will get broken up.”

This chapter investigates the logic of regulation that animates the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. The chapter begins by examining the new laws on security vetting and archival background checks. Reviewing the conduct of the OHAL Commission tasked to decide on applications by purged citizens for reversal of their refusal or civic death status, the chapter reveals how ambiguities in the new law allow for the extensive use of informal rule of law based on extra-legal practices. By focusing on several denunciation cases, the chapter’s theoretical and empirical strands come together in an analysis of the impact this new securitisation logic of regulation has both on those targeted and on society as a whole. I argue that the new regulatory technologies of citizen-informants and the perfusion of distrust throughout society an ‘atmosfear of terror’, inducing the population as a whole to self-regulate, perform, and participate in their own securitisation.

Taking the notion of the ‘mechanic’ as its starting point, this chapter outlines how an interest in the mechanic and scientific aspects of speech production is a pervasive feature of Romantic-era treatments of spoken utterance. The chapter investigates the numerous contemporary senses of the term ‘mechanic’, to highlight these senses’ common concern with physical movement, whether of the human hands, a constructed machine, or the material world. It examines how Romantic innovations in the theory of speech production which present utterance as a form of motion – of bodies, of machines, and of matter itself – combine, engage with, and react to traditions of materialist philosophy and elocution teaching and explores how such studies of speech rely on blending knowledge-based fields of study with traditionally non-theoretical practices including medicine and elocution.