In recent years, nations around the world have faced a veritable crisis of ineffective government. Basic governmental functions – preventing private violence, resolving disputes through lawful means, providing an infrastructure to enable people to meet their most elementary needs for shelter, nutrition, transportation, communication, education – go unmet. In some countries, these basic functions are met but longer-term governance issues languish, and government is perceived to be unresponsive in ways that some believe contribute to political backlashes, including those against minority groups. These failures in governance are also perceived to have contributed to a global upsurge in authoritarianism and a concomitant decline in democracy.1

Moreover, the basic freedoms protected in many democratic constitutions – freedom from state-sanctioned torture and from punishment or coercion without fair process; freedom of expression, of religion, of movement; freedom from invidious discrimination; enjoyment of property without arbitrary government interference; free exercise of the suffrage – cannot exist, in an organized society, without government effective enough to control itself and its agents and otherwise to secure the protection of those rights.

The absence of ISDS cases against China may mean that investors are deprived of adequate and effective remedies for resolving investment disputes. Based on [type of empirical research], the authors find support for the view that the procedures offered by Chinese IIAs and legislation promote dispute resolution that is mutually satisfactory among investors and closely related public officials. However, they also find a possible trade-off in the sense that such solutions might depend on and promote corruption. Against this background, they explore how ISDS could contribute to combating corruption. [Abstract needs to be filled out and follow a logic of legitimacy critique, research method, finding/caveats – not currently clear]

An administrative code and a national framework of administrative courts was established under the 1997 Constitution but the origins of the contemporary system of administrative justice in Thailand go back to well over a century earlier. This essay will consider the relationship between the emergence of a relatively centralised state in the nineteenth century and the provision of an identifiable system of administrative law in Thailand. It will be argued that the episodic development of administrative justice can be related to a range of diverse elements including: the initial foundation of the Council of State during the reign King Rama V; an interest in European law and legal systems; the recognition of a principle of legality under the influence of Pridi Banomyong as part of a transition from absolute to monarchy to constitutional monarchy; the impact of the Council of State Act of 1933, which led to the establishment of a Petitioning Council under the Thai Council of State to handle grievances and provide remedies for Thai citizens.

Chapter 4 examines the role of international administrative mechanisms (linked with a judicial mechanism) in the provision of reparations for international crimes. It questions whether reparations should be dealt with primarily by administrative mechanisms such as trust funds or claims commissions, and examines these questions through the lens of the legal framework and experience of the ICC Trust Fund for Victims (TFV), as the main administrative mechanism dealing with reparations for international crimes. Considering the important questions that the TFV raises regarding reparations and the central role it has played thus far in the ICC context, the book devotes a separate chapter to the TFV to fully engage with the unique dimensions of its mandates, the challenges it faces and whether it can serve as a model for the development of other administrative mechanisms for reparations for international crimes. This chapter carefully analyses the TFV within the ICC structure, its reparations and assistance mandates, the role it has played in the implementation of the first decisions on reparations, and how this role should further develop. It also discusses the practical implications of the activities of the TFV on reparative justice, and its practical challenges, including scarcity of resources.

Reconstructing the past involved the reconsolidation of the post-Mao party-state’s bureaucratic apparatus through the systematic mobilization of state agencies and social organizations at the county, regional, provincial, and national levels. The balance between cross-departmental cooperation, differentiation, and specialization in the administrative organization of wenshi ziliao contributed to the production of locally distinctive accounts of commercial vitality and colonial flavor that resonated with the multifaceted nationalist and market reform agendas of post-Mao historical identity. These tensions were evident in the vertical relationships between wenshi ziliao offices at the county, provincial, and national levels. The national PPCC leadership’s policy of devolving responsibility to the local level was intended to drive national political reintegration from the bottom up, yet it also promoted the strengthening of local and regional identities whereby the goal of national reconsolidation became remobilized for the regional project of revitalizing a distinctive northeast/Manchuria historical consciousness. Wenshi ziliao practices of knowledge production, memory politics, and identity formation, balancing grassroots-based practices with top-down hierarchical control, speak to flexibility and resilience in post-Mao governance strategies.