In mainland China, Reform and Opening up in the last few decades has opened a floodgate of foreign infusion. Foreign businesses such as KFC, Starbucks, Walmart, McDonalds, and Carrefour are seen everywhere. There have also been many loanwords. Some of the loanwords have become so much a part of the Chinese lexicon that their foreign origin may not even be clear to all. Apart from the social and cultural implications, the influx of things foreign presents quite a challenge to Chinese with its non-phonetic script. Various accommodation strategies have been used to represent foreign words with Chinese characters, including meaning translation, phonetic transliteration, or a combination of both, resulting in varying degrees of semantic and phonetic approximation. Incidentally, the fact that the Rebus (phonetic loan) Principle is extensively used for phonetic transliterations, whereby Chinese characters are used only for their sounds without regard to their meanings, gives the lie to the persistent ideographic myth concerning Chinese characters.

Chapter 2 provides historical background of Pahlavi monarchy and its nation-state project. To be a modern nation-state required a cohesive national identity and complimenting narrative. The significance of that account was not lost on the shah, who tried to formulate an uninterrupted history of Iranian dominion. Chapter 2 relies heavily on a close reading of the words of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to shed light on the shah’s rationale for upholding this narrative. The shah understood that Iran could not forge its independence and image as a modern nation-state without freedom from foreign control. According to the shah, it was his father who "created" the modern Iranian state and saved Iran from the ineptness of its previous dynasty. This chapter also challenges the shah’s account and explores how his subjects saw him as foreign and as a symbol of Iran’s capitulation to external powers. The shah’s failed nationalism left space for his opposition to produce an alternative narrative that captured the imagination of the masses of Iranian people. Chapter 2 lays the foundation for the sections that follow by presenting not only the newly constructed image of Iranian nationalism, but also why it was needed in order to advance the cause of independence.

The rapid growth in investor–state dispute settlement has sparked a decades-long legitimacy crisis in the international investment regime. The upshot is that concerns over foreign investor success in arbitration proceedings, from levels of compensation to lack of arbitral diversity and independence, has prompted wide-ranging reform efforts and even calls to abolish this treaty-based system. In the context of this historical and contemporary debate, the authors describe the importance of assessing empirically the claims and counter-claims about the regime’s absence of legitimacy. The chapter begins with an overview of the different types of legitimacy (normative, sociological, legitimation) and discusses how and to what extent empirical research can contribute to assessing legitimacy claims. The different chapters of the book, which is structured largely according to legitimacy categories, are then introduced and the piece concludes with some reflections on the overall themes and way forward for empirical research.

Any assessment of the international investment regime and its legitimacy crisis requires a preliminary understanding of their important and relevant features. However, the sprawling nature of both defies most doctrinal and qualitative attempts at description. The regime is based on a decentralized network of legal instruments, different procedural mechanisms and ad hoc proceedings, while the accompanying chorus of critique and counter-critique is populated with multiple actors and interests across the world. This chapter seeks to capture this distinct and fragmented universe. First, the authors map consent to arbitration, not on a generic per signed bilateral investment treaty basis, but rather by tracking multilateral, bilateral and unilateral consents in force. Second, they provide a description and overview of the over 1,100 registered cases up to January 2020, focusing inter alia on case outcomes, rules, cases types, institution, parties, economic sector and legal basis. Third, they trace discontent with regime, charting the origin of legitimacy crisis and its maturing over time. It ends by discussing both state-led efforts at reform and the extent to which arbitrators themselves have adjusted reflexively to the backlash.

A key response to legitimacy concerns over investment arbitration has been to point to the contribution of investment treaties to significant increases in in-bound foreign investment. The authors return to this vexed question of whether treaties offer material benefits and the large literature on the topic. Through a mixed methods approach and heightened awareness of the synergies and tensions within and between methodological approaches, they: (1) analyse econometrically the impact of ISDS provisions on inbound FDI; (2) present new qualitative research on investor and host state practices and attitudes; and (3) argue that social psychological research on cultural risk cognition is useful for both framing and presenting research questions and findings. They conclude that whatever the results that emerge from empirical research findings, the form of presentation will determine whether they will be accepted by the public or fall victim to growing polarization in perceptions and positions.

Hamilton Carroll considers shifting trends across nearly two decades of post-9/11 novels from early works grappling with the unrepresentability of terror to recent narratives by Susan Choi, Mohsin Hamid, Joseph O’Neill, and Jess Walter that depict the everyday experiences of racialized precarity in a period of perpetual warfare, nuclear proliferation, migration catastrophes, and neo-ethnonationalisms. Political turmoil and violence by state and non-state entities remain central to twenty-first century life, even as the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted from recent trauma to historical retrospection.

Accents in second language speech have multiple perceptual consequences, including breakdown in communication and undesirable judgements about accented speakers. Whereas perceived accents are likely influenced by various acoustic variables, it is not clear which acoustic variables influence the perceived accents the most and whether such important predictors of accents change as learners’ proficiency develops. Here we report a study that has examined acoustic sources of foreign accent in second language Japanese produced by American learners at different instructional levels, including beginning and intermediate late learners and early bilinguals. We collected speech samples from these learners as well as a control group of native speakers, and measured 27 segmental and prosodic variables. These acoustic variables were related to accent rating scores obtained from native listeners. Confirmatory analyses showed that 24 out of 27 variables tested were reliably associated with listeners’ accentedness judgements. Exploratory analyses showed that prosodic features were most predictive of beginning to intermediate late learners’ accents, whereas vowel features were most predictive of early bilinguals’ accents. These results shed light on issues related to the acoustic sources of foreign accent and the development of second language speech.

A description of the varied types of complex business structures employed by large, transnational businesses is outside the scope of this book. However, a few key facts about corporate growth and structure are important to note, given the current jurisdictional paradigm’s focus on the “home” (or in Europe, domicile) of a corporation – a paradigm that is based on outdated notions of how TNCs are structured. First, the sheer growth in number of TNCs has changed the operation of business and the resultant potential for human rights violations at the global scale. The number of TNCs – including parent companies and subsidiaries – has grown exponentially over the last fifty years. Moreover, as companies grow in size and expand overseas, the number of subsidiaries tends to increase and companies’ structures become even more complex.1 Over the last several decades, as TNCs have grown and created other corporations, they have rapidly changed form, with the emergence of complex multi-tiered corporate structures which include numerous affiliated entities that collectively conduct the business of the enterprise.2 As a result, it is difficult to determine ownership of TNCs’ various affiliated companies or to compile complete financial data on TNCs due to their complex structure, the existence of holding companies, and the fact that a subsidiary can be owned by multiple parent corporations.3 Lack of transparency surrounding ownership and existence of various TNC affiliates only exacerbates the problem.