This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

What makes diplomatic negotiation different from other negotiations is that it takes place between or among nation-states through their representatives, and the stakes are usually higher than those in a domestic context. In addition, while other types of negotiation tend to be mostly transactional, negotiating in diplomacy cannot be isolated from the overall relationship with the other party. A truly successful diplomatic negotiation is one that not only resolves an immediate problem, but ensures that the state of relations with the other side will serve one’s interests in the long run. That does not mean that ties must necessarily be close or friendly, as long as they are civil and respectful, and the countries can work together in the future. Another feature of negotiation that is essential in diplomacy is its ability to build a basis for empathy. It helps to convey one’s own motivations and interests directly, which can reduce misunderstanding, and it provides insight into the other side’s motivations and perceptions.

This chapter explains that linguistic uniformity is rarely characteristic of nation-states. In Europe, official national languages brought powerful and ongoing consequences for ‘minority’ languages and their speakers. Nineteenth-century nation- and empire-building affected regional speakers of national languages, such as Flemish or Austrian German, or Afrikaans among other postcolonial varieties of European languages. Imposing European languages in settler nations has irrevocably endangered or eliminated Indigenous languages and cultures. The debates about European orthographic authorities surveyed in this chapter expose conflicting cultural allegiances and pedagogical needs. Vernaculars inherited diverse writing practices from different scholarly discourse communities, whether government chanceries or literary scriptoria or national language academies. Representative conflicts include tensions between scholarly traditions and simplified spellings for mass state education. Existing traditions can be difficult to displace, especially in democracies. Educators’ engagement with the state reminds us that pedagogy is often a matter of politics. Journalists can support or undermine proposed norms, whether using or reporting them. Successful reforms sometimes reflect intersections of low literacy and/or authoritarian states. Many debates that raged in the nineteenth century have continued into modern times. With the rise of social media, individuals can not only internalize but also influence and drive discourses of group identity.

Historically, the central actor in the story of international law has been the nation-state, which has led to a rich array of theories about state behavior, such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism that continue to dominate the study of international law and relations. Today, new challenges such as terrorism, climate change, non-international armed conflict, and cyberespionage require new approaches that ask international law to motivate and constrain the behavior of individuals in addition to nation-states. This has put the study of human behavior at the center of international legal scholarship prompting the rise of behavioral approaches in international legal scholarship. Neuroscience has been critically missing from this discourse even as it is leading the way in providing evidence-based research about human cognition and brain-behavior connections. This chapter introduces neuroscience to the study of international law. It provides a general foundation for understanding the field of neuroscience, describes the existing literature at the intersection of law and neuroscience – neurolaw – and considers how to begin constructing the foundations, frameworks, and central agenda for interdisciplinary connections between neuroscience and international law. The chapter concludes by identifying several areas of study in international law that may benefit from neuroscientific insights.

This chapter describes the basic features and lasting influence on climate governance of the international system of states. When the problem of climate change became apparent, countries responded to it through diplomacy leading to international agreements for collective action. This chapter describes major aspects of this process. It summarizes how countries have negotiated a regime of international agreements and institutions intended to address climate change collectively and individually. A quarter-century was devoted to top-down measures – internationally agreed conventions and protocols setting out allowable greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries. More recently, the focus has been on bottom-up measures – nationally determined contributions to wider global efforts to govern climate change. While these efforts have resulted in a wide array of actions around the world to address climate change, they also demonstrate concretely the ways in which the international system, and the countries operating within it, have precluded aggressive collective action.

Every country, every subnational government, and every electoral district has a designated population. Some are large and some are small. Yet in existing empirical work, population is usually treated as a background factor. In this preface, the present book’s focus on scale effects is outlined and motivated. By means of a brief comparison of the illustrative examples of the United States and Malta, it is argued that population size influences politics in a variety of ways. Since it is difficult to reach a determination about the role of scale for particular cases, this book examines scale effects at a general level, focusing on universal rather than particular causal effects. While a venerable tradition of political thought and scholarship suggests that scale is an obstacle to democracy and good governance, our findings suggest that scale has both positive and negative effects. The final section of the preface lays out the structure of this book, highlighting the themes discussed in each of the following chapters.

This chapter explores differences of scale as manifested in political communities around the world. The first section of this chapter takes stock of scale differences across a variety of political units, highlighting the extraordinary demographic variation on display across nation-states, municipalities, and electoral districts. Next, we demonstrate the extreme skewness that characterizes most differences of scale. In the third section, we examine differences of scale across different organizational types, showing that political communities often contain greater size differences than other sorts of organizations. In the final section, we show that size affects our choice of subjects, with larger communities garnering the lion’s share of attention from academics and (we assume) the popular press. We highlight that this problem of knowledge bias is troublesome, not only because small units in combination contain a good number of people, but especially because our knowledge of the world tends to be based on highly unrepresentative samples.

In the 1990s, the idea that culture had a role to play in political sociology was relatively novel. Identifying sociologists who fit this emerging interdisciplinary subfield posed a challenge. Today, it is difficult to imagine a sociologist, or even a political scientist, who would argue against the importance of culture to politics. It has become de rigueur to acknowledge culture in political analysis. If anything, the field of politics and culture borders on oversubscription. Methodological issues that dominated early syntheses (Berezin 1994, 1997b) remain salient. These include epistemological discussions of culture as an explanatory factor in social analysis (e.g., Berezin 2014a; Wagner-Pacifici 2017) distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methodology (Goertz and Mahoney 2012).