Childhood statelessness is an urgent global human rights issue. Yet, there is limited ethnographic data on the everyday and varied experiences of stateless children and youth, whose representations in mainstream media and campaign materials tend to transmute them into generalized subjects with an ostensibly universal experience of total abjection. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Thailand, this chapter examines the process of ‘learning to be stateless’ among Shan youth participants and the impact of statelessness during their various life stages. The chapter argues that statelessness is not necessarily a fully and actively internalized status since birth but a dynamic condition that constantly undergoes re-interpretation by the affected youth at punctuated moments and at various life stages. By examining the contemporary regime of statelessness in a country such as Thailand, where stateless persons have access to certain rights as children but not as adults, this chapter calls attention to the intersection of life stages and statelessness and the complex ways in which such regimes of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion place the emotional and practical burdens on stateless persons as they transition from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.

Chapter 6 analyses narrative representations of local women, who feature throughout UN mediation texts as ‘the women’. This subject position is multifaceted and articulated differently according to different logics of UN mediation. Especially within the logic of UN mediation as a science, ‘the women’ are expected to play a legitimating, information-providing role to support the UN. This is an extractive, rather than an empowering, relationship. UN narratives position ‘the women’s’ labour as central to mediation effectiveness, but they also question their abilities and authenticity as representatives of their communities. Capacity-building training is one method that the UN, and particularly gender advisors, use to discipline women into appropriate forms of participation. The logic of UN mediation as an art has less use for 'the women' in its narratives and instead questions whether they are 'political enough' to be appropriate representatives in negotiations. In turn, local women resist and navigate the subject position of ‘the women’ through strategic essentialism, critique, or opting out.

Chapter 4 examines how the logic of UN mediation as a science produces and disseminates technical knowledge. It focuses on the practices of conflict analysis and the circulation of ‘best practices’ in implementing the WPS Agenda in Syria and Yemen. The beginning sections argue that conflict analysis produces instrumental knowledge about conflict by fixing actors and issues in a schema that is legible to interveners. It emerges from colonial schemes of knowledge production that diagnose the local sphere as lacking in capacity. As such, ‘gender-sensitive conflict analysis’ – a common tool for implementing the WPS Agenda in UN mediation – is subject to many of the same problems. The remainder of the chapter analyses the UN's institutional learning practices, arguing that its ‘best practice’ case studies of WPS in mediation depoliticise knowledge about gender, position the UN as the protagonist of women’s participation by erasing its own resistance to WPS, and diminish local women’s agency. Crucially, these best practice cases also elide ‘participation’ with ‘consultation’, undermining the WPS Agenda’s call for the meaningful participation of local women in UN mediation.

Julius Caesar presents the theatrical creation of “the spirit of Caesar”. The chapter turns to Hobbes to help articulate how Shakespeare captures the role of the popular imaginary in the generation of the sovereign spirit, the Leviathan that subsumes the raucous multitude. Negation is here central. First, the spirit of Caesar is raised in and through his sacrificial death. Second, we see the power of the people (deciding Rome’s fate) as it is not seen, as it is lost, as it is given away to Antony’s manipulative theatricality and all the future Caesars. The play’s conclusion also reveals what haunts monarchical sovereignty: “a man”. Brutus is negated, but the negation, like Caesar’s before him, raises him to spiritual status. The spirit of Brutus becomes an imaginary rival to the victorious spirit of Caesar. It raises a haunting republican “what if”, a spectral, negative carrier of justice or the common good. Brutus becomes our spirit in the second circle of the audience. The audience is constituted as an alternate crowd, an overarching seat of judgment, able to see the potentially radical implications of this sceptical play: that supposedly divinely ordained sovereignty is an imaginative creation of the theatrical crowd.

Democracies grapple with the tension between the principle of majority rule and ensuring respect for the interest of political minorities, however those might be defined in different societies and different circumstances. As an initial matter, constitutional designers confront this tension in the original architecture of a democratic system. But the balance struck between majorities and minorities is not exclusively settled through the original constitutional design. In the United States, at least, legal doctrine and statutory enactments have also been centrally engaged in ongoing fashion with this fundamental tension.

As this essay chronicles, the law of democracy began with a focus on ensuring the majoritarian basis of American democracy. Over time, the focus then shifted to concern with fair representation of the interests of minorities within the majoritarian system. Now, we argue, the focus of reform efforts is shifting back to efforts to restore the majoritarian thrust of democracy. The law of democracy cycles, perhaps without final resolution, between supporting majoritarianism, concern for minority interests, and back again to shoring up the majoritarian foundations of democracy.

In our era, it is the power of factional minorities who are able to leverage control of plurality winner processes that poses the greatest challenge for American democracy. The threatened tyranny of the minority of the majority now looms as a central challenge that democratic thought, policy, and doctrine must confront.

In the absence of its founding figure Jesus Christ, Christianity developed diverse expressions of spirituality and worship. Central to this process is the embodiment of Jesus’s presence via representation and reenactment, traversing the milestones of Jesus’s life – his childhood, adult ministry, and passion. It is marked by a duality of identification with Jesus and counter-identification with others, fostering personal transformation and deeper adherence to Jesus’s example.

Individuals less closely professionally connected to the deceased may simply be a witness of fact at court instead of being an interested person. Some people worry that being an interested person means that they are in ‘trouble’ with the coroner or more likely to face censure. This is not usually the case. This chapter gives an understanding of what an interested person is, in the context of an inquest, and the advantages and disadvantages of that position.

The child rights movement does not have a requirement of being built by children. When it speaks on behalf of children, where does its authority to represent children come from? Who has the legitimacy to demand major social change on behalf of children and between children? How can the child rights movement begin to open up to self-critique and discourse on how not to reproduce social inequalities of, for example, race, class, and gender? And when the child rights movement chooses the efficacy of the CRC over a democratic legal order, how is accountability for such decisions exercised?

This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

The book concludes by considering the broader implications of the findings of the previous chapters to the study of congressional primaries and the institution of Congress. This chapter advocates that we need to rethink how primaries matter in influencing candidate positioning and elite party identity. It also considers the implications for the scholarly community, citizens’ representation, and practical applications given the current focus on primary reform. It suggests several avenues for further research that can build on the book, as well as identifying potential limitations of this work. It concludes by considering the implications of these findings for the two parties in 2023 and beyond.