More than three decades of the ‘constructivist turn’ in IR has led to clear insights about what the field gained and lost as ‘norms’ moved from the margins to the mainstream. What happened to the pathbreaking theoretical and empirical claims of the late 1980s and early 1990s? The critical edge dropped out, and the field fractured into silos, while an Atlantic divide deepened. Norms got reduced to an analytical factor to be tested. Can renewed attention to critical and holistic aspect of norms, help the world to craft better responses to climate change or pandemics? Not until the field confronts embedded hierarchies built on racism. I explore this overarching claim about racial hierarchy through the historically rooted themes of rights, migration, and nationality. I stress that IR mistakenly builds on the assumption of domestic jurisdiction as a fundamental feature of the inter-state system, rather than as a constitutive norm specific to the early twentieth century. With a conceptual stroke, the discipline eliminates imperialism, in theory and practice. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I do not privilege 1945, or 1648; our genealogical travels concentrate on the 1920s. Even a cursory glance at the diplomatic record reveals persistently fierce contestation over race.

This chapter surveys forms of status by which legal systems assign rights, obligations and capacities to various categories of person. Though such discussions have tended to restrict themselves to statuses recognized in Roman law (the hierarchical birth-based statuses that Maine contrasted with the contractualism of later Western systems), cross-cultural comparison requires a wider lens. Hence, the chapter covers status within the polity, official or military status, unfree or servile status, putatively ‘natural’ statuses, status in the family and status as member of a voluntary or professional association. Special attention is given to the mechanisms involved in change of status, and to status as a factor in legal penalties. It is proposed that, in systems of religious law (which often operate parallel to civil law in a legal-pluralist context and across borders), status within the ‘ecclesial’ polity is comparable to civil status (citizen, resident alien, etc.) within a territorially defined polity.

Chapter 2 analyses some foundational ideas relied upon in the book. This conceptual base comprises an analysis of nature, the environment, development, and sustainable development. These concepts are discussed as a progressive movement of a complex ideation: where nature is conceptualised as the starting point, later becomes the environment, then advances to become development, and is finally transformed into sustainable development. I employ Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) in my analysis of neo-imperial ideologies and allied Eurocentric philosophies and how these are embedded in the contemporary language of sustainable development. At each stage of the analysis, I highlight the significance of human agency as the defining character of the transformations that occur within this conceptual fluidity. It accounts for the persistence of the subtext of Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the interplay of law, politics, ethics, and history as sustainable development is established upon different elements of both law and non-law theories. The analysis in this chapter is refracted through ’Afrosensitivity’, which I describe as a reaction to Africa as a conceptual tool in sustainable development discourse, and as a conscious, alternative route for imprinting African legal cosmologies on this global phenomenon called sustainable development.

Informal carers of people with dementia work with the person with dementia and with professionals to form a secure triangle of care. They make a huge contribution to the health and well-being of individuals and to the economics of care. They have rights recognised in legislation.

Unfortunately, they are often dismayed by the care received by individuals with dementia when admission to a general hospital becomes necessary. This can be avoided and much better outcomes achieved for all concerned if professionals work with informal carers throughout the process of considering admission, effecting admission, and living through admission to discharge or death. Informal carers do not constitute a homogenous group: they have a range of characteristics, strengths, and needs.

Some are old; many have pathology of their own and multiple responsibilities. They need to be listened to and to be respected.

This Handbook brings together a global team of private law experts and computer scientists to examine the interface between private law and AI, which includes issues such as whether existing private law can address the challenges of AI and whether and how private law needs to be reformed to reduce the risks of AI while retaining its benefits.

Whether AI should be given legal personhood should not be framed in binary terms. Instead, this issue should be analysed in terms of a sliding-scale spectrum. On one axis, there is the quantity and quality of the bundle of rights and obligations that legal personhood entails. The other axis is the level of the relevant characteristics that courts may include in conferring legal personhood.

Property has a vexed status in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On one hand, Rousseau seems committed to the conventionalist view that property is a creation of law and state. Yet Rousseau also recognizes prepolitical dimensions of property, such as a right of first occupancy and a natural entitlement to land through “labor and cultivation.” This chapter contends that Rousseau’s seemingly divergent views on property become less paradoxical once one distinguishes between the rights of others and the more self-regarding aspects of morality. Focusing on the dense section of the Social Contract titled “Of Real Property,” it argues that while Rousseau acknowledges moral obligations governing the use of things, he ultimately holds that persons only have full-fledged property rights within the state. It suggests, moreover, that Rousseau’s attention to both the political and prepolitical dimensions of property continues to resonate in contemporary debate.

The Conclusions summarize the book’s findings and revisits the question of whether contemporary liberal states can manage immigration and human mobility in a new security environment. Based on the evidence, we conclude that liberal states in the post-Cold War era are empowered to implement restrictive and illiberal policies by enlisting the cooperation of non-central state gatekeepers and the support of their publics. The chapter then considers the implications of the contemporary migration policy playing field for the civil liberties of citizens and migrants. It also surveys the effects of the 2019-22 Covid-19 pandemic on the course of human mobility worldwide and assesses whether they resonate with the assumptions of the book’s immigration threat politics paradigm. Several emergent inter-generational and values patterns around human mobility and immigration are then identified. We conclude with muted optimism about the liberal compromise elicited by the paradigm shift to embedded securitism. Despite its affront to the core values and principles upon which liberal democracies were founded, the expansion of the migration regulatory field reflects the consent of the governed.

In this chapter by three Swedish authors, the core positioning of children’s rights and equity in ECEfS is explored. The Swedish early childhood curriculum is strong on these points and sustainability, thus offering a unique platform for implementing a revised Swedish version of the OMEP ESD Rating Scale. The authors’ research study focused on the implementation of the scale as a self-assessment tool for teachers in their preschool contexts. The outcomes highlighted preschool teacher commitment to ESD, as well as the need for professional learning and systemic approaches to facilitate transformative change.