Far from resulting from a rational design, the Human Rights Council is in fact a perpetual work in progress. In terms of policymaking practices, the level of open-endedness and the role of trial and error in the institutionalization of this UN body is particularly striking. The making of the HRC is testimony to the prevalence of bricolage in global public policymaking: even its anchoring practice, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), is subject to unending revisions. In terms of value debates, this chapter shows how the consensus against the politicization of human rights, which originally led to the demise of the COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS, actually hides deep cleavages over universality, equal treatment, and dialog. A lot of these debates pit the North against the South, although the lines demarcating these two camps are often blurred. Today’s HRC forms an amazing bricolage of governance practices and universal values, one characterized by constant adaptation and constructive ambiguity.

In chapter 8, I explore how a solidarist logic of cooperation has pushed states to expand the scope for global environmental action via international institution-building and international law. I am interested in understanding the extent to which this emerging system of global environmental governance has brought about a gradual greening of the sovereignty norm – a key marker of environmental solidarisation. This raises several key questions: To what extent has the consolidation of GIS’s commitment to environmental stewardship gone hand in hand with a strengthening of the solidarist agenda in international relations? Has the rise of global environmentalism served to redefine the meaning of sovereignty in an age of global ecological interdependencies? It promoted a deeper sense of common values and interests that transcend national boundaries, thereby helping GIS to evolve from a ‘thin’ to a ‘thick’ sense of community and common purpose?

Born at the beginning of the Civil War in Norfolk County, Virginia, Laura E. Davis Titus was a member of freedom’s first generation in the United States. Titus was among hundreds of African America women who redefined their place in society through education, civic endeavors, professions, and community advocacy. A teacher and a strong advocate for African American access to education, Titus took her work beyond the walls of the public schools to her home community, participating in the National Association of Colored Women, organizing community institutions, and founding settlement homes that provided young girls coming through Norfolk with much needed safe spaces, guidance, and employable skills such as cooking and sewing.This effort emerged from her participation in the black women’s club movement that was partially inspired by the activism of the Progressive Era. Titus embraced teaching and social service as a means for racial uplift.

This introductory chapter of volume II of the Cambridge World History of Violence, which focuses on the thousand years between 500 and 1500, or what is also known as the Middle Millennium, examines .institutions and forms of violence in the geographical area including Japan and China, Central Asia, North Africa, and Europe, with two additional chapters extending coverage into Aztec and Mayan culture.The topics of this introduction are set in four contexts in which violence occurred across this broad chronology and vast territory.They are: the formation of centralized polities through war and conquest; institution building and ideological expression by these same polities; control of extensive trade networks; and the emergence and dominance of religious ecumenes.Attention is also given to the idea of how theories of violence are relevant to the specific historical circumstances discussed in the volume’s chapters. A final section on the depiction of violence, both visual and literary, demonstrates the ubiquity of societal efforts to confront meanings of violence during this longue durée.

By the end of the third century, in Asia Minor and beyond, the churches had some institutional heft. Conflict with the non-Christian majority stayed below the surface, but it was a phoney peace. The Emperor Diocletian, blaming Christians for difficulties in divination, commenced action, demolishing the church in Nicomedia. In a small town in Phrygia, the Roman army burnt a church down with the congregation inside. Valerius Diogenes, governor of Pisidia, constructed facilities for the imperial cult and dedicated an altar to ‘the pietas of our emperors’. Markos Ioulios Eugenios was tortured then discharged from the army; afterwards, about 315, as bishop of Burnt Laodicea (Ladik) he rebuilt the church, with ‘cloisters, antechambers, murals, mosaics, water fountain, entrance porch … and everything else’. Eugenios and his flock were Novatians: their church and the Montanist church were linked. The Emperor Constantine funded construction of churches in provincial capitals, including Laodicea on the Lycus. Gothic settlers came to Phrygia, including the father of Selenas, bishop of the Goths. Phrygia, still remote from the metropolitan milieu, moved beneath a Christian sacred canopy.