This conclusion briefly summarises the main findings of the book. It emphasises that the aim of the book is not to assess the trials from a legal or moral standpoint, but rather to seek to understand what drove different actors at different stages of their implementation. In doing so, the conclusion argues that while the Norwegian post-war reckoning was largely contained in legal form, this did not make the process of coming to terms with the past any easier or less controversial than comparable processes seen in other European countries.

The book looks to the creative potential of experiences of failure, haunting, estrangement, impasse, or dream in Shakespeare. The focus is not just on what the plays represent but on what they do and how they inspire and unsettle the political imaginations of their audiences. The Introduction sets out the intellectual heritage underpinning this approach, including the tradition of negative theology and subsequent philosophies of the negative (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Badiou). It thereby establishes a negative political theology that challenges the official (or positive) political theology that sacralises power. By outlining “the disruptive spirit of negativity”, it shifts critical focus from the mimetic to the affective and opens new and more nuanced readings. The approach builds on the work of critics such as Annabel Patterson, Andrew Hadfield, and Chris Fitter, who have highlighted the anti-monarchical or popular political forces at play during the period. In the via negativia, however, it explores a very different origin and mode of egalitarianism. It focuses on the way negativity and unsettlement imaginatively transform political thought and relations. Shakespeare’s drama opens up visions of something other, including radical experiences of the “perhaps” or “what if”, that deepen the audience’s political thought.

Coriolanus manufactures his unbending martial spirit through both a life-and-death struggle for recognition (Hegel) against Aufidius and a life-defining opposition with the masses. Both oppositions seek to annul the other. By alienating our sympathies, first from Coriolanus and then the people, the play calls for our dialectical political thought. It asks us to see a mutuality, and hence a vision of justice (Plato), that those onstage cannot. We see them in failure and deadlock. His family’s love invades Coriolanus as a foreign force and shatters his self-sufficient oneness. He “melt[s]” before his wife’s silent “dove’s eyes”. In such moments, the subject (indeed the sovereign) becomes an other to itself. It observes itself from a point of estrangement and sees a previously obscured truth. Coriolanus breaks from his warrior-god role (and the master-slave deadlock) and is opened to something intersubjective: he is “not / Of stronger earth than others”. In Hegel’s terms, the masterful subject endures an experience of bondage, whereby “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The chapter argues that Shakespeare turns his alienated audience into the “bondsmen” (or “slaves”) who must “work” on the play and think through its estranging oppositions.

Hamlet is thrown into a state of uncertainty about the eternal. Indeed, his famed “delay” is a response to the thought of eternity. He is given “pause” by imagining “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”. The eternal is the “rub”. The chapter tackles this obscure rub by turning to Soren Kierkegaard, who references Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in his Philosophical Fragments. Resurrection, for Kierkegaard, is a movement through non-being to being. Negativity here plays a critical role. To be “born again”, the learner must “become[] nothing and yet … not [be] annihilated”. Hamlet’s struggle with the eternal opens him to an expansive view of humanity that goes beyond Claudius’s will to power or Laertes’s customary honour. It brings him to a new political vision, outside the violent and reductive dynastic politics of Denmark. Hamlet seeks what would seem impossible within revenge tragedy: the incalculable. The “eternal” is here used in an inclusive sense to show how the obscure but liberating thought of the timeless or untimely allows ideas of justice, charity, equality, and forgiveness to enter the play. The eternal suggests an imaginary perspective that negates our current preoccupations and political economies.

Although no comparable preoccupation with freedom developed in any other part of the world, each region had its own experiences of it. This was true of Africa, but the difficult conditions of survival promoted a reliance on other values, such as courage, honor, and loyalty. The widespread presence of slavery, only rarely as harsh as in the West, and sometimes entered into voluntarily to ward off some crisis, impeded the diffusion of liberty as a value for society as a whole. Islamic society was pervaded by an egalitarian spirit based on the universal submission of everyone to God, but political rule was absolute once established, and only justice, not liberty, set limits to what rulers could do. Formally an empire, Mughal India displayed many forms of local independence, but those who exercised local authority regarded themselves as channels of sovereign power rather than as barriers to it. In China imperial authority was formally absolute but in practice people enjoyed much freedom of action, even against state officials. As in India, however, these limits on imperial authority were not conceived as liberties, chiefly because the state was regarded as essential to providing the moral order on which stable civilized life depended.

This chapter investigates tax payments and self-making amongst Romanian migrants in London. Vicol demonstrates how taxation is a mode of anchoring oneself in a moral order premised on self-sufficiency. Although the UK’s mainstream media cast Romanian migrants through tropes of welfare dependency, Romanian self-narrations as hard working, taxpaying subjects enabled interlocutors to constitute themselves as good migrants. However, becoming a taxpayer in practice was also an exercise in a particular type of bureaucratic literacy. A host of digital barriers, language deficiencies, and unhelpful bureaucrats drove many to seek out private consultants who made a business of helping their co-nationals decode their obligations to HM Revenue and Customs. Thus, this chapter also explores taxpaying as a technical exercise of making oneself legible through the language of the fiscal authority. Taxation becomes part of the making of the migrant subject. It is about the paradoxical ways in which a digitising state premised on self-reliance prompts affirmations of independence at the level of discourse, while simultaneously generating new networks of dependency in practice.

Rebecca West’s novel of ideas, The Birds Fall Down, responds to the intense debate around capital punishment that took place in the UK after the Second World War. Partly motivated by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which West attended as a journalist, this debate led to the introduction of the Criminal Justice Bill in 1947 and the establishment of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1949. Alongside other public intellectuals, West acted as an honorary member of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, founded in 1955. In such non-fictional works as Black Lamb, Grey Falcon and A Train of Powder, West reflects on the meaning of justice and the appropriateness of punishment for murder, assassination, and crimes against humanity. In The Birds Fall Down, she extends her reflections to the political utility of assassination and the wisdom required to pass judgment on crimes and criminals.

A new way of thinking about environmental problems has emerged since the 1980s. Environmental problems are increasingly seen as systematically entwined, with human action as their primary cause. We are in a new epoch in Earth’s history, the Anthropocene, and climate change is its most immediate and dramatic manifestation. The drivers of the Anthropocene can be seen through the lens of a simple equation: Environmental impact is the product of population, affluence, and technology. Nations and individuals vary greatly in their impacts, so questions of justice are unavoidable. Questions of justice extend across generations as well as among nations and individuals. Ultimately, we must ask what kind of world we want for ourselves and our children.

The history of the coroner’s court and its evolution over time is explored, from its presumed origins in the Eyre System to the present day.

Provides a brief overview of elements of the Islamic normative tradition. I consider three key concepts – justice, the common good and community – and ambiguities of their contemporary application. The primary focus of the discussion concerns resources (including wealth and property) – their attribution and distribution. To whom do wealth, property and resources belong, and what are their responsibilities? How, by whom, and for what purposes are wealth and resources to be distributed, and who has the authority to make such determinations? In broad strokes, I outline how, according to religious norms, resources ought to be utilized and managed for the sake of the "common good." The purpose of this discussion is to provide a framework that facilitates a deeper understanding of the extent to which religious norms have been instrumentalized and at times, reformulated in the conduct of the four oil-financed institutionalized practices explored in subsequent chapters.

Wellness, fairness, and worthiness are central concerns in the pursuit of thriving. Wellness is a positive state of affairs, in multiple domains of life, derived from the satisfaction of subjective and objective needs. Fairness can be defined as the practice of justice. Fairness is multifaceted, entailing, among others, distributive, procedural, and corrective justice. Worthiness can be defined as a sense of mattering, which derives from feeling valued and having opportunities to add value. There is evidence that wellness is highly influenced by both fairness and worthiness. We submit that the extent to which diverse groups suffer or thrive depends on the presence or absence of wellness, fairness, and worthiness in their lives. We explore this hypothesis through the lived experience of four groups: LGBTQAI+, Muslim women in Indonesia, Black girls in high school and Black women navigating predominantly White higher education institutions in the United States.

One of Isaiah’s most forceful messages concerns justice, and the sociopolitical conditions necessary to support it. In “The Ethical and Political Vision of Isaiah,” M. Daniel Carroll R. looks at the fundamental themes and vocabulary of the book’s moral vision and surveys approaches that seek to better understand the socioeconomic injustice and politics it condemns. These sins include the greed and malfeasance of governing elites in ancient Judahite society, systemic socioeconomic abuses of agricultural and trade systems, and decisions leading to catastrophic war. At the same time, this prophetic text looks forward to a messianic age of justice and peace under a Spirit-filled king/servant. In closing, Carroll R. looks at how Isaiah’s ethical messages have been received (and resisted) in the pursuit of justice, peace, and ecology.

Though it is derived from individual thriving, community thriving cannot be reduced to the aggregate of individual experiences. Rather, community thriving is defined as the function of a community’s sustainability and its effectiveness at producing well-being outcomes. An overview of community concepts related to thriving, thus defined, is offered, and the implications of well-being, fairness, and worthiness in a community context are detailed. The chapter concludes with specific historical illustrations and steps readers can take to enhance the thriving of their own communities.

The All-Affected Principle is of limited help in thinking about immigration. Immigration raises important normative questions about who should have access to citizenship, what is required for the full social and economic inclusion of immigrants, what legal rights immigrants admitted by a state should have, how migrants who enter and settle without permission should be treated, what criteria should be used in selecting and excluding immigrants, what states ought to do in dealing with refugees, and whether controlling immigration is really morally justifiable at all. The All-Affected Principle is directly relevant only to the first question of who should have access to citizenship, and even in that case, it needs to be supplemented. The other questions are not primarily about who should participate in democratic decision-making but about what justice requires and about the moral constraints on democratic discretion. So, using the All-Affected Principle to think about those questions would not help, and starting from that principle in thinking about immigration might lead us to miss the key normative issues.

This chapter provides critical insights in the important role urban citizens play in urban nature and nature-based solutions. More specifically, it focuses on how citizens and communities interact with and value nature in cities, what resources they offer and need for this interaction, with what associated costs and benefits, and under what conditions. It starts with a discussion of the three key forms of justice (procedural, recognitional, and distributional) that are addressed by and constitute reasons for enhanced citizen participation. Building on this discussion, the chapter then outlines different forms of participation that have been applied in the design and implementation of nature-based solutions. Challenges and obstacles are discussed before concluding with suggestions for how to tackle them. The chapter presents and seeks to inspire different novel approaches of engagement and their associated benefits, which can range from local community empowerment, creation of greater senses of ownership, enhancement of urban citizenship and belonging, and decreasing social exclusion. The chapter engages with two case studies to illustrate its key messages: urban gardens in Leipzig, Germany, and Roerplein pocket park in Utrecht, the Netherlands.