Modern slavery is an amalgam of legal concepts defined in international law united by a shared characteristic – they are all forms of unfree labour: one person deprives another person of their freedom for profit. The introduction explains how unfree labour involving migrant workers and supply chains is particularly troublesome for states to govern because these transnational vectors do not fit within the ‘default’ territorial format of legal jurisdiction and, thus, challenge traditional ideas of state sovereignty. It treats modern slavery laws, which combine international, national, and (sometimes) regional laws, as an example of transnational law and shows how, in this context, the nation state is but one among an assemblage of governance actors. It develops a multidimensional conception of jurisdiction to explore the transnational legal governance of unfree labour and to illustrate how modern slavery laws reconfigure traditional understandings of sovereignty.

This chapter explains how modern slavery figured in a revitalised vision of British global sovereignty as EU membership was under threat. The Coalition Government assembled an elite policy network and forged a bipartisan consensus in favour of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Although primarily carceral, the act also required large corporations to disclose their efforts to rid their supply chains of slavery. Part of the Conservative government’s antislavery agenda, the Immigration Act 2016 pulled labour regulation further towards criminal law. As home secretary (2010–2016) and prime minister (2016–2019), Theresa May positioned the United Kingdom as a critical actor in the global antislavery governance network and fashioned the United Kingdom’s fight against modern slavery as a key plank in her vision of Global Britain. After May’s resignation, the pandemic, and Brexit, the Conservative government came to treat victims of modern slavery as if they were illegal migrants undeserving of human rights.

Chapter 2 discusses the systems of government and the distribution of powers under post-2011 Arab constitutions. It first examines the issue of the overconcentration of authority in the hands of the head of state (with the notable exception of the 2014 Tunisian Constitution, which provided for a genuine semi-presidential system and a fairly robust system of checks and balances [at least on paper]). A special focus is placed on the emergency regimes: Despite some attempts to prevent abuses, the new constitutional provisions governing states of emergency continue to grant the executive branch a significant degree of discretionary power. Furthermore, the chapter shows that not only horizontal but also vertical separation of powers has remained weak. The last part of the chapter discusses the main reasons for the overconcentration of power, namely the constitutional tradition, the patriarchal family, the “top-down” constitution-making processes, and external influences. One of the major consequences of the overconcentration of authority was to undermine the principle of popular sovereignty.

Chapter 2 outlines normative challenges related to jurisdiction over data residing abroad. It illustrates how the law enforcement process involves different types of jurisdictional claim and highlights the challenges in bundling investigative measures with invasive enforcement measures. It also highlights that the traditional focus on territoriality does not meet the needs of law enforcement efforts in fighting cybercrime. Rather, basing claims of jurisdiction to enforce strictly on the location of data raises several questions in terms of the threshold of breaching sovereignty and the legality of accessing such data under international law. Further, the chapter looks at the inadequacies associated with single-factor jurisdictional tests and points to the need for multi-factor assessments. It discusses key actors being placed in a position where compliance with one state’s law necessitates violation of another’s. Last, it analyses international attempts to solve issues of transborder access to data, including the Council of Europe’s Second Additional Protocol to its Budapest Convention, the EU e-Evidence Regulation, the US CLOUD Act and the EU–US CLOUD Act agreement negotiations.

The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.

The premise of this volume is that borders are shifting, and that as borders shift, rights and democratic legitimacy ought to shift with them. For good reasons, the focus of this discussion is on sovereign states and their borders. However, sovereign borders do not exhaust the types of boundaries that shape and circumscribe human freedom. In this chapter, the focus is on the private geographies that shape our lives. These private geographies – and here special economic zones are discussed – are both embedded in the sovereign states system and also help to consolidate its structure. Private geographies, which are characterized by private sources of capital and property-ownership, rely on public actors and institutions to thrive. Private economic enclaves also help funnel capital and trade rights around restrictive sovereign borders. These private geographies are of special interest because they reveal how states and capital cooperate in monopolizing land and carving up the earth, acting in ways that consolidate each other’s power. Therefore, private borders and public properties call into question the public–private divide and reveal how power over land is determined in the global age, often in ways that evade democratic control.

In the last decade, states have fixated on policing their borders beyond their territorial limits. This practice, which has been called “shifting borders,” undermines state legitimacy, because the latter depends on how states exercise their power, who they exercise it over, and also on where they exercise it. As the chapter shows, shifting borders generates a tension among rights, territory, and people, where it seems that we can have any two, but not all three. This chapter examines three responses to this tension. First, Sovereigntism seeks to stabilize the relation of people and territory. Second, Democratic Cosmopolitanism tolerates shifts in territory, as long as people and rights remain. Finally, the Watershed Model keeps borders in their place, but it accepts changes in the people, as it decouples democratic governance and rights from a particular national identity. It is argued that, in the long run, this model best handles the challenges in times of planetary crises, such as global poverty and climate change. For the Watershed Model, like the grass-roots movements of indigenous peoples and transnational migrant activists, can redefine territory, allow for human mobility, and resist state overreach in border control.

What is territoriality, if we consider it from a maritime, rather than landed perspective? And how should borders be reconsidered, if we assume that the nonsovereign space of world seas is constitutive of politics, rather than exceptional to it? To answer this question, this chapter adopts a processual approach to international legal theory and outlines a vast trajectory. Sources from antiquity display an imagination of maritime spaces as an exteriority in relations to politics. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical international lawyers formulated an international law of the sea that sought global applicability. This was what is called here “the first internalization” of the sea. A second internalization is currently underway, in which a central tenet of the first, freedom of movement at sea, is now being questioned. It is argued in this chapter that if we are to understand territoriality, we must reject the premise of universal territoriality and understand it (also) from the position of nonterritoriality which is offered to us by the sea. In other words, the two internalizations are crucial for a processual understanding of territoriality. The chapter concludes with reflections on how traces of exteriority, beyond both internalizations, can be utilized for the purpose of political action.

This chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the book by disentangling the myriad discourses and interpretations of digital sovereignty from the perspective of the Global South and emerging power alliances. It argues that BRICS countries symbolize the “rise of the rest” in an increasingly multipolar world, their digital policies critical to the future shape of global internet, and digital governance. In this book, the idea of digital sovereignty itself is viewed as a site of power contestation and knowledge production. Specifically, the chapter identify seven major perspectives on digital sovereignty in a complex discursive field: state digital sovereignty, supranational digital sovereignty, network digital sovereignty, corporate digital sovereignty, personal digital sovereignty, postcolonial digital sovereignty, and commons digital sovereignty. The chapter highlights the affinities and overlaps as well as tensions and contradictions between these perspectives on digital sovereignty with brief illustrative examples from BRICS countries and beyond. While a state-centric perspective on digital sovereignty is traditionally more salient especially in BRICS contexts, increasing public concern over user privacy, state surveillance, corporate abuse, and digital colonialism has given ascendance to an array of alternative perspectives on digital sovereignty that emphasize individual autonomy, indigenous rights, community well-being, and sustainability.

Chapter 5 tackles the question of the applicability of belligerent reprisals in non-international armed conflict. After assessing the merits and difficulties associated with previous reflections on the topic, it devises a new methodology to approach the issue. Then, it puts the notion of belligerent reprisals in relation with the two features of inequality of status between States and non-State armed groups, and equality of rights and obligations for parties to non-international armed conflicts. A careful reading of the travaux préparatoires of Additional Protocol II to the 1949 Geneva Conventions upholds an interpretation that links belligerent reprisals with the latter principle, and that places reciprocity at the basis of both the applicability and the purpose of the measure in non-international armed conflicts. The chapter concludes with the impact of this formalization on such key questions as the requirement of imputability to a State of the original IHL violation and the actual features of the principle of equality. It suggests that the focus be shifted to the idea of equilibrium of rights and obligations, and that belligerent reprisals be seen as a key enabler of it.

Chapter 2 examines the various ways in which British conquest affected the harbour’s relationship with two neighbouring princely states over the course of the nineteenth century. While the English East India Company attempted to erect various fiscal barriers between the British port and the two neighbouring states over the course of the nineteenth century, these restrictions ultimately proved to be counterproductive severing the port from its hinterland, which lay almost entirely in the two states. As the global market for agrarian produce expanded in the latter half of the nineteenth century therefore, the colonial state was forced to ease many of these restrictions to facilitate the passage of commodities, especially since countermeasures enacted by the two states had begun to adversely affect the port’s fortunes. Through a close analysis of the interportal agreement of 1865, the most significant step towards the region’s economic integration, this chapter will assess the motivations behind the agreement and its wide-ranging impact. Utilizing sources from the archives of the Cochin State, this chapter will track the political and commercial motivations guiding the state as it attempted to get more involved in the British port’s affairs and assess the impact of its growing involvement on Cochin’s development.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.

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.

In fall 1945, Lieutenant Colonel William K. Evans, the US Army’s chief civil affairs officer in Taiwan, smuggled sixty kilograms of gold bullion that he confiscated from the Japanese Tenth Area Army and offloaded it on Shanghai’s black market, returning to the United States with $108,000 in cash (worth approximately $1.5 million today). The gold was supposed to go the Chinese Nationalist government. Although US military authorities found overwhelming evidence of Evans’ guilt and had recently sentenced another colonel to ten years in prison for a nearly identical crime committed in Tokyo, Evans walked away a free man after a protracted Sino-US diplomatic struggle and two mistrials in federal court. By examining the Evans case, this chapter sheds light on the transition from extraterritoriality and formal colonialism to America’s postcolonial model of using status of forces agreements (SOFAs) to exercise jurisdiction over US forces stationed abroad.

Farage also used ‘we’ to show that he identified with ‘the people’. The ideas underlying this phrase need to be understood in their historical context, since they vary depending on particular national histories, but all share a common ancestor in ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. British democracy needs to be traced back to British thinkers such as Buchanan, Hobbes and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. This is relevant because the historical discourse surrounding the phrase ‘the people’ was central to the development of democracy, and is continuous with today’s challenges to it. The various notions of ‘the people’ were connected with the ‘sovereignty of the people’ and the ‘sovereignty of parliament’, the latter being expressly challenged by populist parties like UKIP, in favour of direct democracy, and the same trend was evident in the post-referendum governments. The expression ‘the common people’ played an important role in British political discourse. Its early meaning changed radically until it was replaced by ‘ordinary people’, which in the Brexiter demagoguery was equated with ‘the people’, in opposition to ‘the elite’.

This chapter focuses on the Noncooperation Movement (1920–1922) and, in particular, the role played by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The NCM was the largest political movement for swaraj that India had ever seen. As the leader of this movement, Gandhi would demand noncooperators refuse mercy, and if necessary, sacrifice their lives in pursuit of political freedom. For Gandhi, it was only by reclaiming the right to die a political death that the satyagrahi could finally escape the label of the criminal and the category of rebellion. The chapter studies the place of mercy in Gandhian thought by paying close attention to his response to the Amritsar Massacre, his public speeches and writings, and his performance in his trial for sedition in 1922. As I argue, by embracing guilt and rejecting mercy, Gandhi threatened to finally explode the political conditions upon which imperial sovereignty had been organized.