The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

• ◦ This case study describes price signaling through a third-party data subscription service.

• ◦ Informed Sources provided a data subscription service to companies operating in the retail gasoline market in Australia. Each subscribing company provided its prices at a high-frequency (on the order of every fifteen to thirty minutes) to the Informed Sources online platform and was given access to all subscribers’ prices on that platform.

• ◦ The Informed Sources platform was supportive of collusion as it facilitated coordinating on high prices – by allowing for low-cost signaling of future prices – and monitoring for compliance with those high prices. The platform allowed for tacit and indirect communication, and collusion could occur without explicit and direct communication.

• ◦ Using data from a similar platform, FuelCheck, empirical evidence is provided that supports this type of platform having anticompetitive effects by reducing the risks and costs associated with price leadership while achieving a common understanding among firms as to the prices to charge.

• ◦ For policymakers, the case study underscores competitive concerns associated with price-sharing platforms. In particular, the speed and reliability with which communication was possible through the Informed Sources platform substantially removed the usual deterrents to firms’ using prices for signaling.

As a “Digital Swing State,” South Africa’s approach to digital sovereignty is unique. This chapter analyzes South Africa’s involvement in international processes relevant to digital sovereignty and critically assesses its national policy and regulatory response to the digital economy, focusing on online content regulation, cybercrime, and data policy. Attention is given also to the challenges faced by South Africa, such as cyber vulnerabilities, institutional failures in implementing digital policies, and the struggle to protect citizens’ rights in the digital space. South Africa’s emerging digital sovereignty posture is analyzed through the lens of securitization and development, revealing a complex balance between leveraging digital transformation for socioeconomic development and addressing cybersecurity threats. The chapter reveals while developmental aspirations inform South Africa’s digital policy to reap the benefits of digitalization, they are also increasingly influenced by securitization trends to protect national digital assets and avoid loss of control. The chapter recommends for South Africa to balance its securitization agenda with respect for human rights, calling for proportionate, legitimate, and human-centric policies. The aim is to achieve a positive digital sovereignty agenda that respects human rights and promotes human security, as enshrined in the 1996 Constitution, while effectively implementing digital policies for socioeconomic development.

This chapter traces the developing English empire across the global tropics. Like their European rivals, English colonists, traders, and governors turned to forced labor and migration to maintain the tropical empire. As they forged this empire, English investors experimented with a wide variety of different colonial models. The early empire was not so neatly divided into territorial expansion in the West and commercial settlement in the East. English colonial architects tried to extend plantation agriculture beyond the Americas to West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and they tried to bring the spices and peppers of the East Indies to the West Indies to grow. They became both imitators and innovators, modeling the successful endeavors of European rivals but also carving their own path. Many of their overseas ventures were utter failures. Yet, slave-produced goods and factories constructed and maintained by forced labor ensured profit margins that would be high enough to continue to attract investors. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery had become the defining feature of the English tropical empire, and there were slave majorities at most English sites in the tropics.

Chapter 2 argues that imperial powers (Britain, France and Belgium) deployed a similar strategy of legal imperialism during the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa. Indirect rule operationalised the contradiction that colonial power was weak in its effective reach, yet strong in the systemic upheavals it engendered. It also fostered legal and capitalist unevenness, what Benton and Ford (2016) call ‘lumpiness’. The chapter focuses on three crisis situations that were ostensibly solved through juridical means: the 1920s Gold Coast conflicts before the Privy Council; the 1895 Stokes-Lothaire incident before the High Council of the Congo Free State; and pre-independence military trials in French and British colonies. Together, these judicial crises help account for structural commonalities in the articulation of post-independence African states with the world economy: the deployment of merchant law with and without state sovereignty and middling as a durable though variable sovereign resource of the post-colonial state.

The introduction establishes seventeenth-century English ideas about the tropics, showing that they conceptualized the tropical or “torrid zone” as a coherent and distinct entity. The English thought of that region as both more abundant in resources and more deadly than the more temperate zones. This tropical zone was the focus of early English overseas expansion. The Atlantic World perspective may be too limiting as a geographical framework for understanding the rise of the English empire. Scholars should explore English colonization models across the tropics in the eastern and western hemisphere in a comparative perspective to better appreciate both the development of the early empire and the origins and rise of slavery within that empire. The introduction also argues that the distinctiveness of the variant of slavery that emerged in the English empire can best be understood through the broader framework of the global tropics, linking the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

We show that log canonical thresholds for complex analytic spaces satisfy the ACC.

This chapter defines additive categories and Quillen exact categories, and develops the fundamental consequences of the axioms for exact categories. Projective and injective objects and the Yoneda Ext functor are discussed in the context of exact categories. Abelian and quasi-abelian categories and (weakly) idempotent complete categories are also treated, as well as the connection to proper classes of short exact sequences.