Tyrannicide is a political act, which Ford describes as ‘a circle within a circle within a circle’ limited to striking down illegitimate, capricious or impious rulers and constitutes the ‘only respectable link between ethics and political violence’.1 It is parasitic in nature, being reliant on extant illegitimacy for its legitimacy. Its history is also subject to the history of tyranny and is nearly as old; as soon as archaic Greece came to regard tyranny as negative, tyrannicide became legitimate. This chapter also considers two other concepts: tyrannophobia and tyrannophilia. Tyrannophobia, as defined by Hobbes, is an under-identified but simmering presence in tyrannical discourse which impacts on the ability to diagnose tyranny’s presence. Tyrannophilia, as defined by Mark Lilla, describes the interrelationships between theoretical discourse and political support of tyranny. Much of this book focuses on those discussing tyranny, rather than tyrants and tyrannophilia, but this chapter locates the connections between them.

Farhana Yamin, who advised the Marshall Islands, recounts why and how the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) was formed. Born out of the diplomatic disaster of COP 15 in 2009, where progressive countries had been “stuck in silos within their own coalitions”, the coalition grew in the context of the Cartagena Dialogue (CD) and the Climate Vulnerables Forum and was finally announced as “the HAC” in Paris. Representing a majority of parties, highly vulnerable countries, as well as major emitters, the coalition allowed for a Paris outcome that was more than just the lowest common denominator. Testifying to the HAC’s success, the Agreement came to include key demands of the vulnerable countries that had shaped it, including a temperature goal of 1.5°C. Yamin highlights the role of resources, networks, and relationships, which were formed at informal gatherings such as those in the CD. Assessing the overall HAC experience and impact, Yamin describes the demise of the HAC after COP 21 resulting from the failure of the EU and others to deliver or the election of Trump. She argues that the HAC was a time-bound strategic feature and that “next time there will be a different way of doing it”.

Scale, as a geopolitical concept, incorporates a range of ideas relevant to governance and tyranny. Issues of core and periphery, large and small populations, majorities and minorities, linear and non-linear temporality and physical size – vast and confined as well as local, national, regional, global and universal spaces – feature across debates on the causes of and potential preventative measures against tyranny. Scale is also interspersed across the other elements of tyranny. For instance, the extent of a bureaucracy and its distance from the individuals it regulates can heighten the potential for it to become tyrannical. This chapter uses scale both as an aspect of tyranny and as an iteration of other tyrannical elements to consider how they and international law interact and what this means for potential remedies to tyranny in the global order.

Susan Biniaz, lead US climate lawyer from 1989 to 2017, provides an analysis of the role and perspective of the United States. According to Biniaz, US policy toward an international agreement on climate change was guided by four primary objectives: it should apply to developing countries, incorporate self-determined mitigation commitments, reflect a balance between binding and non-binding provisions, and include strong mechanisms for reporting and review. The chapter traces how the United States sought to promote these objectives in the years leading up to Paris, identifying the Major Economies Forum as a key process to build trust and identify potential “landing zones”. Stronger US-China bilateral engagement played a crucial role. Biniaz shows how the shape of the negotiation table can matter and how informal “huddles” have played an important role. The chapter ends with a commentary by Jonathan Pershing, former US negotiator and Program Director at the World Resources Institute, which highlights the diplomacy and discussions, often behind the scenes, required to assess the credibility of proposed nationally determined contributions.

This chapter analyses different aspects of resilience, or the lack thereof, within the experiences of those affected by five decades of armed conflict in Colombia. Although resilience has long been understood in a person-centred way, this chapter argues that such personal aspects of resilience cannot be understood in isolation from broader socio-economic aspects such as work, social relations and communities’ wider developmental and infrastructural conditions. The chapter discusses whether and how transitional justice has addressed these issues in Colombia. Looking particularly at reparations, it demonstrates that transitional justice has predominantly taken a person-centric approach oriented towards monetary compensation, while disregarding the wider social, built and natural environment. It also explores how the needs of those affected by conflict can change over time and across conflict experiences and geographical spaces. This necessarily requires an ongoing analysis of locally-specific needs and conditions, in line with the core elements of adaptive peacebuilding. The chapter concludes with reflections on how transitional justice, including the restorative justice sentences which will be applied by Colombia’s most recent transitional justice mechanism – the Special Jurisdiction for Peace – could help to promote the resilience that conflict-affected communities need to move forward.

The English poet William Blake provides one of the keenest allegorical descriptions of tyranny. Urizen embodies reason and law using architects’ tools and nets to entrap society in webs of law and convention.1 Urizen believes himself holy and writes the law. The book of brass, brass being the metal of tyranny, forces peace through single rule.2 Urizen is also the creator of wrath and justice. Urizen binds people utilising law and convention to stultify imagination and rebellion. Orc, in contrast, embodies rebellion, revolution, passion and freedom, the very opposite of Urizen’s tyrannical god. But the two are intertwined.3 Urizen uses law to enforce reason, peace and oppression which Orc rebels against with creativity and revolution, but Orc also demonstrates a potential to descend into tyranny if Urizen’s tyrannical tools are not entirely discarded once he is overthrown.4 Blake’s complicated mythology mirrors tyranny’s complexity. Tyranny uses law and reason to establish that absolutism is necessary for peace. Tyrannicide recognises the necessity of rebellion, the false restraint of both rule by law and fear of anarchy, but, as such, tyrannicide is only legitimate if it does not replicate the tyranny it seeks to overthrow.

This introduction focuses on how dead body images, seen as taboo, are framed in various ways to humanize or dehumanize the dead. The graphic nature of images of the dead in humanitarianism is framed as precisely what provides the grounds for their power to effect change; the social and cultural taboo against viewing dead bodies means that when we are invited to view them, it must be under extraordinary circumstances, and viewing is itself posited as a political act. Yet critics have raised the issue of voyeurism, pain porn, or compassion fatigue. In the context of dead enemy bodies, images of enemy dead are often viewed in a context that perpetuates a distancing between the viewer and the subject of the image, designed to cultivate affective responses of retribution, hatred, and satisfied revenge, rather than empathy. These framings are introduced precisely because the binary between bodies we display and bodies we don’t display needs to be examined and problematized. This begins to illustrate what is at stake in the context of the politics of emotion, in the sense that emotions are constructed and shaped through binaries of self and other, though these distinctions are always tentative.

Laurence Tubiana, Climate Change Ambassador and Special Representative for COP 21 for France presents the view from the French Presidency that had the unique responsibility for designing and implementing the facilitation strategy for the Paris negotiations. The key strategic goal was reaching a “durable framework” that would foster significant and lasting climate impact. This called for a comprehensive agreement, spanning not only the global level but also the local level – and with the buy-in of stakeholders across all sectors and geographies. France therefore put great emphasis on an inclusive, consultative process as a basis to rebuild the trust lost at the Copenhagen summit. Tubiana fleshes out the major contribution of constructive lead negotiators across coalitions, while also emphasizing the role of civil society, science, business, and media to create the conditions ahead of and at the COP for a successful outcome. Finally, Tubiana identifies novel elements of regime design as important to the reaching of a final, impactful deal, such as new burden-sharing formula or the “ratchet mechanism” for raising ambition every five years.

Pamela Chasek, Professor at Manhattan College and co-founder and executive editor of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, places the Paris Agreement in its historical context by reviewing the origins and development of the climate change regime. The chapter describes the history of the UNFCCC, from its creation in 1994, through the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, over key milestones in the discussions about a post-Kyoto successor regime. The chapter traces climate negotiations over a series of COPs, including the divisive debates at the Copenhagen COP in 2009 and the efforts to rebuild the parties’ trust in the process during the following years. It details how negotiations in the 2010–14 period led countries to converge around a bottom-up arrangement for the post-2020 regime. While many contentious issues remained unresolved as negotiations entered the home stretch in 2015, Chasek describes how the French Presidency of COP 21 sought to prepare the ground for a compromise agreement, both before and during the negotiations in Paris, ultimately succeeding in bringing the parties together in support of an agreement that “represents an evolution in climate governance”.

Susan Biniaz, lead US climate lawyer from 1989 to 2017, provides an analysis of the role and perspective of the United States. According to Biniaz, US policy toward an international agreement on climate change was guided by four primary objectives: it should apply to developing countries, incorporate self-determined mitigation commitments, reflect a balance between binding and non-binding provisions, and include strong mechanisms for reporting and review. The chapter traces how the United States sought to promote these objectives in the years leading up to Paris, identifying the Major Economies Forum as a key process to build trust and identify potential “landing zones”. Stronger US-China bilateral engagement played a crucial role. Biniaz shows how the shape of the negotiation table can matter and how informal “huddles” have played an important role. The chapter ends with a commentary by Jonathan Pershing, former US negotiator and Program Director at the World Resources Institute, which highlights the diplomacy and discussions, often behind the scenes, required to assess the credibility of proposed nationally determined contributions.

Cycles of violence in Palestine are set against a backdrop of settler colonialism. In this chapter, we argue that in colonial conditions such as in Palestine, ‘transformative justice’ frameworks and practices are needed over transitional justice. In particular, we suggest that transformative justice should e grounded in Indigenous knowledges and emergent practices ‘from below’, meaning the everyday needs and strengths of those most directly impacted by violence and oppression. In this chapter, specifically, we theorise ‘from below’ from the perspective of our work as two Palestinian psychologists. Through this writing process, which involved reflecting on our personal, professional and inter-generational experiences of contending with violence and oppression, we articulate a series of counter-stories as key decolonial enactments of adaptation and resilience. These decolonial enactments include:  1. Self-determination of Colonized Communities: Asserting our Sovereignty with Decolonial Attitude and Unafraid Re-Planting; 2. Radical Coalitions for Transformative Justice: Strengthening our Connections and Capacities to Struggle; and 3. Resetting our Wings: Everyday Enactments of our Humanity and Radical Love. These counter-stories shed light on pathways towards effectively disrupting cycles of colonial violence in Palestine and bringing forth, into everyday life, the decolonial futures that we so desperately need and deserve.

This chapter explores the tensions between resilience models of recovery, adaptive peacebuilding and transitional justice by examining the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, its aftermath and the country’s recovery processes. Rwanda has been lauded as a success story for post-genocide recovery, peacebuilding and transitional justice. Yet, a closer look demonstrates that its recovery and peacebuilding reinforced a centralised state and the ruling party’s dominance. These processes produced the appearance of stability and resilience while hiding new hierarchies and social divides that risk generating conflict in the future. Adaptive peacebuilding efforts led by local non-governmental organisations, on the other hand, responded directly to ordinary people’s immediate needs without promoting political agendas. Government-led transitional justice efforts often disrupted these local successes and ultimately benefitted the nation-state at the expense of community healing. The lessons learned from the Rwanda case point to the importance of tending to local-level concerns in recovery processes and of employing peacebuilding approaches that focus on broad notions of positive peace instead of only state-building. In addition, resilience models of recovery must consider micro- and macro-level concerns and pay attention to the impact of political power on outcomes.

Jennifer Morgan describes how civil society worked to secure a fair and ambitious multilateral agreement as seen from her perspective as Global Director of the Climate Program at the World Resources Institute at the time. In her view, civil society had four different roles and functions: civil society (1) gathered together idea generators, analysts, and researchers ahead of time, (2) provided informal intelligence and diplomatic service combined with high-trust networks, (3) brought the voices of people into the negotiations, and (4) explained COP 21’s complexities and alerted the outside world. Morgan concludes that no single function or role of civil society made the difference in Paris, but the combination of them all did so. She highlights the “bursting of the UNFCCC bubble” as a main function and assesses that the 1.5°C goal, came into the Paris Agreement as a result of peoples’ voices being heard and listened to. Without the NGO contribution, it would have been much more difficult, perhaps impossible, to sow the seeds of change. Morgan suggests that civil society can use its principled and objective-based approach to its advantage and listen to allies in their movement.