In the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, mixed claims commissions were established as a way of resolving claims for injuries caused to foreign nationals by rebels when political instability, especially in the form of revolution and civil war, threatened foreign imperial and commercial ambitions and interrupted periods of capitalist expansion in decolonised Mexico and Venezuela. Enforcing state responsibility for such claims was often the justification for intervention in Latin America during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. While not all of the mixed claims commissions were imposed by the threat or use of force, invasion, occupation and bombardment existed alongside arbitration as part of a spectrum of more or less coercive measures to protect foreign commerce and capital during this time. The system of mixed claims commissions – as a political intervention in decolonised Latin America – served to insulate global economic liberalisation against revolution and civil war in the decolonised world, by taking the question of who assumed the risk of harm by rebels out of the scope of national authority.

Chapter 7, ‘The MICT and the Archive’, turns to the Residual Mechanism for the International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), the institution that took over the remaining functions of the ICTR after it closed down. This looks at the extent to which the logics that underpinned the ICTR’s archive were replicated at the MICT, specifically through a reading of the materiality of the archive, which sits at the heart of the new MICT complex in Arusha. In doing so, this demonstrates that whilst the rhetoric that surrounded the MICT revived the broad idea of justice that underpinned the ICTR at is inception, the reality was that an even narrower vision of justice came to underpin the archive. This also draws on Pierre Nora’s understanding of Lieux de Memoire to examine the dynamic between remembering and forgetting that is at the heart of the archive.

The previous chapters started with the simple idea of politics as a specific site, focused on the public authority of the City Council. However, we quickly showed the limits of this one-dimensional account of politics as a site, exploring its various other dimensions within the processes of the City. Nevertheless, we remained within the City Council as the central site of politics, despite the odd foray into other arenas such as Carbon 613, which we discussed to show how the City as a site of climate politics was in part being constituted.

Chapter 6, ‘Imagining a Community’, brings together, and builds on, the findings made throughout the book about the nature of the international community imagined within the archive. This shows that whilst the tribunal functioned as a site of liberal international governance, that underneath this liberal vision sat a distinctly illiberal understanding of community. In particular this shows that the archive divided the international community into the international, as a site of peace and order, and the local, as a site of barbarity; protected a space wherein violence was a legitimate aspect of international relations; and projected a patriarchal and colonial vision of community as the voice of the subaltern was denied.

The idea that states have to exercise due diligence in protecting investments against non-state armed actors and Article 10 of the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts have common origins in the emergence and contestation of the rules of state responsibility for injuries to foreign nationals (or ‘aliens’) by rebels during the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing these common origins, the story starts with a series of arbitrations involving Latin American states that were set up between 1839 and 1927. It then follows the scholarly debates about state responsibility for rebels that proliferated particularly from the turn of the twentieth century onwards, finishing with the League of Nations Codification Conference at The Hague in 1930 where states failed to agree a convention on responsibility. This first chapter sets out the book’s main argument and situates it theoretically and methodologically.

With the failure to codify, state responsibility for rebels went quiet. After the 1930s, there were no more of the great suites of mixed claims commissions. Scholarship on the topic dried up. Nevertheless, we can follow the trajectory of state responsibility for injuries to aliens by rebels as it split in two. On one hand, we have the International Law Commission (ILC)’s half-century odyssey to codify state responsibility, and on the other, the emergence of international investment law. The story of state responsibility for rebels and its legacy for both the modern law of state responsibility and international investment law have a number of implications for international law scholars and practitioners today: for specific legal issues in the law of state responsibility and international investment law, for our understanding of the development of these fields and for the state of the law today when it comes to responsibility for the acts of armed groups across various fields including international human rights and humanitarian law. Finally, it allows us to put together these fragments of state responsibility for rebels and tells us something about the whole, exposing how today international law prioritises the protection of foreign investment against rebels, and non-state armed actors more generally, in the decolonised world.

Complete Streets represent conscious attempts to remake place-specific urban infrastructures in ways to enable low carbon pathways. But they help us understand at the same time that the production of carbon pathways – high or low – has the patterns of urban development at their heart. How we make space available for specific types of mobility, including whether we enable people to access daily resources and amenities without needing to travel large distances, is key to the carbon trajectories of cities. Attempts to shift these sorts of mobilities have, as was seen in Chapter 5, generated powerful conflicts. In this chapter, we see that these conflicts over how we move about, and the infrastructures that enable that movement, have parallels in conflicts over where we live, and the decisions about where new buildings go up, what types of buildings go up, and who gets to make those planning decisions. In Ottawa, as in many North American cities, these conflicts have been over the term ‘intensification’, a specific bit of planning language, loosely focused on increasing urban density, around which much contestation has occurred (see also Leffers and Ballamingie 2013; Leffers 2015a, 2015b).

As we saw in Chapter 7, educational institutions – the city’s two universities, two colleges, and two school boards – play a large role in generating governance initiatives on climate change in Ottawa. They are central to the cluster of public initiatives focused on building new sorts of infrastructure and managing energy consumption. Of these, the University of Ottawa (I will use either UofO or simply ‘the University’ as shorthand) is significantly the most active. This chapter explores in more detail climate politics within that university.

While the City was developing climate policy in fits and starts, as shown in Chapter 2, there was plenty going on in the City that shaped the patterns of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the city, reflecting what we talked about in Chapter 1 as ‘implicit climate politics’. At the same time, while much of the explicit climate politics in the city reflected relatively low levels of political conflict, operationalized for example through the smooth technical arena of carbon accounting, the conflict dimension of politics has been much more central regarding questions of transport and planning.

This chapter provides the framework for the book’s analysis of the ICTR’s archive. First it establishes, theoretically, the link between archives, and the formation of community, as the archive is presented as a site where the themes of law, knowledge and governance coalesce. Second, it looks at other scholarly work on international courts for insights on the interrelationship between law, knowledge and governance and argues that this work has, to date, wrongly treated courts as sites of ‘knowledge deficit’, and further that there is a need to understand how the inner workings of the court contribute to the formation of particular types of community. Finally, drawing on Foucault and Ann Stoler’s work, it shows how the archive can function as an analytical and methodological tool to examine the politics of knowledge production in international courts.