The increasing mobility of athletes prompts a reconsideration of the presumed connection between allegiance, identity and nationality. Olympic citizenship challenges traditional understandings of community membership by calling into question the privileged status of birthright citizenship and by bringing forth a different, more fluid and changeable notion of belonging. By juxtaposing the ‘old’ world of nations competing via ‘their’ athletes, as momentary representatives of the nation, for glory, medals, dominance and prestige, to the increasing mobility of sportspersons engaging in the pursuit of athletic excellence and creative self-expression, we argue that neither the enactment of tighter rules to prevent ‘citizenship shopping’ nor the transformation of the Olympic Games into athletes' Olympics are desirable reforms. Instead, we propose a participatory growth model which would allow athletes to choose the country they intend to represent following their enmeshment into a localised web of socio-economic interactions and a flexible framework of citizenship. This cannot but have wider implications for the Olympic Charter and for politics in general.

Due to the distinct nature of international crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity originating out of and contributing to the pervasive collective character of mass atrocity, the appropriate mens rea for individual commission of these crimes is difficult to pin down. The mens rea for these international crimes has been deliberated, disputed and inconsistently applied, leaving what it means for individuals to intend to commit crimes of mass atrocity mired in confusion. This paper explores the meaning of intentional commission of collective crime, and demonstrates that from both philosophical and legal perspectives, acting intentionally in the context of mass atrocity can be interpreted in different ways, resulting in a condition of international criminal law which is at risk of unpredictability and expressive uncertainty. The paper endorses purpose-based, rather than knowledge-based, intent as the appropriate standard in the context of international crimes by arguing that mere knowledge of outcomes is insufficient.

Since the spark of the Egyptian revolution in January 2011, issues of political party law reform, constitutional declarations, and the institution of free and fair elections have taken the lead in mainstream politics, and at times, relegated the role of organised labour to mere economistic agitation and disruption of an already ‘disrupted’ life, in the eyes of the Egyptian public. In contrast to mainstream depiction of the labour movement as a ‘single issue’ movement, this paper shows the decisive political role of labour struggles that took place both inside and outside the judicial and legal systems, in the years leading up to the events of 25 January. This paper identifies the diversity of tactics used by the labour movement, and its unique approach to legality – a defensive legality approach, where legality and illegality are both taken seriously as legitimate tactics of resistance. The defensive legality approach recognises the violence and coerciveness of the legal form, as well as the tactical potential of recourse to the legal system to defend the labour movement. The experience of Egyptian workers in the wake of the 25 January revolution reveals the politics and the limits of law, as well as the significance of tactically and defensively using the law.

This paper critically examines the ways in which the European Court of Human Rights represents applicants' religious and cultural practices in its legal discourse. Borrowing tools from critical discourse analysis and incorporating insights from the anti-essentialist critique, the paper suggests that the Court has most problematically depicted the practices of Muslim women, Sikhs and Roma Gypsies. The analysis reveals that, by means of a reifying language, the Court oftentimes equates these groups' practices with negative stereotypes or posits them as the group's ‘paradigmatic’ practice / way of life. The thrust of the argument is that these sorts of representation are problematic because of the exclusionary and inegalitarian dangers they carry both for the applicants and for their groups. In negatively stereotyping applicants' practices and in privileging certain group practices over others, these types of assessment underestimate what is at stake for the applicants and potentially exclude them from protection. Moreover, these types of reasoning risk sustaining hierarchies across and within groups. The paper concludes by sketching out an approach capable of mitigating stereotyping and essentialising risks.

The protection of Geographical Indications (GIs) is often conceived as a way to preserve cultural creativity embedded in a specific place. But can GIs be understood as a mode of cultural creativity in their own right? This paper tries to answer this question through a case-study which compares three specific GIs for wines in three different countries (Australia, Italy and Canada). By using an interpretative analysis based on narratives, the paper highlights how GIs are the protagonist of legal narratives in terms of cultural creativity and, at one and the same time, something extrinsic and intrinsic to a given social and productive environment, contributing to defining that same notion of place.

The introduction of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative in 1996 established landmark legal and policy innovations both in the regulatory landscape of sovereign debt and in the framework of international development finance. As the HIPC framework draws to a close, this paper reviews the impact of this initiative on the regulation of sovereign debt, in particular the governance of third world debt. The paper considers the implications of the initiative's explicit link between debt restructuring and development policy and its incorporation of non-traditional normative values, such as poverty reduction and participatory development, into the legal and political discourse of sovereign debt. The paper argues that while the changes which brought about the HIPC initiative have led to a number of key initiatives to reform the governance of third world debt, they have also had the contradictory effect of reinforcing the core disciplinary discourses and pre-existing practices of the sovereign debt regime.