International human rights as a legal regime is founded on the premise that the State is both the violator and the protector of the same set of rights. Universal positivism is the effort to eliminate the internal contradiction embedded within the heart of human rights law. This is done by creating international legal regimes that break through the sovereign veil of States for the benefit of the individuals within the States. This is a benevolent authoritarian move since international human rights treaties cannot be adjusted or addressed by the democratic will of its rights-holding subjects. Universal positivism’s focus on the State as the object of suspicion obscures the intrinsic dependency on the State for the actualizations of said rights, and how a democratic legal order will protect the individuals within the State in ways that international human rights cannot.

Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

Chapter 6 shows how false Stories help to perpetuate the economic imbalance described in Chapter 4. These Stories include those of economic growth, comparative advantage, creative destruction, and ceaseless innovation. Most of them originate in mainstream economics, including praise for shareholder interests and insistence on social choice theory. Karl Polanyi claimed that such Stories, which endorse a society roiled by constant change, ignore what he called community welfare.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

A prominent theme in the mirror literature is the exceptionalism of the king’s position, a point often presented as the result of divine selection or favour. Many mirror-writers evoke, in various articulations, the notion of the divine mandate – the proposition that the king ruled by virtue of divine choice and with divine support. But the authors bring very different perspectives to this idea; even when they invoke a common repertoire of formulae and metaphors, they employ them to create different meanings. Several authors insist that the singular bounties that the king enjoys are counterbalanced by unparalleled, and burdensome, responsibilities. The texts in this chapter are drawn from Pseudo-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; al-Thaʿālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Ghazālī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

In this chapter, I revisit the idea of a substantial Jewish population from the Islamic East in Egypt by looking at the names of individuals as they appear in documents in the Cairo Geniza. My study reveals that a small core of individuals in medieval Egypt hailed from the East, but onomastic practices do not suggest that a massive migration from East to West took place. I compare these findings with other studies looking at the names of Muslim individuals; these comparanda confirm my conclusions concerning the Jewish minority.

Chapter 3 re-examines the “ascent” of the United States within the 19th century’s Eurocentric international order, retracing its special path from a fledgling and vulnerable republic to the status of an exceptional and exceptionalist world power. It focuses on the evolution of American ideas and ideologies in the sphere of international affairs, the rise of distinctive forms of US imperialism and unilateralism, and the emergence of core maxims of US international conduct such as those embodied in the ever more expansively defined Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Doctrine. It then casts new light on ephemeral aspirations to establish a modern Atlantic order of empires – led by the United States and the British Empire – that were pursued after the Spanish-American war of 1898 and in the era of Theodore Roosevelt.

We discuss the important – but rarely scrutinized – role of archaeology in the constitution of Greece and Israel as contemporary crypto-colonized states, defined by Herzfeld as countries with a strong national sentiment that serve as buffer zones and whose political independence is accompanied by massive economic dependency. We elaborate on what this crypto-colonizing process means for the two societies.

This chapter examines the role of lawyers in attempting to deal with the past through processes and institutions commonly referred to as ‘transitional justice’. First, we offer a brief overview of the evolution of transitional justice as a field of theory and practice. We then examine the role of lawyers in helping to shape transitional justice efforts, focusing on legalism and its consequences for the efficacy of transitional justice. We explore in particular the role of lawyers in the truth commissions of Chile and South Africa – including in the latter context the work of the Amnesty Committee element of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). We then examine the efforts of lawyers to use prosecutions and litigation to hold accountable those guilty of past human rights violations in Chile, South Africa, and Tunisia. In the last context, we were particularly interested in the role of the Tunisian Bar Association as a transitional justice driver. Finally, we reflect on lawyers as objects of transitional justice – wherein the legal profession itself is held to scrutiny for past actions during periods of conflict and authoritarianism.

The concluding chapter draws together the core themes of the book in light of the broader literature on conflict, authoritarianism, transitional justice, cause lawyering, and the broader sociology of law and the legal profession. In particular, we revisit the themes of exceptionalism, agency/resistance, legitimacy, and memory to illuminate the tools, tactics, and strategies that lawyers resort to when professional boundaries, ethics, and norms are compromised. In all of the sites under review, engaging in legal work that challenged the prevailing political regime required moral and political commitment and often entailed significant personal risk and sacrifice.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

Roth does not hesitate to interrogate and skewer many elements of American identity and politics (and identity politics) in his work; nevertheless, certain characters maintain an investment in particular values and ideologies. One of these is the notion of American individualism, which is embraced by characters ranging from Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus to Seymour Levov in American Pastoral. This chapter will situate some of Roth’s key works in the larger context of an American individualist ethic, also addressing the way his works respond to changing notions of American exceptionalism.

How did democracy promotion become a key goal of Sweden’s official development assistance (ODA)? Existing research has regarded comparatively high levels of ODA as a key indicator of Sweden’s foreign policy exceptionalism, supposedly rooted in domestic values of solidarity, democracy, and equality. However, such culturalist accounts of foreign policy exceptionalisms tend to mystify rather than clarify the influence of values. In this chapter, I seek to provide a different account of how values shape foreign policy, using the goal of democracy promotion through ODA as an illustrative case. While policy documents occasionally refer to unique Swedish experiences of democracy, I argue that the beliefs governing Swedish democracy promotion efforts rather result from contentious political processes and have been partly shaped by evolving international conjectures. Empirically, the paper analyzes how Swedish policymakers have framed the aims and strategies of democracy promotion in ODA from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Frederick Douglass’s relationship to education was multifaceted and at times paradoxical. Douglass’s accounts of his denied access to education while enslaved, his history of unsanctioned self-education, his role as an activist-educator and promoter of Black education, and his evolution into an iconic subject for education on U.S. slavery and Black history more generally demand that a discussion of Douglass and education be addressed from several angles. This essay traces the consonance of and tensions between the various ways we must consider education’s place within Douglass studies. Douglass’s overrepresentation in educational materials for children further compounds tendencies to view Douglass in more simplistically individualistic terms. Though exceptional in his ability, learning methods, and educational circumstances, Douglass is best understood within the larger historical context of Black education. Moreover, Douglass himself recognized that education was not a simple cure for racism and criticized the educational elitism attached to prestigious institutions and occupations.

This chapter seeks to better understand the formation of literary-geographical identities and imaginaries by examining the publications and cultural afterlife of Captain John Smith, the explorer, promoter, author, soldier, and self-made knight so closely associated with the beginning of English involvement in North America, and particularly with the original colony of Virginia. The chapter provides a brief overview of the longstanding tendency to see Smith and his works as belonging to, and even a point of origin for, the literature and character of America and the U.S. South, and how this has made him a political and historical lightning rod in highly contentious constructions of North/South identity. To account for this contentious afterlife, but to also move beyond it, the chapter surveys critical approaches that have since better situated Smith’s place in the literature and culture of Renaissance England. Looking at examples from his major works, the chapter attempts to show some of Smith’s experimental structuring and shaping of oppositional and antithetical literary-geographical imaginaries, which he employed to address economic and geographical challenges for the English nation state in the modern colonial and plantation context.