The rule of law, an abstract concept heavily debated among legal scholars and social scientists, has in the past few decades acquired a nearly universal appeal, as democracies, autocracies, and oligarchies all claim to uphold it. Repeatedly, Xi and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have pledged to build a “rule-of-law country.” But when the ruling elites of a one-party authoritarian state allege commitment to the rule of law, what do they really mean? How is it different from the Western concepts of the rule of law, especially the “thick” version of it that has been closely tied to liberal democratic values? What are the key features of the “rule of law with Chinese characteristics”? And how will it impact the international legal order? Applying a transnational legal ordering framework, this chapter attempts some answers. It traces the development of the Chinese legal system and the evolving rule-of-law debates in China and then explores how China might impact the international legal order.

This chapter concerns the preface to an 1844 (Ottoman) Turkish translation of al-Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya by Kemalüddin İbrahim b. Bahşi b. Dede Cöngi (d. 975/1567). The translator, Meşrebzâde Mehmed Ârif Efendi (d. 1274/1858), examines the use and application of the technical Arabic term siyāsa in its Muslim legal and political contexts. The translated work reflects the need to legitimate sultanic intervention in law in the wake of the addition of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to the Ottoman Empire in 1517; it aims to conceptualise Ottoman criminal law in religio-legal terms, in an attempt to bolster the religious credibility of the Ottoman state. Its translation in the 19th century reflects changes in administration that led to the redefinition of the broad powers and discretionary (taʿzīr) authority given to administrators in the field of politics, as well as the mission descriptions of governors and judges.

This chapter provides important background on legal reform and social change in Vietnam since the economic reform of đổi mới. It examines various accounts of the role of law in shaping state and society relationships in Vietnam, covering issues such as constitutional amendments, economic governance, dispute resolution, and rights mobilization. It also draws upon some important and useful insights relating to the operations of law in daily life from the anthropology literature. It can be seen from existing literature that law has had a limited role and legitimacy in the regulation of social life, which is predominantly shaped by informal practices and morality.

The peculiar purpose and population of the Australian penal colonies presented a raft of problems for the administration of justice and the maintenance of discipline. There was a perceived need for a simplified and more coercive system of law, which however coincided with a desire that local law and justice be fairly applied and keep pace with metropolitan legal reforms. That bred numerous tensions and confusions. This chapter considers how the need to control convict populations in colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land invited a myriad of compromises and peculiarities, including a chaotic application of English transportation law and the assumption of vast and informal powers by colonial magistrates. Although there was a broad shift over time towards the normalising of colonial justice and discipline, the imperial and local governments were slow to correct local informalities, injustices, and deviations from metropolitan law and practice.

This chapter shows how the Chinese commercial legal system has improved significantly over the past two decades, to the extent that in most cases it compares favorably in dispute resolutions outcomes with legal systems in most liberal democratic nations. However, it falls short of a "rule of law" system in certain types of cases due to three distortions interfering with decision-making by courts: political interference by local and sometimes central government officials; corruption; and guanxi (personal relationships) involving judges or senior court/government officials. The chapter uses the case of Judge Wang Linqing and the Shaanxi Billion Yuan Mining Rights dispute to demonstrate that these distorting elements have infected legal institutions right up to the Supreme People's Court and involve senior Chinese Communist Part leaders within China's anti-corruption agency and Politburo, making the problems very difficult to stamp out.

Chapter 4 analyses the banishment and penal transportation of enslaved people in the British Caribbean. The first part of the chapter shows the links between punitive mobility and the management of colonial labour. Magistrates sentenced and resold enslaved runaways, rebels, and lawbreakers to colonies like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and St Thomas. They also instigated mass banishments and transportations following so-called conspiracies and plots, and revolts, including to British settlements and colonies in Honduras, Sierra Leone and Australia. Such sentencing became a key element of the larger question of legal reform, following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the reform of the ‘Bloody Code’ in England in the 1820s, and the amelioration of enslavement (c. 1823-38). The second part of the chapter constructs a detailed narrative of the penal transportation of a group of over one hundred enslaved rebels following the Barbados Rebellion of 1816, via Honduras to their final destination, Sierra Leone. It views their journey as an allegory for a slave voyage in reverse, analysing the layers of connection between and the multi-directional circulations associated with enslavement, imperial governmentality, penal transportation, and other forms of colonial bondage and repression.

This chapter ventures into defining the Islamic legal tradition, its main characteristics as a legal tradition. Three main themes shed light on the nature of Islamic law historically. These themes are (1) legal pluralism, (2) legal determinacy, and (3) legal reform. While defining a tradition is hampered by its pluralism, legal determinacy allows for some stability and a better attempt at definition. I argue that in our conceptualization of the Islamic legal tradition we must incorporate the practice of law in the work of judges, rather than narrowly focusing on the black-letter discourse of jurists. It is this interaction, which is captured in several legal genres, that creates a stable legal system. In addition to the realist nature of this approach, it also promises to open up new possibilities for legal reform.

Examining changes in the legal rules and procedures that render the courts more or less attractive for rights-claiming helps answer a core question: To what extent and how has civil litigation become an institutional mechanism for rights-claiming in South Korea? The concept of legal opportunity structures pinpoints the relatively stable but not static rules and statutes related to access to the courts, adjudication procedures, and judicial remedies that affect whether individuals and groups will use private litigation to try to enforce rights. This chapter’s analysis indicates that Koreans have benefited from a liberalizing structure of legal opportunities and improved potential for rights protection via the courts in the past two decades. I illustrate how claimants and lawyers are recognizing and using legal opportunities, and sometimes even prying open new opportunities, in pursuit of rights.

The history of women’s activism in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is closely intertwined with the history of political resistance. In the 1950s, women mobilized against political oppression. Later, they joined the struggle as members of the underground movement, as couriers, as protectors and nurturers of male fighters, and sometimes as the peshmerga (those who face death) fighters. However, only few women played leadership roles in the resistance. After 1992, when a form of autonomy was attained, civil society organizations, including independent women’s organizations, proliferated. This growth in the 1990s and 2000s, combined with the end of the four-year Kurdish civil war in 1998, led to the formation of collaborative networks and umbrella organizations. Now we can speak of a women’s movement that, despite its internal shortcomings and outside obstacles, has been able to bring about change in the region (Hardi, 2013). This chapter builds on two earlier studies about the women’s movement in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Hardi, 2011, 2013). It draws on the voices of a group of experts to highlight the achievements and limitations and focuses on what to do next to surpass the perceived stagnation.

This book has sought to provide an understanding of the unique features of the Chinese venture capital (VC) market, especially from the perspective of legal and corporate practices. Drawing on the materials covered earlier in this book with regard to the life cycle of VC in China – fundraising, investment, and exit – this chapter seeks to answer the questions raised in the first chapter on a more principled basis. 1. How did China create the world’s second-largest VC market within such a short period of time? 2. Are there any lessons of general applicability, which may be extracted from China’s VC story? 3. What are the ways forward for China’s VC market? These questions will each be discussed in turn.

Since Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, the party-state has moved to increase its control over virtually every important element of Chinese public life, including the media, the Internet, academia, civil society organizations, rights activists and lawyers, the legal profession, and arts and culture. The crackdown on civil society has been particularly damaging. Many of the top rights advocacy organizations in China have been targeted: some have been forced to scale back their work, while others have been shut down. In other words, whereas in the past, the party was willing to tolerate some degree of activity outside of party-sanctioned zones, it now wants a less crowded playing field, one in which it plays a larger role. At the same time, the CCP has also sought to tightly constrict foreign influences. Whereas law was once seen as a tool to facilitate foreign engagement in China, it is increasingly being used to control – or even block – international engagement that the Party sees as problematic. The passage of the Foreign NGO Law, which heavily regulates the activities of international NGOs and foundations, represents a new chapter of China’s engagement, both with domestic civil society, and with the international community.

This final chapter briefly sets out two lists of recommendations with the intention of helping to progress the debate about regulation of autonomous weapon systems currently being conducted by the States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The first set relates to the definition of autonomous weapons. This has been a point of contention since the first informal Meeting of Experts was held in 2014. The recommendations given here are drawn from the points made in earlier chapters and can be used to formulate a definition of autonomous weapons which will support regulatory efforts. The second set of recommendations briefly outlines a proposed regulatory response based on the approaches taken in existing Protocols of the CCW.

This chapter concludes and provides recommendations for the better integration of the judicial and private mechanisms discussed in previous chapters so that they deliver fairer, clearer, more predictable and UNDRIP-compliant outcomes for indigenous communities. National laws must recognise the special vulnerability of land-connected people to development projects and impose a moratorium on land disturbance until a developer has undertaken a preventative conflict assessment. That assessment must take no longer than state divestment of land and must necessitate a mediation process which interfaces with the layers of race, ethnicity, legacy and postcolonial histories that can relate to land. This chapter considers what this process entails (including the requirement for the legal ability of communities to say no at this point) and methods for dealing with the cost and independence of such a process (blind trusts). Aspects of this assessment could, through a code of practice, then feed into project governance much further upstream and tighten existing documentation at the specific points at which indigenous vulnerability to dispossession is high, as detailed. Other suggestions on institutional culture are made.

Chapter three tracks the geographical expansion of the legal reform, exploring the debates and negotiations around its implementation in Crimea and Kazan. In order to better contextualize this implementation, it first discusses the changing political climate after the Great Reforms and the limited politicization of the emerging public sphere, which also affected provincial cities such as Kazan. Pragmatic concerns over resources and infrastructure came to play as important a role as political and ideological concerns over power and authority. The chapter shows that the reform had to be negotiated carefully at the provincial and local levels, with occasional clashes disrupting the process, as a range of individuals and institutions advanced their positions and defended specific interests. In charting these negotiations and controversies, the chapter also paints a detailed ethnographic portrait of communication and administrative interaction in post-reform Russia.

The introduction outlines the major questions in the book and how they are addressed, including a discussion of research design and methods. This book explores the overarching question of why authoritarian regimes adopt women’s rights with the recognition that both the question and answer can only be context-specific. To that end, the book explains why Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria have converged in their adoption of women’s rights legal reforms. It explores why they differ from most of their neighbors in the Arab Middle East, with whom they share a religion, language, and history, when it comes to adopting more women’s rights reforms earlier and at a faster pace. To understand how this happened and why women’s rights have been so central to the major developments in the region, I argue that one has also to take into consideration not only the events that occurred, regional dynamics, but also the symbolic dimensions of politics, which is the battlefield upon which many of the struggles have been enacted.