This chapter argues that while great strides have been made to humanise the law of diplomatic protection, its practice in the courtroom is not in alignment with this as the protected individual does not participate in proceedings. It first dismantles the famous Mavrommatis fiction and argues that other conditions for diplomatic protection (such as nationality and the exhaustion of local remedies) and its features (such as state discretion and state responsibility) have been increasingly humanised to place emphasis on the individual. Second, it analyses the case law to show how the individual does not participate in proceedings at the Peace Palace. Finally, it provides suggestions to advocate for stronger procedural participation for the injured individual in cases of diplomatic protection at the ICJ.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

Tracing the figure of the ‘non-Russian’ across nearly three centuries of Russian writing and literary tendencies, this chapter considers how it came to embody cultural and philosophical values against which Russian writers sought to measure their own culture, history, and politics. The chapter shows that the ‘non-Russian’ was a figure central to a range of writers who grappled with Russia’s position between the symbolic antinomies of East and West, confronted the Russian and Soviet empires or emerged out of it, or used the figure to formulate what ‘Russianness’ could mean. As the constant companion of their ‘Russian’ counterparts, the ‘non-Russian’ figures examined in this chapter include those created by ethnically Russian writers as well as those who wrote in Russian while also navigating their own ethnic identities within various historical contexts and literary tendencies.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

More than three decades of the ‘constructivist turn’ in IR has led to clear insights about what the field gained and lost as ‘norms’ moved from the margins to the mainstream. What happened to the pathbreaking theoretical and empirical claims of the late 1980s and early 1990s? The critical edge dropped out, and the field fractured into silos, while an Atlantic divide deepened. Norms got reduced to an analytical factor to be tested. Can renewed attention to critical and holistic aspect of norms, help the world to craft better responses to climate change or pandemics? Not until the field confronts embedded hierarchies built on racism. I explore this overarching claim about racial hierarchy through the historically rooted themes of rights, migration, and nationality. I stress that IR mistakenly builds on the assumption of domestic jurisdiction as a fundamental feature of the inter-state system, rather than as a constitutive norm specific to the early twentieth century. With a conceptual stroke, the discipline eliminates imperialism, in theory and practice. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I do not privilege 1945, or 1648; our genealogical travels concentrate on the 1920s. Even a cursory glance at the diplomatic record reveals persistently fierce contestation over race.

Union citizenship was created to provide a closer bond between the European Union and the nationals of the Member States. It provides a frame for rights to move and reside throughout the EU, and to work and live in conditions of equality and non-discrimination within a host Member State. Union citizens also have the right to be accompanied by their families when they move, even if the family members are not Union citizens themselves. The very power and scope of these rights can make them controversial. The question of whether and when Union citizens should have access to benefits, whether their same-sex family arrangements should be recognised in Member States that do not allow same-sex marriage themselves, and the extent to which Member State nationality law is constrained by the fact that each Member States national is also a Union Citizen, have all been the subject of much discussed case law.

The variety of immigrant experiences expressed through the essay form is the subject of this chapter, which presents a panorama of writing by US immigrants who have found unique ways to give language to an often disorienting venture. The personal essay has proven to be a powerful tool for US writers exploring what it means to be a migrant or a descendant of migrants. Social scientists tend to look at the big picture when it comes to migration, theorizing and investigating migration as the large-scale movement of people from one place to another. But every mass migration is an aggregation of individual experiences, fraught with hardship, sacrifice, and the full gamut of human emotions, from hope to despair. Personal essays about migration and its effects chart the transformations that occur when people leave one place for another. Leaving home is inevitably wrenching, and many essays about migration register a nostalgia for the place – and the life – left behind. The personal essay is a form ideally suited for capturing the motivations, achievements, and disappointments of migrants who have often come to the United States because of the promise of the nation’s democratic principles.

On 1 July 1997, Britain transferred its sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. But even after British withdrawal from Hong Kong, its residents’ engagements with Britishness did not cease. This chapter explores Hong Kongers’ continued engagements with Britishness in the recent two decades. Drawing from findings of previous chapters, this chapter explains why, albeit the unfairness of colonial rule, rosy impressions of British colonialism linger, and Britishness continues to mean more than just a legal status in post-1997 Hong Kong. It also discusses the contemporary relevance of historic notions of Britishness beyond Hong Kong. What constitutes Britishness is still as much a debate today as it was in colonial Hong Kong. After empire, after Brexit, as Britain searches for a new world role, Britons also search for what it means to be British. Seeing how Britishness existed in multiple, varied forms in 1910–1945 Hong Kong, a colony where whiteness was supposed to matter most, help us unravel what it means to be British today.

This chapter lays out the legal framework that enabled Hong Kong’s multiracial residents to engage with Britishness. It explains how the British nationality law enabled multiracial inhabitants in pre-war Hong Kong to make claims to Britishness. Using immigration cases, guidebooks, and census reports, this chapter shows when, by whom, and to what extent this inclusive legal status was recognized. Racial presumptions often prompted officials to deny people of colour access to their legal entitlements as British subjects. Nevertheless, colonial subjects in Hong Kong became increasingly aware of their British status, with some making active claims to their rights. In exploring the understanding and usage of British nationality law in 1910–45 Hong Kong, this chapter illuminates how nationality and citizenship were understood in an era when such concepts remained relatively new.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

It is important to differentiate between various kinds of appropriations of Herder’s ideas. Herder cannot rationally be seen as encouraging oppression of national minorities or aggressive foreign policies. Such instances of reception would have to be qualified as misappropriations, whilst there have been other, substantively more justified lines of political reception. Herder’s ideas resonated with post-revolutionary liberals outside Germany, pre-1848 radical republicans, representatives of smaller peoples and national minorities as well as some socialist thinkers with anarchist leanings. Herder inspired both those emphasising the need for a vibrant and culturally distinct public sphere in representative democracies as well as those opposing the top-down ‘nationalising’ attempts of ‘state-machines’. His ideas not only encouraged national liberation and awakening movements but also those for humanitarian cosmopolitanism. Important unifying elements for these different appropriations are a commitment to the ‘humanisation’ of states and to combining local attachments with humanitarian aspirations. Authors sympathetic to Herder have characteristically rejected power politics, putting forward the ideal of a culturally diverse and vibrant as well as peaceful and interconnected Europe.