Before the 20th century, most rules of international law were in the form of customary international law. Since then, the increased complexity of international relations and rapid international development have led to a substantial growth in the number and diversity of treaties. Article 38(1)(a) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (‘ICJ Statute’) recognises treaties as a (material) source of international law by referring to ‘international conventions, whether general or particular, establishing rules expressly recognized by the contesting states’. Treaties now regulate trade, communications, environmental protection, military cooperation and defence, and human rights, to name but a few of the myriad topics. International environmental law, for example, is almost entirely governed by treaties, and international trade, investment and communications ‘are unimaginable without treaties’. The main rules in the law of treaties are contained in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (‘VCLT’), which governs treaty relations between states and is the focus of this chapter.

This chapter examines how a state becomes a party to a treaty, including signature, initialling and ratification, where applicable. Whether a state can participate in a multilateral treaty depends on the terms of the treaty. The practice of the Council of Europe is examined. Signature may express consent to be bound but often signature will be subject to ratification. Ratification is the international act whereby a state establishes on the international plane its consent to be bound. It is to be distinguished from the domestic process which enables a state to ratify. Advice is given on the form and content of an instrument of ratification. A state may also consent to be bound by acceptance, approval or accession. Accession is primarily the means by which a state may become a party if it is unable to sign the treaty. The chapter also examines rights and obligations prior to entry into force, the possibility of withdrawing consent to be bound, and the ways in which treaties might be developed.

In this chapter, we will discuss the (infinite-dimensional) geometric framework for rough paths and their signature. Rough path theory originated in the 1990s with the work of T. Lyons. It seeks to establish a theory of integrals and differential equations driven by rough signals. For example, one is interested in controlled ordinary differential equations driven by a rough signal. Here, a rough signal is a Hölder continuous path of potentially low Hölder regularity. Numerical methods for equations with more regularity suggest that iterated integrals of the rough signal against itself are needed to construct solutions. However due to Youngs theorem, these iterated integrals do not exist. To compensate this problem, the notion of a rough path was developed. After a qucik introduction to the theory of rough paths, we shall see that rough paths of various flavours can be understood as certain continuous paths taking values in infinite-dimensional Lie groups. The main focus of the chapter is to present an introduction to this geometric side of the theory.

The chapter considers the range of features that enable investigators to describe a killing as ‘sexual’, such as clothes removed, objects inserted into the body and presence of seminal fluids on the body. Some killing done in association with sexual behaviour is not motivated by lust. For example, it might represent an attempt to avoid capture following a sexual assault or the accidental result of choking. Some killers reach orgasm from simply cutting a victim, while others (e.g. David Berkowitz) are sexually aroused by shooting a courting couple. The chapter describes a number of common features of a ‘composite killer’, such as cruelty to animals and voyeurism. Various ruses might be used in order to get a victim in the situation where he or she can be killed, such as offering a lift or seeking help. However, the most common method appears to be to engage the services of a sex worker.

We know a lot about Jack the Ripper’s crimes, but have no idea as to who he was. His crimes had a sexual character, and his dislike of women could be because he caught venereal disease from one. He targeted, amongst other regions, the women’s sex organs. We don’t know the identity of the Zodiac Killer, who targeted courting couples. It is likely that he felt envy towards them. Although Albert DeSalvo was widely believed to be the ‘Boston Strangler’, not everyone is in agreement about this and he was not found guilty of these crimes. However, his toxic upbringing and his characteristics of offending fit the pattern of other known serial killers. He showed evidence of dissociation. DNA evidence points to his involvement in at least one of the murders. A perspective of motivation might cast some light on these cases.

This chapter studies Anna May Wong’s active construction of her international star/celebrity status through “greetings” to the world. My goal is to understand how she mobilized such “greetings” to retool the film and media apparatus into an empowering relation-building vehicle. I argue that her relation-building stems from multi-registered audience address in her “greetings,” which elicit divergent responses depending on the viewers’ lingua-cultural knowledge and sociopolitical consciousness. I dwell on two categories of “greetings”: scriptural “greetings” as illustrated in her signature in gifted photos, in Piccadilly (dir. E. A. Dupont 1929) and in a lithographic visual map showing the European cities she performed in from 1933 to 1934; and performative “greetings” as seen in her reiterative dialect performances in Hollywood on Parade A-3 (June 5, 1932) and the “China Mary” episode of an ABC Western TV show, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (aired on March 15, 1960). Methodologically, I depart from simply tracing Wong’s empirical reception to develop strategies of taking cues from Wong’s “greetings” so as to reactivate and parse out her ability to speak to audiences of disparate stances across history. This alternative lineage of performer-spectator dynamic deconstructs the race-gender ideology underpinning mainstream film and media, and harbingers a more self-reflexive interstitial identitarian position.

In this chapter, I begin by covering the legal definitional differences between treaty signature and treaty ratification. I discuss the two-step legal nature of signing and ratifying international treaty law and present an argument of when and why signature is important. I posit that states confronting domestic legislative barriers to ratification place an importance on the act of signature, as it is easier for these states to sign than it is to ratify. I examine the case of the United States and the historic hurdles confronted ratifying human rights law. Then, I statistically test the effect of signing human rights treaties on human rights behavior on the ICCPR and CEDAW treaties. I find that for states confronting domestic legislative barriers to ratification, signature is a significant indicator of improved human rights. This finding does not hold for states without such barriers.

In this chapter, I introduce the central claim of the manuscript – that the different types of treaty commitment need to be analyzed and considered as distinct when generating expectations of human rights behavior. The legal paths that states take concerning commitment to human rights treaties are consequential for how they engage with the law and human rights behavior. The chapter devotes attention to fine descriptive data analytics demonstrating a variety of differences across the four commitment actions.

A consideration of the “materiality of discourse” necessarily implicates a reexamination of some fundamental contributions to sign theory. Here, I first review the theoretical writings of Saussure, Volosinov and Peirce, comparing their various approaches to the problem of the sign and to semiosis. Peirce’s insistence on the importance of “secondness” (i.e. sigsigns, indexes, dicents) suggests a way of thinking about discourse that does not involve positioning it, either as representational medium or as social effect, in isolation from the material contexts in which it is used (and of which it is, in fact, a part). Drawing on some contemporary work in linguistic anthropology, I aim to illustrate this approach through a discussion of a few particularly perspicuous, ethnographic examples.

We introduce Witt and IP spaces, which are the spaces on which middle-dimensional intersection cohomology self-pairings are possible. This leads to signature invariants for such spaces, and we demonstrate their basic properties, including Novikov additivity. Using the signature, we provide in detail the Goresky–MacPherson construction of the characteristic L-classes for Witt spaces, which is modeled upon the classical construction for PL manifolds. We also provide a survey of bordism groups and bordism homology theories based on different types of pseudomanifolds.

We review some algebraic topics that are useful throughout the text, including the Koszul sign convention, chain homotopies, algebraic mapping cones, projective modules, Dedekind domains, and signatures of bilinear forms.