This chapter discusses the subjects of international law: how states come into being, and how international organizations are created.

The constitution of any state, whether written or unwritten, is the set of political, governmental and legal structures and shared values within which the business of everyday politics and governance operate. In fourteenth-century England there occurred the first two depositions in post-Conquest English history, which were precipitated by ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour by the monarchs in question and were effected by ‘unconstitutional’ legal devices on the part of the community of the realm. It was a century of cataclysmic demographic transformation brought about by the Black Death, of almost constant warfare with Scotland and France and of spectacular governmental growth and legal change. It is therefore ironic that, when English constitutional history was at its height, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourteenth century, parliamentary developments apart, was regarded as a sorry backwater. It was useful only to reflect on how a wrong turning had been taken. ‘We pass’, Bishop Stubbs lamented, ‘from an age of heroism to the age of chivalry, from a century ennobled by devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness and moral degradation’.1

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

In the mirror literature, power and sovereignty are identified with the king’s person. The king’s conduct established a model, which his subjects would follow; consequently, the ruler’s actions and behaviour determined the nature of the polity. The king’s cultivation of virtue is, in consequence, a pragmatic as well as a moral imperative. The mirror-writers insist on the importance of the king’s self-discipline as a prerequisite for his governing other people; if he is unable to govern himself, he will be incapable of governing anyone else. The three extracts in this section describe the virtuous and effective king. From different perspectives, they treat some of the ethical and philosophical problems of human nature; in particular, they discuss how to strengthen, acquire and practise virtues and how to overcome and eradicate vices. The texts in this section are drawn from Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib, Kutadgu bilig; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; and Kaykāʾūs, Qābūsnāmeh.

Chapter 2 – Humanisation in IR Theory and International Law – critically reviews the relevant IR and IL literature. The objective of this chapter is to identify gaps, strengths, and weaknesses of several approaches in both disciplines concerning the book’s objective, arguments, and research questions. In addition, it provides an answer to whether alternative approaches to the chosen framework provide a viable pathway to conceptualise the humanisation of global politics. Regarding alternatives approaches in IR, I discuss realist and liberal approaches, the literature on human rights and human security, and literature dealing with concepts such as self, identity, and agency. Regarding IL, I discuss, for similar reasons, the notion of mediation and how the individual human being, the international community, and the state relate to each other. And I offer a discussion of international law and the individual human being.

Knowing when to stop: define your parameters. ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ – take no small detail of everyday life for granted. Start broad and shallow; later go deep and narrow. The big story and the little story – keeping the balance right. Keeping research unobtrusive. Historical fiction: checklist of areas for initial research and suggested sources.

‘We’re not looking for historical truth but for fictive plausibility, on terms the writer must establish with the reader. A better question than ""Is this true?"" is “Have I made this seem plausible?”’

Not all inhabitants of Saint-Louis embrace the history of colonialism. The descendants of the colonial subjects remember colonialism very differently from the elites who celebrate the Fanal. They remember that the founder of the Muridiyya Sufi order, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, was tried by the privy council in Saint-Louis in 1895 and sent into exile. On 5 September of each year, the disciples of the Sufi marabout commemorate a prayer of emergency said by their saint at that trial. This chapter analyses the history of that prayer and examines it as a palimpsest performance that accumulates many different histories and remembers them at once. It analyses the commemoration as a hybrid of different temporalities aligned to repair the legacy of colonial domination for the disciples of a Muslim marabout whose resistance is remembered as the foundation moment of the independent nation. In an interpretation inflected by Afro-nationalism and Sufi spirituality, the disciples credit the prayer with bringing about national independence through occult means. They remember it as a miracle performed by the Sufi leader that established Senegal’s political independence.

Drawing upon Foucauldian ideas this chapter explores how the ‘datafication’ of modern life shifts the modes of power acting upon the individual and social body. Through a brief exploration of three banal everyday social practices (driving, health, gambling) it argues that the construction of the data-self marks an emergent algorithmic govermentality centred simultaneously upon intimate knowledge of the individual (subjectivities) and the population. The intersection of technology, data and subjectivation, reproduces a ‘neoliberal subject’ – one closely monitored and policed to freely perform ‘correct’ forms of action or behaviour, and one increasingly governed by the imperatives of private capital. This chapter explores how this nexus between power and knowledge is central to debates about the relocation (or appropriation) of personal and population data from state to non-state institutions, with private corporations increasingly managing the health and wellbeing of individuals and society. It makes an argument for critical engagement with the complex interactions, intersections, effects and unintended consequences of multiple technologies that, through the use of data, make the simultaneous government of individuals and populations their targets of action.

This chapter discusses the subjects of international law: how states come into being, and how international organizations are created.

Scientific research areas and their development in Africa vary. In this chapter, the nature of science that is produced in Africa is gleaned from the analysis of the scientific research areas. Using large quantities of publication data, a closer look is taken at all scientific research areas in African countries. The analysis shows the contribution of countries to specific scientific areas, strengths in specific research areas, and recent research foci. Using two time periods, not only the trends in the production of science according to the scientific research areas but also to the shifting foci of countries in scientific research are revealed. Countries and their focused research areas are shown in this analysis. Some countries, in contrast to others, were in the forefront of producing the highest number of publications for African science. They are the key science producers in specific areas of research that are very relevant for the development of Africa. Clear differentiation between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa in research areas is seen in the analysis. The attention and focus on specific research areas by African countries are influenced by developmental needs, interests and scientific capabilities.

Scientific collaboration is an unavoidable practice in science. Science is growing with collaboration, which is itself increasing. The chapter examines the kinds of collaboration, from regional to international, that prevail in Africa. Bibliometric data forms the basis of this analysis. Collaboration in Africa can be explained by the core-periphery theoretical model. Regional collaboration within Africa was not as strong as international collaboration that is mostly with the USA, France, the UK, Germany and Belgium. The colonial ties of Africa have not been severed in the current collaborative links and continue to have prominence in international scientific collaboration. Some neocolonial ties are also evident in international collaboration in recent years. International partners, apart from their past ties, look for scientifically strong countries in Africa to associate with. Within the continent, South Africa is the centre of regional collaboration, maintaining scientific ties with many other African countries. Specific scientific fields and collaboration are related. Scientific alliances between specific countries in Africa and other countries are found in the analysis. Forms of collaboration also vary across African countries. While international collaboration is useful, the comparative benefits gained are not equally beneficial for Africa.

This chapter explores two kinds of intra-clausal relations: grammatical functions and semantic roles. Each such relation allows us to describe the dependencies that exist between a predicator and the units that it combines with to make phrases of various kinds. The grammatical functions discussed include subject, (direct and indirect) object, predicative complement, oblique complement, and modifier. The chapter explores diagnostics used to identify each of these grammatical functions in a sentence. For instance, tag questions, agreement, and subject-auxiliary inversion can tell us if a given constituent is a subject or not. We note here that a key to understanding the syntax of English is the recognition that the mapping between form (categorial type) and function is not one-to-one; mismatches, as when a clause or even a PP serves as a subject, are possible. The chapter describes cases in which a given grammatical function can have various categorical realizations. We see that semantic roles (or participant roles) are combined in the manner they are because they reflect what kind of event, state, or relation the sentence depicts. One cannot, for example, have an event of transfer without a donor, gift, and recipient. The chapter gives examples of semantic roles like agent, theme, patient, location, source, and goal. We observe that, although there are instances in which it is difficult to diagnose an argument’s semantic role, semantic roles can be of use in classifying verbs into distinct subclasses.

Experiments allow researchers to determine cause and effect relations between variables. As such, they are a critical component in the advance of scientific psychology. In this chapter, we discuss the theory behind the design of good experiments, and provide a sample study for evaluation. We outline three important types of replication, and give an overview of historical events that led to a renewed vigilance regarding replicability. Finally, we discuss generalizability of research in terms of four factors: Subjects (or participants), materials used in the experiment, dependent measures, and the experimental situation. Effects that generalize across these sets of factors are robust. We end the chapter with a set of 18 critical-thinking questions that should be borne in mind while reading and evaluating experimental research. Referring to these questions will help to sharpen critical thinking skills about experimental research.

This chapter provides an orientation in the people, place and time of the book’s setting. It examines the precolonial history of the kingdom of Burundi, including the parameters of ethnic identity, societal stratification and dynamics of power in the nineteenth century. Through German conquest and transfer to Belgian control after the First World War, it considers the nature of chiefly authority and colonial ethnic policy, brought into focus by civil war and anticolonial rebellion in the early twentieth century. Focusing subsequently on the relationship between a subject peasant population on the border and their imposed chief, Pierre Baranyanka, it explores the chief’s authority of ‘commandement’, and the popular evaluations of his behaviour. While required to perform deference and obedience, the peasant population talked about politics through keen observation of personal behaviour, gossiping about the chief’s attitudes towards the king, and exchanging jokes and parables that expressed political opinion about their social superiors. With the return of the first elite students to study abroad, the chapter ends with the arrival of the ‘time of politics’ in the north of Burundi.