Mining relates to violence in diverse ways, and frequently the relationship includes environmental violence. New technologies, including those central to a clean energy transition, mean that mining will remain a necessary industry. This means in turn that the human community will remain in need of ways to minimize and cope with the environmental violence of mining. The theory and practice of Catholic peacebuilding can offer distinct resources for dealing with these challenges. First, there is Catholic social teaching, which creates a foundation from which to respond to the environmental violence of mining in suitably complex and integral ways. Second, the Catholic community has a vibrant base of grassroots actors defending people and the environment from mining damage. And third, there is the church’s institutional capacity to network those grassroots actors and coordinate their work with national and international efforts to change resource governance and industry practice. The argument is not that these resources are necessarily unique to the Catholic community. The idea is that the Catholic community can array and marshal these resources in a distinctive way that gives it special potential for responding to mining and environmental violence.

The Conclusions put forward a first catalogue of procreative rights based on the claims successfully asserted in international case law to date. Obstacles to the development of procreative rights are also considered, from jurisdictional issues (such as the recognition of the subsidiary nature of international human rights law and States’ margin of appreciation in sensitive areas) to certain underlying assumptions in the judicial analysis (e.g. the importance of marriage as a foundation for intentional non-genetic parenthood). Finally, this closing chapter examines incipient and potential rights, that is, claims which have not yet been raised in international litigation (some currently pending in Strasbourg) or which were left to the discretion of national legislatures. Although many procreative rights are still aspirational in nature, it is suggested that the continuously evolving interpretation of the ECHR, aligning its requirements with medical advances and social perceptions, will eventually expand the scope of procreative autonomy in international law.

Chapter 2 begins by detailing how the escalation of violence in northern Mali in 2012 became a security concern for regional, continental, and international actors by focusing on the spatial semantics ‘Sahelistan’ and ‘territorial integrity’. From the basis of this somewhat shared spatial semantics, the potential intervening actors engaged each other in a struggle over who would be the most suitable based on different understandings of ‘subsidiarity’. In so doing, each tried to prove their capability to intervene, projecting their power through this concrete deployment to Mali within wider African military politics. After months of negotiations, the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA) was deployed amidst plans for a re-hatting to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in mid-2013. This foregrounds the story about the marginalization of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and later of the African Union from steering military deployment in the region. This experience for (West) African decision-makers having their Malian ‘neighbours’ saved by ‘strangers’ has impacted subsequent debates on who is responsible for security in the Sahel, who is seen as legitimate intervener, and who is best equipped to take military action.

Chapter 1 provides the book’s theoretical bedrock and conceptual basis for a rereading of the techno-managerial policy world of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and an analysis of the African military politics that surround it. This is guided by a rethinking of space as relational, as well as the analysis of spatial semantics, observable structures of meaning-making in narratives that allow actors to shape social space. By way of the organigram as an artefact in the field of African peace and security, the chapter highlights the omnipresence of a representational understanding of space as well as its limits for grasping African military politics. Instead, a relational and processual ontology to understanding space is proposed, which allows us to conceptualize change and, consequentially, agency. Based on this reconceptualization of space, Döring draws on critical geopolitics as a tradition of thought that has allowed the observation of the shaping of space and highlighted the role of elites in doing so. These two conceptual moves are framed by an introduction to the spatiality of subsidiarity within APSA at the beginning of the chapter and by a discussion of the role of spatial semantics in African military politics at the end.

The concept of federalism, and examples of federalism, are considered. Although, over 100 years ago, British Imperial federalists argued the empire must ‘federate or disintegrate’, the imperial federation movement did not succeed. Nor did its close relation, the ‘Home Rule All Round’ movement. Instead, the UK has become a devolved State, which transfers power from the centre without relinquishing sovereignty. The main obstacles to federalism in the UK appear to be the ‘England problem’ and parliamentary sovereignty. It has long been recognized that the disproportionate size of one federal unit can destabilize federalism by affecting the capacity of other territorial units to influence central government. However, the main obstacle lies with an insistence on preserving absolute parliamentary sovereignty in the UK. Dicey insisted that ‘limited sovereignty’ was a ‘contradiction in terms’ and that federalism was ‘absolutely foreign to the historical and, so to speak, instinctive policy of English constitutionalists.’ But this chapter argues there is no reason why sovereignty must be understood only as unlimited and indivisible. The obstacle is a lack of political will and not legal impossibility.

This chapter introduces and discusses the approach of each body to deference and subsidiarity, and assesses how the differences may affect convergence and fragmentation. From the margin of appreciation (MoA), typical of the European Court, to the conventionality control (CC) of the Inter-American Court, the chapter investigates all the different shades of subsidiarity and deference and put them in a comparative perspective. Moreover, through specific examples, this chapter shows how different approaches may trigger fragmentation (such as in the headscarf cases) and how convergence on the level of deference and subsidiarity may, on the contrary, foster convergence (such as in defamation cases).

This chapter argues that natural law duties and corresponding human rights require attention to moral and metaphysical frameworks, and education into moral traditions sustaining those frameworks. If such traditions are eclipsed, or lost for a time, there will be deformations in our understanding and language concerning the relationship between the self and the moral universe around us; and, thus, to our understanding and application of human rights. In particular, the chapter examines the shift in language from ‘virtue’ to ‘values’ and ‘person’ to ‘individual’. It explores how the abstracted concepts of ‘values’ and ‘individual’ create confusions in the application of human rights. Instead, it is argued that the moral language supporting human rights application should be sustained within a metaphysical tradition. And, for such traditions to thrive, they require subsidiarity for what Habermas calls ‘life-worlds’ – the many and varied voluntary associations that make up human life in community. Without commitment to subsidiarity, the pursuit of mere techné will undercut the moral sources embedded within those life-worlds, which nourish understanding of and respect for human rights.

This chapter argues for a revised theory of moderate vaccine cosmopolitanism, grounded in a Thomistic natural law interpretation of the principle of solidarity, tempered by the principle of subsidiarity. Solidarity does call for love of neighbour, and therefore for global responsibilities of mutual care among nations. However, love of neighbour does not necessitate equality of treatment and resources, or equality of care and concern. Instead, it necessitates equity: love requires shared yet differentiated duties to care for those in need, according to their needs and our relationships to the most vulnerable. So, love tolerates – and even justifies – some partiality in taking care first of those in one’s own community, without abandoning outsiders to their own luck. This understanding of solidarity is predicated on the idea of equality of dignity – meaning, equal respectful consideration and loving regard among persons and nations. Equality of dignity is consistent with treating, caring, and being concerned with different people in different ways, according to their different needs and their different relationships to us, like the principle of subsidiarity suggests.

Contemporary thought on human rights is rooted in significant part in the soil of natural law theory. Some natural law theorists embrace the idea of enforceable rights to a range of desirable socioeconomic outcomes. But natural law theory is best understood as grounding rights that foster these outcomes indirectly. Such rights, as I envision them, qualify as socioeconomic rights because they directly concern the socioeconomic sphere and because they further those aspects of flourishing which alternative schemes of socioeconomic rights are often intended to protect. There is, I suggest, a plausible natural law case to be made for indirectly promoting these dimensions of well-being by enforcing legal rights to bodily integrity, property, and labor, and so accepting robust limits on the use of force. In this chapter, I lay the groundwork for an exploration of that case by elaborating the variety of natural law theory in which I seek to ground my understanding of socioeconomic rights. I go on to discuss norms germane to the institutional context of socioeconomic life and to propose a set of fundamental socioeconomic rights and briefly consider the significance of these rights.

This chapter considers the following two questions about the future of freezing injunctions. First, what changes should be made to the jurisdictional preconditions of freezing injunctions in order to effectively fulfil the international function of the rules of jurisdiction? Second, by what means and on what basis should we allocate regulatory authority in this field? A ‘bold proposal’ for an international agreement is considered. While that would be the ideal solution in this field, some modest solutions are then proposed. Modest solutions rely on the implementation of changes only at the domestic level. The counter-arguments to the proposals based on functional theories of jurisdiction are also considered. The functional theories are heavily dependent on the principle of territoriality. The role of the doctrine of forum non conveniens is discussed in the context of modest proposals.

A global federal government would be a mighty instrument – and lots of power-hungry leaders and groups from around the planet will no doubt vie with each other to manipulate it to their parochial ends. The global institutions will therefore need to incorporate robust mechanisms to ensure that they remain rigorously accountable, fully transparent, and genuinely independent and impartial in their basic functioning. Four features would therefore be important to include in such a government: strong subsidiarity, the separation of powers, an executive branch with plural leadership, and a high bar of supermajority voting before major action can occur in the world legislature. A second key goal for this government will be to reduce the gross disparities in wealth and opportunity that divide the world’s peoples. One plausible mechanism for achieving this would be a UN-run system of Guaranteed Minimum Income, implemented globally. Such a government could also adopt pragmatic policies to nudge the world’s autocratic nations toward higher degrees of democratization and respect for human rights.

The pragmatic partnership among West European nations that has emerged since 1945 exemplifies how “win-win” strategies can bring powerfully beneficial results over time. Yet the EU model cannot be straightforwardly applied at the global level, for five reasons. First, the cultural and political differences among the world’s nations are much greater than they are within Europe. Second, the obscene divide between “haves” and “have-nots” is much starker and more intractable at the global level than it is within Europe. Third, rapid globalization has caused a political backlash in many nations, bringing to power leaders who seek a defensive retrenchment behind national walls. Fourth, global institutions of cultural integration, such as UNESCO, remain relatively weak. And fifth, racist prejudice and nativist xenophobia are on the rise in many nations. Nevertheless, the historical precedent set by the EU demonstrates that national sovereignty can be incrementally dismantled, yielding new forms of institutionalized cooperation among formerly separate and mutually hostile peoples.

Chapter 3 explains how any evaluation of effectiveness requires the measurement of goal realization. In order to understand what an effective remedy is and could be, it is thus necessary to know the purposes the effective remedy is to serve. The chapter proceeds by explaining how remedies may have different purposes which are connected to different functions in different manners. Further, even though the Court's case law reveals that Article 13 advocates a specific form of access to justice and that the primary purpose of the required redress is to correct individual justice, it remains uncertain to what extent Article 13, also, promotes other functions and purposes, for example, to what extent the access to justice required by Article 13 has independent procedural value apart from being a prerequisite for achieving redress, to what extent Article 13 must promote general and/or individual deterrence, and to what extent Article 13 has a function of promoting and regulating the relationship between the domestic and international levels by promoting, for example, subsidiarity and the rule of law.

Chapter 13 summarizes important findings and offer two recommendations to the Court with regard to how Article 13 could be developed: (1) The Court should engage in more and stricter procedural review by controlling and setting out requirements with regard to how domestic remedial authorities must consider whether the Convention has been violated. To this end, the Court should make more use of Article 13. The counterpart of the increased procedural review should be less substantive review. (2) The Court should engage in more principled and abstract reasoning concerning Article 13, in particular the required form of redress. More principled and abstract reasoning stands in contrast to concreteness. It provides guidance, but allows for flexible implementation in different domestic legal systems.