The chapter opens with a basic structural description of declensional patterns in Slavic languages, concentrating on several pervasive, salient, and typologically important features. The Late Common Slavic (LCS) system is outlined, with samples of key substantival and pronominal paradigms. Next, the survey traces crucial changes from LCS into the modern languages in the organization of nominal inflection into classes, including emergence of patterns specific for adjectives and numerals. Also discussed is the prehistory of the LCS system and its contextualization within the Indo-European family. Finally, the chapter reviews a number of mostly post-LCS innovations involving interesting synchronic or diachronic problems, such as: encoding virility and animacy; encoding innovative case/number categories (‘second locative’, partitive, paucal, etc.); patterns of syncretism and developments towards analyticity; defectivity and indeclinability; recycling of former dual endings; rise of definiteness markers; transfers to and from declensional morphology; role of segmental alternations and prosodic distinctions in declensional systems.

This chapter serves as the general introduction to the volume. It discusses two major impasses plaguing EMU in the 2020s: the first, a clash between politicization of EMU decisions, on the one hand, and an institutional structure designed to reject political conflict, on the other; the second, a scholarly impasse between those analysing EMU accountability comparatively and those doing so through EMU specific standards. The chapter briefly introduces the core concepts used in the volume as a means of overcoming this impasse: the distinction between procedural and substantive accountability as well as the normative goods framework developed in Chapter 1. It finally provides an overview of the structure and content of the volume, concluding with a plea to focus scholarly attention on EMUs substantive accountability deficits.

Concerns of incoherence surrounding investor-state decisions have been widely discussed by scholars over the past several years and have moreover been overwhelmingly raised by state delegations during the UNCITRAL Working Group III discussions on investor-state dispute settlement reform. In the coda, the discussion is briefly brought back to its beginnings and the topic of investor-state dispute settlement reform. Are there any conclusions in relation to reform that may usefully be drawn from the book’s discussion? The coda argues that states may be required to reframe and recontextualise their understanding of the concept of coherence in light of the book’s overall analysis. In so doing, they may also be required to address coherence from the ‘bottom-up’ rather than the ‘top-down’.