The aim of this chapter is to reconceptualise climate politics as a struggle to name the problem and thereby determine how it is known and acted upon. I suggest that underpinning the visible elements of contestation over the reality of climate change, who is responsible and by how much, is a struggle over order – the distribution of economic, social and political resources and the values that organise it as such. Describing the politics of climate change as a field of activity orientated around determining the meaning of the problem enables me to situate the IPCC centrally within this struggle as the key site in producing international assessments of the issue. The IPCC’s role in establishing collective interest in climate change and the knowledge base for action has generated the structures and forces in which the IPCC as an organisation and method for producing authoritative ways to know climate change has emerged, which in the book, I identify as the IPCC’s practice of and for writing climate change.

This chapter fast-forwards to the days of the hearing. It offers an overview of the oral pleadings, the exchanges between the parties, and the interactions between the litigants and the bench. The analysis seeks to dispel the common misunderstanding that a hearing entails a free-flowing and spontaneous discussion. In fact, it often looks like a tightly choreographed play where agents, counsel, adjudicators, and court officials each follow their script. All participants embrace their role as actors and gleefully contribute to this staged performance. The theatrics of the hearing serve a twofold purpose. On the one hand, they enable the professionals involved to come together, tacitly acknowledge one another, and enhance their relative prestige. On the other hand, they help convey the symbolic force of international adjudication as the center-stage of peaceful governance.

Claire Kramsch grew up between four different languages, French, English, German, and Yiddish. She tells how beyond the differences in languages, it is the misunderstandings between the speakers of these languages that have always fascinated her and that have guided her research. Literature and discourse analysis led her to develop the concept of symbolic competence.

The Introduction explains the purpose and scope of the book, and the research questions it addresses, as well as its place within recent scholarship – both in relation to works focusing on languages in Late Antiquity and to more theoretical studies of various forms of group identity and its attributes. We open with a discussion on changes in the linguistic views of the increasingly Christianized elites in the late antique Mediterranean and the ways they experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. The chapter defines such important concepts as “metalinguistic comments,” “the alloglottic Other,” “communities of linguistic sensitivities,” “objectification of language,” “linguistic awareness,” and “a different language”; clarifies the linguistic and religious terminology to be used; outlines the geographical scope, chronological limits, and the range of primary sources analyzed; and describes the book structure. The Introduction also explicates possible methodological problems in research like this and suggests the ways in which one could overcome them –avenues this book further explores.

This book aims to shift the focus from the instrumental to the symbolic dimensions of language that account for its awesome power to affect people’s view of themselves and the world. It takes a post-structuralist approach to the study of language – language not, as Dwight Bolinger wrote in 1980, as a loaded and potentially dangerous weapon, but as a discourse with symbolic effects. The chapter defines symbolic power as “the power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming their vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world” (Bourdieu 1991) by mobilizing not only their minds but also their emotions, beliefs, memories, imaginations and aspirations. It will therefore revisit some of the mainstays of language study that are usually taught as linguistic and discourse structures and show how these structures are vectors of a symbolic power that manifests itself in all areas of everyday life from boardrooms to classrooms to courtrooms. It will show the fundamentally paradoxical nature of symbolic power that at once enhances individual language users’ ability to act upon the world through the use of symbols, and limits their ability to do so in order to be seen as legitimate members of the group that speaks that language.

If political sociology centers on relations between the state and civil society, then it is fair to say that those relations are now marked increasingly by state repression and racial and ethnic violence. The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed the rapid rise of antiglobalization protests around the world followed by even larger antiwar demonstrations as the United States prepared to invade Iraq. Yet these movements faced intense crackdowns from increasingly militarized police and state security forces. Similarly, the 2010s saw deadly clashes between police forces and authoritarian regimes on the one hand, and popular movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter on the other. Ethnic nationalism is now in the ascendant and with it has come a permissive attitude toward official and unofficial violence.