This book concludes by reiterating the importance of avoiding grand narratives in research on sustainable development in international law. While each chapter revolves around its unique theme, my adoption of TWAIL helped unite these separate parts to tell a single story on Africa’s intersection with sustainable development’s legal evolution, conceptualisation, and implementation. Even so, this book is more than just writing about sustainable development or Africa as it deeply explores how international law should evolve, going forward. Finally, I end this book by drawing on TWAIL’s hopeful agenda by foreshadowing my future research interests in re-reading the law and politics of ecological crises as everyday occurrences and not as episodic events in international law.

It is not hard to find examples of the use of Latin in nineteenth-century Cambridge to reject modernity or to mystify and police the boundaries of elite status and existing social and imperial hierarchies. But concentration on such examples obscures a history of the expression of radical ideas in Latin and of engagement with here-and-now issues. How can we incorporate such complexity into our understanding of the history of Latin studies, and avoid mistaking one side of an argument for the standard view of the elite? And how should Latin face its future or even its present? We should be brave enough to insist that the history of ‘western civilisation’ (not uniquely admirable or the only one to deserve attention) is incomprehensible without Latin.

“Staging The Magic Flute” examines the production history of Mozart’s opera over more than two centuries, from its 1791 premiere to 2019. It focuses especially on productions of The Magic Flute since 1970 and the critical reactions they have provoked, and asks if there can ever be a definitive staging of this iconic work. Productions discussed in detail range from Barrie Kosky’s radical “silent movie” version for the Komische Oper Berlin to August Everding and David McVicar’s long-running fairytale-Enlightenment stagings for (respectively) the Bavarian State Opera and The Royal Opera. Among the many other directors and designers discussed are Marc Chagall, Ingmar Bergman, David Hockney, Peter Sellars, Pierre Audi, Julie Taymor, Peter Stein, and Simon McBurney.

Chapter 7 focuses on the 1970s, when anti-colonial movements sought to turn global hierarchies upside down. Their efforts moved from the US civil rights movement to expose the racism and sexism embedded in professional work, as in education, social work, and medicine. Teachers observed their ‘hidden curriculum’, which excluded those they long claimed to help. Lawyers noted their close alliance to capital and sought, for the less-powerful, alternative routes to legal service. Engineers, who up to this point claimed that they had literally built civilization, began to ask whether they had in fact condemned society to live in concrete boxes and breathe polluted air. Even accountants were not immune. The high and fluctuating inflation that characterized the end of the moral-economic order established after the Second World War produced a legitimation crisis that required, in Britain, a Royal Commission on something as fundamental to capitalism as the calculation of profit.

This chapter aims to build an understanding of the differences between words and characters in Chinese by introducing the ways that words and Chinese characters are formed. Particular attention is paid to learning and writing Chinese characters.

Most actual poachers were not vagrants in the Victorian period; but a significant number of literary ones were, especially during the so-called Hungry Forties. Examining popular and literary sources from across the political spectrum, this chapter argues that the vagrant poacher became a politically loaded figure in British print culture during the 1840s. In the conservative ‘poacher’s progress’ the poacher’s vagrancy was a sign of selfishness and a staging post on the road to ruin. These morality tales supported the landowning elite and their monopoly on game by depicting the poacher as a predatory criminal. Meanwhile, in radical literature, such as Charles Dickens’s The Chimes (1844), the poacher was represented as a victim of permissive laws; these included both the vagrancy laws and the game laws. In these texts the poacher’s vagrancy was a sign of social oppression and was used to critique what many liberals and radicals perceived as the criminalisation of poverty. Alongside Dickens, this chapter examines Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848) as well as works by Hannah More and Charlton Carew.

The concluding two chapters take up cultural responses to the ongoing violence perpetuated by mass incarceration and the global cycles of warfare and terror. Dennis R. Childs examines narratives of immobility based on police and state violence, imprisonment, and detention and deportation at national borders. He argues that “anti-carceral hip-hop” is the “aesthetic practice [that] represents the quintessential storytelling method for those most commonly targeted for police killing and imprisonment.” Reading hip-hop narratives within a “long twenty-first century” of radical literary, political, and musical practices since the 1970s, he links recent works by Dead Prez, Reyna Grande, Ann Jaramillo, Kendrick Lamar, Monifa Love, Main Source, Invincible, and Askari X to those of James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Public Enemy, Chester Himes, George Jackson, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Assata Shakur, and Malcolm X.

In this chapter, I address important preliminary challenges to any discussion of deontic principles in ICL. Thoughtful scholars have raised concerns that familiar liberal principles may be entirely out of place in ICL. I will argue: (1) For any system that chooses to punish individuals, deontic principles do matter, and thus they should constrain ICL. (2) This does not necessarily mean replicating formulations of fundamental principles familiar from national systems; instead we can return to our underlying deontic commitments and see what they entail in these new contexts. (3) We can learn from common critiques of liberal accounts, to build a sensitive, humanistic account of deontic principles.

In response to various criticisms of criminal justice and liberal principles, I emphasize the ‘humanity’ of criminal justice. Criminal justice and its restraining principles are sometimes portrayed as abstract, metaphysical, retributive, vengeful, Western, or ideologically unmoored from experience. But criminal law serves pro-social aims. Its constraints are rooted in compassion, empathy, and regard for humanity. An intelligent liberal account considers all facets of human experience, including social context, social roles, and collective endeavours. Principles reflect broadly shared human concerns, and can be refined through human conversation.

This chapter examines the myriad ways that authors subverted the post-bellum slavery narrative - employing, variously, Marxist ideas, pan-Africanism and non-racially motivated anti-imperialist rhetoric. It shows that the rhetorical processes through which slaves and slave owners had been othered were challenged and an alternative vision of anti-slavery was offered.

We describe the basic properties of algebraic groups, starting with tori and diagonalisable groups, then going on to solvable groups and Borel and parabolic subgroups, then going on to semi-simple and reductive groups, radical and unipotent radical, and finally giving as examples the classical linear, symplectic and orthogonal groups.