Chapter 7 notes that there is a significant lacuna in the posited social anarchist position. One might expect that any view described as an “anarchist” position will include an endorsement of the political anarchist thesis that the mere existence of a state is unjust, with some persons thereby having an obligation to abolish any existing states. However, this contention does not appear among the five social anarchist theses defended by the book. Chapter 7 defends this choice by arguing that political anarchism is implausible. Specifically, it contends that political anarchists must provide an analysis of statehood that entails that (a) any group that qualifies as a state is unjust in a way that its non-state counterpart is not and (b) there are existing states. It then argues that there is no plausible analysis of statehood that satisfies both of these desiderata.

Chapter 6 traces the logic beneath state-sponsored reconfiguration of family order in general, and generational relations in particular, within the context of China’s constitutional transformation in the first half of the twentieth century. Within a few decades, an empire that “ruled through the principle of filiality” became a modern republic that denounced the father–son cardinal bond in power succession and abandoned generational hierarchies in laws. Social practice on the ground witnessed gradual and uneven changes; but state builders, from late Qing legal reformers to Nationalist lawmakers, persisted in the statist direction they designed for China, in the hope of atomizing individual citizens as the first step to connect them directly to the state. The generation-long building of new sociolegal mechanisms, while obstructive to the formation of a stable political order in the short term, laid the foundation for the rebirth of China as a modern state.

This chapter introduces the tension at the heart of international law, traces the evolution of international legal relationships and provides an overview of the dimensions of altruism in international law. It also provides a roadmap for the study.

Israel’s leading newspapers – Yedioth Ahronot and Maariv – stand central in this chapter’s exploration of mass mediated Holocaust memories in Israel’s press. Through providing a systematic “cultural seismograph” of annual media content in these outlets on Memorial Day to the Holocaust and Heroism (MDHH) and, subsequently, daily Holocaust output, Chapter 6 evidences a heightened centrality of the Holocaust in the wake of the Oslo Accords. This chapter also reveals an increased contextualization of the Holocaust in line with contemporary societal and political concerns, including those emanating from the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Consequently, even outside of MDHH’s ritual media event, the Holocaust remains a newsworthy narrative as it constitutes an effective and powerful prism through which to view the present. Bolstered by the framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the context of an ongoing threat, part and parcel of the identified prospective memory constitutes a mediated marginalization of the Palestinian Nakba. The final paragraphs of this chapter illustrate the effects of the presentation of an incessant genocidal threat, including at the hands of the Palestinians, by charting the mediated articulation of a superior, “constructionist” Israeli-Jewish victimhood narrative. The explicit allusion to the Nakba within Holocaust media output testifies to an awareness of its formative role among Palestinians, revealing that a minimization of the other’s history is not solely based on its active erasure; rather, the social silencing of the Palestinian Nakba involves debunking the credibility of the narrative and those that externalize it.

Interdisciplinary research of international law has been on the rise in recent decades and scholars have adopted widely varying disciplines, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks to investigate international legal behavior. However, it is this chapter’s contention that a lion’s share of the literature on international legal behavior has understated the role of individual people in international law. Although international law is made, implemented, changed, or broken by people, this ontological insight has not found its way into influential paradigmatic views of international law and consequently has not been adequately embedded in methodologies, theoretical accounts, and research agendas. This chapter offers an illustrative review of relevant scholarship, critiques the scholarship’s statism and outlines its implications. It uses the United States case of the Torture Memos as a means to demonstrate the pitfalls of the literature’s statism and the potential benefits of steering away from it. The chapter therefore argues that future interdisciplinary work of international law would benefit from ridding itself of the dominance of paradigmatic statism and instead recognizing the central role of individuals in the everyday practice of international law.

This chapter compares virtue epistemology to two types of Internalisms, Statism and Propositionalism in light of the intelligibility problem first raised by Sellars. It explains the problem and argues that both virtue epistemology and Statism are subject to this problem. Even thoughPrropositionalism is designed to address the problem, the problem is much more difficult to solve than is recognized. I show why, and what a solution to the problem might look like.

Chapter two presents an overview of the evolution of Egypt’s political economy under Nasser and Sadat. Central to this history are the struggles over property rights. Under Nasser, nationalist attempts to modernize the economy eventually gave way to an experiment in Arab socialism within the geopolitical context of the Cold War. During this period, an ‘authoritarian bargain’ was established in which broadly redistributive social and economic policies sought to provide welfare for, and redistribute land to, the popular classes in return for their political subordination. In the 1970s, Sadat began to dismantle Arab socialism and establish a more liberal political economy through his infitah policy. In doing so, Sadat presided over the beginning of the disintegration of the authoritarian bargain. To contain social conflict, Sadat emboldened the right-wing forces of political Islam in the hope that they would combat the left and provide an Islamic alternative to the social protection offered by the Nasserists.

This chapter surveys the history of terrorism from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Terrorism is defined here as a strategy that uses symbolic violence that seeks to change the behavior of the many by targeting the few. After a brief historiography of the phenomenon, the chapter discusses the origins of modern terrorism in the nineteenth-century paradox of growing individualism and state power; thus, while terrorism can be used in pursuit of any ideology, it is closely associated with the emergence of modern democracy. Particular attention is paid to the role of violence in the French Revolution, early efforts to theorize and organize conspiratorial violence, and three late nineteenth-century terrorist movements: revolutionary terrorism in the Russian Empire, white supremacist terrorism in the United States, and anarchist terrorism in Europe and the United States. The essay uses primary and secondary sources and includes a lengthy annotated bibliography.