Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discarded, new ones adopted, and existing ones modified. This implies that any exercise in ‘futurology’ must necessarily come with an openness towards conceptual change, and that a key challenge for International Studies going forward will consist in matching our conceptual toolbox to an ever-changing world. The importance of conceptual change has until recently been neglected in the study of global politics. Thus, in this paper we start by presenting the empirical case for incorporating conceptual change by laying out key past and present conceptual changes in the international realm. We then move on to a presentation of conceptual history and the tools it provides us for grasping conceptual change, before discussing how to tackle conceptual developments when thinking about the future of global politics.

Book banning is a topic covered in many US history classrooms. Students learn that in the first decades of the twentieth century, fights over the teaching of evolution led to restrictions on science texts. Meanwhile, fears about the spread of communism sparked campaigns to limit access to “subversive” ideas. Well into the 1960s, textbooks usually explain, Americans remained at odds about what schools should be free to teach.

What’s old is new, it seems. And tomorrow’s textbooks will have to be updated with stories from the present. As this issue goes to press, conservative groups across the United States have sought to remove hundreds of titles from schools and libraries. Such attempts range from challenges filed by individual parents—often inspired by the list curated on BookLooks.org—to statewide legislative efforts to recall books from schools. Thousands of books have been removed from libraries and classrooms, and the chilling effect has led cautious educators to self-censor even further.

For this policy dialogue, the HEQ editors asked Adam Laats and Kasey Meehan to discuss book banning in the US, focusing particularly on the motivations of groups seeking to limit what young people can read. Adam Laats is a professor of education and history at SUNY Binghamton. A leading scholar of conservative activism in education, he is the author of several books including The Other School Reformers (Harvard University Press, 2015) and Fundamentalist U (Oxford University Press, 2018). Kasey Meehan is the director of the Freedom to Read program at PEN America, where she leads initiatives to protect the right of students to freely access literature in schools. Founded in 1922, PEN America is the largest of the more than one hundred centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. PEN America works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others.

HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

A debate has raged for decades over legal pluralism and its value for the study of law. Much of this back and forth has resolved to a fight over what law “is” and push-and-pull between legal centrists and pluralists. This introductory essay proposes a new framework for thinking about legal pluralism. Turning away from the centrist/pluralist binary, we instead ask what work legal pluralism as a category of analysis can do. The debate, we suggest, is a fundamental methodological disagreement about the normative work that categories of analysis do and the costs that historians should be willing to pay to reap the benefits of theoretically sophisticated frameworks of analysis which are interoperable between times and places. The debate about legal pluralism, we argue, can be productively reframed as a question about the benefits and drawbacks of the legal pluralist framework.

Confronting the coming five decades from our present conjuncture demands – to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra – both critical pessimism and a wilful politics of hope. In this article, we engage with the politics of climate breakdown and the responses to wider socio-ecological crises with a necessary critical pessimism. Specifically, we confront the capture of green transition imperatives by finance capital, as well as the troubling orientation of transition towards building new structures of accumulation around the vision of an electrified consumer society. We also see the coming decades being marked by the ever-increasing wealth of global asset-owning classes – who, by definition, enclose the atmospheric commons faster than any other community. Against this dystopian picture of increasingly concentrated wealth, corporate excess, and terrestrial crisis, we focus on the stubborn reproduction of socio-ecological life through various grounded projects across the world. We engage with communities who work against structural constraints to reproduce life from below through urban commoning, food sovereignty, Indigenous organising, and caretaking economies – all of which are scaling out their visions through alternative internationals. All of these projects, we argue, present a planetary and multiscalar political economy in practice, which connects grounded experience with resistance to the dynamics of capitalism at the state, corporate, and transnational levels. With lessons from these communities in mind, we call for a ‘planetary political economy of the global majority’, which prioritises the reproduction of socio-ecological life according to the visions of grounded anti-systemic projects.

Adjacent to, and connected to, the churchyard was an area known as the ‘church garden’. The land had been given to the church in 1960 for the purpose of adding to the churchyard, the deed of gift conforming with the formula set out in section 5 of the Consecration of Churchyards Act 1867. After a long period of disuse, the land was used to create a garden, separated from the churchyard by a hedge. The garden was never consecrated. As well as containing amenities such as a lawn, trees, flower beds, benches and a ‘fairy grotto’, the garden had been the site of various scatterings and interments of cremated remains. No authority had ever been sought for such interments.

This paper discusses potential responses to harmful prejudicial speech. More specifically, it considers how different types of prejudicial speech merit different responses. The paper distinguishes hate speech, discriminatory speech, and toxic speech as different types of speech that are prejudicial or oppressive – they are not of the same kind diverging only in their severity and explicitness. As these sorts of problematic speech are categorially distinct, the paper holds, they also demand differential remedies. The task of this paper is to consider such remedies, their potential effectiveness, and compatibility with the liberal value of free speech.