This chapter examines the contextual elements of article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the requirement that a prohibited ‘threat or use of force’ be in ‘international relations’. It analyses the meaning of this term and whether it requires that the object of a prohibited use of force be another State and draws conclusions about the types of acts that fall within and outside the scope of this term (and thus the scope of article 2(4)). The type of acts discussed include use of force on another State’s territory or against its extraterritorial sovereign manifestations, to reclaim disputed territory not within de facto control, those in violation of international demarcation lines, those directly arising from a political dispute between States, use of force by a State within its own territory against its own population, in the exercise of law enforcement jurisdiction against private foreign actors, against entities falling short of Statehood, those with no nexus to another State (such as against an international organisation or on terra nullius) and the use of force within a State’s own territory against small-scale incursion by another State’s armed forces.

Children are a critical part of certain legal trials, such as cases involving child abuse and neglect, and especially in cases of child sexual abuse. It is common for the only evidence in these types of cases to be the statement of the child victims. Children’s decisions about if and when to disclose the abuse are affected by many factors, and delays in disclosure are common. Police, forensic interviewers, prosecutors, and other professionals make decisions about when and how to interview children, the accuracy/credibility of their statements, if a case will move forward, and if and how children will testify in court. In some courtrooms, children are given special accommodations (e.g., testifying through closed-circuit TV or being accompanied by a therapy dog). Decisions about evaluating children in these situations have implications for the safety of children and the protection of innocent adults. Future research and policy implications are discussed.

Biases in judicial decision-making are prevalent throughout the criminal legal system. In various chapters of this volume, the contributors have highlighted specific incidents or indicators of biases in decision-making that disproportionally affects minoritized persons and groups. If these biases are inherent in decision-making, is the criminal legal system upholding its aspiration of distributive and procedural justice? What is justice? Justice typically refers to fairness (or equity) for all people. Advocates and scholars have refrained from referring to the system as the criminal justice system because for some victims, victims’ families, defendants, and those who have been convicted, the system is not operating in a just manner. In my view, the US criminal legal system is broken – or, as Hunt (Chapter 3) suggests, operating in the way it was originally intended. The criminal legal system disproportionately targets racial and ethnic minoritized populations, as well as minoritized sexual and gender-diverse populations. This phenomenon, known as disproportionate minority contact (DMC), has been in the purview of the criminal legal system for several decades.

This chapter investigates how formal autonomy and informal administrative working styles of international public administrations (IPAs) are interrelated empirically. Recent research on IPAs identified a paradoxical constellation. Some IPAs with low structural autonomy, such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Secretariat, are able to compensate this restriction by developing an entrepreneurial administrative style with emphasis on initiating new policies and sound internal management (paradox of weakness). Other IPAs, such as the formally autonomous European Commission, were found to anticipate member state control and voluntarily restrict themselves to a more passive servant style (paradox of strength). This finding raises the question whether the two paradoxes are idiosyncratic features of the two cases or a more universal phenomenon of international bureaucracies. To answer this question, this chapter introduces the concepts of structural autonomy and administrative styles and lay out a strategy for their measurement. It compares the empirical pattern of autonomy and style in eight IPAs. It concludes with some propositions about potential consequence for international bureaucratic influence.

In this chapter, we present an overview of current knowledge about learners’ use and understanding of connectives. In the first part of the chapter, we will see that connectives are notoriously difficult to master for second language learners, because they require an array of complex competences. Learners must know how to use them appropriately in various genres and registers, have a fine-grained understanding of the meaning differences between connectives used to convey similar coherence relations, and also automatize this knowledge so that it is activated automatically during discourse processing, and not only when they consciously elicit usage rules. In the second part of the chapter, we review the important body of studies that have empirically assessed the causes for learners’ difficulties with connectives, and conclude with some recommendations for teaching. We conclude that research on the second language acquisition of connectives contributes to answering important questions, such as what makes connectives difficult to master, and how they are they used across languages.

It is well recognised in international children’s rights law that children have a right to participate in decisions concerning them. This chapter considers that right and the extent to which it is protected in domestic law. Many working within the family justice system are committed to improving children’s participation and there has been significant progress in including children in some decisions. This includes increasing judicial willingness to meet children, hear children’s evidence, grant them party status and allow competent young people to give direct instructions. Nonetheless, the system provided for representing children in family proceedings is extraordinarily complicated and the extent to which children are heard in practice varies considerably, particularly for children caught in private parental disputes. As a result, many children find that significant decisions are made about their lives without the opportunity for them to be heard or represented in the decision. Where children have been heard, the weight given to their views remains inconsistent and unpredictable, despite greater commitment in the higher courts to taking children seriously.

The introduction establishes the characteristics of divine music. Noting the discrepancies between the visual and literary accounts of the gods and the variability in the instruments with which they choose to perform, Laferrière argues that the gods’ active use of their instruments lends a sonic quality to their representation. In demarcating divine music-making as distinct from human musical practices, she shows that these images require a correspondingly distinct mode of interpretation and analysis, since the scenes feature musical performances that are undertaken outside the human world.

The Biskupa sögur (sagas of bishops) deal with the lives of six medieval Icelandic bishops, covering the history of Iceland’s two bishoprics, Skálholt and Hólar, from the mid eleventh century to the fourteenth century. They are important sources for Icelandic church history and the lives of individual bishops, three of whom were venerated as saints. This chapter provides a history of the genre, surveying texts about the saints Þorlákr Þórhallsson, Jón Ögmundsson and Guðmundr Arason, the chronicle Hungrvaka, which records the lives of the five bishops who preceded St Þorlákr, the sagas of three other bishops, Páls saga, Árna saga Þorlákssonar and Lárentíus saga Kálfssonar, and two þættir, Ísleifs þáttr and Jóns þáttr Halldórssonar. This genre has received less scholarly attention than some other genres of Icelandic literature, but this chapter argues that the sagas have much to offer historians and literary scholars. It examines the role of miracle-stories within the sagas and considers what these texts can tell us about such questions as the relationship between memory and literacy in medieval Iceland, the expression of emotion, masculinity, sexuality and celibacy.

This chapter assesses the extent to which children’s rights are protected in domestic law. The heart of the problem for children’s rights in domestic law is that those international rights that are designed for children are not directly enforceable, while those rights that are directly enforceable have not been written for children. Further, the central place of the welfare principle in domestic child law has often been interpreted as being in conflict with a rights-based approach to children. Nevertheless, the Human Rights Act 1998 has been the vehicle for some real advances in protecting children, especially through the use of international instruments in interpreting its rights to be more effective for children. In the political sphere, children’s rights have gained greater influence, especially through the enhanced role of the Children’s Commissioner. This chapter assesses these developments and analyses the continuing weaknesses in the protection for children’s rights in law and policy.

This book summarizes the current archaeological and ethnographic knowledge regarding the indigenous people who inhabited the South American Southern Cone since the end of the Pleistocene (Figure 1.1). This land, roughly between 32° and 56° S latitude, comprises the Pampas and Patagonia. Since the beginning of the European conquest in the sixteenth century, both regions have attracted the attention of conquerors and explorers even though there were no precious rocks or metals within them, nor were they inhabited by indigenous populations who could be easily exploited or subjugated to slavery or encomiendas. This is not to say that there were no fabulations – notably, the legend of the Ciudad de Los Césares, or Trapalanda, where supposedly fabulous riches could be found. This legend originated around the sixteenth century when stories after the inland trip by Francisco César, a captain from the Sebastian Gaboto expedition, began to circulate. Also, the castaways from the shipwreck of one of Francisco Camargo’s expeditions fueled these legends. The sad reality was that no evidence existed about the fate of those castaways.