In spring 2024, the European Union formally adopted the AI Act, aimed at creating a comprehensive legal regime to regulate AI systems. In so doing, the Union sought to maintain a harmonized and competitive single market for AI in Europe while demonstrating its commitment to protect core EU values against AI’s adverse effects. In this chapter, we question whether this new regulation will succeed in translating its noble aspirations into meaningful and effective protection for people whose lives are affected by AI systems. By critically examining the proposed conceptual vehicles and regulatory architecture upon which the AI Act relies, we argue there are good reasons for skepticism, as many of its key operative provisions delegate critical regulatory tasks to AI providers themselves, without adequate oversight or redress mechanisms. Despite its laudable intentions, the AI Act may deliver far less than it promises.

Over a century and a half, expos have been used by the Japanese state, local authorities, and private companies, not to prescribe meaning, but to aggregate interest – to accommodate the multiple demands of organizers, exhibitors, and visitors – and thereby to foster development. After three decades of economic stagnation, the age of regional expos in Japan seems to have passed, though ‘expo’ (haku) remains a useful, protean term. Japan also remains a reliable participant in international exhibitions overseas, rehearsing an old story about harmony between nature and culture, first retailed in the late nineteenth century. The Japanese state also continues to use expos at home to promote its vision and plans for the future. The next world expo will open in April 2025, promulgating the United Nation’s sustainable development goals and the Japanese government’s vision of Society 5.0, while also promising Osaka’s neoliberal ‘restoration’. Meanwhile, the Japanese lesson about the utility of expos for development has been absorbed elsewhere. Shanghai in 2010 and Dubai in 2021 deployed, Riyadh in 2030 and possibly Busan in 2035 will riff on, a template first made in Japan.

Young people with cognitive disability found school to be both good and bad. Things were good when young people had friends and when teachers listened and tried to help. Things were bad when the school wanted young people with cognitive disability to be like everyone else. Young people could be punished or neglected if they didn’t fit in with everyone else. Leaving school could be hard. Young people with cognitive disability often didn’t have a job or university to go to. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities says that all people with disability have a right to a good education, and that people should be supported to get a job or to learn more after school.

Slave vessels dispatched from Northwest Europe were larger and more heavily armed than their Iberian and American counterparts. The barricado, a heavy wooden barrier located midship, separating off men-slaves, was a central feature not found among slavers in the South Atlantic. The Portuguese operated vessels in which many crew were Black, including some enslaved. These were able to talk to captives in their own language and provide some assurance that they would not be eaten on arrival and would have some familiarity with their new environmrnt. Rebellions of slaves on Portuguese vessels were unusual. The Portuguese/Brazilians also did very little ship trading. Instead, they used bulking centers on land to hold slaves prior to their embarkation en masse. This reduced the time a captive would spend on board, which was already shorter than those of their Northwestern European rivals because of the shorter voyage times to Brazil from most parts of Africa. The Portuguese were thus the most efficient of all national slave traders. The bulking centers in Upper Guinea and Angola were connected to trade routes through to the interior and manned by lançados, usually half-African and half-European. The shipping part of their system was adopted by all slave traders in the nineteenth century.

This chapter studies the voting behavior of members of the House of Representatives. If the presence of Fox News in a district shapes potential candidates’ perceptions about district party composition and the constituency’s electoral preferences, there are good chances that the same can be said of sitting House members. Here, of course, the expectation is not about how these perceptions affect the decision to run for office; instead, they affect decisions about how to perform so as to stay in office. Much like potential candidates, sitting members of Congress have to make inferences about what their constituents want. Typically, they make these inferences based on their perceptions of the partisan composition of their district, among other considerations. If sitting members are influenced like potential candidates, Fox News might shift their perceptions in the direction of thinking their district is more right-leaning. Alternatively, based on our evidence from Chapter 3, they might feel more vulnerable to challenges from potential candidates to their (ideological) right. In either case, a reasonable expectation, which we find evidence for, is that member roll call votes will move in a rightward direction, especially among Democrats representing more competitive districts.

There were practical limits to these political imaginaries and projects. People needed to work, and the war was a source of employment for many displaced people. This chapter explores the parallel systems of governance in Khartoum that southern militia-running businessmen (including Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, Paulino Matip, Abdel Bagi Ayii Akol, and others) organised in Khartoum, including their own prisons, barracks, and offices. Many residents drew on their jobs, sympathetic policing, and ‘traditional’ courts, but these rebel authorities also propagated their own ideas of future structures of political community based on regional zones of ethno-political authority. This is an unrecorded history of militia governance, looking beyond these authorities’ immediate mercenary aims and exploring their leadership’s and members’ own critiques of governance and models of power. This sets a challenge to current studies of rebel governance systems, which rarely examine pro-government proxy militias. It also outlines how the more creative, inclusive, and imaginative intellectual work detailed in this book was undermined (and ultimately buried) by these wartime exigencies and practical (if mercenary) structures of militia work and ethnic self-defence.

This chapter reviews the main points of the manuscript and discusses in detail the implications of this work. Black voters are not the only identity group for whom popular assumptions have been made. Indeed, Latinx and LGBTQ+ voters have also been subject to beliefs about how their identity informs their candidate selection. This chapter deconstructs the community commitment signaling framework to explain how it can be applied to other groups. Moreover, this chapter discusses the limitation of the community commitment signaling and invites deeper thinking about the role of racial identity in political representation.