Between 1660 and 1775 the number of European countries with diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire that obtained ahdames of their own grew rapidly, but many of these newcomers did not establish networks of consulates and vice-consulates in the eastern Mediterranean. Instead, they appointed the consuls of other European nations as their vice-consuls. This did not hurt the legal privileges of the merchants from these countries. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some nations asked the Ottoman government to renew their capitulations several times with the single aim of obtaining more privileges. This development culminated in the French capitulations of 1740, which incorporated the clauses of virtually all earlier ahdnames. In the eyes of many Ottomans, the capitulations of 1740 came to symbolise the Europeans’ ceaseless attempts to obtain more and more privileges from the Turks. But the French renewal of their capitulations in 1673 already laid the foundations for the rise of imperialism. It was then that the Ottoman authorities granted Ottoman subjects working for foreigners as interpreters or as warehousemen the same fiscal and legal status as the Westerners. It was also in 1673 that the French had their role as protectors of the Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem, as well as of all Catholic clergymen – not just Western missionaries, but all Catholic clerics – in the Levant codified in their capitulations. It was this French model that the Russians used in 1774 to claim their own protectorate over all Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman realm.

Genocide is sometimes called the ’crime of crimes’. The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, then declared an international crime by the United Nations General Assembly. In 1948, the Genocide Convention was adopted. As the first human rights treaty of modern times, it constituted a significant intrusion into what had previously been a matter exclusively of domestic concern. This explains the narrow definition of the crime of genocide. It requires proof of an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Only a half century after its adoption did the Genocide Convention take on real significance with inter-State cases being filed at the International Court of Justice and many prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Convention requires that States Parties punish genocide but they are also required to prevent it, even when it takes place outside their own territory. More than 150 States have ratified the Genocide Convention. Genocide is also prohibited under customary international law. It is generally agreed that the duty to punish genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens).

The post-First World War minorities treaties regime was an initial attempt by international law to address the rights of national and ethnic minorities. Its shorcomings prompted Raphael Lemkin, in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, to propose a new category of international crime that he named genocide. The International Military Tribunal prosecuted acts of genocide using the category of crimes against humanity. Several of the defendants were convicted of acts aimed at destruction of Europe’s Jewish population. However, crimes against humanity were confined to acts associated with aggressive war. At the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, a resolution on genocide was proposed in order to address the peacetime atrocities that were neglected in the Nuremberg judgment. The resolution recognized genocide as an international crime and called for preparation of a convention.

This chapter explores the synergies, limitations, and challenges of addressing statelessness through human rights and development approaches, using the Hill Country Tamils of Sri Lanka as a case study. In addressing the legacy of statelessness, both the human rights and development frameworks must be drawn on and used simultaneously. However, a frameworks approach alone falls short in addressing statelessness, given the political, economic and societal factors that perpetuate discrimination. Instead, as the case of the Hill Country Tamils demonstrates, both human rights and development approaches must be underpinned by a deeper commitment to pursuing equality and combatting discrimination at large. Despite claims of success, the legacy of statelessness in Sri Lanka still lingers. The Hill Country Tamils are still among the ‘furthest behind’ in Sri Lanka and continue to experience severe discrimination well after securing formal citizenship. The community’s prolonged statelessness has led to long-term deterioration in human rights conditions, such that a grant of formal citizenship alone is inadequate to address structural drivers of disadvantage that the community continues to endure.

What does it mean “to tolerate” in a post-Christian and post-secular state? This chapter argues that antecedents of contemporary conflicts over diversity in Europe can be found in early modernity, specifically in early modern practices of toleration, which impacted on both the belonging and the visibility of minorities. New forms of intolerance pertain to the position of religious, ethnoreligious, and sexual minorities in public life, echoing the concerns of the public visibility of minorities inhering in historical Christendom. The political articulation of certain groups as “other” to “the nation” is increasingly mediated through constitutional repertoires, such as constitutional revision and amendments, developments in the hermeneutics of constitutional concepts, or pseudo-constitutional behaviour. This chapter introduces the main themes: tolerance and intolerance, constitutionalism, secularisation, and their significance across the liberal–illiberal divide.

This concluding chapter reflects on the phenomenon of constitutional intolerance, its many faces, its entanglement in histories of toleration, and its implications for discourses on constitutionalism, illiberalism, and secularisation. It argues that the default lines have shifted from secularisation to fundamental questions about the future of constitutional democracy in Europe, considering the fundamental aspects of constitutional intolerance: the articulation of otherness vis-à-vis the political community and the sanctioning of this othering in public space. The conclusion also considers the rise of “cynical democracy” in the instrumental use of constitutional repertoires to further partisan interests, as well as the right wing tendency towards the overrepresentation of formal-procedural legalism, an attachment of legitimacy to legality, and a weakening of the capacity for normative reflection in the highest courts.

While statelessness remains a global phenomenon, it is a global issue with an Asian epicentre. This chapter situates the book within the context and multi-disciplinary scholarship on statelessness in Asia by reviewing the causes, conditions and/or challenges of statelessness. It recognizes statelessness in this region as a phenomenon beyond forced migration and highlights the arbitrary and discriminatory use of state power in producing and sustaining statelessness. The chapter reviews the ‘state of statelessness’ in Asia, including applicable international, regional and national legal frameworks. It also maps some of the core themes that emerge from the contributors’ examination of the causes and conditions of statelessness in Asia. These include: the relationship between ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity and statelessness; the legacies of colonialism; contemporary politics surrounding nation-building, border regimes and mobilities; as well as intersecting vulnerabilities. The chapter concludes with some preliminary thoughts on frameworks of analysis and future research agendas, including challenges and prospects for reform.

Democracies grapple with the tension between the principle of majority rule and ensuring respect for the interest of political minorities, however those might be defined in different societies and different circumstances. As an initial matter, constitutional designers confront this tension in the original architecture of a democratic system. But the balance struck between majorities and minorities is not exclusively settled through the original constitutional design. In the United States, at least, legal doctrine and statutory enactments have also been centrally engaged in ongoing fashion with this fundamental tension.

As this essay chronicles, the law of democracy began with a focus on ensuring the majoritarian basis of American democracy. Over time, the focus then shifted to concern with fair representation of the interests of minorities within the majoritarian system. Now, we argue, the focus of reform efforts is shifting back to efforts to restore the majoritarian thrust of democracy. The law of democracy cycles, perhaps without final resolution, between supporting majoritarianism, concern for minority interests, and back again to shoring up the majoritarian foundations of democracy.

In our era, it is the power of factional minorities who are able to leverage control of plurality winner processes that poses the greatest challenge for American democracy. The threatened tyranny of the minority of the majority now looms as a central challenge that democratic thought, policy, and doctrine must confront.

This chapter takes German history all the way up to the early years of the twenty-first century. It tells the tale of the all-German youth revolt of 1968 and of the later students’ revolt in Frankfurt am Main. Moving on to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, it then concentrates on the issue of remembering the National Socialist past and commemorating the Holocaust in the new Germany, beginning with the Historians’ Debate in the 1980s and ending with the later, more public and more political controversies, till the scandal around the festive speech by Martin Walser in the Paulskirche and the various responses to it. Most important among these was surely that of Ignaz Bubis, and this man’s biography, a rather tragic tale again, is concisely told in this chapter. Finally, a discussion of the controversies around the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered European Jews closes the chapter – and the book, bringing the story all the way to the new millennium.

This chapter aims to synthesize evidence from large-scale studies on the magnitude of disparities in students’ literacy development between students from low socioeconomic and language minority backgrounds and their more advantaged counterparts in the United States and Canada, particularly on reading skills. Among various structural inequalities that are relevant to reading, the focus is on socioeconomic status (SES) differences and linguistic diversity (and their inter-relationships). It is explicitly acknowledged that extensive structural inequalities also exist for indigenous peoples in both countries across a range of education, health, and social outcomes. The focus is on language minority learners in this chapter primarily because the large-scale research that has examined disparities in reading development has provided valuable insight regarding students from immigrant backgrounds. By focusing the lens on reading development in language minority learners, we do not intend to minimize or obscure the very real barriers to equitable education in indigenous communities, nor do we intend to convey that structural forces that affect immigrant students can generalize to indigenous communities. Instead, we echo calls to address the sociocultural context of reading development and education more broadly in indigenous communities in both countries.

This chapter focuses on literacy development in East Asia, the eastern region of the Asian continent. Students in most East Asian countries perform well in literacy. However, migrant communities still face struggles, leading to fewer opportunities in the labor market. East Asia has a very long history of literary practice. With China being the largest and oldest country in East Asia, its writing system has a profound impact in the region. The modern Chinese writing system is used not only by the 1.4 billion people in Mainland China but also in Chinese-speaking regions such as Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. It is further used by Chinese-heritage speakers in Singapore, Malaysia, and countries around the world. However, most East Asian countries are biscriptal. This chapter starts out with an overview of the writing systems used in China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia, followed by a description of the educational system in relation to literacy in each country. In the remaining part of the chapter the focus is on individual variation, neurological foundations and environmental factors related to literacy development in Chinese. Finally, the chapter presents a comparison of the factors related to literacy development in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.