This chapter identifies and examines the elements determining the legal content of any given theory of, or positive law provision for, the human right to resist. It reviews the primary triggers or conditions for activation, indicating the ‘right to resist what’, including ‘tyranny’, ‘oppression’, and ‘other violations’. It reviews the secondary triggers or conditions for activation, indicating the ‘right to resist when’, in particular the necessity condition. It also reviews both aspects of the personal scope, being the rights-holders, indicating ‘who may resist’, and also the duty-bearers, indicating ‘whose corresponding duty’. It identifies a four-fold typology of legitimate ‘object and purpose’, or ‘right to resist why’, being for human rights enforcement, for self-defence, for self-determination, and for ‘peace’ or human security. The final element examined is the material scope of application, or ‘right to resist how’, identifying three competing approaches to permissible means, and affirming proportionality limitations and other applicable limitations in international human rights law and international criminal law, as well as grounds for discretionary non-exercise. This general analytical template for identification and comparison of elements and therefore content is then applied to the evidence of legal sources of the right considered in Chapters 5–7.

This chapter analyzes the norm impasses over the status of Kosovo after its declaration of independence in February 2008 and over the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia following the 2008 August war. Both cases happened within quick succession, revolved around the same well-established norms in the United Nations (UN) Charter – the rights to territorial integrity vs. self-determination – and showed an interesting reversal of sides: While the United States (US) and European states recognized Kosovo’s statehood and rejected Russia’s emphasis on Serbian territorial integrity, the US and European states rejected Russia’s support of South Ossetia’s statehood and emphasized Georgian territorial integrity. These norm impasses became protracted because each side received social support from key audiences, or at least only muted criticism, for their interpretations, lowering the cost of disagreement. These disputes show both the power and limits of international law: The US’s sui generis frame and Russia’s quasi-legal argumentation indicate that there is a strong collective expectation regarding using international law to justify claims. Yet these cases also indicate that protracted norm impasses weaken individual norms: Unclear norm meaning gives leeway for interpretation, which can be used to craft interpretations that appeal to important audiences and thereby reduce pressure to abandon contested norm interpretations.

Digital sovereignty is a fluid and complex concept. This chapter highlights the necessity to consider digital sovereignty strategies, policies, and governance mechanisms from a holistic and long-term perspective. Digital sovereignty plays a pivotal role in fostering self-determination, while remaining critical to cybersecurity and the control capabilities of the “digital sovereign.” The “sovereign” can be an individual, a community, a corporation, a state, or a group of states. Taking an agnostic approach to digital sovereignty, the authors explore diverse practices and provide insight into what this concept means in practical terms. Digital technologies can facilitate enormous advancements to be put at the service of people, but can also be weaponized against individuals, corporations, and nation-states. BRICS countries’ approaches offer telling examples of not only how and why the need for digital sovereignty can emerge but also how dysfunctional the implementation of digital sovereignty policies may become without a coherent and long-term vision. Ultimately BRICS experiences illustrate that enhancing a digital sovereign’s self-determination, cybersecurity, and control is likely to reduce the undue influence of other digital actors. However, the success of a digital sovereignty strategy largely depends on the understanding, consistency, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, organizational capabilities of aspiring digital sovereigns.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

For many postcolonies, a national currency—like a constitution, flag, or passport—was a necessary accompaniment to independence. Money and credit were more than potent symbols of decolonization; they were means of constituting a new political order. This Introduction argues that the monetary regimes established in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania aimed to remake their independent societies, turning savings, loans, and other financial instruments into the infrastructure of citizenship and statecraft. These instruments tried to create a “government of value” in which personal interest and collective advance were aligned through mechanisms that were simultaneously ethical and economic, cultural and political. They did so because colonial subjects experienced empire as not only political domination but also a constraint on economic liberties. Yet, the ensuing decolonization was at best partial, not least because the value of national currencies depended on the accumulation of foreign money. Moreover, the independent political economy of East Africa created new inequalities and divisions. Struggles over money, credit, and commodities would animate a series of struggles between bankers and bureaucrats, farmers and smugglers in the coming decades. By detailing the notion of the “moneychanger state,” this chapter provides the conceptual frameworks to understand these conflicts in new ways.

This chapter offers a synthetic overview of the range of international law issues that arose during the course of the Vietnam War, especially as Americans took over from the French after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and moved towards massive escalation between 1964 and 1973. The chapter begins with the debate about what law applied to the conflict, which turned on the legal status of South Vietnam. The chapter then asks what claims were possible and plausible when it came to the legality of American intervention in the war. Next, the chapter addresses the different kinds of warfare in which the United States engaged, from its bombing campaigns over North Vietnamese territory and waters to the changing forms of its counterinsurgency in the South and, later, across the Cambodian border. Finally, the chapter concludes by examining the legal legacy of Vietnam: not only how it led to the most significant substantive development of the laws of war since the Geneva Conventions, the First and Second Additional Protocols, but also, and equally importantly, how it ensured that international law would play (for good or ill) a central role in debate over and analysis of all future conflicts.

This chapter investigates (1) whether there is a convincing justification for the All-Affected Principle, (2) whether it is best understood as substantive or procedural principle, and (3) whether it provides a useful way to approach boundary questions. Though the All-Affected Principle is often justified as realizing self-determination in political decision-making, I argue that the AAP does not do so. Instead, the ideal of self-determination, properly understood, supports individual and collective autonomy rights, and institutional arrangements that are at odds with a global democracy of the all-affected.

While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations said of the term ‘national interest’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world’s population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O’Callaghan 2002: 202–13). Notwithstanding this confusion, nationalism is typically characterised as both an important form of cultural identity and a pervasive political ideology affirming that territorial communities called nations are necessary for human flourishing and that each nation should therefore be accorded a degree of autonomy in determining its own affairs (Woods et al. 2020: 813).

This chapter focuses on three primary models for understanding motivation during transitions and addresses: (1) Expectancy × Value theory, (2) cognitive models for motivation and in particular attribution theory, locus of control, and taxonomy of perceived causes; and (3) intrinsic/extrinsic motivation theory and the self-determination model. We focus specifically on the ways in which intrinsic and extrinsic motivation influence human behavior. Individuals who are repeatedly successful in making a transition will more often demonstrate motivation intrinsically in decisions to make a transition. We examine the role of achievement motivation, need for autonomy, need for competency, search for satisfaction, and need for affiliation and relatedness as motivators for career change. They are discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

Chapter 1 argues that parenthood aspirations, including those reliant on novel reproductive techniques, have started to evolve into justiciable rights. It challenges the view that human rights law cannot adequately address bioethical issues and examines commonalities and mutual influences between human rights and bioethical discourse. The chapter first analyses international case law establishing (predominantly negative) obligations in relation to natural procreative capacity. As regards medically assisted procreation, it observes that, perhaps counter-intuitively, most of the claims raised in Strasbourg litigation have been assessed by the European Court of Human Rights as involving active interferences as opposed to lacunae. The chapter provides a catalogue of (alleged) negative and positive obligations as they emerge from the case law; it examines the rationale for the Court’s treatment of a claim through the lens of negative or positive obligations while suggesting that that classification does not have a significant practical impact on the outcome of the case.

Most often, solitude starts out neutral, like a lump of sculptor’s clay that we can shape into whatever we want. Our experiences, and those of our research participants, have shown us that there are a lot of positive outcomes possible when choosing to carve out some time alone. Why is solitude so potentially powerful for all kinds of people? That’s a question that has driven a large part of our research, and we continue to build on what we have learned. What we’ve seen so far points to the fact that solitude creates an environment where two important things can happen: each of us can captain our own ship, and while in that role, we can connect to our true selves. Think of it as the ultimate place to do what you want (autonomy) and be who you are (authenticity).

In solitude, as with any human experience, choice is an important driver. We know that humans, in general, like having some decision-making capability, or at least the perception of it. Positive time spent in solitude stems from the desire to be with ourselves, and we talk about how to exercise choice to be more comfortable and stronger in solitude. Simply wanting to avoid other people does not unlock its benefits and opportunities. The fact that you choose to devote your morning walk, drive to work, or shower time to solitude is what matters in building an enduring practice of everyday solitude. In this chapter, we also consider involuntary solitude, like prisoners in solitary confinement and pandemic lockdowns. This chapter also looks at what it means to have a "preference for solitude," the importance of understanding motivation in why we’re choosing time alone, and what it means to have the right framing and expectations for solitude.