For many visitors to China, airports may be where Chinese signs are first seen. This chapter will sample some signs that are commonly seen at airports, including those for customs, terminals, departure lounges, boarding gates, baggage claims, and transportation options. Most of the airport signs are bilingual with English translations. Most of the signs in this chapter are seen at the Pudong International Airport in Shanghai.

This chapter analyses the efforts by Benin and other sub-Saharan African countries to raise tax revenue, in regard to structural characteristics, and explores possible determinants of, and the scope for, greater domestic revenue mobilisation and for tax policy and administration reforms. First, the tax effort in Benin remained relatively stable in 1980–2015, but Benin performed poorer (14th) compared to its neighbour Togo (5th). Second, there is evidence of a positive effect of government transparency and accountability, ‘control of corruption’, and political stability on tax effort. On the contrary, foreign aid is associated with low tax effort. Third, several strategies are investigated to reduce the tax gaps in Benin. If the tax policy seems relatively constrained by reference to the West Africa Economic and Monetary Unions Tax Directives, the Togolese experiment of switching to a semi-autonomous revenue authority may provide guidance to find some room to improve domestic revenue mobilisation. In particular, Benin should review the management of human resources in the tax and customs administrations, and the scope of derogatory regimes that generate tax expenditures.

The paper examines the origins of the distinction between physis, “nature,” and nomos, “norm,” and the uses made of it during the period of the Sophists. The two terms did not originally lend themselves to being contrasted, but the contrast becomes natural in light of two mid-fifth-century developments: a growing interest in the different customs of different societies and a proliferation of accounts of the origins of human civilization. While the contrast is employed by others, such as Herodotus and the medical writers, it is the Sophists themselves, above all, who exploit it for sociological and philosophical purposes. Some, such as Protagoras, see nomos as building on physis – that is, on tendencies in human nature; others see an opposition between the two, and suggest that we would be better off ignoring nomos and attending to what our natures dictate. The contrast is also applied to religion, which some Sophists treat as nomos.

Chapter four turns its attention to the Americas, to observe how the foundational statutes of Christian citizenship made their way into the legislation of colonial synods and councils. To guide the exploration of this corpus, the chapter follows the Archbishop Luis Zapata de Cárdenas of Santafé (1573-1590). A Franciscan with experience in Spain’s ethnically diverse interior frontier, once arrived in Santafé, Zapata developed an innovative program for the Christian evangelization of the native communities. Conducting a deep dive into the conceptual underpinnings of policies in Santafé and across the Indies, chapter four includes a horizontal analysis of synodal and conciliar reform in the subsequent decades. This chapter highlights how core values of the Spanish church – such as Christian education, the inculcation of policía, and the preservation of “good customs” – were under a continual legislative revision that involved actors on both sides of the Atlantic, an ongoing imperial legal revolution whose local changes were the product an era of global transformation.

Chapter 7 lays the foundations for the second half of the book, which focuses on the question of institutional persistence within and beyond conflict. It chronicles the road to political transition and peace in both Guatemala and Nicaragua. The chapter then examines a key difference between the two settings: the coalitional configurations that emerged from war. It provides an in-depth examination of how these dynamics played out within the three institution-level cases examined in the previous chapters. Specifically, it illustrates how the Moreno Network and Detective Corps in Guatemala laid the foundations of institutional survival by broadening the distributional coalition—the web of interest groups with a stake in the fraudulent customs arrangements and extrajudicial killing, respectively. Meanwhile, the FSLN’s transformation into the political opposition in Nicaragua following its 1990 electoral defeat resulted in persistent coalitional volatility, which bred chronic instability within postwar institutions.

Chapter 4 traces the wartime emergence of undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus by the Moreno Network. It analyzes how the Moreno Network was forged by an elite clique of military intelligence officers granted extraordinary discretion while infiltrating the state apparatus to combat Guatemala’s insurgent groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Amid the heightened sense of threat, this counterinsurgent elite introduced a series of predatory institutional arrangements to capture customs revenues. The chapter also examines how the illicit customs procedures were enforced by the Moreno Network, both through the use of violent and nonviolent coercion and through the co-optation of security forces and other state agencies.

Chapter 8 examines the survival of the undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus from the discovery of the Moreno Network in 1996 to the uncovering of La Línea in 2015. Specifically, it discusses the series of reforms implemented by the Arzú government in the aftermath of the Moreno Network revelations to curb customs fraud and contraband, including (1) the expulsions of high-ranking security officials implicated in the scheme, (2) the restructuring of Guatemala’s port system, and (3) the creation of a new fiscal apparatus in the form of the Superintendent of Tax Administration (SAT). The chapter then evaluates how the undermining rules in customs outlasted these sweeping reforms, illustrating how the wartime distributional coalition, while largely displaced from the state sphere, penetrated new semi- and extra-state spaces like political party channels and private port concessions.

The market in ancient Greece should be understood as a specific institutional construct, that of the city-state, which allowed its citizens to exercise private property rights guaranteed by law. By extension, free foreigners were also acknowledged these rights, which however extended to the private ownership of human beings (slavery). The city-state also created the conditions for an unusually high division of labour. Each city was a market space of its own, with its own rules and logic, which could include the control over sales margins and even sometimes the establishment of maximum prices for some perishable fresh goods. The network of hundreds of Greek city-states also created the conditions for the development of an original form of international market.

This chapter provides an overview of how the Irish Sea customs border established under the Protocol functions in practice and what impact this new border has on companies trading between Great Britain (GB) and Northern Ireland. Given the ‘unique circumstances on the island of Ireland’, the border dividing Ireland and the UK was always going to be unlike any other border. The Irish Sea border, established under the Protocol, is a result of an imperfect compromise – an attempt to consolidate a range of requirements which, to a large extent, were contradictory.

This chapter provides an overview of what the Protocol does and why it does it. This is a more challenging task than one might initially imagine because the Protocol is written with what one might generously describe as calculated ambiguity, or, less charitably, outright evasion. What the Protocol does is not what it says. Elucidating its true meaning requires a journey through four particular matters: (i) the customs territory to which Northern Ireland belongs, (ii) the effect on West to East (Northern Ireland to GB) trade, (iii) the effect on East to West (GB to Northern Ireland) trade, and (iv) state aid. Each of these issues is considered in greater detail in subsequent chapters. The argument of this chapter is that the approach to drafting the provisions of the Protocol is the same: in each case, the Protocol is written in a way that understates the nature and the extent of the commitments made on the UK side.

In this chapter, we are interested in the mechanisms through which some customs are “incorporated” into legal systems. In order to make our demonstration, we start by clearing up some of the conceptual confusion surrounding the use of terms related to the notion of custom, by exploring some of the jurisprudential literature that addresses the distinctions among custom, customary law, and the customary sources of law. Turning to the Islamic world and normativity, we also conduct a very broad review of studies addressing the question of ‘urf. Taking the specific case of Morocco, we then concentrate on the colonial period, colonial interest in customary law, and the rejection of such law in the nationalist discourse and in the first decades following independence. Finally, again in Morocco, we focus on the specific case of al-kadd wa’l-si‘âya, which offers a striking example of the transformation of a local custom into a positive legal provision. In conclusion, we suggest some analytical caution regarding the concept of legal hybridity in order to better ascertain the historically contingent character of positive law.

This chapter consists of three sections. First, I analyze PIJ’s view of the state as outlined in its political philosophy with the perceived need to control it. I then proceed to analyze the constituents of the state, the political and democratic processes as outlined by PIJ, and the framework in which these processes take place. We see that there are inherent democratic deficiencies and limitations to its outline of a just society. The future society of PIJ can, at best, be described as one that is non-liberal, yet rights based. Third, after assessing the conception of a just society, I conclude this chapter by arguing that PIJ’s desire to return to a perceived ideal past is reflected in its analysis of violence, which is of a conservative nature.

Chapter 3 engages in a close analysis of several interrelated categories of the normative order that, together, provide the ethical foundations of the res publica. They include the concepts of virtue, the common good, citizenship, education and customs, which are discussed as representing a coherent normative political theory influenced by the classical republican tradition, but also by the empirical context of the Commonwealth. For the republican writers, it was evident that in a well-ordered political community liberty could be preserved only by the law and virtue. They paid scrupulous attention to character formation and the duties of citizenship. It is argued that, in doing so, they were followers of Aristotle and civic humanists for whom the virtuous character of citizens rather than a well-designed institutional order was the most important safeguard of liberty. This chapter stresses the influence of Platonic and Aristotelian insights in the republican discourse. Numerous texts published in the sixteenth century shared the same conclusion, that a free political community needed constant attention and improvement, because of the weakness of imperfect human nature

Chapter 3 addresses taxation in Early Roman Palestine. It divides taxes into direct taxes (tributes), which were levied by the imperial state, and indirect taxes (tolls, customs duties, sales taxes, etc.), which were more often organized at the provincial and municipal levels. The structure of direct taxation changed repeatedly in the different regions of Early Roman Palestine. In general, the rates of Roman direct taxes were relatively low compared to those of other fiscal regimes. Moreover, censuses brought some regulation to the collection of taxes and thus helped to prevent abuses by officials. While direct taxes were transmitted to Rome, their collection was supervised by councils of local elites. For many Judaeans, indirect taxes were much more exacting. These taxes were levied by local elites and collected, often with little regulation, by tax-farmers and their agents. In addition to their political and economic power over the institutions of taxation, local elites were also involved in market oversight.