The fifth chapter continues the excavation and evaluation of evidence in the making of a government pension contract by describing the circumstances under which reforms have proven effective against constitutional contention. It probes the power of reservation clauses, the credence of contemporary commentary like employee handbooks, the impact of persuasive authority, and the influence of the Supreme Court of the United States. It identifies which forms of proof have been the most effective and why, along with what matters have been missed. In assessing the evidence for and against the creation of a contract, this chapter prioritizes sources, comments on their respective import, and otherwise argues for courts to undertake an expansive inquiry to determine whether government pension benefits receive contract protection.

In attempts to identify root causes of terrorism, the view that terrorist actors are poor and uneducated often plague the speeches and works of politicians and media outlets. The grouping of these issues is appealing, making terrorism a seemingly easier to solve problem. Yet, rigorous academic research over the past two decades helps refute this view. Studies have revealed that while some stereotypical notions of terrorists are correct, such as that they are usually single, young males, others are wildly misleading. Terrorists are often wealthier and better educated than their peers in the broader population. This, perhaps surprising, academic finding has been independently identified in numerous studies around the world and has subsequently opened the topic of terrorism up to further investigations on microeconomic factors. The question in this chapter then turns to, what other characteristics might influence terrorism? Studies into individual religion have yielded results that are complex and inconclusive. Macroeconomic investigations into theories that involve heroic acts or screening effects have thus far failed to capture a fully substantiated mechanism. Additional research focusing on grievances, media, systematic-indoctrination, and psychological motivations should contribute to a fuller picture of the typically wealthier, better-educated males that choose to engage in terrorism.

Trade and investment in services and intellectual property grows rapidly, driven by new technological advances, while servicification resolutely alters FDI patterns. As digital services trade grows, its aterritorial nature becomes a source of concern for policymakers and regulators, while companies affected by public interventions seek legal avenues to protect their rights, often throuth recourse to investor-State arbitration. Against this background, this chapter delves into the universe of digital services supply in an increasingly polarized international economic order. It identifies the challenges that servicification poses on international investment law, before focusing on the recent cases of TikTok (involving the digital services supply of the social media giant in the US) and Uber (relating to the service supply of the American company in Colombia and other countries) but also on Metaverse as a new challenge for economic regulation to discuss the applicable substantive investment law obligations and the scope for upholding national security concerns by the regulatory State. Throughout the chapter, I discuss related challenges that regulatory authorities face by emerging patterns in services trade and investment; the potential impact of measures such as geoblocking, bans or ringfencing; and the repercussions of such geo-economic fragmentation for the investment regime.

Insurance and its related products and instruments plays an important role in the management of risk and potential loss from terrorist attacks. This chapter will introduce the reader to the concept and structure of insurance and how the sector approaches catastrophic risks like terrorism. It will then explore the roles that insurance has, and that different actors play, in the process of insuring against loss caused by terrorism. In order to insure a risk, it must be possible to assess it and to model the potential loss to the insurer. So the process of how insurers assess and model the risk will be laid out. This sets the conditions for the challenges that such modelling faces and treatments of those challenges. The chapter concludes that the process of validation of models is critical to their success and is an excellent area for future research.

Terrorist groups face a wide range of organizational issues. They have to recruit members, raise funds, articulate a political vision, develop operational plans, train personnel, execute attacks, and justify their actions. Unlike most organizations, however, they must do so while remaining as covert as possible, making all the normal challenges of organizational management significantly harder. This chapter reviews the organizational issues that terrorist groups face and that counterterrorist organizations should take into account.

This Chapter examines whether and to what extent WTO members can be accountable for applying security measures before international adjudicators and how the invocation of security exceptions can impact the international courts’ or tribunals’ proceedings. The idea of balancing free trade and national security is bound to substantiate itself in a compression of the right to sovereignty, which can be assessed through the good faith review or the use of a necessity test. The investigation of the meaning and mechanisms of these tests and the scope of discretion that should be granted to the decisions of WTO members in their national security matters allows for establishing the framework for reviewing security exceptions.

On June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb committed the most consequential terrorist attack of the twentieth century, shooting dead the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife as their motorcade rode through Sarajevo. The young assassin, a civilian armed and trained by a Serbian intelligence officer, could not have known that by killing the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire he would trigger the First World War. Yet he did. Allies of both Austria-Hungary and Serbia honored existing commitments, so their bilateral conflict escalated into a war of unprecedented scale, killing 20 million before it ended in 1918. Worse, instabilities resulting from that war contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War two decades later, which was four times as lethal. To this day those catastrophes cast dark shadows on our lives.

In this paper, we analyze the role of global geopolitical risks (GPRs), including those associated with terror attacks and threats, on the realized volatility of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), i.e., the G7 countries, over the period 1917 to 2016. For our purpose, we use a time-varying nonparametric panel data model approach, which offers substantial efficiency gains in estimating the relationship in a time-varying manner, while controlling for nonlinearity and cross-sectional interdependencies across economies, unlike a time series-based model. We find that GPRs can decrease or increase volatility contingent on the state of the two variables of concern, with attacks having a stronger impact on volatility than threats. Our results have important implications for investors and policymakers.

The first tentative indications that times were changing came in the 1960s and, more particularly, the 1970s. The sustained civil rights protests of these years contributed to growing interest by scholars in examining the strategies of protest and accommodation adopted by African Americans in earlier periods. The daily lives of black slaves in the antebellum South became an especial focus for academic study. Historian Daniel Leab's line of enquiry typified what by the 1980s had become a dominant trend in studies by cultural historians, namely to explore the origins, character and significance of stereotyped depictions of African Americans in US popular culture. The 1990s saw both rapid and unprecedented developments in the academic study of popular culture. In part this interest can be seen as reflecting the cult of celebrity that enveloped the leading stars of sport, music, film and television entertainment at the close of the century.