This chapter brings in the complexities of the intersection between renewable resources, sustainable development, and Indigenous treaty law. It begins by examining international guidance for renewable energy sources and their role in achieving sustainability objectives. This chapter then delves into the principles and rules governing sustainable forestry practices, fisheries management, and energy development. It highlights the importance of international agreements, protocols, and treaties in promoting responsible resource management, conservation, and the recognition of Indigenous rights and knowledge. By considering these principles and rules within the context of Indigenous treaty law, it highlights the need for harmonious and inclusive approaches to renewable resource use in the age of sustainable development. It underlines the significance of collaboration, respect for Indigenous knowledge, and the integration of sustainability principles to ensure a balanced and equitable relationship between renewable resources, Indigenous rights, and sustainable development.

The recruitment of men into armies had its counterpart in the placement of soldiers taken captive during war – and these, too, took place on the edge of consent. Customary laws of war prohibited hard labor for Christian prisoners of war. Yet a succession of English governments sent their European war captives into servitude with private masters. These governments and their collaborators instead operated under the logic of the English Poor Law, in which the indigent could meaningfully consent to serve a master even while under duress. The case of Scottish and Dutch prisoners of war in an East Anglian fen drainage project from 1648 to 1653 shows how the Council of State and the drainage company board members conceptualized lower-status prisoners as willing workmen. The broader arena of transatlantic and intra-European coercion of prisoner of war labor throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries further reveals how the discourse of consent permeated even those more convoluted international relations.

Chapter 6 is devoted to the topic of Variable Interest Entity (VIE), which is widely used for overseas listings of Chinese companies. The legality of VIE has long been a subject of intense debate in China due to its alleged circumvention of China’s foreign investment law: The VIE structure allows foreign investors to participate in overseas-listed Chinese companies through contractual control rather than a shareholding relationship, thus bypassing relevant restrictions on foreign investment in China. This chapter argues that China adopts a policy of strategic ambiguity about the legality of the VIE structure, so as to balance the need to protect national security and the need to facilitate overseas listing of Chinese companies. There are institutional reasons behind this policy, including interest group politics of regulatory agencies and the rent-seeking activities of regulatory officials. The policy of strategic ambiguity will likely continue in the foreseeable future, and so will the uncertainty over the legality of the VIE structure.

Chapter 6 addresses the second theme outlined in the introduction. It first analyses whether the capacity to impose discipline as an organizational requirement for the status of party to an armed conflict implicitly presupposes the capacity to impose penal sanctions over members of the armed group. Moreover, it discusses to what extent an obligation to punish conduct with penal sanctions can be derived from the doctrine of command responsibility under ICL and whether the customary law duty to prosecute and punish war crimes, as applicable to states, can be extended to armed groups. The chapter argues that while courts and penal sanctions administered by armed groups might be a legitimate way to ensure respect for IHL and to avoid individual criminal responsibility on the basis of command responsibility, this conclusion does not translate into a positive obligation of armed groups as a collective to employ penal sanctions, let alone to set up judicial institutions. This conclusion notwithstanding, the chapter points out that there is increasing state practice requiring armed groups to ensure accountability within their ranks.

Centring the devastating case of five-year-old Michael Komape’s drowning in a pit latrine at school, this chapter discusses the ‘dis/empowerment paradox’ inherent in South Africa’s ‘transformative constitutionalism’. Through the example of the Komapes’ 2018 case against the Minister of Basic Education (2018), it reveals the limitations of transformative constitutionalism rooted in Euro-American liberalism, which resonates with a neoliberal political economy that has failed to relieve the impoverished majority of their dehumanising precarity. While the chapter highlights the failure of the South African government to relate and respond to the suffering of the people it is meant to serve, more profoundly, it exposes the limitations of transformative constitutionalism due to its inability to even ‘see’ (let alone, validate) the world-sense of its majority population as legitimate law-sense. The Komape case thus reveals three key insights: (1) the resistance of private law to transformative ideals, (2) the reluctance of South Africa’s legal culture to embrace decolonial transformation and pluralism, and (3) the tension(s) between the legal consciousness of ordinary South Africans and the dominant legal culture. The case therefore underscores the need for Ntu Constitutionalism: a system grounded in indigenous normative priorities and robustly representative of South Africa’s marginalised communities and their needs.

Chapter 2 traces the evolution of the overseas listing of Chinese companies and its regulatory regime. It defines the main modes of overseas listings of Chinese companies, divides the historical development of the overseas-listing market into several stages and discusses how China has gradually established its regulatory regime in this area. It then focuses on the current regime, particularly the uniform filing regime introduced in 2023, including the key elements and their implementation issues. It also conducts an evaluation of the new regime and makes relevant comments.

Chapter 11 concludes with a summarization of relevant research findings and suggestions for improvement. It also identifies a series of questions to be answered by future research.

Chapter 5 addresses these weaknesses by combining STS with sociological systems theory, which provides a persuasive account of law in society, but has been criticised as technology-blind. This does not mean, however, that systems theory lacks the means to conceptualise the interface between the materiality of a distribution medium (e.g. the Internet) and the sociality of communicative systems (e.g. law), since structural coupling provides the means to explain how operatively closed systems can relate to each other, e.g. the sphere of technical materiality (the technosystem) and the sphere of communicative sociality (society and its subsystems). A separation between the material and the social is the prerequisite for adopting a critical or normative position vis-à-vis digital media, enabling us to empirically study the diverse interrelations between the two spheres in online communication. To do so, technologies must be understood as artefacts possessing affordances, that is possibilities and constraints, raising the question of how digital technologies acquire affordances. The final question concerns the concept of normativity in the digital ecosphere, namely whether normative expectations about digital technologies can emerge. Since normative expectations structure the legal system, our answer will explain the nature of the structural coupling between law and technology.

This chapter delves into the United States’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, with a specific focus on Indigenous sovereignty and economic rights. It begins by introducing the topic and setting the context for the discussion by providing a history of the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the legal framework, with an emphasis on the series of cases dubbed the Marshall Trilogy. This includes the struggles and advancements in recognizing tribal nation sovereignty and economic rights. It examines the recognition and affirmation of tribal nation sovereignty within the United States, including legal developments and court decisions that have shaped Indigenous self-governance. This chapter analyses the landmark case of McGirt v. Oklahoma, emphasizing its role in addressing past legal injustices, establishing tribal reservation boundaries, and strengthening tribal jurisdiction. It also investigates US tribal sovereignty in the context of international Indigenous trade, showcasing the ways in which Indigenous communities engage in economic activities and exercise their sovereignty on the global stage.

Chapter 7 zooms out of conceptual and empirical studies of AI governance to ask if we can build a better future with AI. The technical, corporate, and legal governance models presented in this book are necessary but insufficient to endow ordinary people with the power to push back against risks and harms, and chart a course for AI for the common good. Thinking together with philosophers and social scientists in the Critical Theory, Science and Technology Studies, and Democratic Theory traditions, I argue that most people’s experience with AI is one of fear as a result of their long-standing disempowerment and alienation from the technologies shaping their lives. Attributing disempowerment and alienation to technical aspects of AI is wrongheaded: It is the evolution of modern capitalism that has widened the gap between people and the technologies that are supposed to make their lives better. Reorienting the relationship between people and AI requires a radical-democratic politics that questions hierarchy in government and in the workplace. Technology can serve as a force for the social good only if informed citizens participate in the decisions shaping their lives in the design, development, deployment, and use of modern technology, AI included.