This chapter synthesizes the book’s core findings and theorizes the political logic underpinning China’s dual state. It argues that expanded judicial autonomy in routine cases arises not despite autocratic consolidation, but because of it. By centralizing authority, disciplining local actors, and constraining unsanctioned interventions, the regime strengthened courts’ capacity to adjudicate according to legal norms in nonsensitive matters. Simultaneously, politically salient cases are systematically excluded from judicial channels – either through repression and co-optation or through diversion to nonjudicial mechanisms – thereby insulating the courts from political pressure. This fusion of vertical discipline and strategic dejudicialization sustains a revised dual state model: one that preserves a normative legal sphere through strong and calibrated authoritarian control.

Chapter 1 highlights the changing definitions of republicanism in light of the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, debates over slavery, and the admission of new states. The Twelfth Amendment elevated the voters to a central position in republican theory by creating an expectation that the President be the choice of a majority of those who wield political power on behalf of the state. This version of majoritarianism, filtered through the medium of political parties, also became a limit on the types of political systems that states could adopt in accordance with the Guarantee Clause. However, Congress’s power under the Clause was stunted because of a slaveocracy that consistently made federalism arguments to protect that institution, even when such arguments were contrary to newly redefined republican ideals.

Historically, democratic progress has been widely understood as correlated to the representative quality of institutions. Representativeness has been seen as essential for the social appropriation of institutions in societies analyzed as having a class structure. In the national political order, parties were intended to represent the different social interests, and in the particular context of labour, the recognition of trade unions played this role. It is in this spirit that the International Labour Organization (ILO) included trade unions in its various bodies when it was created a century ago, and, since then, the ILO has served as a reference point for representation at the international level.While this conception of representativeness remains relevant, the scope of its application has become more limited. A growing number of essential issues, such as the conservation of the environment or the protection of privacy, are, in fact, directly political: they structure our common world. In this context, authority and legitimacy carry weight in the public debate. Representativeness, by which we can ‘measure’ the social weight of a speaker, is only secondary. ‘Public voices’ have come to have greater relevance, due to their ability to resonate with, and thereby focus and shape, public opinion. These ‘public voices’ are expressed by expert groups with specific subject-area knowledge, or by individuals who have benefited from the haphazard nature of media coverage. As a result, their integration into international life can no longer be institutionalized in the ‘old fashioned’ way.

From the founding era to the turn of the twentieth century, Congress has at times asserted its power over elections robustly and creatively, even in periods of judicial obstruction, and its role in shaping the nation’s electoral landscape has always been pivotal – even when contested, uneven, or ineffective. This period invokes a rich and overlooked history that reveals a repository of federal authority over elections that was triggered (or ignored) less for reasons of federalism, and more so due to pragmatic, principled, or partisan considerations.

‘Democratic representation’ seems to have no explanatory power for the current structure and operation of universal IOs and a weak justificatory value for upcoming political reforms of these IOs. However, under the benefit of a renewed approach to universal IOs functions and deliberation, which is one of their meta-functions, the creation of new subsidiary bodies designed to accommodate delegates from Non-State Actors (NSAs) and enable, or even compel, intergovernmental bodies to take into account other interests and perspectives appears to be both necessary and feasible, without any reference to contentious criteria of representativeness based on a fragile principle of democratic legitimacy in IL. The alternative to ‘democratic representation’ consists in amplifying diffuse attempts to redesign the institutional architecture of universal IOs and harnessing the potential of international institutional law, implied powers and privileges and immunities regimes for the sake of a genuinely international, transnational and transgenerational deliberation. Concretely, people speaking for sub-state communities (e.g. from the Global South), future generations or natural entities for instance should be given an institutional role within consultative subsidiary bodies, in combination with state representatives or scientific experts, or not – depending on what is necessary for the fulfilment of the IOs functions. The current context of exacerbated competition between more democratic and less democratic states, some of them obviously being authoritarian, also pleads for a modest approach to IOs political reform leaving the concept of democracy unaltered.

This chapter introduces the foundational mechanics of the Bitcoin blockchain. You will learn how Bitcoin structures data through addresses, transactions, and blocks, and how it ensures integrity using cryptographic hash functions and Merkle trees. We explain how users interact with the network via a peer-to-peer architecture and how mining, Proof of Work, and block rewards secure the system and control coin issuance. The chapter also covers key design upgrades such as Segregated Witness, Taproot, and hierarchical wallets, and explains how forks, mempools, and scripting govern Bitcoin's functionality. By the end, you will understand the core components that make Bitcoin a decentralized, trustless, and resilient financial protocol.

This chapter introduces Ripple as a blockchain-inspired credit network designed for fast, low-cost cross-border payments. You will learn about its origins, architecture, and how it differs from Bitcoin and Ethereum, particularly through its validator-based consensus and account model. You will explore XRP's tokenomics, the structure of the XRP Ledger, and how Ripple supports features like trust lines, path-based settlements, escrows, and a built-in decentralized exchange. The chapter also explains how Ripple enforces finality, handles fees, and enables institutional-grade transaction tagging, while addressing regulatory and security mechanisms unique to the network.

In the history of international institutional law questions of legitimate or ‘democratic’ representation, participation and decision-making have somewhat regularly re-appeared in both theory and practice over the last 150 years.1 Concrete controversies usually referred to voting procedures, composition of organs, rules of participation, and the formal status of decisions taken by organs of international institutions. A handful of related dichotomies have structured the associated international legal debates in this field, such as unanimity- versus majority-rule, ‘one State one vote’ versus weighted voting, binding versus non-binding decisions, diplomatic versus civil society-representation, as well as legislative versus individualized or administrative decision-making. Structurally, these dichotomies revolve around the foundational and enigmatic principle of sovereign equality of States, consent-based lawmaking and the concept of international institutions as creations and subjects of international (treaty-) law. Inevitably, these debates have also been framed against the background of contemporary world-historical developments, such as the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN) after the two world wars or the decolonization era.

The Epilogue examines how authoritarian regimes manage dual state structures through comparisons with Russia, Egypt, Singapore, and Poland. It argues that sustaining judicial autonomy in routine cases requires two core capacities: disciplining prerogative actors and dejudicializing politically sensitive disputes. These conditions are more readily met in centralized regimes like Singapore, whereas larger or fragmented systems such as Russia and Egypt face persistent informal interference and, at times, prerogative takeover. Poland illustrates how dualism can unravel under democratic backsliding, as courts become contested arenas between regime and opposition. Across cases, the viability of dual states hinges not on liberal pluralism but on hierarchical control that insulates courts from destabilizing pressures while preserving regime authority. The dual state thus emerges as a replicable model of authoritarian legality – one sustained not by institutional restraint but by centralized coercion.

Part IV (Chapters 7, 8, and 9) argues that Congress, in crafting the Reconstruction Amendments, wanted to preserve its authority to exclude those it deemed undesirable from the political community of “We the Voters,” which significantly undermined later efforts to protect Black voters. The preservation of some elements of the pre–Civil War constitutional framework – i.e., the absence of an affirmative right to vote – when combined with the judicial invalidation of many key aspects of the Reconstruction project provided Congress with the exit for which the institution was searching as Reconstruction became less viable politically.

Following the Civil War, Congress used its power under the Elections Clause, the Guarantee Clause, Article I, Section 5, and the Reconstruction Amendments to rebuild southern political systems. Chapter 5 discusses the ratification debates surrounding Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and the understanding that voting rights, which would now be exercised by a broader swath of the population in the post-war era, supplanted the natural right to alter or abolish government as the mechanism through which the people could express their sovereign authority. Section 2 not only reset expectations around what constituted a republican form of government consistent with the Guarantee Clause, but it is also provided a penalty – reduction of representation in Congress – for states that disenfranchised African American men now entitled to membership in the political community of “We the Voters.”

Violent uprisings across the South, from the Colfax Massacre of the 1870s to the Wilmington Insurrection of the 1890s, further complicated Congress’s already precarious standing on issues related to voting and elections, especially given its ongoing war with a Supreme Court intent on limiting congressional power. In addition, the controversy surrounding the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, which would have instituted federal supervision of congressional elections, revealed that there were political risks attendant to legislating toward the outer limits of constitutional power to empower and protect Black voters, risks that tended to manifest at the ballot box. Republican support for the bill cost them a significant number of congressional seats in the 1890 and 1892 elections. Instead of becoming a moment in which a revitalized Congress used the Constitutions of Political Structure and Political Rights to ensure that African Americans would be permanent fixtures in the political community of “We the Voters,” politics guaranteed that they would remain transient and temporary visitors.

In addition to the structural constitutional provisions that govern voting and elections, Congress’s authority also had implications for the “Constitution of Political Rights” which, during the antebellum era, encompassed a state-defined right to vote, mostly exercised by White men, and a natural right to alter or abolish government, nominally retained by everyone. Part II (Chapters 3 and 4) discusses the status of these rights during the founding and antebellum eras and, in particular, how they interacted with the structural constitution – namely, the U.S. Constitution’s mandate that Congress guarantee to every state a republican government, judge the elections of its members, and regulate the times, places, and manner of federal elections, all of which are an implicit limit on the power that states have to create, shape, and protect their political communities.

In this chapter, you will learn about the privacy limitations of public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and how these limitations have led to the development of privacy-focused cryptocurrencies. You will study the motivations for privacy coins and the risks posed by government-issued digital currencies. The chapter introduces and compares three major privacy coins: Zcash, Dash, and Monero. For each, you will explore their underlying technologies, including zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), CoinJoin-style mixing, and ring signatures with RingCT and stealth addresses. You will also learn about consensus protocols, supply models, and the trade-offs each project makes between privacy, usability, and scalability. Finally, you will analyze the comparative strengths and weaknesses of these systems and understand the broader implications of privacy on blockchains.

These conclusions do not intend to summarize and even less to close the debate but instead to revert to the main issues addressed during the conference and maybe identify further issues for research. All contributors agree that not only a discussion on democracy and representation in and by international organisations is not purely speculative or theoretical, but that it seems necessary today. Despite this, contributors are not all in agreement on the need to use the concept of representation when discussing democratization of international organizations. Some question the link between democracy and representation, or whether using representative systems is even feasible in international organizations. This, in turn, leads to the various definitions of the concept of representation in political science and in law. A multiple international representation system (MIRS) as proposed by Besson and Marti is based on a strict concept of democratic representation and contrasts with other more flexible concepts such as ‘descriptive’ or ‘mimetic’ representation. In the end, the chapters address the merits of various systems, including in existing processes of global governance, for further democratizing international organisations.

Many contemporary international organizations (IOs) are empowered to adopt international law that claims to bind their Member States (and, directly or indirectly, their peoples). Certain IOs have also become members of other Ios or, at least, active participants in international lawmaking processes that claim to bind those IOs and their Member States (and their peoples).Generally speaking IOs play a central role in contemporary international lawmaking: they institutionalize most of the processes through which international law is adopted today, be it through international conferences, international courts, or as IO secondary law. From the perspective of the democratic legitimacy of international law, this raises the question of the conditions under which those Ios may be regarded as democratic representatives of their Member States’ peoples and, accordingly, under which the international law they have the right or discretion to adopt inside and outside of IO organs and processes may claim to bind those peoples legitimately.