Over the past few decades, the Mediterranean Sea has become a complex geography of human migration and its governance. Yet, we remain without a clear language to take seriously this sea as a space shaped by the practices that transpire within it. Rather than treating the Mediterranean as a maritime zone traversed, this chapter examines this sea as a dense political geography in its own right. The chapter focuses on the policies and practices of the European migration governance programme, Eunavfor Med, to demonstrate how the actions that emerge as an effect of this programme are influencing this sea at large. In order to build up a language that considers the importance of these changing practices at sea, the chapter explicates an example of maritime power held by the ancient Greeks. This period is drawn upon both for its Mediterranean orientation, as well as the way it reflects an example of power that is rendered through the sea and the connectivities within it. Through borrowing on this colonial and thalassic example of at-sea connectivity, the chapter highlights this sea as a central political geography, where seafaring is tied in with political ordering, to reveal how contemporary European agendas of migration governance are shaping the Mediterranean.

In Tongoane v National Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that the government’s attempt to regulate property in traditional communities through the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) was unconstitutional. It emphasised that traditional land was already governed by indigenous ‘living law’ and CLARA sought to replace this vernacular law, a system evolved over time, with legislation. This highlighted the presence of indigenous law predating colonialism, challenging colonial notions like ‘lex nullius’ (no law) and ‘terra nullius’ (empty land), which denied indigenous Africans their rights. This chapter argues that South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional vision fails to fully recognise and integrate this vernacular law, undermining true transformation, and instead advocates for ‘Alter-Native Constitutionalism’, which would amalgamate ‘customary’, ‘common’ and vernacular law to reflect the realities and normative convictions of most South Africans. This approach aims to rectify historical injustices and create a more just legal system, rooted in indigenous values and addressing social and economic inequities. Explicating the indigenously feminist decolonising concept of Alter-Native Constitutionalism, the chapter calls for reconstitution of South Africa’s legal framework and content to give full voice to indigenous world-sense and law-sense, advocating a shift away from Eurocentric logics and norms.

On my interpretation of Kelsen’s ‘pure’ theory of law, his basic norm must be understood as a regulative assumption, a claim about inquiry and what individuals must assume if their inquiry is into the authority of law. As such, this idea has both theoretical and practical dimensions. As a matter of theory, it requires an elaboration of authority as legitimate and attention to the way in which the relationship between those who wield authority and those subject to it can be said to be one of right rather than might. As a matter of practice, it requires attention to the way in which, in light of legal subjects’ experience of law, legal order is and should be designed with a view to vindicating its intrinsic commitment to the rule of law and its concomitant commitment to constitutionalism. However, all that cannot be had without acknowledging the drive towards substance in Kelsen’s theory, one that sacrifices its claim to be pure of ideology in the sense of political value commitments. But it preserves purity in an account in exclusively legal terms of how politics can take place in a space constructed by law, internationally as well as domestically.

This chapter captures the intricate relationship between Indigenous cultural heritage and rights for advancing sustainable development and enabling the well-being of Indigenous communities. It analyses the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 No. 169 (ILO 169) regarding the preservation and protection of cultural heritage. The chapter highlights the challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation to Indigenous cultural heritage and emphasizes the need for resilience and safeguarding measures. It further examines the treatment of cultural heritage in Indigenous treaties, delving into legal and historical perspectives in the US jurisprudence and political landscape, then addresses the ability of Canadian modern treaties to foster or frustrate the ability to safeguard cultural heritage. By considering these aspects, the chapter underscores the significance of recognizing and preserving Indigenous cultural heritage, and the integration of Indigenous rights and knowledge to ensure the continuity and vitality of cultural heritage for present and future generations.

This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive and critical examination of how Mainland China and Hong Kong cooperate to regulate cross-border securities market misconduct, and based on the examination, make suggestions for improvement. While the Mainland–Hong Kong cooperation has produced good achievements, there remain many important issues which can be broadly divided into two categories: substantive rules on the definitions of market misconduct and penalties for such misconduct; enforcement mechanisms in relation to information exchange, regulatory architecture and extradition arrangement. This chapter suggests that the substantive rules be harmonized to the extent possible and the enforcement mechanisms be unified as a long-term goal. Despite its peculiarities, the Mainland–Hong Kong case can contribute to the international discourse on the regulation of cross-border securities misconduct.

Introducing the book’s third essential part on ‘property’, this chapter sets out Alter-Native Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation informed by vernacular law and oriented towards the everyday, ordinary South African as the ‘reasonable’ person in law. It draws on ethnography and sociolinguistics, problematising the continuities in how democratic South African law treats ‘customary law’ consistently with colonial-apartheid. A SiSwati conversation with Make Ng’Gogo frames the chapter’s exploration of vernacular law’s indigenous ethical orientation, embodied in Ubu-Ntu, as it applies to guiding not only societal organisation but also land rights – emphasising human-centred values over individualistic property rights. By first examining indigenous normative relationships with land then translating their application into critique of Constitutional Court interpretive practices, the chapter advances an Alter-Native framework that represents a paradigm shift in constitutional interpretation, privileging Ubu-Ntu’s holistic world-sense. This framework advocates reinterpretation of dignity and rights under the Constitution, moving beyond Western legal principles toward a jurisprudence grounded in indigenous natural law and relational ethics. The chapter argues for South Africa’s Constitutional Court to adopt this indigenously transformative constitutional approach to interpretation, treating vernacular law as equally legitimate to European ‘common law’ and thereby making truly transformative socioeconomic outcomes more possible.

The sea is a political space. It is bounded and contested. While it cannot be reduced to land, it is no different in this regard. Traditionally the sea has been constructed as an open, natural space but this is a political construction. I demonstrate the sea as political space by looking at shifting constructions of ‘the line’ as a boundary in the Northern Atlantic from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It was originally drawn in the fifteenth century to demarcate where the Spanish and Portuguese could explore. By the mid-sixteenth century it was the Tropic of Cancer and Spain claimed all south of it. This was contested by the French and English. The Spanish would hire privateers to attack ‘illegal’ ships below ‘the line’, while the French and English would hire privateers for retaliation and to attack Spanish Gold Ships. There was ‘no peace beyond the line’. By the late seventeenth century, the political economy of the region shifted from extraction to trade, and sea raiders who were once privateers were made into pirates. To deal with the ‘golden age of piracy’, England abolished the idea of ‘no peace beyond the line’ and pushed it south to the equator where it was no longer politically meaningful. The result was something akin to the ‘open sea’ that we see today. What this case shows is that the sea was a bounded, contested, and dynamic space, and that understanding political space means we need to understand the sea.

This chapter explores the relationship between Hans Kelsen’s philosophical relativism and his theory of democratic leadership. First, it argues that Kelsen’s theory of democratic leadership cannot be fully understood unless placed within his broader political thought, which includes a commitment to philosophical relativism. Second, it suggests that Kelsen provided an original answer to the puzzle of democratic leadership that is significant in its own right. Writing during the rise of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet communism, Kelsen made a crucial distinction between autocratic and democratic forms of leadership: while autocratic leaders are seen as possessing absolute knowledge and, therefore, hold unlimited power, democratic leaders are thought to carry only relative truths, and their power is consequently limited. Kelsen demonstrated that if we believe moral absolutes exist, it is logical to have an absolute leader with unfettered power. In contrast, if we hold that moral absolutes are inaccessible to human knowledge and only relative truths exist, it follows that leaders should have limited power and be subject to constant scrutiny and control. Contrary to the common characterisation of Kelsen as an abstract and idealist thinker, this chapter shows that his approach to political leadership was normative yet realist. Rather than eliminating leadership, Kelsen associated democracy with multiple, temporary leaders who have limited and relative political power.

I revisit how my practice of adda instituted a counter-hierarchical, shared practice of knowledge making which helped to show the diverse locations and experiences that produce a field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. I recount how my performances of adda helped to carve out specific conversations—in authors’ texts and lives—to show how these are conscious experiences of law that account for the diverse organisations of mutual law–life relations in an Indian post-colonial context. I draw this book to a close by reaffirming that the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence is a diverse body of knowledge that is produced out of the disparate lived practices of varied groups of people who live different lives and relate with law differently; and that the performances of emplaced conversations help us attend to, and recognise, such differences in law-life relations.

This chapter argues that the Afrobarometer survey findings indicating South Africans’ preference for housing over land are easily misunderstood. Supported by modern science, it emphasises human interconnectedness as evidenced and grounded in land-based relationships. The chapter therefore critiques the limited world-sense within which ‘property’ is conceived in Ramuhovhi and Malan and, instead, amalgamates vernacular, ‘(un)customary’, and ‘(un)common’ law to illustrate how relationships, ‘seen’ particularly through the spatiotemporal lens of Ubu-Ntu, might deepen our constitutional understanding of ‘property’. It thus shows how the concept of ‘house’ (beyond physical structure) – perceived in ‘vernacular time’, rather than Euromodernity’s ‘colonial time’ – equitably shapes ‘property’ rights, linking them to multigenerational ‘survivance’ and thereby integrating Ntu principles into contemporary legal interpretations. Hence, the chapter concludes the book by demonstrating how embracing the vernacular law conceptions of ‘human(e) existence’, ‘rights’ and ‘house’ would transform the sociolegal reality for South Africans by decolonising it and achieving sustainable socioeconomic change. Returning to encounters in Mbuzini, the chapter ends by highlighting young people’s understandings of Ubu-Ntu and ‘housing’ amidst colonial law’s afterlives and vernacular law’s continued erasure. It contends that true transformation demands respecting the country’s constitutional commitments by genuinely representing all South Africans’ diverse normative ideals.