Vulnerability is clearly one of the most common notions in the modern discourses on regulating contracts and market policy. They reached particular prominence in the EU digital market rules, where various forms of vulnerability arguments became a commonplace justification for intervention in horizontal market relations. All these arguments build on various versions of an assumption that market actors are a heterogenous group that demonstrates various degrees of proneness to certain risks and harm. In a nutshell, some of the participants in the market are more susceptible to certain practices or can incur a higher economic and personal loss. Consequently, the legal system should provide a diversified regulatory response that accounts for various forms and degrees of market disadvantage. Framed along these lines, the vulnerability-based arguments can be traced across various parts of the discussion about digital market and society – from state–citizen relations, to data protection and consumer law. More recently, vulnerability became a part of policy blueprints, playing a prominent role in the regulatory framework of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and product liability, and especially in the AI Act (with 25 mentions of vulnerability in one Act) that elevated it to one of the central positions in its rationale. In all these instances vulnerability is usually used as a generic notion that encapsulates various specific sources and types of human weakness in the digital realm. Each of these spheres develops, however, its own, mostly autonomous understanding of this term or sometimes, quite perplexingly, does not seem to develop any coherent understanding at all.

This chapter considers Europeanisation as a construct of middle-range theorising. It examines the scope, causal processes and outcomes of Europeanisation with a particular emphasis on the implications for model-building. It describes the Europeanisation of conflict resolution as a non-traditional area of Europeanisation related to the capacity of European Union policies and discourses to alter or subsume the organisational logic of the process and induce behavioural change on behalf of the conflict parties. This chapter also outlines the important stages in the Europeanisation of conflict resolution.

This chapter analyses the philosophical foundations of United Nations (UN) democracy, including the political discourse leading up to the creation of the UN, and its place in the UN Charter. It explains that the idea of democracy features strongly as an essential element of the liberal internationalist politics out of which the UN grew. But despite a central location in the philosophy of international organisations and liberal international relations, democracy was not included in the UN Charter. It was subjugated under the pragmatics of peace and the establishment of sovereignty in the decolonisation process.

The words of the subject are very broad and I shall limit my introduction to a few remarks.

The notion of ‘constitutional values’ is not really a legal concept. The term ‘values’ itself does not often appear in legal texts, except in preambles or general statements. The concept is used in both singular1 and plural forms. Constitutions instead guarantee ‘rules’, ‘principles’, or ‘fundamental rights and freedoms’. However, law necessarily conveys an axiology, and fundamental rights thus refer to values protected by law. Still the term ‘values’ seems to be somewhat at odds with the notion of constitution, which is the text containing the common principles of a nation. In contrast, the word ‘values’ seems to refer to individual and subjective preferences, as we now live in a world where pluralism of values is accepted and guaranteed.

However, the adjective ‘constitutional’ certainly makes it possible to say that these are not only personal values, but collective and essential values – those that make up the identity of a nation.

This chapter discusses different interpretations of democracy using the democratic continuum as analytical tool. It explains that the democratic continuum is conceptualised as ranging from minimal/procedural democracy to maximal/substantive democracy and argues that the problems influencing definitions of democracy are exacerbated by the different use and study of democracy by democracy theory and democratisation studies. This chapter contends that the democratic continuum aims to capture the nuances in defining democracy and draw out the lack of clearly set boundaries between definitions without imposing such boundaries.

The human driven1 global environmental crisis requires measures that are able to, if not reverse, at least mitigate, its speed, impact, negative effects, and future prospects for humanity. Based on the scientists’ claims regarding rising temperatures, rising sea levels, the disappearance of some species, the increasing droughts and decreasing amount of water availability for human consumption, to name a few, it may be too late to reverse the current situation so that we can ensure the viability of human civilisation on Earth in the way we know it.2 However, we still may have an opportunity to mitigate it so that we can slow down the impact of the environmental crisis and gain time to maintain human life and societies the way we know them.

This chapter presents a case study on Europeanisation effects in the context of a failed, or non-negotiated, settlement as in the case of the Kosovo/Serbia conflict. It analyses the European Union's (EU) involvement in the conflict since 1990 and discusses the EU integration strategy for the Western Balkans. The analysis reveals weak direct effects but a strong positive association between the EU influences and the institutional dynamic of the conflict resolution process, measured as political change and reform in Serbia and progress in state-building in Kosovo. This chapter contends that despite significant limitations, the EU has become an indispensable agent of conflict resolution in Kosovo.

With the growing involvement of the European Union (EU) in private law relationships since the late twentieth century, public regulation to control the operation of markets and traditional private law have become more and more intertwined. Recent accounts of European private law refer, for example, to ‘European regulatory private law’, ‘hybrid regulation of markets’ or the ‘integration of regulation into private law’. The hybridisation between market regulation and private law is particularly manifest in EU contract law, which regulates contractual relationships in the pursuit of public goals, notably the establishment of the European internal market. The EU legislator harnesses contract law concepts, such as information obligations or duties of care, as instruments to alleviate the market failure resulting from the information asymmetries between participants in a particular market or to achieve other policy outcomes.