A military aircraft would be one 'operated by commissioned units of the armed forces of a state having the military marks of that state commanded by a member of the armed forces, and manned by a crew subject to regular armed forces discipline'. Military aircraft has the right to fly over international waters and to use such flights for surveillance or photographing another state's territory, even including its military installations. Military aircraft brought down by a neutral state or which land in neutral territory should be detained by the neutral until the end of the conflict and then returned to their home state. Personnel on board such aircraft should be interned until the cessation of hostilities. The general rules regarding the use of weapons forbidding those which cause unnecessary suffering apply in air warfare.

The rules and principles are applicable regardless of the legality or justness of the conflict, and even if operations are undertaken by way of punitive or police action in the name of the United Nations. The humanitarian principles that operate during armed conflict are to be found in customs originally based on rules of chivalry as between the feudal orders of knighthood. To a great extent these humanitarian principles are to be found in Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Broadly speaking, they amount to the basic and minimum conditions underlying the rule of law as understood in modern society. Whether the Hague and Geneva Conventions are regarded as codificatory of customary or creative of new law, they are not and do not purport to be exhaustive.

Chapter 5 asks how translators reconciled divergent, seemingly conflicting portrayals of God within the Gospels. Although Matthew’s Wedding Feast and Luke’s Great Supper likely derive from the same source, the two parables project radically different images of divine power: one conveys inclusive, hospitable love and the other exacting, punitive justice. To demonstrate the theological difficulty of reconciling the two feasting parables, the chapter explores the varied exegesis of the stories in the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels. Against this nexus of historical interpretations, the chapter analyses the hybrid Wedding Feast/Great Supper parable retold in the Middle English poem Cleanness. It argues that the interpretive variety typical of academic exegesis can help us understand a poem that so often foregrounds multiplicity of meaning and paradox. Although the poet harmonises disparate biblical passages, he maintains and sometimes sharpens the contradictions that emerge between the two parables and between the two testaments of scripture. By foregrounding narrative discord, the poet asserts that divine truth ultimately transcends human understanding.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen deftly pairs ‘heavy atmosphere’ – ideas about weather and mood – in Chaucer’s works, while at the same time unsettling received ideas about a unidimensional human and elemental world. In Cohen’s exploration of them, the ‘weighty’ atmosphere of the Reeve’s Tale and the fate of Arcite in the Knight’s Tale contrast sharply with Troilus’s celestial transcendence.

This chapter provides an overview of Chinese history and highlights key features of the imperial system. It explains the stage from the mid-nineteenth century until 1949, a particularly turbulent period in Chinese history, which the Chinese have come to refer to as 'the century of national humiliation'. The chapter examines Mao Zedong's rule from 1949 until the late 1970s, which saw the entrenchment of the core features of the communist system and the re-establishment of a functioning Chinese state. It also examines the period since the late 1970s, an era characterised by market oriented economic reforms which have produced sustained high levels of economic growth and moved the country far from the economic and social model developed after 1949. The chapter concludes by highlighting the way in which legacies from the various historical periods shape contemporary Chinese politics.

Africa’s trading status with the UK has been seriously complicated by Brexit. Since 2000, African states have negotiated with the European Commission for Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The EPAs are imminently coming onstream in African sub-regions such as the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Development Community. ‘Hard’ Brexit, however, means that the UK will not remain a part of EPAs. This has obvious repercussions for African producers dependent upon access to British consumers. Hard Brexit of course also raises the question of tariff access for British exporters vis-à-vis African markets. This chapter examines elite and civil society discourse about the possible contours of post-Brexit arrangements. In so doing it highlights UK aid as a likely leveraging device. Moreover, it critiques the ‘pro-poor’ discourse of Brexiteer elites. It does this in relation to the likely negative impact of envisaged free trade arrangements for African agro-processing and manufacturing sectors and the neo-colonial logic of making aid conditional on trade negotiations. Finally, the chapter concludes by assessing the potential usages of African Regional Economic Communities – or indeed the African Union – to mitigate neo-colonial trade and aid agendas.

Traditionally, for an armed conflict to warrant regulation by the international law of armed conflict, it was necessary for the situation to amount to a war, in other words, a contention between states through the medium of their armed forces. While the full panoply of the international law of armed conflict does not apply to non-international conflicts, to some extent non-international conflicts have come under the aegis of international law since 1977, with the adoption of Article 1 (4) of Protocol I. The first and only international agreement exclusively regulating the conduct of the parties in a non-international conflict is Protocol II additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. As to non-parties to the Conventions, in so far as the Conventions embody rules of customary law they will apply in any international armed conflict, as will all other rules of the customary law of armed conflict.

This chapter provides a quantitative overview of the scale and complexion of medical welfare for the period 1750–1834. It focuses on the records of 117 parishes across seven English counties, specially chosen to reflect the socio-economic distribution of English communities at the time. Following an investigation of change over time and variation between different areas and between different community types, the essential finding of the chapter is that there was a concerted upward shift in the scale of medical welfare spending by the mid-1810s.

For many preface-writers, the use of apostrophe facilitated the inclusion of autobiographical minutiae, providing an inherent rationale for the revelation of personal details in a public forum. Colley Cibber's Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber used the defensive rhetoric of the apology for the purposes of literary history, glossing an artist's creative output by situating it in the context of his own past experiences. Throughout the work, Cibber manipulates the rhetoric of apostrophe, using the conjunction of specific addressee and broad audience to commemorate those actions that substantiate an artist's, rather than a statesman's, claims to historical importance. Although the Apology is nominally formulated as a response to a particular cluster of readers, it is clear from the outset of the work that Cibber has set his sights on a much broader audience.

This postscript locates the essays collected in The power of pragmatism within the context of ongoing debates about what is distinctive about pragmatism as a living and contested philosophical tradition. It is argued that what is most distinctive about pragmatism is best revealed by attending to some family resemblances with other pragmatically oriented strands of social thought. The case for further developing a small-p pragmatist ethos in social inquiry is made in relation to core commitments: a focus on knowledge as emergent in relation to shared problems, and therefore a thoroughly social phenomenon, one in which issues of giving and receiving reasons is central to determining ‘what is good in the way of belief’. It is suggested that the future development of this ethos requires further attention to the agonistic dimensions of practically oriented styles of reasoning.

This chapter considers Jonathan Richardson’s critical ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting Tancred and Erminia (c. 1633) as both analysis and ekphrastic representation. It focuses on Richardson’s keen interest in the artist’s visual interpretations of, and additions to, Tasso’s great Italian epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (1581). It becomes clear that both the French painter and the English critic know the Italian poem well; it is far less certain, however, whether the intended English readership would have shared similar first-hand knowledge of either the picture or its literary source. Richardson’s paragone of the two forms is intended to emphasize Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages This Art has over that of his Competitor’; problematically, however, the pre-eminence of the visual medium in this specific example can only be attested to by means of a sustained verbal comparison of the painting and its poetic source, which ultimately seems to imply a more complex, symbiotic relationship in the encounter between the visual and literary arts than Richardson initially admits.

The development of both the Israeli and Palestinian media explains why Palestinian cartoonists fail to enjoy the political freedom of their Israeli counterparts and why Israeli cartoonists do not benefit from the government subsidies Palestinians cartoonists enjoy. Despite intertwined histories, and shared experiences with Ottoman and British rule, distinctly different media regimes evolved in Israel and Palestine that shaped their cartoons' content. This chapter examines three Israeli papers: Ha'aretz, Yediot Achronot and Maariv. History has made Maariv fiercely competitive with Yediot Achronot, although the former is perceived to have lost the innovative edge it once enjoyed after it lagged in introducing colour and tabloid style reporting. The chapter also examines three Palestinian papers: Al-Ayyam, Al Quds, and Al-Hayat al-Jadida. Where Al-Quds is a commercially driven independent press and Al-Ayyam is a loyal self-censoring outlet, Al-Hayat al-Jadida is the ideological mouthpiece of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

A fifth book, partly the work of a continuator, begins with the continued efforts of the monks to rebuild after the fire. After a brief description of Frederick Barbarossa and the Alexandrian Schism, most of the rest of the book focuses on Abbot Conrad (r. 1127–1164) and his exploits, including some pointed critiques of his many missteps.