Transnational commercial surrogacy involves women in the host countries acting as surrogates for foreign homosexual/heterosexual couples or single persons who aspire to parenthood but are unable or unwilling to bear children themselves. Different legal regimes across various cultures and countries recognise different actors in surrogacy as the bearer of citizenship rights; citizenship can thus be transferred to the newborn through the birth mother, the genetic mother, the genetic father, or the adoptive parents. However, this variance and diversity in laws governing nationality and citizenship attribution in surrogacy can lead to statelessness. This chapter addresses the problematic of ‘citizenship’ in the context of transnational surrogate births by probing how doctrines of moral and political legitimacy determine the ascriptive value and legality of these ‘biocitizens’ through the context of the Indian experience of transnational commercial surrogacy.

Neutrality did more than merely survive the creation of the League. It even experienced something of a renaissance in the wake of the most striking failure of the League system: the unsuccessful attempt to stop the Italian conquest of Ethiopia from 1935 to 1936, by imposing economic sanctions against Italy. This humiliating failure led many to conclude that the collective-security apparatus was too weak to rely on in a crisis. There was general agreement too that neutrality was not abolished by the Pact of Paris for the Renunciation of War of 1928. One regional codification effort should be noted: the Pan-American Convention on Maritime Neutrality of 1928. The 'new neutrality' group disagreed with its community-interest rival in not being hostile to the very concept of neutrality per se. Neutral solidarity, in the spirit of the Spanish Civil War, was one of the most striking features of World War II.

This chapter focuses on concerns about the nature of the online discourse related to #MeToo in India. It draws upon interviews with ten feminists based in New Delhi, the majority of whom identified as queer. The concerns shared include the limits of the digital space with respect to enabling healing, the focus on retributive and not restitutive justice, aggression among feminists targeting those not ‘with us’ as being ‘against us’, and the lack of space for views outside of the binary. Concern was also expressed about how the discourse on consent did not recognise that desires can be messy, changeful and interact with power in very specific ways. The overarching concern was the perceived contradictions with feminism, including with queer feminism, which draw upon the experience with (in)justice experienced by queer people. The analysis of responses undertaken in the chapter draws upon Lacanian psychoanalysis. The possibilities explored include how the binary nature of the digital space might serve the (collective) psyche’s need for certainty, particularly given the messy nature of our desires. There is also an exploration of whether narcissism might help understand the online aggression among feminists, helped by the possibility offered by the digital to create private/public conclaves of those who think exactly like us. Might it also be that the ideology of feminism gives us permission to break prohibitions against online aggression and that at the intersection of permission and prohibition lies the erotic charge of jouissance?

The conclusion highlights the significance of everyday humanitarianism in a broader context. People who seek to instigate social change are inevitably challenged to consider their own, limited actions with what they consider as the wider context or causes. I suggest that beyond a reflexive understanding, a scalar approach can provide a blueprint for action. Making and operating within a set of interlinking scales, consciously or not, can offset doubts about lacking significance. It provides a sense of how one’s own actions matter in a wider world, and those of others. Challenging scales and the values associated with them, has wider applicability. People seeking social change consider how their own, limited actions link with wider issues including social injustice, environmentalism, or the climate crisis.

While tidying up e-mail archives in 2019, the authors stumbled across correspondence from their research participants that captured their attention. They had interviewed thirty-two high school students as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project over a three-year period while these young people were transitioning from school to the world of work. Even though the project had finished in 2013, the authors deliberately maintained contact with them electronically to understand what was happening in their lives. Not all young people responded in 2014; however, the fact that some did was quite remarkable, and their responses unearthed ‘thick descriptions’ and powerful narratives that the authors reflect on throughout the chapter. Participants’ stories advance theoretical and methodological insights capable of informing social action, bringing to the fore ‘modalities of time and space’ as they continue to ‘echo’; demanding our reflexive attention as we enter the ‘field’ once again to engage, connect and listen to their narratives; ‘with them’. Weaving together student narratives, researcher fieldnotes and supporting theoretical frameworks, this chapter culminates in sharing experiences and memories that ‘haunt’ even when consciously attempting to ‘let participants go’ (from a field of choice). We learn from and acknowledge the haunting echoes of our participants because they never really ‘exit’ but ‘tag along’ as we continue to create democratic spaces, places and directions in future educational research.

This chapter offers a guide to visualising historical data, with two case studies centred on the Post Office directory data used throughout the book. The first visualisation is two stacked bar charts showing the most common female professions against men in the same professions and breaking down professions by married and unmarried women. The second visualisation is a map of one London street in 1879, with discussion of the process and the thinking that led to the finished visualisation.

In Norwegian local politics, the so-called ‘hourglass-model’ has, since the early 1990s, served as a normative blueprint for the separation between politics and administration. In essence, the model suggests that all communication between elected politicians and municipal administrators should be passed through the top political and administrative leaders: the mayor and the chief municipal executive. Yet, the normative rules prescribed by the model are routinely breached through more pragmatic procedures. In the chapter, F. G Bailey´s game theory is applied to analyse the enactment of the hourglass-model in three Norwegian municipalities. The author demonstrates the strength of Bailey’s framework through capturing how the hourglass-model affects the dynamics of local politics under different circumstances and by addressing the question of why the model is reproduced despite its obvious fallacy. Under certain conditions, the author argues, the hourglass-model may serve to ensure that political competition remains focused on achieving consensus and that the actions taken by the municipal administration reflect the agreed goals of the municipal council. However, the author also applies Bailey’s framework to understand shifts in these social dynamics as political competition escalates into more pragmatic fights.

This chapter introduces associational anarchism’s mode of organisation in full. In transcending the divide between state and civil-society, democratic participation is extended to the economic and civic realms and is centred on the various self-managing organisations individuals belong to. Self-governance applies both within and between these differentiated formations. It is the organisational contours sketched in Cole’s Guild Socialism Restated (1920) that are primarily drawn from. Particular attention is paid to the functional principle of representation, which breaks down chiefly into a system of economic guilds and formal agencies to represent consumers. While these interrelating economic structures are retained and adapted throughout this book, both the role and the powers of Cole’s communes are heavily revised. The chapter then explains how goods and resources will be allocated democratically. At this point, David Schweickart’s ingenious approach to the planning of new investment is introduced. In order to assimilate his scheme into the guild system, it will be subject to a thorough functional demarcation. From here it is shown that although both planning and market-exchange will continue to have a role, it will not be through the central planning of command socialism or the mixed-economy typical of social democracy. The method of democratic planning and the delineation of the guild market system are both original and are hence unique to associational anarchism. It is these structural arrangements that make up the organisational aspects of freedom as Marxian-autonomy. The chapter concludes by establishing the internal structures the guild cooperatives will need to assume in order to make labour a fulfilling and enriching experience for all associates.

In this chapter, we return to Anglo-Chinese bilateral relations, covering the period from late 1984 to the end of 1986. After the resolution of the Hong Kong question, the Thatcher government sought to capitalise on the good political atmosphere to increase trade and economic cooperation with China – or to promote Britain as a global trading nation. Anglo-Chinese interactions during this period were characterised by high-level mutual visits, growing merchandise trade, and a convergence of strategic views on the Soviet Union. The chapter details the high-profile visits of Premier Zhao Ziyang and General Secretary Hu Yaobang to Britain, and of Queen Elizabeth II to China, highlighting the symbolism of personal relationship. In the age of intensified globalisation, though, China was acutely aware of international competition. In negotiating business deals with British companies, the Chinese constantly bargained over price. By the close of 1986, China’s integration into the global economy remained shallow and limited. Although China was eager to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Deng Xiaoping saw China’s status as a ‘developing country’, which necessitated a system of tariffs and non-tariff barriers to protect against foreign imports. To Britain, however, China’s state trading features were not compatible with the principles underpinning the multilateral trading system – that is, a market economy. As this chapter shows, Deng and Thatcher held contending visions of globalisation.