The chapter addresses ideas developed by Max Weber and Niklas Luhmann related to sovereignty and the state in a framework that highlights a contested constitutional semantics. It demonstrates how sociology enables the ideals of sovereignty to be placed into more general social theories on rationalisation and functional differentiation. It discusses the concept of ‘constitutionalism’, arguing for a sociological version. It goes on to argue that Max Weber provided a concept of sovereignty along with his understanding of the constitutional state. It discusses Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the state, and argues that the sovereignty debate ought to be seen as a legitimating semantics.

This chapter turns to Hong Kong between 1979 and 1981, during which the Callaghan and then Thatcher governments took soundings about Hong Kong’s future. It explores how the processes of decolonisation and globalisation interacted in Hong Kong’s case. In March 1979, Governor Murray MacLehose visited China to explore the question of Hong Kong’s long-term future via the immediate issue of New Territories land leases. Deng Xiaoping seized the initiative by claiming that sovereignty over Hong Kong belonged to China. Having been rebuffed by Deng, the British decided to go slow regarding an approach to China during 1980 and 1981. The second part of this chapter looks at how Hong Kong’s financial and administrative autonomy from London since the 1960s, and its emergence as a ‘global city’ by the early 1980s, had brought about subtle changes in the UK–Hong Kong relationship. This was manifested in Hong Kong’s textile trade disputes with Britain, its growing economic links with China and the rest of the world, and the passage of the 1981 British Nationality Act which denied a right of abode in Britain to Hong Kong residents. The ‘long decolonisation’ of Hong Kong provided the backdrop of Thatcher’s visit to China in September 1982.

Decisions made by those frontline bureaucrats who process applications can have life-altering outcomes for the people who are affected. This chapter explores how the administrative work of government officials in Malaysia can affect individuals’ ability to access Malaysian citizenship. While the analysis is of very local contexts in Malaysia, its implications are much broader given many states around the world use a delegated system of administration to make decisions. Further, the principal way in which many people may interact with their governments is through administrative encounters with local officials. On the basis of interviews with people with a variety of perspectives on the work of Malaysian registration offices, this chapter illuminates the often-overlooked effects of encounters in administrative offices on stateless persons and on the governance of citizenship. It invites the reader to include the consideration of these low-level government officials in global thinking relating to statelessness. Of concern is not just the difficulties stateless persons have in understanding administrative processes and applications but the potentiality that individuals may be denied forms, information, and the opportunity to apply for citizenship, for no other reason than the discretion of the government employee. This chapter advocates for a wider lens when examining legal venues, legal accountability, and reform given the wide discretionary power exercised by frontline government officials to make decisions that effectively create and maintain statelessness.

The European Convention on Human Rights, although now just one among many human rights treaties, is certainly the most fully developed and the best observed. By the same token, the institutions created to supervise the Convention, originally the European Commission and Court of Human Rights, and now the new Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, have through their work provided an inspiring model for other human rights systems. It is vital to lay down in advance the rights and freedoms that must be respected in a democratic society and to create institutions to see that they are observed. In December 1966 the two Covenants and the Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights were approved by the General Assembly and ten years later came into force.

The Introduction provides a summary of the aims and intended audience of the book, and a justification of the choice of tools to be used: the book recommends well-tested, free tools for working with large amounts of text. The Introduction also draws attention to the importance of data cleaning – the preparation of data for use in a project. A precis of the following chapters and appendices is given.

The #EndRapeCulture campaign in 2016 in South Africa, an online movement as well as a set of direct actions, preceded the #MeToo campaign in 2017, which was never taken up in South Africa to the extent it was in other parts of the world. The campaign was characterised by topless marches of women students against practices, attitudes and perceptions that normalise sexual violence in South Africa. These were different to the more global slutwalks in that they were marked by powerful expressions of anger and rage. This chapter compares #EndRapeCulture with #MeToo, analysing similarities and differences as well as the use of online spaces and social media in both campaigns. It also looks at the backlash against cases of sexual violence that have gone to court in South Africa (such as the recent high profile Cherryl Zondi vs Pastor Omotoso case), where the secondary victimisation of due process often prevents women from speaking out. The Omotoso case is interesting for its secondary victimisation but also for technical issues that contributed to the judge recusing himself, meaning that the rape survivor now has to go through the same hearing for a second time. Lastly, the chapter asks questions about the type of feminism that allows for solidarity in #EndRapeCulture or prevents it, particularly given that white women students were reluctant to join in the topless marches.

Legal identity in the context of civil war comprises a highly significant but vastly understudied field of inquiry with huge humanitarian significance. This chapter studies insurgent movements that confer legal identity, including forms of citizenship. It asserts that to capture the coercive, performative, and legal aspects of this phenomenon, we need diverse conceptual lenses. The chapter combines specific elements of political science, anthropology, and international law to answer two questions. First, what are the key similarities and differences in how insurgent groups instil legal identity? Second, and based on this comparative mapping, how can legal identity in relation to rebel governance be conceptualised? The newly opening field of research reviewed in this chapter is relevant to practitioners and academics alike. The issuance of legal identity documents by armed groups raises a broad range of empirical, conceptual, normative, and humanitarian questions about sovereignty, the foundation of law, state–society relationships, and the materiality of identity documents.

The introduction compares and contrasts the decisions taken by the British Government and the United Nations to partition India and Palestine in 1947 by drawing attention to their timing, which occurred within months of each other. The chapter then traces the etymology of partition to earlier imperial divisions in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, portraying partition as an imperial continuum. The similarities in British administrative policies in India and Palestine are then considered – identifying colonial subjects by their socially constructed religious identities – and attention is drawn to the provenance of both places as holy lands. The role of institutions, such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, in partition, are then considered, as well as the influence of external powers such as the USA and the Soviet Union. Finally, the introduction summarises the contributions in the chapters that follow.

Sex workers in South Africa are confronted with high levels of violence, stigma, discrimination and other human rights violations, which sex worker groups and organisations – such as Sisonke, the national movement of sex workers, and the Sex Workers’ Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) – argue is the direct result of the criminalisation of the work. In addition, studies conducted within the country indicate that the violence experienced by sex workers increases their risk of STI and HIV infection, and prevents them from accessing health, social and legal services. During 2014–2017, SWEAT received reports of 118 women who sold sex who had died through violence. More than 50 per cent of the deaths reported were a result of murder. Consequently, SWEAT launched the #SayHerName campaign. The campaign exists to commemorate and honour women in sex work who have lost their lives through violence. It further aims to protect and uphold sex workers’ human rights, including the constitutional rights to access healthcare, freedom from violence, justice, and labour law protections. The campaign serves as an important curative in global feminist discourse on sexual and gender-based violence as it brings the often-marginalised voices of sex workers into the discussion. In this chapter, SWEAT’s Human Rights and Lobbying Officer Nosipho Vidima engages in conversation about the #SayHerName campaign with researcher and PhD candidate Ntokozo Yingwana.

Chapter 2 tackles the ‘problem of the singular’ (Ticktin 2015) with which humanitarianism has been diagnosed. While aimed at the entirety of suffering humanity, its efforts, whether carried out by large organisations or lone individuals, can only ever have a partial reach. The situation of everyday humanitarians in Cambodia is no exception. This chapter traces their often acute awareness of the bigger picture, such as the socio-political landscape of Cambodia, and how they feel positioned and act within this. Some arrive at what they are doing after having become disenchanted during careers in large aid organisations. Others have had less linear trajectories, but are ambitious for the future of their projects, such as bringing their activities to a larger group of beneficiaries. For either process, the making of scales is crucial: their insistence that ‘small is beautiful’ provides an ongoing source of inspiration and assurance for some, and their actions become meaningful within this particular scale. For others, their attention remains fixed not on a whole nation but on members of a particular community, such as training a group of single mothers, to help improve their livelihoods. A key practice to sustaining everyday humanitarianism is the adoption of temporal, spatial or numerical scales which express their priorities, manifest in the popular mantra, ‘changing the world, one village at a time’. This does not imply ignorance or neglect of other forces that shape the lives of their beneficiaries, and often affect them adversely, but means articulating their position within this context.

This chapter consists of a critical overview of Bailey’s major books in the field of political anthropology, including his early ethnographic work in India, his contributions to anthropology at home, his theoretical volumes and the examination of the links between power and religion in his final book. Special attention is paid to the important changes in the author’s perspective as he became increasingly disillusioned with the suitability of positivism for a complex and disorderly world. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of criticisms levelled at Bailey’s approach to politics, especially his celebrated treatise on the agency model in Stratagems and Spoils.

Chapter 6 argues that the concept of the archive lines up with what before the archival turn in art had been known as institutional critique. By way of several artwork examples such as Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992), George Adéagbo’s La Colonisation belge en Afrique (2000), Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album / Look at Me 1890–1950 (1997) and Emily Jacir’s ex libris (2010–12), the notion of the archive is shown to nuance the idea that a structure or an institution is defined as much by what is excluded as by what is included therein. Not only does the institutional definition of art make critique of the institution an urgent and complex focus for artists, but the concept of the archive ties institutional critique to broader practices of questioning historical, gendered and ethnic exclusions. Historical and political events add further complexity and urgency to the connection between critique and the archive, seen for instance in the ending of apartheid in South Africa and the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there. The chapter shows that archive art practices at the turn of the twenty-first century tend to avoid head-on attack on the structures they critique, and instead engage in strategic destabilisation and undermining, where the sense of uncertainty is an integral part of the critical endeavour.