Building on existing theories of communicative ethics and the limitations to Habermas's project identified in earlier chapters, this chapter articulates a series of communicative imperatives and a set of issues regarding the relationship between theory and practice which strike at the heart of the emancipatory and evaluative orientation of critical theory. The communicative imperatives have two key purposes: to operate as an instrument of critique and to guide actors and participants in the normative development of practical dialogue. The chapter seeks to facilitate our understanding of the role of language in the construction of legitimacy and to contribute to the procedural argument that how we arrive at decisions may be as important as the substance of those decisions.

Ocean shipping handles 90% of global trade and may triple by 2050, while contributing about 3% of greenhouse gas (GHG). In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed unprecedented warming due to human activities. Reducing emissions is complex, and needs diplomacy, science, and reform as legal frameworks emerge. This chapter examines legal and policy limits shaping maritime decarbonization through low or zero-emission fuel adoption. Progress requires technology, finance, and skills among global stakeholders. Though not under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), International Maritime Organization (IMO) addresses shipping emissions by global rules. This highlights the need for cooperation among flag, coastal, and port states under IMO. While climate law promotes fairness, maritime complexity persists. The UNFCCC promotes equity through the legal doctrine of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC) recognizing varied socio-economic contexts. IMO instruments apply non-discrimination and “no more favorable treatment” (NMFT), regardless of national context. The 2023 GHG Strategy balances CBDR-RC and NMFT using constructive ambiguity. Technology enables just decarbonization, possibly using GHG pricing. The chapter stresses the policy need to cut maritime GHGs and how technology supports a just transition within legal frameworks, now and ahead.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book attempts to trace the utopian arc. Jean Genet's commitment, as argued in the book, is to a deterritorialised world, to a utopos. The book addresses Genet's contemporary political significance by looking at his key influence on modern directors in Spain, the USA and UK. The decidedly spatial aspect of this textual practice confirms the relationship existing between Genet's late theatre and his post-1968 political commitment. Despite a brief moment of hope from the late 1960s through to the mid-1970s, racism simply took new forms and migrated en masse from the global South to the global North. That Genet himself realised this is apparent in his commitment to armed insurrection in the 1970s, and in the equivocal but inescapable melancholy that haunts his last book, Prisoner of Love.

The chapter traces the development of corporate internationalization processes at Ford and General Motors since the late 1960s, and highlights the different ways in which these processes affected the German and British subsidiaries. In the second part, the chapter examines the specific challenges internationalization posed for British and German trade unions, and the concerns it triggered among labour representatives.

Hugo Grotius, jurist and ‘father of natural law’, produced the first substantial discussion of punishment in On the Law of Peace and War (1625). The death penalty is not a central concern of Grotius. His unstated position is that it was legitimate and justified for certain offences, which he does not detail. Our specific interest is in his notion that the right to punish, including to punish with death, was already present in the State of Nature, that is, in an order outside of or prior to civil society. His views were criticised by later natural philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau. The first abolitionists, close readers of the natural jurists, were compelled to oppose the notion that the right to deprive of life had the status of natural law. Pelli, in particular, made use of arguments critical of Grotius’s theory issuing from some of his successors, notably, Pufendorf and Heineccius. Beccaria went a step further in producing a version of social contract theory that ruled out the possibility that natural man could have surrendered to a civil sovereign his right of self-preservation in the form of the institution of capital punishment.

Chapter 1 traces the emergence of the social wife in late Qing diplomacy, showing how concubines became the earliest Chinese women to assume this role. By focusing on chahui, an important form of Western social gathering typically hosted by officials’ wives, it demonstrates how Qing diplomats observed the significant role of the social wife in the West. It begins with the first well-known case of an official, Guo Songtao, bringing his concubine abroad and attending public functions with her during their stay in London (1877–1879). Ambassador Guo was criticized by conservative factions at the Qing court and later recalled as punishment, partially for breaching Confucian gender propriety. It then examines how other diplomats, such as Guo’s successor, Zeng Jize, and his family adjusted to the expectation of a social wife’s presence in diplomatic functions in Europe. Finally, it shows how chahui and its gender-related etiquette were adapted to suit the cultural contexts of late Qing China to entertain Western dignitaries, enabling Chinese officials’ wives to attend without violating the Confucian norm of gender separation.

This chapter looks at the use of representations of the rural to explore how the cinematic countryside functions in war films. War films in British and US cinema are riddled with rural representations, used as scenic devices for narrative and plot purposes and as metaphors for broader arguments and anxieties about national identity and the morality of armed conflict. The chapter discusses three types of representation; the rural as hostile territory; the rural as a legitimate space for national defence; and the rural as a space in which anxieties about armed conflict can be played out. It concludes with the observation that the connection between warfare and the rural is being destabilised, in the age of 'postmodern' war and the Revolution in Military Affairs. The symbolism of landscape is overwhelming in Southern Comfort, an allegorical film which transposes the American military experience in Vietnam to the Louisiana swamps.

The contributing editors assess the future of technology and the law of the sea in light of the distribution of power and authority among flag states, port states and coastal states.