In Africa, heads of government and civil society representatives have linked climate resilience to the urgent need to address the continent's debt crisis. The African Leaders Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change has called for a restructuring and relief from the debt as being essential to achieving climate goals, along with access to health and education (African Union 2023). A 2023 statement clarifies that Africa is bearing the social and economic brunt of global warming despite not being responsible for it. Dealing with the catastrophic effects of climate change on lives, livelihoods, and economies through loans is further exacerbating the ‘great financial divide’ between wealthy nations and African countries. This is neither sustainable nor just.

These negotiations reflect historical processes of social exclusion, economic dominance, and political control that have marginalized not just specific communities but also entire geographies. The climate discourse is not spared from this and remains vulnerable to reproducing inequities. The most recent reflection of this is Papua New Guinea's decision to withdraw from the 29th Climate Conference of Parties (COP29) calling it a ‘total waste of time’ (Bush 2024), as there remains inaction on the part of big emitters to reform the economic models to reduce emissions and rich nations to ensure _nancing.

Climate Justice seeks that the climate discourse reject exclusion and recognize marginalization of people and places. In doing so, it creates a complex process of embedding questions of power, hierarchy, fairness, and relief as necessary to understand climate change.

The chapter examines the operation of cloud technologies within the system of international investment law. It analyses the operation of cloud technologies themselves within the system of international investment law and the interaction between the regulation of cloud technologies and international investment protective standards. The common element in each analysis is the existence, inexistence, and eventually forceful existence of territorial nexus between the ‘cloud’ and the national jurisdictions. Amidst the increased regulatory interference, the chapter focuses on localization requirements and forced localizations as a medium through which fundamental territorial and extra-territorial implications of international investment law are assessed. In essence, it constitutes a crash test on the capacity of existing international investment norms to protect and regulate assets and investments that are inherently detached from traditional views of territorial jurisdiction or tangible property rights.

This chapter examines the early development of Constantine’s religious imagery following his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 ce. It argues that Constantine’s administration swiftly began portraying the civil war against Maxentius as a religious conflict, with Constantine defeating Satan through the aid of the archangel Michael. The chapter highlights the apocalyptic nature of this imagery, emphasizing Michael’s role not only as a heavenly warrior but also as a herald of the end times and Christ’s millennial reign. Scholars have overlooked both the early emergence of this imagery and Michael’s significance within it. While the imperial court may have believed in this narrative, its promotion in the aftermath of civil war suggests that not all Christians in Constantine’s new territories necessarily welcomed their new emperor.

Synesius of Cyrene (b. ca. 373–d. ca. 410) was trained in the classical literature that depicted war as an event with armies opposing one another in battle, but he experienced a different kind of conflict in his own life – namely, the periodic and unpredictable raiding that troubled late ancient Libya. Synesius’ letters and his treatise On Kingship show that these conflicts brought sentiment to the surface as a kind of evidence about people that could be implicitly trusted; Synesius’ sentiment was palpably xenophobic, aligned against both “barbarians” and “Scythians,” and so strong as to circumvent rational examinations of the evidence around him. This essay examines the scaffolded construction of stereotype, built in Synesius’ advice to a hypothetical ruler, and demonstrates how knowledge, even knowledge that seems intimate and trustworthy, can be bent through engagements with violence.

Introduction

India ranks seventh in the 2021 Global Climate Risk Index (Germanwatch 2021), and in 2017, it was the second most-affected country in terms of casualties related to extreme weather (Germanwatch 2017). Water pollution, food and water shortages (Niti Aayog 2019), waste management, and biodiversity loss (Kumari, Wate, and Anil 2014, 107) are just some of India's problems. Its large population coupled with a severe economic dependency on agriculture (FAO 2023) exposes it to severe vulnerabilities. Owing to its geography and high economic dependence on climate-sensitive sectors, India is one of countries most vulnerable to climate change (Harjeet Singh 2015). ‘Food security of India may be at risk in the future due to the threat of climate change leading to an increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods, thereby affecting production of small and marginal farms.’ (Ministry of Environment and Forest 2009, 78). As a protector of people's rights, Indian courts are legally bound to protect the environment.

The chapter's research method involves an analysis of the literature and review of the judicial precedent. The chapter aims to compare the judicial precedents of the Supreme Court of India and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to understand the evolution of their response to environmental litigation.

Article 48A in the Constitution of India obliges the government to protect the environment and conserve the natural resources of the country.

This chapter argues that Augustine structured book 1 of the City of God according to the urbs capta motives. Urbs capta narratives (such as Livy’s), offer consolation for civilian populations that had suffered the sack of their city. They address captivity, looting, starvation, mass burials, but also sexual violence. In book 1, Augustine calls these afflictions (that is, the urbs capta motives) “law of war” (ius belli). Once recognized as the structuring device of book 1, it becomes evident that Augustine addresses sexual violence against women through the well-known case of Lucretian, but also against (elite) men. Augustine then uses the laws of war, and in particular sexual violence against men, to reframe traditional Roman virtues, especially pudicitia (modesty) and patientia (edurance) as Christian. As a result, patientia and humilitas (humility) become essential responses to war’s devastation, and Rome’s sack a sign of divine correction, while the urbs capta motives are Christianized.

China’s notion of cyber sovereignty reflects an assertive extension of state authority into the digital realm. Rooted in principles of territorial jurisdiction, national security, and technological independence, this framework is embodied in key legislation. These laws impose rigorous compliance obligations on foreign and domestic businesses, particularly those operating critical information infrastructure. While these measures reinforce China’s digital autonomy, they pose significant challenges for foreign investors navigating this intricate regulatory landscape. This chapter critically examines how China’s cyber sovereignty aligns with its international investment obligations, focusing on three core principles: protection against expropriation, national treatment, and fair and equitable treatment (FET). It explores whether the stringent requirements and lack of effective remedies breach these standards, highlighting potential areas of discord with China’s investment treaties. Furthermore, it evaluates the limitations of security and general exception clauses in justifying these regulatory measures under international law. The findings suggest that China’s cyber sovereignty framework, while advancing its domestic security and technological goals, may conflict with its international investment commitments. As more nations adopt similar regulatory stances, this trend could signal a shift toward a fragmented global ICT market, reshaping the dynamics of international economic governance.

This chapter calls attention to the violence of everyday life in the Roman world as the backdrop to the more extraordinary violence of war. Drawing specifically on archaeology, which is poorly equipped, it is argued, to reveal war violence but well situated to reveal the unusual volatility of living in the Roman world, it describes the ordinary upheavals of daily life. In particular, it examines the archaeological evidence for volatility in domestic circumstances, in how one made a living, and the physical trauma experienced by working bodies.

Introduction

While initially piloted as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, the distributed ledger technology underlying Bitcoin, that is, blockchain, now extends to use cases beyond mere virtual currencies. Technologists and blockchain evangelists have been quick to overlook the excessive carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world's first cryptocurrency, and have attempted to expand the use cases of blockchain to areas beyond virtual currencies, finance, and payments (Huang, O’Neill, and Tabuchi 2021). This technology that brings together characteristics of decentralization, peer-to-peer computing, hash functions, asymmetric public–private key cryptography, and consensus algorithms to form a shared, immutable, and non-repudiable database is considered to have tremendous potential in fields such as identity and access management, healthcare, supply chain tracking, climate change, and so on (De Filippi and Wright 2018). Therefore, unsurprisingly, blockchain technology is now touted as the Panglossian solution to a myriad of problems ranging from financial inclusion to aid and climate change (Marke 2018).

This chapter attempts to ascertain whether the claims of blockchain as a solutionist technology for climate change, in reality, reflect and entrench the incumbent power asymmetries and the global digital divide in the guise of disintermediation and collective capitalism. This chapter applies the extant concepts of techno-colonialism and data colonialism to critically examine blockchain-based initiatives in the climate change sector.

“War,” writes military historian Alexander Sarantis, “is largely a niche area rather than a mainstream concern of late antique and Byzantine studies, which tend to be dominated by theological, literary, artistic, and socio-economic themes.” The fact that war and warfare now occupy a “relatively marginal position in modern scholarship” reflects a number of shifts in the academic landscape, from the reframing of Late Antiquity as a period of change and continuity (rather than an epoch of decline) to the entrenchment of cultural history as the dominant approach in history departments across North America and Europe. And yet, even as military historians have dismantled stale theses about “military decay” as the root cause of the empire’s geopolitical fragmentation and show the late Roman army to have been a source of Rome’s extraordinary resilience, “their” topics of war, warfare, and the army nonetheless fail to resonate with most scholars of Late Antiquity. As Bryan Ward-Perkins wryly notes in his controversial 2005 book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, “banishing catastrophe” has become a mainstream response to late antique narrative history. Where has war gone?

Climate change has been duly recognized as a common concern of humankind (UNGA 1988). Nevertheless, its effects are not commonly shared. Instead, marginalized individuals, especially women in the Global South,1 have been primarily acknowledged to bear the brunt of climate degradation despite being less responsible for its advancement than individuals and nations in the Global North (UNGA 1992, Principle 7; Kakota et al. 2011; Singh, Feroze, and Ray 2013; Pearse 2017; MacGregor 2017). Against this background, efforts for addressing the differentiated impacts of climate change on the lives and livelihoods of Southern women have been mobilized at the international level, including through the issuing of dedicated decisions and programmes for action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (see, among others, COP of the UNFCCC 2010, 2017, 2021).

Within this broader debate, however, feminists have been wary that a disproportionate focus on the specific vulnerability of women to climate change can produce inadvertent effects in terms of policy discourse, negotiation, and design (see MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurreccion 2013; MacGregor 2017). For instance, feminist scholars have highlighted that this narrative has limited feminist transnational activism on climate change by fixating the frames of reference for women as poor subjects more vulnerable to the impacts and risks of climate change (MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurreccion 2013; MacGregor 2017).