In Norwegian public discourse, reactions to the October 7 massacre were peculiar. Sympathy with the victims of terrorism was explicitly suppressed, as when the Labor government stopped the king from sending his condolences to Israel. The king has sent condolences to victims of terrorism on several previous occasions. In general, sympathy with the Palestinians was displayed loudly, starting while the massacre was still ongoing and long before any military campaign against Hamas. These reactions raise a number of questions about Norwegian worldviews and attitudes to Jews and to Israel. This chapter is where the book tackles the conceptual questions about the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism must be kept apart as two distinct concepts. Whether there is a correlation between the two, that is, whether people who are anti-Zionist are more likely to be antisemitic, or vice versa, is an empirical question.

This chapter moves from race to gender and looks at how the women’s movement from the 1960s linked the struggle for women’s rights to concepts of the national struggle of the Palestinians against colonialist Jews. The chapter looks at what happened during the UN Women’s Conferences in Mexico City in 1975, in Copenhagen in 1980, and in Nairobi in 1985 and pays particular attention to the great influence of the Palestinian cause at the conferences. The chapter looks at the UN women’s conferences and discusses the meaning of characters like Leila Khaled, the Palestinian activist who fused anti-Zionism with women’s liberation and made terrorism glamorous in the eyes of the far left.

This chapter studies H. G. Wells’s integration of climate control as the atmospheric background of the Victorian empire, future, and utopia. In the Victorian period, dubbed the Crystal Age, British engineers such as Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (case), John Claudius Loudon (conservatory), and Joseph Paxton (palace) all built glasshouse structures, increasingly fit for human inhabitation, hoping to construct the climatological statis of eternal summer on a regional scale. Engaging with the aesthetic, architectural, and ideological development, the chapter argues that Wells examined the anthropogenic climate of the Victorian empire, future, and utopia in the short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), the novella The Time Machine (1895), and the novel A Modern Utopia (1905), speculatively thematising the long-term socio-biological consequences of the planetary greenhouse.

In conjunction with reshaping the imperial office, the challenges of colonial governance brought about broader changes in Germany’s system of government. The states represented in the Federal Council were increasingly sidelined as emerging Reich agencies came to dominate this body by sending their own representatives through the Prussian delegation. As this chapter explains, the colonies deepened the states’ marginalisation in the legislative process. With its chronic lack of funds and recurring scandals, the overseas empire gave the Reichstag a powerful lever for strengthening its position in national politics. From 1892, when colonial expenditure was made subject to parliamentary approval, the Reichstag increasingly compelled the Reich leadership to justify its policies. This dynamic contributed to early forms of a federal government with de facto cabinet ministers who, though lacking constitutional accountability, acted as counterparts to parliament. Yet parliamentary power remained sharply circumscribed. As the wars in South West Africa (1904–07) and East Africa (1905–07) revealed, the Reichstag could debate, criticise, and expose misconduct, but ultimate authority lay with the kaiser.

This chapter examines how Germany’s colonial empire reshaped the imperial office and its public displays. Although constitutionally a primus inter pares among the German monarchs, the kaiser gained additional authority through the Colonial Act of 1886 and its later amendments, which tied the protectorates directly to the imperial office. In the Wilhelmine period, Germany increasingly embraced its role as an overseas power. The kaiser assumed a more prominent role in public life, using colonial politics to stage himself as a national monarch, while the colonial administration expanded in tandem. In 1890, a Colonial Department was established within the Foreign Office, and the Colonial Council introduced a corporatist structure that linked state administration with the colonial lobby. Abroad, Wilhelm II pursued an interventionist foreign policy, culminating in the occupation and lease of Jiaozhou Bay in 1897–98. Naval expansion under Tirpitz, beginning with the 1898 Fleet Act, anchored these ambitions and enhanced Germany’s standing as a maritime power. Under the banner of Weltpolitik, Germany came to define itself as an imperial nation with global aspirations, claiming its ‘place in the sun’.

This chapter reviews research on language development in IA children. Compared to the extensive literature on attachment and mental health, as well as the substantial bodies of research on cognitive development and educational achievement, studies focusing on language development in this subpopulation of children remain relatively scarce. Nevertheless, the unique combination of factors shaping IA children’s developmental trajectories makes their language acquisition an important area of inquiry. In this chapter, I examine the existing literature with particular attention to: (a) the age at adoption and its role in second language acquisition and related critical periods; (b) the maintenance of the birth language alongside learning new languages; (c) overall language functioning outcomes; and (d) the predictive value of second language acquisition for broader developmental domains such as cognition and communication.

This chapter examines Meta’s Oversight Board, a pioneering experiment in governance by emulation that adapts individual rights adjudication to the private governance of social media platforms. Operational since 2020, the Board has been celebrated as a step toward greater accountability while also criticized as a superficial PR strategy. Through its structure, practices, and public perception, the Board blends public- and private-law principles, presenting itself as operationally independent and adjudicating disputes based on international human rights norms. However, its circumscribed authority raises questions about its capacity to elicit substantive structural change at Meta. The chapter situates the Oversight Board as an Emulated Guardian, designed to mimic adjudication but primarily serving as a performative tool to lend legitimacy to Meta’s content moderation. While initially dismissed as symbolic, the Board’s incremental expansion of its guardianship role highlights its dialectical potential: it is both limited by its private nature and empowered by its adjudicatory appearance. This case study progresses through six analytical steps, exploring the Board’s origins, institutional structure, decision-making processes, and practical impact, offering insights into the challenges and opportunities of regulating private power in a globalized digital environment.

Chapter 7 develops a multidimensional typology of investor stewardship, offering a framework to interpret its expanding scope and practice across the investment ecosystem. It identifies five dimensions: levels of intervention (micro, portfolio, system, and macro); stewardship actors (direct and indirect, across the investment chain); targeted assets (extending beyond public equity to debt, infrastructure, and real assets); motivations (financial value, ESG risk, and sustainability goals); and operational means (capital allocation, engagement, collaboration, and escalation). The chapter introduces the concept of blended stewardship to capture how institutional investors increasingly operate across levels and strategies to address complex, systemic challenges. Drawing on qualitative insights from the second-generation UK Stewardship Code disclosures, it shows how stewardship is diversifying in form, focus, and asset class. Framing stewardship as a pluralistic and relational practice – shaped by institutional roles, market structures, and normative expectations – the chapter provides the analytical foundations for rethinking how stewardship can meet the governance demands of the twenty-first century.

This chapter takes a fresh look at the period 1993–2000, when the Oslo Peace Process dominated international and Norwegian understandings of the Middle East. Several dimensions of the Oslo Process have been analyzed by previous research. However, this chapter looks at the process from the vantage point of what came after (i.e., the Second Intifada), which marked a turning point in the radicalization of the global and the Norwegian left, in particular the trade unions, regarding the Middle East. The chapter looks at how the identity of Norwegian foreign policy elites and the labor movement was linked to the concept of Norway as a humanitarian great power. The Labor party and the trade unions owned the Oslo Process and took great pride in it. When it fell apart after Camp David in 2000 the reaction of the left was deep disappointment, and this is a crucial element in an analysis of the left’s turn towards a more radical denunciation of everything Israeli.

The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

This chapter addresses the second main challenge to Kant’s conception of autonomy: the sense that the opposition between nature and freedom renders the actuality of freedom unintelligible. Turning to the Inaugural Dissertation and the three critiques, the second chapter shows that tackling the problem requires us to first overcome a widespread misunderstanding of Kant’s notion of the intelligible world. The intelligible world is not a given world available to theoretical cognition but initially accessible only through practical cognition as a world that ought to be. The chapter develops a new interpretation of Kant’s use of the principle “ought implies can” to show how the moral self-consciousness of the ought provides the realm of freedom with a first degree of actuality that, however, remains insufficient on its own. For freedom to be truly realized, we have to realize our freedom in the natural world by endowing it with a different purposive form. The third Critique offers unrecognized resources to explain how such a realization may be possible. By means of its account of natural purposiveness and the feeling of life, it redescribes external and subjective nature in such a manner that we can see how freedom may take root in them. By means of its account of fine, Kant specifies the general form of processes through which we can transform given nature and produce a second nature expressive of ideas. The chapter closes by considering why Kant did not fully develop these resources and why freedom remains ultimately unreal in his own account, something especially obvious in his discussion of the highest good.

Historically, adoption has reflected the values and norms of the society in which it occurred (see Chapter 1). In its modern form, emerging in the mid twentieth century, adoption was widely promoted as a compassionate and straightforward solution for children whose biological families could not provide care. However, decades of research have demonstrated that adoption is far more complex than this post–World War II narrative suggests. While adoption often offers children loving and stable families, it also introduces unique developmental, identity, and emotional challenges that complicate the idealized notion of a “forever family.”