This essay discusses Pablo Neruda’s youth love poetry collection Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) in relation to situated subjectivities, from decolonial, intersectional feminist perspectives. One hundred years after the collection was published, we briefly account for Neruda’s inter- and intra-subjective exploration of love and otherness. Particular attention is given here to the poetic process as an unending dialogue between production and reception, including some current poetic and nonpoetic canceling, as well as rediscoveries of his rich eco- and geopoetic vocation.

This Chapter examines the diversity of practice in drafting security exceptions under the international economic agreements entered into by the US, the EU, and BRICS. The first part discusses trade agreements, and the second part examines investment treaties. The Chapter compares the texts of the security exceptions used by the US, the EU, and BRICS, identifies to what extent the texts of the analysed agreements differ from the WTO agreements, and examines how such differences affect the approaches of the US, the EU, and BRICS to the application of security exceptions and their interpretation by international and domestic adjudicative bodies. Ultimately, it concludes whether and why different WTO members have different approaches to drafting security exceptions under WTO Agreements and in their regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements.

This chapter examines the intersection of blockchain technology and international investment law, offering an analysis that moves beyond the traditional focus on blockchain’s financial aspects. It explores how blockchain’s decentralization is poised to impact the principles and practices of international investment law. As blockchain technology matures, it becomes essential to assess its implications for the rules governing cross-border investments. A comparative analysis of blockchain’s treatment across jurisdictions provides insights into global legal trends and jurisdiction-specific approaches. The chapter also contemplates ideal normative approaches for adapting to blockchain’s advancements. It underscores that integrating blockchain technology into legal structures can lead to a more transparent, efficient, and inclusive global economic system. This chapter contributes to the broader theme of the book by proposing that international investment law should anticipate and respond to the challenges posed by emerging technologies, preserving and enhancing legal principles.

This essay connects Barbara Strozzi’s life and career to the complex dynamics of Seicento Italian academies and to the strategies women cultural producers and their academic supporters devised in navigating and even reshaping gender norms. We begin with analysis of two thorny discourses in which Strozzi plays a starring role: a 1637 satiric dialogue in manuscript (“Sentimenti gioiosi”) that lampoons the Accademia degli Unisoni, a sodality that served in part as a performance venue for Barbara Strozzi assembled by Giulio Strozzi, a poet and probably her father; and a printed celebration of the Unisoni’s interdisciplinary activities, the Veglie de’Signori Unisoni (Venice, 1638). These representations of Strozzi’s engagement with the Unisoni lead us to consider other women cultural producers who interacted with Italian academies, particularly Isabella Andreini and Virginia Ramponi (fl.1580s–1630s). This exploration affords a new appreciation of the ways that Italian academies both enabled and constrained creative women.

While a novelist and short story writer may not have been an obvious choice for an appointment to the British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949–53), Elizabeth Bowen’s presence on the commission was vital precisely for those credentials. This essay explores Bowen’s approach to criminality and punishment through her contributions to and commentary on the commission alongside her short fiction from the 1920s to the 1940s. She had been thinking and writing about murder, criminality, and the adjudication and punishment for decades before the commission heard its first testimony. She made two explicit interventions in the outcomes of the report – regarding the status of verbal provocation and the importance placed on marital status in murder cases – but her influence far exceeded those bounds. Bowen’s explorations and understanding of relationships, human temperament, insanity, mental deficiency or abnormality, and circumstance in her stories enhance British legal understanding and practice.

The introduction addresses the double erasures of the story of the Nicaragua Canal and the history of the Mosquito Coast as a result of the triumphalist narrative of the Panama Canal. Arguing that the Nicaragua Canal route has historically been an imperial staging arena, the chapter suggests that exploring the entwined history of the Mosquito Coast and the Nicaragua Canal can help us visualize the shadowy limits of imperialism and sovereignty in the nineteenth century.

A distinctive feature of Barbara Strozzi’s compositional style is her predilection for unusual endings that defy the expectations by concluding too abruptly (leaving the listener hanging on the dominant or without a strong sense of closure) or delaying the final cadence (inciting the listener’s desire for closure). After briefly summarizing ideas about closure from classical rhetoricians and early modern musicians and considering the likely influence of the humorous and often ironic rhetorical stance that was popular among Strozzi’s friends and acquaintances in the Accademia degli Incogniti, I explore Strozzi’s enigmatic conclusions in a selection of both sacred and secular compositions. Drawing upon Bettina Varwig’s Music in the Flesh, I propose that the endings are remarkable not only for the ingenious ways they respond to their text and eschew convention, but also because of the profound impact on the listener’s physiological responses, inspiring variously laughter, irony, frustration, yearning, pleasure, or even rapture.

Chronological age is a common feature in the organization of North American society. From institutional to everyday spaces and our cultural practices of association within these spaces, age segregation is the norm. Yet, intergenerationality persists in its various forms. One such space in which intergenerationality occurs is the skatepark, and one such form is that of organic intergenerational friendships forged between youth and adults. In this study, the phenomenon is explored through data gathered from eighteen semi-structured, on-site interviews with twenty participants at a skatepark in a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through these interviews, three main themes are identified: (1) making intergenerational friends at the skatepark, (2) practices of youth-adult intergenerational friendship, and (3) perceptions of youth-adult intergenerational friendship. These three themes contribute to the overall argument of the chapter that youth-adult intergenerational friendships simultaneously disrupt boundaries and patterns of age/generational differences in friendship while also reinforcing such differences in both subtle and explicit ways.

The Ewe-speaking region straddling the border between Ghana and Togo has not been envisioned by much of the scholarship as a viable political community capable of forming a nation-state. Yet this interpretation does not account for the continued identity claims arising from this transnational region. By looking more closely at grassroots perceptions of what constitutes a political community, the diagnostic may be different. This chapter considers how the scalar and genealogical principle underpinning the local indigenous political space, the dukɔ , has come to underpin the transnational Ewe-speaking region to form a larger political community. This is notable in the Ewe Newsletters, which aimed to convene and construct a transnational Ewe nation based on mutual recognition and oral tradition but also today across the border in both oral tradition and the performance of festivals.

International investment law faces a paradigm shift with the rise of the digital economy. Emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, and the platform economy redefine investment dynamics while challenging traditional regulatory frameworks. Digitalisation expands cross-border investment opportunities in areas like AI, genomics, and smart infrastructure, while also complicating traditional jurisdictional and territorial considerations. The shift from physical to digital assets necessitates a re-evaluation of the classic definitions of an ‘investor’ and ‘investment’. Meanwhile, states increasingly regulate strategic digital assets under national security concerns, introducing measures ranging from data localization mandates to investment screening mechanisms. These changes raise geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions and highlight disparities in digital governance models between major powers. Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) may have to adapt to address disputes over digital assets and data, as well as leverage AI and other digital technologies for efficiency while safeguarding due process. This chapter, along with the broader volume, examines these themes, emphasising balanced frameworks that promote innovation while safeguarding public interests in the evolving digital economy.

Even as friendship carries overwhelmingly positive connotations, the categories of “fair-weather friend” or “frenemy” indicate that less-than-ideal friendship is commonplace. What remains poorly understood is how people make sense of the persistence of their imperfect friendships. Drawing on studies of difficult friendships and friends who cohabitate, this chapter offers an interpretive perspective on how and why friendships that people characterize as difficult persist. Using the concept of the “good enough friend,” we unsettle ubiquitous yet simplistic directives of modern therapeutic culture to “cut off” difficult relationships. We argue that the potential for ease and difficulty are equally inherent to what friendship is, and that by attending to “difficult” ones and how people evaluate their worth, we can better understand how people navigate concord and conflict in personal life. We advance the intervention that a critical friendship must resist hierarchies of intimacy inherited from Western philosophical traditions that rank easy, pleasurable friendships as inherently “better” than ambivalent ones, which may also have core places in people’s lives.

This chapter examines how exiled Syrian intellectuals navigated their positionality between their home society and host countries, developing a dual gaze – balancing engagement with Western audiences while remaining invested in the Syrian cause. Their intellectual production shifted towards universalism, broadening international resonance but risking disconnection from local realities. Two currents shaped this shift: one emphasising cultural difference, reinforcing Orientalising discourse, and another promoting cosmopolitanism, aligning with non-governmental organisation funding priorities. Many also exhibited exceptionalism, framing the Syrian revolution as uniquely tragic and situating it within global discourses of oppression and resistance. The chapter explores ambivalence towards integration, particularly in Germany, where state-led policies were seen as patronising. It concludes by identifying a paradigm shift: from a politics of being perceived (concern with Western views of Syrians) to a politics of perceiving, where exiled intellectuals assert critical agency in judging global political failures rather than merely responding to Western narratives.

Chapter 3 focuses on a period in the 1990s when Iraqi oil flow was restricted and closely regulated by a special UN Security Council committee, thus severely reducing the state’s ability to collect or spend oil revenues. By homing in on the state’s enterprising response to the sanctions regime, we can see clearly how the state navigated its consolidation in the margins of the economy, of institutions, of borders, and of legality. What emerges from tracing the state in those margins is thus consistent with a number of sociological understandings of the state as a non-bounded actor. In other words, once examined on the ground, the state’s boundedness disappears, giving way to a multitude of actions that together contribute to the production of the state as a unitary actor.