Private dispute resolution mechanisms – such as arbitration, mediation, and negotiation – are often criticised for high costs, lengthy proceedings, and inconsistent outcomes. Simultaneously, confidence in traditional courts is declining amid rising litigation expenses, delays, and concerns over impartiality, highlighting the need for more efficient and equitable resolution methods. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer promising tools to address these challenges. AI enhances case preparation through natural language processing (NLP), which organises documents, extracts key insights, and supports evidence analysis. Predictive analytics help anticipate outcomes based on past decisions, aiding strategic planning. AI also enables automation in routine case management, accelerating resolution and reducing costs. Generative AI further alleviates administrative burdens, enabling legal professionals to focus on complex legal reasoning and client interactions. This chapter examines how AI is reshaping private dispute resolution, with a focus on current applications, emerging innovations, and future developments. While AI cannot replace human judgement in complex disputes, it plays a vital role in streamlining procedures, promoting fairness, and improving user satisfaction.

This chapter examines the spectral version of the well-known Ulam reconstruction conjecture, focusing on whether the characteristic polynomial of the adjacency matrix of a signed graph with at least three vertices is uniquely determined by the collection of characteristic polynomials of its vertex-deleted subgraphs. In the setting of signed graphs, a simple counterexample already exists: a pair of signed cycles on the same vertex set, with exactly one of them balanced. Beyond this instance, no additional counterexamples are known. We establish a sequence of structural properties that are reconstructible from the polynomial deck and identify several classes of signed graphs for which the characteristic polynomial is uniquely reconstructible. These classes include trees, unicyclic signed graphs (other than cycles) and signed graphs whose spectrum is bounded below by −2, among others. We also present numerous specific results concerning additional graph families.

In the winter of 1984, large-scale and targeted violence against Sikhs engulfed New Delhi's suburbs such as Sultanpuri, Mangolpuri and Trilokpuri. The country witnessed a massacre that left an indelible scar on its history. Between 3,000 and 17,000 Sikhs were killed, and over 50,000 forced to flee their homes. Amid all this violence and curfew-bound streets, a group of like-minded people—university professors, government officials, doctors, lawyers, students and members of civil society groups—took to the streets carrying nothing more than notepads and pens. They had first gathered at a friend's place, and divided themselves into two teams. One was led by the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and the other by the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), both of which were civil liberties groups that had been set up about a decade ago in the early 1970s.

Both teams navigated the violence-prone neighbourhoods, documenting testimonies of the survivors, destruction of gurudwaras and people's allegations against Congress leaders for having orchestrated the carnage. They interviewed victims, police officers, neighbours, army personnel and political leaders. They collected perpetrators’ information, car numbers and locations which had been targeted during the riots. The testimonies they recorded revealed that mobs had precise information on Sikh households across the city and were armed with kerosene and sulphur powder to set fire to those. Instances of complicity by officials were also recorded, including the names of those who looked the other way. This systematic documentation and its release in the form of a report exposed the chilling coordination behind the violence and revealed how massacres often unfold with calculated precision.

These two responses to essentially the same question, that is, what factors led to the emergence of civil liberties activism, represent the contrasting motivations and political contexts behind the setting up of civil liberties groups in India. Simon sees their first appearance as a pressure group to lobby for the release of Naxalite political prisoners in the early 1970s.

The field of politically relevant affective orientations encompasses more than what is consciously felt. Greta Thunberg’s call, ‘I want you to panic’, for instance, alluded to the collective failure to experience appropriate emotions towards climate change. The field of manifest political emotions is based on complex processes leading to certain issues becoming the object of public affective engagement, while others are excluded from the field of public concern. This paper examines ‘ontological terror’, which denotes the response when confronted with the ungroundedness of the metaphysical order underpinning the modern world. Calvin L. Warren argues that this ungroundedness is projected onto the Negro who becomes the incarnation of nothingness, creating the illusion of control over it. The paper explores the abyss presented by ontological terror via two routes: first, through the intersection of ‘the unfelt’, of ‘affective injustice’ and of ‘white ignorance’; second, by discussing Gianni Vattimo’s ‘weak thought’ as a model of post-metaphysical thinking that shares many characteristics with Warren’s ontological nihilism but retains an optimism sharply contrasting Warren’s pessimism.

In governing the development and deployment of AI across the European Member States, the EU AI Act tries to bring together two very different visions of AI. The first sees AI as a powerful tool that can be made less risky to the health, safety, and fundamental rights of European consumers if it adheres to a series of technical requirements. The second sees AI as a systems technology whose governance requires a nuanced understanding of its transformative effects on the values, fundamental rights, and power relations that characterise society. This chapter uses these two perspectives on AI as a lens through which to reflect on the implications of the EU AI Act for the justice sector. It analyses the extent to which the Act’s provisions and safeguards are aligned with emerging ethical guidelines for the use of AI in the administration of justice and discusses whether it can be expected to effectively address core ethical concerns about the use of AI in the justice sector. This analysis demonstrates the limitations of the ‘tool’ perspective that dominates the AI Act and reveals the considerable discretion it gives judicial authorities to guide the integration of AI as a societally transformative systems technology into the justice sector.

Chapter 4 opens Part II of the study with an overview of literary activity during the late ninth and early tenth centuries, and the political backdrop of the emergent kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. A summary of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons itself is provided, followed by discussion of three categories of evidence: epistolary correspondences, the corpus of Alfredian Old English literature, and Asser’s Life of King Alfred. Throughout, several points of continuity with earlier decades of literary activity are stressed, particularly the continued importance of letter-writing and international communication. It is also emphasised that contemporary investment in vernacular literary production was extraordinary, yet Latin remained a valued commodity as well. Just as there would have been competing political visions within the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, so too there would have been preferences for literary patronage of Latin or Old English. The decision specifically to compose the Life of King Alfred in Latin is assessed, particularly in light of Asser’s intended audiences. The overview provided by this chapter sets the scene for the case studies explored in the subsequent two chapters.

The fourth chapter concerns a key institution in Shiʿism’s reproduction, namely its system of higher learning. Two British institutes that long defined the field in Europe are focused on and compared with a flagship German seminary and other, especially Scandinavian cases. Two theoretical trends are contrasted: of ‘integrative blending’ in studies of Islam in Europe and ‘diversity challenge’ in the field of education and citizenship. Each perspective is traced in Shiʿite higher education, where they produce a paradox of local adjustment and foreign frames. Birmingham’s Al-Mahdi Institute and London’s Islamic College are each read for manifestations of ‘European Islam,’ seen in curricula rebalanced with secular topics; diversity engagement perceived as an Islamic challenge; or ambitions for Western contributions to ‘minorities jurisprudence.’ At the same time, the locally particular practice is led by a cultural logic of transnational religious organization. ‘Western’ Shiʿite seminaries are encompassed as their Dumontian ‘contrary’ within organizational hierarchies of ‘Eastern’ religious (state) education. In the continental European seminaries, these facts show in the outsized role of the Qom-based Al-Mustafa University and its emphasis on proselytizing as opposed to the local formation of independent scholars who might help reform Shiʿism.

This chapter explores issues of patent infringement and sustainability, with a focus on the case of destruction of infringing goods and contextualizing the analysis in relation to the practice of upcycling. The destruction is a corrective measure adopted by courts when a patentee is confronted with an infringing product or a product resulting from an infringing method of production (Article 64(2)(e) of the UPC Agreement). While this remedy is standard practice, it often results in the destruction of fully functional, high-quality – albeit infringing – goods. In view of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and the Unitary Patent (UP), it is imperative to look at the provision on destruction of infringing goods through the eyes of sustainability. The UPC Agreement neither bars sustainable alternatives to destruction nor offers a sustainability-focused interpretation of the remedy. After reviewing UPC and EU case law, the chapter explores more sustainable interpretations of the destruction remedy, including whether practices like upcycling might still qualify as ‘destruction’. As such, this chapter could serve as a guide for future, more sustainability-centred interpretations of the identified provision under the UPC, thereby better aligning European patent law with the goals of the EU Circular Economy Strategy and the Green Deal.

This chapter investigates how Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s 1824 Voyage dans le Nord de Haïti contributes to early Haitian writers’ production of Haitian sovereignty. Hérard-Dumesle contributes to this larger effort by contesting the imperial genre of natural history that instrumentalized Haitian people and nature. Against the imperial natural histories that justified colonial extractivism, Hérard-Dumesle offers a Haitian mode of natural history that weaves together the real and imagined natural cosmologies of the Taino people, rural Haitian small holders, and Haiti’s postcolonial elite. This expressly political Haitian natural history and the poetic eloquence on which it ran aspired to redress tyranny not only for Haiti but also on a planetary register.

Chapter 4 contextualizes the earliest explorations in the domain of electronic music in Yugoslavia. Besides Malec and Kelemen, who left Yugoslavia in 1955 and worked in electronic music studios abroad, a decade later, a handful of other composers traveled to learn techniques of electroacoustic music at the newly formed studios in Europe and the US. Rajko Maksimović, Natko Devčić, and Aleksandar Obradović went to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City to study with Vladimir Ussachevsky, James Randall, and Milton Babbitt. Ludmila Frajt, the first woman in Yugoslavia to work in the domain of electronic (and film) music, went to the Experimental Music Studio of Czechoslovak Radio Plzeň. Vladan Radovanović was trained at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw before returning home to establish the first electronic studio in Yugoslavia – a state-of-the-art, third-generation digital-analog Electronic Studio of the Third Program of Radio Belgrade (EMS). This ethnographic study with interviews with the founder of the studio reveals a compelling, yet little-known story of the formation of the electronic studio in Yugoslavia, the acquisition of the legendary Synthi 100 – the first custom-made instrument designed by Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell at EMS in London – and how EMS Radio Belgrade became the center for creation, collaboration, and experimentation in electroacoustic music both within and outside the borders of Yugoslavia.

This chapter examines the pervasive issue of media capture within the European Union (EU) and its detrimental effects on media freedom and democratic governance. Using a theoretical model of media capture consisting of four critical components (control over national media regulators, manipulation of public service media, misuse of state funds for media control, and the consolidation of private media ownership by government-aligned businesses), it maps past and ongoing EU interventions in those areas. Despite the EU’s legal frameworks such as the European Media Freedom Act and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, significant gaps remain in enforcement and oversight, limiting the Union’s ability to address these challenges. The analysis highlights the EU’s struggles to effectively intervene in safeguarding media independence due to constrained competences, weak enforcement tools, and reliance on politicised national regulatory authorities. The chapter underscores the need for enhanced regulatory mechanisms and stricter monitoring to counteract media capture and uphold democratic principles in EU Member States.

Chapter 5 is a case study of two notable pioneers of electronic music in Yugoslavia – Vladan Radovanović and Ludmila Frajt. Even though Frajt joined the Communist Party early on, which enabled her to hold some of the most powerful positions in the country, her creative process was not guided by the doctrine of socialist realism. Rather, she was seeking innovative ways to expand her sound palette. Her distinctive oeuvre of film, instrumental, electronic, and vocal music is derived simultaneously from Yugoslav folk and Western avant-garde elements. Thus, although she was particularly drawn to Lutosławski’s aleatory processes, Penderecki’s use of clusters and nonstandard treatment of instruments, and György Ligeti’s micropolyphony, Frajt also presented these techniques within the Yugoslav folk idiom. Radovanović was a true catalyst for change. His oeuvre pushed the limits of every art form – in addition to his advances in the domains of electroacoustic and computer music, Radovanović pursued poetry and visual arts, which he synthesized with acoustic elements. In his other works, Radovanović also incorporated kinetic features, created conceptual and polymedia projects, and devised working with the body as an object, tactile art, plastic art, meta-art, transmedia, transmodalism, metamusical projects, and computerized music based on Stochastic principles.

The introduction sets the stage for the analysis of the political, social, and cultural events that led to the momentous avant-garde scene in the country. It follows the formation of postwar Yugoslavia – a multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual nation – and the ongoing ethnic and nationalist conflicts that would by 1991 result in the collapse of the political state and bring about an abrupt stop to all musical and cultural activities.