Drawing from the archives of the League of Nations as well as those of the French Foreign Ministry, supplemented by press sources and official reports of the parliamentary debates, this chapter traces the essential role played by France in the development of compulsory arbitration and legal methods of settling international disputes, from the Geneva Protocol (1924) to the adoption of the General Act of Arbitration by the Ninth Assembly of the League of Nations in 1928 and its ratification by the French Parliament, almost unanimously, in 1931. France’s engagement in favour of compulsory arbitration for all conflicts was above all dictated by security concerns. Feeling exposed and vulnerable to an unstable and potentially revanchist Germany, France expected arbitration to provoke the implementation of the mechanisms of collective security provided for in the League of Nations Covenant, since it made it possible to identify the party that refused to submit the conflict to arbitration procedure as the aggressor. But whereas the Geneva Protocol had clearly established the close link desired by France between ‘arbitration’ and ‘security’ – a prelude to ‘disarmament’ – the General Act of 1928, for its part, failed to reproduce this link, and did not organize any system of sanctions.

The criminal justice system is becoming automated. At every stage, from policing to evidence to parole, AI tools and other technologies guide outcomes. Debates over the pros and cons of these technologies have overlooked a crucial issue: ownership. Developers often claim that details about how their tools work are trade secrets and refuse to disclose that information to criminal defendants or their attorneys. The introduction of intellectual property claims into the criminal justice system raises under-theorised tensions between life, liberty, and property interests. This chapter argues that trade secrets should not be privileged in criminal proceedings. A criminal trade secret privilege is ahistorical, harmful to defendants, and unnecessary to protect the interests of the secret holder. Meanwhile, compared to substantive trade secret law, the privilege overprotects intellectual property. Further, privileging trade secrets in criminal proceedings fails to serve the theoretical purpose of either trade secret law or privilege law. The trade secret inquiry sheds new light on how evidence rules do, and should, function differently in civil and criminal cases.

This concluding chapter addresses the urgent imperative to establish Islamic environmental law as a formal discipline capable of responding to unprecedented planetary crisis. Drawing on insights from 26 chapters examining the intersection of Islamic jurisprudence and environmental governance, this conclusion argues that Islamic environmental law offers transformative frameworks for addressing climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, and ecological injustice through principles of khilafah (stewardship), mizan (balance), and maslaha (public interest). The chapter outlines comprehensive strategies for institutionalizing Islamic environmental law as an academic discipline, including curriculum development, research infrastructure, and methodological innovations that integrate environmental science with traditional Islamic legal reasoning. It examines critical research priorities spanning climate jurisprudence, Islamic environmental finance, and environmental justice frameworks that connect ecological protection to human dignity. Recognizing the scale of environmental crisis, the chapter proposes institutional innovations including Islamic environmental courts, shariah-compliant regulatory mechanisms, and revitalized traditional institutions like waqf and hima adapted for contemporary conservation needs.

The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the potential contributions of Islamic finance as an important faith-based approach for financing environmental policies and programs in Islamic countries. While the need for environmental protection and sustainable development have been recognized in the laws of virtually every country on earth, countries often struggle to mobilize environmental finance, i.e the financial resources and tools needed to implement environmental protection programs. The global rise of green or environmental finance as an approach to meet climate change mitigation and adaption financing has highlighted the nexus between environmental finance and Islamic finance as both share similar underlying ethical principles and social and environmental objectives. In this regard, Islamic finance has recently witnessed the development of green sukuk, a new asset class targeting projects that address climate change. The chapter discusses the potential of Islamic finance as a viable environmental finance alternative. In so doing, it will first discuss the ethical and legal principles underpinning Islamic environmental finance. Second, it will discuss the legal and institutional gaps that currently hinder the wide scale integration of Islamic finance into environmental law in Islamic countries.

Chapter 19 explores the legal and political constraints to finding a systemic answer to collective security and general disarmament by delving into three aspects: first, the legal and political gaps and inconsistencies left by the League of Nations Covenant; second, the fast-moving geopolitical and multilateral context that hindered a fruitful connection between collective security and general disarmament during the 1920s and early 1930s; and third, the increasing, and by the mid-1930s openly frustrated, legal bewilderment around core concepts of the existing collective security system: how should it be enforced? And how should it be revised? The study zeroes in on key moments in the League’s existence, and important protagonists of its functioning – the Secretary-General, the leading international lawyers of the time – and draws the conclusion that the League of Nations was too consumed by upholding its fragile and always-contested order to pursue collective security and general disarmament in a systematic, comprehensive, and connected manner.

Insofar as his poems generally take the mimetic form of a monologue unfolding in the present, Pindaric poetry is the Pindaric speaking voice. Far more of the corpus, furthermore, is directly concerned with the speaking subject than with any other individual. But the identity and functions of this prominent and indeed all-encompassing voice have been a persistent source of fascination and puzzlement, not least in their relationship to Pindar of Thebes as a historical individual. Better understanding the scare quotes around the ‘I’ in the title of this chapter can help us to better understand Pindar’s poetry. Scholars have formulated various ways to refer to the speaking voice, and the accumulation of terminology reflects the complexity of the topic. This chapter offers a taxonomy of voices and then criticises that taxonym. It discusses the ‘bardic I’, the ‘first-person indefinite’, the authorial voice, and the choral voice and then argues that the victor never speaks in epinicians. A conclusion briefly ties these threads together.

This chapter examines a series of court cases in Hong Kong in which a number of newly elected legislators were disqualified from taking office in part because the ways in which they took their oaths during the swearing-in ceremony were deemed too flamboyant, too extravagant and too theatrical to be taken seriously. Implicit in the legal and political objections to their oath taking is the view that theatre has no place in the hallowed chambers of the law courts or the legislature, a view that is all the more surprising given the intertwined histories and representational strategies between law and theatre. Taking these cases as a starting point, I explore what may be at stake in this legal anti-theatricality, and argue that law’s determination to expurgate the theatrical could be read as part of an attempt to render invisible its own performative nature.

Through a new account of three early disputes, Chapter 16 revisits the novel role of the League Council in interstate dispute settlement. This role was delimited by a legal threshold: the question of whether disputes arose out of a matter purely within a state party’s national jurisdiction or domaine réservé. Application of this test, nominally left to the Council, prompted considerable experimentation with institutional forms, and particularly recourse to ‘committees of jurists’, an understudied, flexible, and protean mechanism which would go on to be deployed in many spheres of League activity. Drawing on contemporaneous legal scholarship and a range of archival materials, the chapter sketches the Council’s procedural management of three key disputes, redirecting focus to the larger landscape of institutionalized dispute settlement beyond the Permanent Court of International Justice. In this larger landscape, the chapter teases out the diverse characteristics associated with recourse to avowedly ‘legal’ expertise and reasoning. This close reading of varied ‘legal’ deliberations recovers the multifaceted relationship between institutionalization and legalization of dispute settlement – and suggests the complexity of relations between legal reasoning and peaceful ordering, both for contemporaries and for us.

This chapter deals with the institutional history of Nuer Christianity and examines how various interconnections that were made possible through people’s movement across the frontierlands contributed to the development of churches and the circulation of Christian knowledge. It starts in the early twentieth century with the coming of missionaries to southern Sudan and explores the introduction of Seventh-day Adventism in the 1970s and the consequent emergence of Messianic groups out of the Adventist church since the 1990s. The chapter demonstrates how claims of biblical authenticity (that is, of being the ’true church’) fuelled schisms and institutional fragmentation. The chapter is concerned with both the history and proliferation of Messianic institutions in Gambella, and the ways in which Messianics thought about the history and biblical indexicality of their churches, as institutions that traced their roots to the Holy Bible.

Chapter 1 conceptualizes a primary form of racial doubt: questioning the equation of blackness with slavery. It is built around the testimony of Ben Newton, who declared he was born free in the United States, kidnapped at the age of ten, and subsequently enslaved in Cuba for several decades. It explores the degree to which racial doubt was intrinsic to the tension between racist agnosia (the social practice of actively ignoring exploited, racialized people) and anti-racist recognition (whereby some of these people could make themselves seen or heard). As Ben Newton pointed out when he reached the US consulate in 1853, “almost everybody” knew his story, but neither his owners nor the local authorities had felt pressured to liberate him. When he told this same story in a new context, recognition and freedom became less elusive. Through a focus on Ben’s testimony, the chapter charts the legal, practical, and linguistic terrains in which captives challenged their enslavement.

This chapter explores Nuer experiences of encountering the urban frontier and the Ethiopian state in the borderlands. It does so by tracing the history and evolution of Gambella town and Newland, the Nuer dominated peri-urban settlement at its eastern edges. Newland has long been a place that attracted people seeking modern education and links with new actors and institutions. Over the past two decades, this peri-urban settlement expanded significantly and emerged as an important node in global Nuer networks. The chapter highlights the salience of fears of manipulation, trickery, and embarrassment in people’s engagements with the urban frontier, and central role such sentiments played in motivating people’s quest for education, knowledge, and global connectivity in the urban environment. The attitudes concerning learning and modern education that this chapter explores are essential for understanding the religious dynamics described in the rest of the book.