This chapter reviews the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s (WGAD) approach to issues of evidence and burdens of proof. It aims to provide a useful point of comparison with the UNTBs’ evidentiary procedures. The WGAD has developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to evidence, providing strong incentives for other decision-making bodies to take up its conclusions and procedures. In this chapter, the following arguments are substantiated: first, that the Working Group’s increasingly formalised and standardised approach to evidence reflects the maturing of the Working Group and its entrenchment in the ecosystem of human rights bodies; second, that its nuanced evidentiary approach can serve to enhance its credibility with states and claimants, in order to increase compliance rates; and third, its detailed approaches to evidentiary standards and challenges could provide precedents for UNTBs with individual claims mandates to follow a similar approach.

It is a must to dedicate the last chapter to the topic that, according to the promises in our Apology, occupies a central place in our book: the longstanding and fascinating problem of the stability of the Solar System. On the other hand, we should not forget a warning often emphasized by Victor Szebehely: the concept of stability is itself unstable [250].

Growing up in a racial hierarchy that favors Whiteness and stigmatizes Blackness exposes young individuals to racial marginalization and discrimination. Racial discrimination has become a regular occurrence for most Black children and adolescents in the United States, resulting in negative impacts on their social, emotional, academic, and physical well-being. Nevertheless, these experiences also enable young people to strengthen their racial identities, form communities, and work towards Black liberation. In this chapter, we begin by placing Black youth development within the sociohistorical and political context of anti-Black racism. Subsequently, we discuss the various definitions and methodological considerations in discrimination research. Furthermore, we briefly explore how young individuals interpret racial discrimination and the strategies they employ to combat racism. We then focus on three collective resistance strategies that create space for Black liberation within the realms of family, education, and media: (1) socialization, (1) rest and being, and (3) imagination and dream-building.

This chapter focuses on the connections between sea surfaces, the atmosphere, and outer space. Its upward-oriented perspective to oceanic history traces these connections from early 20th-century visions like the failed idea of floating airports (seadromes), whose horizontal runways were impractical in aquatic conditions, to later orientation changes. Artificial islands served horizontal helicopter take-off and landing, or offshore rocket launches. The chapter argues that these energy-intensive built environments, enabled by the Age of Oil, spatially and sensually marked the emergence of the oceanic Anthropocene. Platform illumination for helicopters operations, rocket launches, and the flares of oil platforms whose radiation is visible from outer space, created massive “light islands” in marine regions, manifesting carbon emissions. Simultaneously, the light island effect turned into a form of placemaking. Light islands became regular offshore destinations and departure points for other vehicles, creating new oceanic equivalents to terrestrial ports, airports, and spaceports. They also indicated the extension of the human habitat to sea surfaces.

This chapter integrates empirical research on the pains of imprisonment with psychological and neuroscientific insights into the nature, sources, and effects of social pain, including its connection to the fundamental human need to belong. It argues that social pain provides a comprehensive framework for situating the pains of imprisonment – outlined in Chapter 3– within a unified conceptual construct. This argument rests on three interrelated premises. First, the contexts of exclusion that elicit social pain – social isolation, rejection, and ostracism – closely mirror the layers of exclusion that define the various domains of prison life. Second, the effects of social pain – particularly when pervasive or prolonged – on psychological well-being, behavior, and health significantly overlap with those documented among incarcerated individuals, both during and after imprisonment. Third, the psychological mechanisms that lead people to cause social pain in others, while underestimating its consequences, similarly underpin the logic of punishment, including the tendency to minimize the actual harms of the prison experience. Building on these premises, the chapter develops the book’s central claim: that the real pain of carceral punishment ultimately resides in the systematic threat to the fundamental human need to belong.

This chapter “enters” the prison and examines the extensive body of empirical literature documenting the pains of imprisonment. Given the breadth of research, the analysis is necessarily selective, focusing on the principal frameworks through which these pains have been studied and classified across different populations and institutional settings. The chapter organizes these experiences into four interrelated domains that shape prison environments: deprivation, space and time, power, and relationships. While acknowledging variability across individuals and contexts, it emphasizes that prison pains most often manifest as severe psychological distress, accompanied by feelings of loneliness, disempowerment, dehumanization, and self-stigma, with profound implications for one’s sense of social self. Crucially, these pains do not stem necessarily from overt abuses or extraordinary deprivations. Rather, the diffuse combination of social isolation, lack of recognition, denied agency, neglect, and pervasive distrust renders imprisonment a chronically stressful and potentially traumatic experience. These factors, the chapter contends, are profoundly consequential because they undermine the fulfillment of basic social needs grounded in the fundamental human need to belong.

Do legislatures possess the capacity – and the will – to temper the agenda‑setting power of outsiders? This chapter probes that question by comparing bills drafted by external actors with those written inside the chamber. If outsider bills look systematically different and survive the process with fewer changes, they may reflect strategic behavior that limits deliberation and shifts representational duty away from elected lawmakers. After outlining benchmarks for “legislative quality,” I employ large‑scale textual analysis to track complexity, readability, and changes. Outsider‑authored bills are markedly more complex and emerge from the process largely intact. Business‑sponsored bills are especially opaque, while departmental proposals adapt to context: They are simpler in low‑professionalism states but denser where legislatures have greater capacity. These patterns imply that sophisticated actors tailor texts to the audience, and that lawmakers often accept the drafts with minimal scrutiny. The findings may raise normative red flags: reliance on outsider language may preserve valuable expertise, yet it can also entrench narrow interests and erode democratic deliberation when representatives do not rewrite or fully vet the legislation they introduce.

Psychological researchers have investigated ethnic–racial identity (ERI) among ethnically and racially minoritized youth, focusing on key developmental periods of adolescence and young adulthood. Relevant to the development of ERI are both experiences of ethnic and racial discrimination (ERD) and overall racialization. However, rather than leaning into the nuances of ethnicity and race to understand the development of ERI, most researchers have foregone serious consideration of these conceptual and theoretical distinctions altogether. This paper argues that racialization is a key construct in understanding the coformation of experiences of ERI and ERD, yet it is often left out of psychological study. In this chapter, the authors overview existing models of ERI and ERD development, then propose a new model: the Reciprocal Racialization, Ethnic–Racial Identity, and Discrimination Model (R-RERID). Future directions for theoretical understanding and research are discussed.