Religious codes possess social control effects that can potentially change the behaviour of their adherents towards becoming pro-environment. In the case of Islam, Muslim-majority states since the time of the Prophet Muhammad have implemented Islamic environmental law to this effect. Unfortunately, accounts of its implementation today in the legal literature are scant, thereby requiring fresh insights that consider changes in the application of Islamic law in modern states. Generally, this article observes that the implementation of Islamic environmental law today takes two forms: first, implementation through constitutions; and, second, implementation through non-binding religio-legal instruments. Focusing on the second form, application in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia is analysed and evaluated. In these three Southeast Asian states non-binding religious rulings (fatwa) and mosque sermons (khutbah) have been used to implement Islamic environmental law. There are two key factors which contribute to ensuring that these non-binding instruments achieve their social control objectives: first, local legal and political contexts shaped by religion-state relations that help their implementation and legitimation; and, second, the pursuit of post-fatwa/khutbah follow-up action by religious authorities to put Islamic environmental law into actual practice.

A hima is a reserved pasture, where trees and grazing lands are protected from indiscriminate harvest on a temporary or permanent basis. It existed in the Middle East before Islam; it was treated as a private reserve for powerful chieftains who were said to have used it as a tool of oppression. With the emergence of Islam, its function changed; it became a property dedicated to the well-being of the whole community around it. Tribes had their own himas with the permission of the state, and acted as self-government in the absence of state control. This institution flourished through the first half of the 20th century, when major political, economical, and social changes took place in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. The paper reviews the changes that have taken place in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen with regard to the himā. Modern researchers and consultants of governments in the region still recommend using this traditional institution, because they believe that its revival and extension for land improvement based on cultural principles would be successful; it would not require the introduction of alien social institutions or values. This paper recommends some modifications required to adopt this traditional system in the current societies of the region.

The original continuum Ginzburg–Landau functional and continuum Allen–Cahn equation (see Section 3.7) had their origins in materials science in the pioneering work of Cahn and Hilliard (1958) and Allen and Cahn (1979), but found their way into the mathematical imaging sciences via the $\mathrm{\Gamma }$-convergence result that links Ginzburg–Landau to total variation in the continuum (see Modica and Mortola, 1977 and Modica, 1987).

This chapter explores how Messianics in Gambella understood their own Nuer ‘ethnic’ identity in relation to biblical genealogies. Some Messianics argued that Nuer are descendants of the biblical Cushite nation, while others insisted that they are descendants of one of the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. The chapter explores this debate in light of longer processes of change in the conceptualisation of Nuer identity. The chapter shows how Nuer Zionists reinterpreted Nuer identity, known for its permeability and constructivist nature, in light of contemporary premillennialist Zionist notions of peoplehood, which emphasise ethnic fixity and focus on lineages, exclusive bloodlines and biological descent. The chapter shows how these processes impacted the way Nuer Messianics imagined their own ‘true’ identity and place in history and in relation to nation states, as both Nuer and Christian. The chapter offers a new perspective on Israelite identities in Africa and on the influence of born-again Christianity on the construction of ethnic identities.

This chapter offers a historical and legal reinterpretation of the minority protection clauses of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, with a particular focus on their implications for the Kurds living in Turkey. While the treaty is often cited as excluding the Kurds from formal minority status, on the one hand, this chapter argues that Articles 38 and 39 of Lausanne nevertheless extended certain rights and protections to all inhabitants of Turkey, including the Kurds. Drawing on the treaty’s drafting history, diplomatic correspondence, and international jurisprudence this article demonstrates that Turkey’s subsequent denial of Kurdish rights therefore constitutes a breach of its treaty obligations. On the other hand, it further explores how Ankara, through military leverage, strategic ambiguity, and political assurances, succeeded in “de-internationalising” Kurdish claims, effectively shielding its domestic policies from external scrutiny. The article concludes by highlighting the shared responsibility of the Allied Powers and the League of Nations in allowing these violations to go unchallenged, and calls for renewed scholarly attention to Lausanne’s unfulfilled Kurdish question.

This chapter focuses on people’s spiritual journeys and the evolution of local Christian literacy practices. It traces the process through which the Christian Word of God (or ‘speech’ of God, in Nuer) came to serve as a guide for distinguishing and navigating between divinely created institutions, practices and laws, and human-made ones. Tracing the dissemination of biblical texts starting from the colonial period and exploring people’s changing engagements with them, it shows how, for generations of educated youths in Gambella, Christian literacy and biblical literalism became tools for overcoming doubt and confusion, uncovering falsities, and fashioning new identities. As opposed to earlier scholarship that primarily associated conversion to Christianity in the region with utilitarian, economic interests, this chapter highlights the centrality of engagement with texts and doctrinal debates in shaping the local Christian landscape, emphasising the actions and agency of believers.

Chapter 3 explores the relationship between whiteness and the awareness of pretense. For some Cubans, racial mixing could be an effective means to eliminate blackness and the possibility of its communal or political articulation; for others, it would doom the nation. Racial passing and the pretense of acting as if races could be neatly demarcated endowed racism with the flexibility it required to preserve structures of inequality. When writers of African descent began to publish on the question in the 1880s, they often addressed this logic of pretense. Rodolfo de Lagardere, for example, deployed racial doubt in his 1889 booklet Blancos y negros to demonstrate that whiteness entailed a collective effort to forget the African origins of Cuban society. While some people of known African descent participated in whitening processes, others mobilized racial doubt to call attention to the amnesia and denial inherent to whiteness as an institution and set of lived practices.

In this chapter I address the killing of human embryos under three different kinds of circumstance. First are embryos in vitro; second, embryos that are a result of sexual intercourse but which have not yet implanted in a woman’s uterus; and third, embryos that have implanted in the wrong location, typically in the fallopian tube, and which thus cause a significant danger to the mother’s life if the pregnancy continues.

In this chapter I present the Core Argument for why intending death is always wrong. The argument gives reason to hold a sanctity-of-life view but does not depend on such a view.

This chapter examines the intricate relationship between First Knowledging and First Languaging, highlighting their intersection through playfulness and precarity. Drawing on examples from Indigenous reindeer communities in Mongolia and Aboriginal schools across Western Australia, it explores how people live, perform, and negotiate these interwoven practices within and beyond classroom contexts. First Knowledging, rooted in ancestral wisdom, cultural practices, and land-based ontologies, is expressed through First Languaging – fluid, embodied, and spiritually infused forms of communication that transcend conventional linguistic boundaries. Storytelling, yarning, art, and song become vital modes through which these knowledges are enacted, shared, and sustained. Yet, this vitality unfolds amid precarity, as institutional constraints, standardised curricula, and settler-colonial systems continue to marginalise Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Within this tension, playfulness emerges as a radical form of resistance and resilience – a creative force enabling learners to navigate and subvert dominant norms while maintaining continuity with ancestral traditions.

Marleen Gorris’s feminist classic A Question of Silence (1982) features what may be one of the most memorable court scenes ever filmed: an extended scene of wild laughter that grows and grows to eventually engulf all the women in the courtroom. The scene offers an occasion to think through modes and gestures of feminist refusal. There are other scenes: a fifteenth-century image depicting Calefurnia as it pops up in Julie Stone Peters’ Law as Performance; the bacchants in ecstasy tearing apart the son/king as figured in Bonnie Honig’s reading of Euripides’ play in A Feminist Theory of Refusal; Nancy Spero’s Sheela na gigs… Juxtaposing these and yet other scenes, this chapter returns to critical legal themes of rupture and minor jurisprudence in an attempt to further populate the feminist heterotopia that is the elsewhere of law’s mediation.

Adjudication in the various courts in Nigeria has been struggling to break through the jinx of case backlogs, slow legal service delivery, limited access to justice, particularly in rural areas, overburdened courts, and insufficient legal resources. However, Covid-19 led to the adoption of digital technology in the filing, service of court processes, and speedy dispensation of justice through virtual court sittings. Technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are the driving force behind the digital administration of law and justice, and courts in Nigeria stand at the precipice of a potential technological breakthrough. However, this is not without challenges, such as inadequate infrastructure, poor funding, and lack of capacity building for the judges to understand the complexities. This chapter examines the development of the AI-driven court system and attempts to put in place a national AI policy for the justice sector in Nigeria.