Financial flows and financial structures are fueling climate instability and worsening inequities around the world. A stable future now requires urgent change including transformative financial innovations. Yet the pandemic and recent financial disruptions reveal how financial architecture designed to promote stability in times of crises exacerbates economic inequities and vulnerabilities. Recognizing the division in climate politics among those advocating for stable policies and a smooth transition and those calling for more radical, disruptive politics, this chapter reviews the critical role of financial innovations, including central banks’ monetary policies, in redirecting society toward a more just and stable future. We propose a paradigm shift to reconceptualize stability and politicization in finance and central banking for climate justice. We argue that current depoliticized perspectives on financial stability are worsening climate instability, and that finance, central banks, and their monetary policies are an underappreciated part of climate politics. Transformative climate policy to promote stability requires repoliticizing finance and financial innovations.

California is often seen as a homogeneous entity that uniformly values environmentalism and climate action. This image universalizes the idea of climate change and detaches it from its cultural and political settings. It also obscures how the localization of environmental policy and science within the state involves processes of public contestation and legitimation. This chapter examines the culturally contingent nature of climate policy – the assumptions and worldviews that often create conflict between community understandings of local environmental conditions and the prevailing global regulatory culture of climate change. I argue that through a reoccurring process of conflict and collaboration, a broad range of individuals and organizations is co-constituting what climate change and environmental justice mean. California’s climate change programs are fostered by certain conditions of privilege – a robust economy, racial and ethnic plurality, and progressive statewide leaders. Nonetheless, they offer clear models of how to broaden climate change worldviews and imagine various relationships among the atmosphere, economic and racial disparities, and climate change policy.

This chapter explores three particular circumstances where integrity has been found to be breached in tennis, namely doping, match-fixing and other less serious offenses, such as failure to report or failure to cooperate. The chapter goes on to explain anti-doping jurisprudence in tennis, the nature of proceedings, the relevant burden of proof and the intricacies of “intent” and “fault,” as well as the standard of “no fault or negligence” and “no significant fault or negligence.” The section on anti-corruption examines match-fixing by athletes and third parties, and also by umpires and other officials, as well as the sanctions imposed under relevant rules. These offenses are typically associated with legitimate betting and may involve money laundering and other non-predicate offenses.

In September 2023, the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) joined the numerous Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council which, over the past decade, analysed the subject of the human rights impacts of new technologies and it published a thematic study on ‘new technologies and enforced disappearances’. The Chapter briefly presents the gestation and contents of the study, but its main aim is to analyse the role played – if any – by new technologies, and in particular digital, information and communication technologies, in the regular activities of the WGEID, with a view at identifying innovative methods to carry out its mandate. The functions of the WGEID are illustrated, together with the opportunities that new technologies may offer to perform them. The challenges currently posed to the WGEID and its ‘counterparts’ by the use of new technologies in terms of security, verification and accessibility are also considered. The concluding remarks offer a reflection on how some of the findings and observations made with regard to the WGEID could be relevant also for the work of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances.

The chapter explains the increasing frequency of so-called morality clauses imposed by sponsors in sponsorship agreements with professional tennis players. The aim of these clauses is to restrict players from particular conduct that reflects negatively on the product sponsored. The chapter explains the contractual nature of these clauses and provides an explanation as to how a violation of these restrictions may bring about a right of termination on the part of the sponsor. In the particular tennis context, the chapter explains the impact of social media and the digital world. It goes on to provide examples of morality clauses in tennis endorsement agreements.

The player explores the history of professional unions in tennis up to the current day. It starts by setting out the dual and shifting roles of tennis player unions, which at all times of its history ranged from a collective action to shared governance. It goes on to ponder what actually is a professional tennis players’ union and lays out a framework for the trade union rights of professional tennis players. Its historical account throws light at initial attempts at player unionization and the pivotal role of player unionization in 1967–75. This led to pro tennis’s labor settlement – business in lieu of bargaining, which in turn culminated in the so-called “Seven Kingdoms” – player voice, rights, pay and conditions in professional tennis, which is the current status. The chapter explores these seven kingdoms and the latest development with the PTPA, which was established in 2020.

This chapter discusses the situation of contemporary disappearances in Mexico and explains how the heterogeneity of perpetrators and victims, especially the involvement of non-state actors in the commission of these crimes, poses conceptual challenges under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances. It specifically addresses two legal questions: the state’s failure to identify dead bodies as a form of enforced disappearance and impunity as a form of acquiescence. Following this, it presents the Committee on Enforced Disappearance’s 2023 Statement on Non-State Actors and examines how the definition of acquiescence provided by the Committee could impact the categorisation of disappearances in Mexico. It is argued that the Committee’s definition could and should be applied in such a way as to consider a large number of disappearances in Mexico today as enforced disappearances, as well as that a presumption of acquiescence would be appropriate in Mexican context, as it places the burden of proof on the state, thereby potentially overcoming a seemingly arbitrary classification of victims into two categories.

FFramework climate laws have been enacted across a growing range of countries, and are often assumed to provide stability in terms of climate policymaking. This chapter provides a more nuanced assessment. I argue that, while some common design elements of framework climate laws do indeed serve to bring stability to climate policymaking, in many respects framework climate laws depart from the ideal design type envisioned by the literature on time inconsistency, commitment devices, and non-majoritarian institutions. Moreover, framework climate laws can actually serve to make explicit political conflicts and sectoral trade-offs, and can thus serve to politicize even as they depoliticize. Furthermore, by seeking to introduce stability to climate policymaking in the sense of stability in policy design over time, framework climate laws simultaneously and deliberately seek to undermine and challenge stability as status quo. The chapter draws on examples of framework climate laws principally in European countries to illustrate the argument.

This chapter describes the long process of awareness and creation of the International Convention for the Elimination of Enforced Disappearance, the role of non-governmental organisations and the national and international cooperation organisations in that process.

It analyses the role of Condor Operation launched as a multilateral agreement between the national security dictatorships of the Southern Cone and the reaction of civil society and the relatives of the victims who began to seek a way to achieve the recognition of enforced disappearance as an autonomous offence and then the adoption of an International Convention for its punishment.

In this chapter, the testimonies about this process are analysed as well as series of concomitant actions gained momentum, as a result of which, the United Nations (UN) convened a Drafting Group for what ended up being the long-awaited International Convention. Finally, there is a brief analysis of the current state of those NGOs which fought hard for such Convention.

Finally, this chapter consists of research about a historic stage of a generation which is giving way to new people with their new rights, their new fights, and their new utopias.