This chapter provides a snapshot of Rwanda’s evolving political settlement and economic development trajectory. The chapter begins by highlighting significant structural vulnerabilities that shaped Rwanda’s domestic politics historically, including ethnicity-based inequalities and political contestation, historical divisions associated with the royal family and aristocracy, refugee issues, inadequate employment opportunities and regional inequalities. It then highlights the rapid growth that took place in Rwanda over the last three decades, which has also been accompanied by significant export diversification. It then provides a brief political settlement analysis of present-day Rwanda, highlighting how development is being contested transnationally, pointing to the key vulnerabilities characterising its hub-based strategy. In particular, it describes how increased elite vulnerability has meant that the government has been reluctant to support domestic capital. As a result, the Rwandan government has failed to develop effective state–business relations aimed at achieving structural transformation.

The book is motivated by the question of analysing how Rwanda’s development trajectory can contribute to our understanding of why structural transformation remains so elusive. This chapter introduces the central contributions of the book. First, the book employs structuralist political settlements analysis to highlight how contemporary late development is contested transnationally, prompting the need for analysis across different scales. Second, the book describes how African growth has been largely driven by the services sector and Rwanda is emblematic of contemporary African growth experiences, especially since, like elsewhere on the continent, structural transformation has remained elusive. Third, the book contributes to existing literature on Rwanda by highlighting that the Rwandan Patriotic Front prioritised services-based strategies partly to reduce its reliance on domestic businesspeople because of the elite vulnerability that has characterised its rule. This strategy has yielded growth and export diversification without achieving structural transformation because elite vulnerability has inhibited effective state–business relations. The introduction also includes a discussion of the methodology employed in the book and the structure of the chapters that follow.

While early postwar musical modernist explorations seemed progressive during the 1950s, Yugoslav composers faced European and American avant-garde trends at the inaugural Music Biennale Zagreb in 1961. Founded by Croatian composer Milko Kelemen, who refused to conform to the demands of socialist realism, the Zagreb Biennale was the most significant cultural event in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s and continued to play a pivotal role in the country’s cultural diplomacy over the next three decades. Taking advantage of the Cold War political divisions, Yugoslavia’s unique position as a “liberal” communist state that did not belong to either bloc, and an economic model that adopted elements of socialism and capitalism, Kelemen devised a plan that reads like a Cold War spy novel. Pitting the Soviets against the Americans and Western Europeans with fabricated stories, Kelemen managed to secure the participation of the most recognizable figures in contemporary music in the US and Europe. Consequently, his festival became one of the most relevant international festivals of contemporary music and a forum for Yugoslavia’s engagement with Western avant-gardism.

The press publishers’ right (granted under Art. 15 of the EU’s 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market) equips publishers with a legal basis for negotiations with digital intermediaries. However, the process of bargaining has not been specified by the EU legislator, which left it to the discretion of EU Member States and the market. This chapter examines the four main approaches to the operationalisation of the press publishers’ right in the EU, in contrast with the bargaining framework that has evolved in Australia without the underpinning of a new intellectual property right. It analyses these frameworks from the perspective of ‘bargaining in the shadow of the law’ to understand the relationship between statutory law and private bargaining as mediated by institutional frameworks. By defining and coding key parameters concerning the bargaining parties, their endowments (bargaining chips), measures to mitigate dependencies and the role played by the authority (such as a regulator), the chapter shows that bargaining frameworks sit as complex institutional constraints between pure private ordering and the law. It is the shape of the bargaining framework that matters for the range and frequency of agreements between press publishers and digital platforms.

In 2019, the EU legislature introduced a right in favour of press publishers over their press publications. The rationale supporting EU intervention in relation to Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD) is multi-fold, ranging from support for press publishers when licensing the use of press publications to ensuring a fair marketplace and the protection of a free and pluralist press in performing its societal functions. Article 15 CDSMD has now been transposed at the national level. Despite the harmonizing objective of EU legislature, the resulting legal landscape across the EU appears fragmented. Focusing on the exclusion of ‘very short extracts’ of press publications and considering selected divergent national transpositions, this chapter investigates whether such divergences will thwart the harmonization objective of 15 CDSMD, whether they are incompatible with EU law, and, if so, what the solutions could be. The chapter’s title question is answered: harmonization is necessary, but where the instrument chosen is a directive, national legislatures must correctly interpret and act within the freedom afforded to them under EU law. In many national transpositions of Article 15 CDSMD, this has not occurred.

To inform how we think about EU media law in the future, this chapter traces the understandings of harm evident in EU media laws, their proposal documents, and explanatory notes since the 1989 Television Without Frontiers Directive. It identifies a shift from concern with individual harm from exposure to content, to addressing a variety of sources of harm to individual consumers, collectives, and societal systems. It demonstrates that a link between assumptions about control over risk and responsibility remains persistent and shows how responsibility for preventing harm has been increasingly distributed among various actors as changes in the technology and design of services and in the harms being addressed have affected control over the risk. This chapter argues that future thinking in EU media law needs to focus on how the institutional architecture can support effective cooperative responsibility, including addressing imbalances of power and information asymmetries.