Natalia Perez, Advances in Underwater Archaeology

Underwater archaeology serves to understand cultural heritage, artifacts, sites, and objects. It advances with technology, enhancing the ability to locate and study shipwrecks. Shipwrecks are a key element under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. This paper examines how underwater archaeology technologies impact the rights of coastal and flag states to access shipwrecks in maritime zones and to collaborate in preserving underwater cultural heritage. It considers wreck locations, vessel types, and the flag state of archaeological ships. The analysis focuses on warships, which may enjoy sovereign immunity, in contrast to other kinds of shipwrecked vessels. Relevant UNCLOS articles, such as 33, 149, and 303, emphasize the protection of objects at sea and warn against infringing upon another state’s rights when retrieving archaeological finds from the seabed. The change is significant as technology increases access to inaccessible sites. The paper explores side-scan sonar, unmanned surface vehicles, and specific underwater imaging technologies. These technologies enable states to study and access shipwrecks across ocean zones. This chapter examines UNCLOS, the Underwater Cultural Heritage Convention, concerning rights to access wrecks within and beyond national jurisdiction amid growing ocean exploration.

This chapter delves into the realities behind dominant Chinese narratives of ‘beautiful and happy’ Chinese–Russian international marriages by foregrounding the voices and experiences of migrant women from former Soviet republics who moved to China. Through personal stories shared by women who moved from the mid-1990s to the late 2010s, this chapter reveals a complex and layered picture that contrasts with prevailing stereotypes of marriage migration. While popular perceptions in China and the former Soviet states suggest that most women migrate to escape difficult conditions in the Russian Far East, settling permanently in Northeast China, the women’s accounts reveal diverse motivations and pathways. By tracing their stories of cross-border romance and the challenges of adapting to life in China, I argue that these diverse narratives reflect a shifting perception of white femininity within China’s transformations and global aspirations. Although white femininity is a desirable asset valorising Chinese masculinity and national image, its value remains constrained, insofar as it serves China’s patriarchal domestic sphere.

The conclusion synthesises the book’s arguments, highlighting how marriage and migration serve as pivotal sites for examining the intersection of geopolitical and intimate projects. It reveals the complex relationship between national desire, family, marriage and race within China’s quest to realise the China Dream. The war in Ukraine further amplified these narratives, reinforcing the image of China as a rising force capable of stepping in where other nations falter. A relational approach to China’s interactions with the world, particularly through the lenses of gender and race, necessitates an exploration of the historical, geographical and normative dynamics that shape China’s self–other relations. Russia, in this context, serves as a critical node, connecting China to the racialised global order through its proximity, historical ties and shared geopolitical outlooks. The gendered and racialised dimensions of these processes highlight that national security and international relations are deeply intertwined with intimate relations.

Murat Sumer, Port Jurisdiction and Remotely Controlled Ships

Jurisdiction institutionalizes shipping regulation, rooted in State sovereignty. States act as flag, coastal, or port authorities. While UNCLOS prioritizes flag States’ jurisdiction, it also recognizes ports as enforcers of international maritime compliance and provides the legal foundation for State jurisdictions. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) creates treaties. The synergy between UNCLOS and IMO adapts the legal framework to emerging challenges. This paper examines the interplay between UNCLOS and IMO regulating MASS and its implications for port and coastal States’ responsibilities and navigational rights. This study assesses the navigational rights to MASS. While port States possess discretion in setting entry conditions, it discusses the legal basis of port State jurisdiction and key elements of autonomy. It explores the rights of semi- and fully autonomous ships to call at foreign ports and analyzes port States’ discretion in regulating MASS entry. Despite UNCLOS and IMO regulations hesitating to regulate ports directly, the advent of MASS operations necessitates port States’ role in ensuring compliance with international norms. This paper examines IMO’s mandate regarding the introduction of MASS. It questions whether IMO plays a proactive role in encouraging Member States, through developing Generally Accepted International Rules and Standards (GAIRS), to welcome such ships in ports.

This chapter examines the visual narratives through which China’s ‘China Dream’ of global rise idealises a particular type of international marriage: a union between a Chinese man and a white woman who is transformed into an obedient daughter-in-law absorbed into Chinese patriarchal structures. Analysing three Chinese TV dramas and a fiction film that highlight pivotal moments in Chinese–Russian relations across three decades of reform (1990–2010s), the chapter explores how these cultural products construct a consistent portrayal of the white woman – strong, intelligent, beautiful and independent – who ultimately submits to Confucian patriarchal values under the guidance of a Chinese man. By connecting televised portrayals of Chinese–Russian romance with broader political and public discourses on China’s foreign relations, this chapter uncovers the role of cinematic geopolitics in creating a hyperreality that bridges fantasy and the everyday.

This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

Introduction

Data convey information about greenhouse gas emissions, financial flows, and climate impacts. Such information is used to give meaning to the unfolding climate crisis and global efforts to respond to it. Moreover, data are assumed to increase transparency and accountability (see Gupta and van Asselt 2019), and related reporting and disclosure mechanisms work to facilitate continuous engagement with relevant governance fora and processes (Heyvaert 2018, 110–111). Importantly, in addition to supporting meaningmaking, transparency, accountability, and engagement, data themselves have emerged as a central means of climate change governance. They have become operational elements of institutionalized mobilization, organizing, and steering. At the global level, the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Secretariat, for example, relies on data to strategically structure governance processes, animate implementation activity, and coordinate between actor groups (Mai and Elsässer 2022), and at the transnational level, cross-border climate governance initiatives have begun to collect local climate data to position cities as central players in climate change governance (Mai 2024). Thus, rather than merely supporting or being the outputs of governance processes, data, in a very real sense, do governing work. They constitute and restructure relations between actors, create and sustain novel forms of power and authority, and disrupt existing modes of claiming legitimacy (see Johns 2021). This chapter refers to such governing work as the ‘datafication’ of climate change governance. As data transform ‘what counts as known, probable, certain, and in the process’ (Hong 2020, 1), they powerfully reconfigure existing and give rise to alternative modalities for governing.

In Africa, heads of government and civil society representatives have linked climate resilience to the urgent need to address the continent's debt crisis. The African Leaders Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change has called for a restructuring and relief from the debt as being essential to achieving climate goals, along with access to health and education (African Union 2023). A 2023 statement clarifies that Africa is bearing the social and economic brunt of global warming despite not being responsible for it. Dealing with the catastrophic effects of climate change on lives, livelihoods, and economies through loans is further exacerbating the ‘great financial divide’ between wealthy nations and African countries. This is neither sustainable nor just.

These negotiations reflect historical processes of social exclusion, economic dominance, and political control that have marginalized not just specific communities but also entire geographies. The climate discourse is not spared from this and remains vulnerable to reproducing inequities. The most recent reflection of this is Papua New Guinea's decision to withdraw from the 29th Climate Conference of Parties (COP29) calling it a ‘total waste of time’ (Bush 2024), as there remains inaction on the part of big emitters to reform the economic models to reduce emissions and rich nations to ensure _nancing.

Climate Justice seeks that the climate discourse reject exclusion and recognize marginalization of people and places. In doing so, it creates a complex process of embedding questions of power, hierarchy, fairness, and relief as necessary to understand climate change.

Introduction

India ranks seventh in the 2021 Global Climate Risk Index (Germanwatch 2021), and in 2017, it was the second most-affected country in terms of casualties related to extreme weather (Germanwatch 2017). Water pollution, food and water shortages (Niti Aayog 2019), waste management, and biodiversity loss (Kumari, Wate, and Anil 2014, 107) are just some of India's problems. Its large population coupled with a severe economic dependency on agriculture (FAO 2023) exposes it to severe vulnerabilities. Owing to its geography and high economic dependence on climate-sensitive sectors, India is one of countries most vulnerable to climate change (Harjeet Singh 2015). ‘Food security of India may be at risk in the future due to the threat of climate change leading to an increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods, thereby affecting production of small and marginal farms.’ (Ministry of Environment and Forest 2009, 78). As a protector of people's rights, Indian courts are legally bound to protect the environment.

The chapter's research method involves an analysis of the literature and review of the judicial precedent. The chapter aims to compare the judicial precedents of the Supreme Court of India and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to understand the evolution of their response to environmental litigation.

Article 48A in the Constitution of India obliges the government to protect the environment and conserve the natural resources of the country.

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.

The study of law suggests that its performances, largely through the format of trials, take place behind the closed doors of courtrooms. Little of the exterior would seem to intrude upon its routines and, vice versa, little of what might constitute law’s performativity occurs outside of its bounded architectural habitat. Yet this has not always been the case. Numerous examples of outdoor performances provide a rich study into the siting of legal performance. The argument presented in this chapter is that it was initially the outside that provided the primary stage and staging of law. Asserting the presence of law across the various and remote parts of the realm required performances of its majesty on the very surface of the earth. It required acts heralding, inscribing and publicising common law as the law of the land and so it was the land that had to become the physical platform and the scene of its delivery. The evolution of common law depended upon the rudiments of landscape, on the plotting of the countryside, and on the elemental matter of the earth. Such features formed a stage on which the emergence of common law not only took place but was very much performed.

Introduction

While initially piloted as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, the distributed ledger technology underlying Bitcoin, that is, blockchain, now extends to use cases beyond mere virtual currencies. Technologists and blockchain evangelists have been quick to overlook the excessive carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world's first cryptocurrency, and have attempted to expand the use cases of blockchain to areas beyond virtual currencies, finance, and payments (Huang, O’Neill, and Tabuchi 2021). This technology that brings together characteristics of decentralization, peer-to-peer computing, hash functions, asymmetric public–private key cryptography, and consensus algorithms to form a shared, immutable, and non-repudiable database is considered to have tremendous potential in fields such as identity and access management, healthcare, supply chain tracking, climate change, and so on (De Filippi and Wright 2018). Therefore, unsurprisingly, blockchain technology is now touted as the Panglossian solution to a myriad of problems ranging from financial inclusion to aid and climate change (Marke 2018).

This chapter attempts to ascertain whether the claims of blockchain as a solutionist technology for climate change, in reality, reflect and entrench the incumbent power asymmetries and the global digital divide in the guise of disintermediation and collective capitalism. This chapter applies the extant concepts of techno-colonialism and data colonialism to critically examine blockchain-based initiatives in the climate change sector.

Quintilian suggests that law be learned in significant part a comicis, from the usages, customs and comedies of everyday life. Starting out from the theatrical and foundational form of a legal dialogue between sovereign and philosopher on pedagogy, the body, letters and images, this chapter examines the fabrication of common law in terms of what the barrister Blount coined as comediography (comœdiographus). In whirl and jig, lawyers and playwrights of comedies share a trajectory from conflict to resolution, disruption to decision, that provides a harmonious conclusion for the audience if not necessarily the actors.