In a recent interesting contribution to this journal, G.A. Mawer suggested that Antarctica was first so named in 1890 (Mawer 2008). New evidence however reveals that Antarctica first received its modern one-word name as early as 1840 at a congress of Italian scientists. The new name was soon adapted for other languages, and its use in English can be traced from 1849. A hypothesis is advanced as to why alternative French and German names were coined later in the century. The first map to use the new place name was published in 1843, and the first map to show a complete outline of the continent, estimated from expedition reports, was produced in 1844. But nothing could become the settled name of the south polar continent until its existence was confirmed at the turn of the twentieth century.

In her essay “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “Nobody had been aware that mankind, for so long a time considered under the image of a family of nations, had reached the state where whoever was thrown out of one of these tightly organized closed communities found himself thrown out of the family of nations altogether.” Surveying the aftermath of the world wars, the same aftermath that eventually led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arendt found that a person had to be emplaced—the subject of a political space—in the state-oriented order of geopolitics to be cognizable as a subject of human rights. The stateless, being displaced, were excluded from such a regime of rights and from the global political community. Bare humanity, Arendt argued, was an insufficiently binding political identity. As she wrote in her arresting language, “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”

The Constitution of Man by George Combe (1828) was probably the most influential phrenological work of the nineteenth century. It not only offered an exposition of the phrenological theory of the mind, but also presented Combe's vision of universal human progress through the inheritance of acquired mental attributes. In the decades before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the Constitution was probably the single most important vehicle for the dissemination of naturalistic progressivism in the English-speaking world. Although there is a significant literature on the social and cultural context of phrenology, the role of heredity in Combe's thought has been less thoroughly explored, although both John van Wyhe and Victor L. Hilts have linked Combe's views on heredity with the transformist theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. In this paper I examine the origin, nature and significance of his ideas and argue that Combe's hereditarianism was not directly related to Lamarckian transformism but formed part of a wider discourse on heredity in the early nineteenth century.

Although most all contemporary studies of China and Africa focus on current economic or foreign policy concerns, this article provides a preliminary mapping of Africa-China cultural exchanges during the Cold War. Growing out of the Africa-Asia Conference of Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau forged third world solidarities via an alternative conception of postcolonialism based on the transnationalism of global South cultural struggle. By analyzing the cultural exchanges of the bureau, and in particular their definition of world literature, this article seeks to move beyond postcolonial scholarship that focuses exclusively on a vertical relationship between the colonizer and colonized. In so doing, it both reinterprets the Cold War from outside of an American and Soviet dichotomy and provides a critical cultural historicization to China’s current, and often controversial, presence in Africa.

This paper explores the implications of political risk insurance (PRI) in the regulation and governance of natural resources sectors in developing countries. Operating in a hybrid public–private sphere, PRI arrangements involve a more complex web of contractual and non-contractual relations than commercial insurance products, and parties to such arrangements are inserted into a much more intricate framework of legal and political governance, with correspondingly broader international and domestic implications. The paper argues that PRI represents a form of government rationality that provides a framework for organising and regulating the behaviour of actors involved in natural resource investments in developing countries. In natural resources projects where tensions regularly exist between the interests of the foreign investor, the host state and local communities, PRI arrangements can reframe the terms of engagement between these various stakeholders and redefine the host state's engagement with the broader international community.

Natural resources are critical to global value chains as minerals, good climate and fertile soil are commonly required for the beginning of the chain, with the consequence that any interruption in their supply threatens the chain's continued integrity. Trade in such resources provides a valuable source of income for resource-rich states. Yet exploitation of natural resources can result in their exhaustion and biodiversity loss, while their extraction can lead to environmental damage and human rights abuses, with the result that any positive contribution to sustainable development for resource-rich states is quickly undermined. Effective regulation is critical to maximise benefits and minimise potential harm. The WTO's rules seem ideally suited to allow the state to impose measures that militate against the overexploitation of the resource by corporations, whilst simultaneously ensuring that that regulation does not unnecessarily impede the flow of resources within the value chain. However, this paper will show that applying the WTO's rules to natural resource use in global value chains presents both substantive and normative challenges.

This paper contains three main arguments. First, tropical forests have become objects of climate and environmental governance under the REDD+ mechanism in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that combines legal, market and scientific rationalities with measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) technologies in a neoliberal green governmentality regime. Second, the current structures and institutions of governance are contradictory and international environmental law provides inadequate means for regulating and protecting forests. Third, these deficiencies point to the need for imaginative alternative forms of governance to prevent further deforestation.

States utilise international law to create opportunities within global markets for private transnational economic actors, such as multinational oil companies, to invest and/or operate within foreign jurisdictions. However, there is a lack of directly enforceable international mechanisms against these private actors when they cause environmental damage abroad. International law responses to this problem range from the establishment of international compulsory compensation schemes, the proposed expansion of the doctrine of state responsibility to include liability for private actors, and more recently through litigation in the home states of multinational oil companies. However, both international jurisprudence and US, Dutch and British domestic case-law reveal an ambivalence towards holding such private transnational economic actors legally accountable in their home state jurisdictions for violations committed abroad. Certain states (the US and France) that have suffered environmental damage from the activities of multinational oil companies have responded by reasserting their domestic regulatory powers to require immediate clean up and compensation, prior to domestic judicial litigation. Other states (Nigeria) are unable to achieve the same level of effective enforcement due to their weaker political and economic bargaining positions.

Long at the margins of international law, property is now among the key challenges facing international law- and decision-makers. A ‘shrinking’ planet and a polycentric international law regime provide the backdrop for contestation between different property concepts and claims. While presenting important commonalities in legal concepts and normative content, international investment law and international human rights law protect different and possibly competing rights, reflect different balances of commercial and non-commercial considerations, and embody different standards of legal protection. As the frontiers of natural resource extraction expand, natural resource investments can bring different property concepts and claims directly into tension. In this context, the articulation between investment law and human rights law influences the ways in which international law mediates competition for the world's natural resources, redefining the balance between public and private interests and reshaping spaces for the lawful exercise of state sovereignty.