This introductory article challenges foundational assumptions that structure how international legal theory conceptualizes “the Global.” The prevailing approach remains anchored in a Eurocentric legacy that conflates the earth with a geometrically spherical, chronometrically linear, and cartographically fixed model of space and time. This triad has rendered “the Global” an ostensibly objective terrain—embodied by an iconic World Map of states that is presumably atheoretical and transhistorical. I argue this is a form of “misplaced concreteness,” which constrains international legal thought as it confronts increasingly fluid and non-contiguous patterns of global ordering that have become difficult to visualize via the reigning cartographic imaginary. Further, it ignores how “the Global” was constructed by multiple and intersecting types of power, which together manifested demarcations, borders, territories and states as proclaimed mimetic reflections of planetary reality. As contemporary challenges—ranging from e.g. climate change to cyber governance—create trans-territorial or planetary scales of consequence, time is ripe to unfold international legal theory beyond the legacy of a priori conceptualization. Accordingly, the special issue encourages bottom-up, practice-oriented approaches, inviting international lawyers to explore how global spatiality and temporality are actively (re)produced across diverse legal contexts—from mobility regimes and global value chains to counterterrorism forums and planetary systems. Rather than treating “the Global” as a fixed totality or singular map, this special issue reframes it as a historically engineered concept, shaped by ongoing practices of geo-political, geo-economic and legal world-making.

This article argues that the infrastructural and regulatory politics of Accra’s town council in the early twentieth century highlight competing and transforming understandings of ‘neighbour’ and ‘neighbourhood’. British officials and their elite African allies on the town council championed new forms of physical, social and economic infrastructure, which they touted as ‘modern’ improvements that would bring Accra in line with other major cities and improve life for its inhabitants. Accra residents did not reject all reform or innovation, but they did insist that urban development take place on their terms and in ways that would support their interests, informed by indigenous notions of civic virtue, social responsibility, moral community and spatial organization.

The rise of anti-immigrant parties has reshaped global politics, forcing mainstream parties to recalibrate their strategies. This study examines how Turkish political parties responded to the emergence of the Victory Party (Zafer Partisi) in 2021, which placed immigration at the center of political debate. Drawing on 1,089 parliamentary group speeches (2011–2023) and elite interviews with key party figures, we identified three key factors shaping party responses: voter overlap with radical-right parties; reputational risks associated with shifting policy positions; and access to political power. Our findings revealed five strategies: issue avoidance; amplification; cooptation; repositioning; and reinforcement. Unlike conventional models that emphasize voter competition, we highlight the role of political power in shaping party strategies, particularly in competitive authoritarian settings. This study advances the understanding of how mainstream parties navigate niche party pressures, offering a broader perspective beyond Eurocentric and electoralist frameworks.

This article, prepared for the symposium, “Law, Christianity, Racial Justice: Shaping the Future,” puts Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for a “revolution in values” and radical change in prevailing political convictions within the context of contemporary liberal theory, liberal legal thought, and critical race theory. The author argues that Rawlsian political theory and liberal legal thought largely overlook the need to transform the underlying political convictions that are at the root of racial injustice. In contrast, as did King, critical race theory recognizes the importance of extra-legal attitudes in producing and sustaining injustice. But, in part because of its skepticism of objective truth, critical race theory does not cogently reveal how convictions can be changed. In contrast to both liberalism and critical race theory, King’s pastoral vocation, experiential approach to truth, and commitment to wielding nonviolent coercive power offers a promising path for fostering changes in existing political and moral convictions and thereby opens a path to wider social change, including structural change. Given the importance of the pastoral vocation to King’s work, the author concludes that scholarship at the intersection of Christianity, race, and the law might have its most practical impact in the hands of the pastorate.

This article examines socialist globalization from the perspective of technical-labor internationalism in Mozambique, focusing on the final stage of the Cold War. First, it analyzes the four main pathways through which international technicians arrived in Mozambique: Latin American exile, socialist intergovernmental cooperation, European postcolonial humanitarianism, and African regionalism. It offers a cosmopolitan perspective on the relations that socialist Mozambique forged with the world. It then provides an inventory of the models of integration of these international technicians into the Mozambican state apparatus, presenting a framework emphasizing organizational rather than ideological aspects. It concludes that, while these paths were singular, they were not mutually exclusive. More importantly, they were instrumental in shaping the political affinities and frictions between international technicians in that cosmopolitan universe.

This introductory essay establishes the site of the neighbourhood and the social fact of urban proximity as crucial, conflicted and volatile conditions of colonial society. We show that the colonial neighbourhood was a highly contested space where diverse populations, stark inequalities and asymmetric power distributions played out in the most palpable manner. At the same time, it also emerged as an incubator of sociability, solidarity and protest across communal lines. The constant tension between physical proximity and profound inequality defined much of the social dynamics in the colonial city, making neighbours and neighbourhoods a most promising terrain of enquiry.

Galen’s most deeply held professional values included clarity of expression and the epistemological importance of clinical experience. Therefore, it is not surprising that he thought and wrote about communication with patients. His stories about patients show that he questioned them about their symptoms and history, and some stories explicitly teach the lesson that this type of questioning is important. His stories often quote patients indirectly or directly; they are often told partly from the patient’s perspective, and some contain constructions indicating that Galen paid attention to an individual patient’s exact words. In On the Affected Parts, his discussion of the vocabulary of pain – a problem in medical communication still important today – he privileges the common usage of patients over the technical vocabulary invented by Archigenes. He argues that only by listening to patients and their words can we construct a useful vocabulary of metaphors for pain that can bridge the gap in experience between physician and patient. He does not dismiss the words of women or enslaved patients; on the other hand, in a few stories where the patriarch of a family is present and the patient is female or enslaved, Galen’s dialogue tends to engage the head of the household rather than the patient. While some of his stories show off his ability to diagnose patients without talking to them, and others raise the problem of the lying patient, none of these stories would have meaning unless the patients’ words were normally crucial to clinical practice.

This paper discusses the syntactic behaviour of a small subset of object control verbs that have an implicative interpretation (e.g. obrigar ‘force’, impedir ‘prevent’) as well as the behaviour of superficially similar syntactic causatives in European Portuguese. By exploring different syntactic properties and giving special attention to inflected infinitives as complements to the two classes of verbs, we argue that implicative object control verbs are ambiguous between true control verbs (which are ditransitive) and syntactic causatives (which take a single, clausal, internal argument). To this extent, we present an argument defying Landau’s (2015) analysis of control under these verbs as predication. We also argue that the implicative interpretation of these verbs is not determined by the syntactic nature of their complement: This interpretation is maintained in both the causative and the control counterparts of the verb. By comparing implicative object control verbs and the understudied and superficially similar pôr a ‘put to / make’ and deixar a ‘put to / make’, and by highlighting the distribution and interpretation of inflected infinitives in their complements, we can argue that the latter are unambiguous syntactic causatives, which take as complement a small clause in which we internally observe control.