Before accessing the UN treaty bodies’ individual communications procedure, a complainant must have exhausted domestic remedies. This admissibility rule exists for good reasons, but it has limits. In particular, exemptions must be recognised in respect to domestic remedies which lack effectiveness, including accessibility. Regrettably, UNTBs are currently reverting to a formalistic and mechanical application of this admissibility rule. What justice requires, however, is the opposite: an expansive consideration of the plethora of barriers that prevent access to domestic justice, as well as a reflection about how each barrier can realistically be evidenced by a complainant. This can be achieved, this chapter argues, through an individual-centred, contextual approach, which achieves the aim of preventing the state from escaping international scrutiny, while highlighting the crucial role domestic justice should play in remedying human rights wrongs.

This chapter explores the progressive integration of environmental law and human rights considerations in international law, with a specific focus on the development of environmental access rights and the acceptance of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment from the early1970s to the 2020s. Concepts such as sustainable development and environmental rule of law, are an essential part of this evolutionary journey. A specific example of the integration of these concepts is the increasing recognition of environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs). It is argued that EHRDs play an essential role in enabling states’ realisation of environmental rule of law, the achievement of sustainable development, and the promotion of a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The chapter notes that EHRDs face escalating physical threats and legal risks by both government and private sector interests in many regions of the world, often entailing violations of environmental access rights. Such risks detract from the otherwise significant progress that has been made. The chapter concludes that there is an urgent need for greater recognition and protection of EHRDs through stronger legal and policy mechanisms as part of enhancing environmental access rights globally.

While regional survey datasets provide a wealth of information on the distribution, chronology, typology, and material culture of rural sites, many research questions concerning the rural Roman world require the integration of such regional datasets. This paper discusses the potential and pitfalls of such data integration drawing on the experiences of the Rome Hinterland Project.

The military history of the Song Dynasty is a tale of contradictions: the first three emperors sought to replace the militocracy that had dominated society through the first half of the 10th century with a rising class of exam-recruited civil officials. This goal was institutionalized by the so-called Chanyuan treat in 1005, which exchanged wealth, territory, and pride in return for peace along the northern frontier. The Chanyuan settlement inaugurated a national strategy based on accommodation over confrontation, the disparagement of military men, and the subordination of the military apparatus to strict civilian control. But the Chanyuan model was insufficient to contain the challenges posed by an unstable East Asian political order roiled by new states constantly jockeying to assert claims over status, wealth, and territory. Thus over the course of the 11th through 13th centuries, the Song court was constantly forced to amend or abort the centralized, defense-oriented, civilian-run Chanyuan model, only to reimpose variations once crisis was averted. It is this oscillation that shaped the evolution of Song China’s military institutions.

We often conceive of objects as fixing us – and themselves – in time and space. We place them by their dates, materials, manufacturers, and other markers of origin. Yet exemplary narratives from the eighteenth century – such as “it-narratives” that imagined material objects as sentient protagonists – prioritize objects in motion. Accordingly, this chapter attends to moveable goods and what their circulation unveils about the slipperiness and unknowability of material culture. It tackles mobile material culture from three intersecting perspectives: material culture’s multidisciplinary terrains; the movements of objects across and within cultures; the movements of objects between the material and the literary. In addition to foregrounding how circulation might enrich the multidisciplinary study of material culture, it examines the key role of the cultural and geographic movement of literary and fashionable things across a global eighteenth century. Rather than fixing what we know about objects in provenance and place, this chapter highlights how objects might unmoor us and invites us to rethink rigid disciplinary categories.

This volume offers a complex and multifaceted image of US public health and how the challenge to improve people's welfare became interwoven with the building of modern America. The development of the public health system in the United States has overlapped with many crucial changes in the country's governance that have taken place since the early twentieth century. The expansion of citizenship and civil rights, the tremendous growth in economic productivity, and the emergence of an overpowering and all-encompassing concept of national security, among others, have profoundly modified the federal state's functions, operations and power projection. At the same time, the implementation of specific public health policies and reforms – regarding immunisation, sanitation and occupational safety, for example – has been at the core of the self-assigned, global mission that the country pursued during the American Century, and the liberal order Washington built around it.

The contrast between these ambitions and the actual practices of American public health has been – and to a large extent still is – one of the most significant tests to American conceptions of democracy. As the authors of the chapters presented in this volume recognise, the story of the public health system in America is one of expansion and progressive reform, as well as long-standing constraints and discriminations linked to cultural, economic, social and political determinants.

To better identify and explain such tensions, the contributors of this volume focus mainly on two inter-related issues. On the one hand, they explored the dynamic relationship between public health and the American state, looking at how the country's public institutions have coped with the growing need for care of people in the United States and, given Washington's increasingly global outreach, also abroad.

Providing affordable, accessible and effective healthcare services to the highest number of people has been one of the main challenges of modern societies. Countries across the globe have tried to address the issue in various ways, often by adopting policies and frameworks very different from each other, mirroring the discrepancies in the structure and ideology of their political regimes. The result has been a patchwork of approaches to healthcare research, delivery and reform. Particularly for democracies, improving and ensuring access to quality healthcare – a key dimension of the UN Human Development Index – has been a defining struggle that governments have not always won.

This is also true for the United States, where debates about access to public health have been fierce and highly consequential for social change, and where life expectancy has recently seen the biggest drop in a century amid a deep economic and institutional crisis. The difficulties in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused over 1 million deaths in the United States, are the main reasons for this dramatic fall, but not the only ones. Drug overdoses – driven mainly by the opioid epidemic that has engulfed the country – are the second leading cause of decreased life expectancy and are evidence of another recent, major public health failure. Meanwhile, diseases long considered eradicated, such as polio, have made a dire comeback in states like New York.

These developments demonstrate how complex and multifaceted health governance is and how difficult it remains, even today, to address public health challenges effectively, even for a state like the United States, whose resources, reach and ambitions have grown immensely during the last century.