Sephardi women in the Mediterranean, whose vocality was primarily confined to private spaces, used singing in situations of danger as a beacon to deploy networked connections of protection. Before the heritagization of Judeo-Spanish repertoire in the late twentieth century following massive emigrations from the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Balkans, female Sephardi voices were deployed as a manner of portable salon. This chapter demonstrates how women used their voices, and the cultural capital embedded within communicative functions of timbre, affect, volume, and silence to resist sexual aggression, assault, and coercion. Using two case studies from urban Mediterranean Judeo-Spanish, one from Bulgaria and the other from Morocco, this chapter unpacks how this intersectional minority deployed voice as a powerful creator of enclosed and safeguarding space. In these cases, women’s voices pushed their traditionally inner salons outwards, enacting a vocal protective shield semiotically prevalent in Sephardi communities.

At nightfall on 20 May [1947], I had just left the site where we maintained our radio communications equipment and was on my way home when two comrades suddenly appeared and seized me as I passed the entrance to this building. They said: ‘You walk past here every day. Today we would like you to come in for a chat.’ Since we were close to a sentry point and they had already seized me, resistance seemed pointless, so I entered the building with them. By coincidence, our equipment had malfunctioned that day and I had not been able to send or receive any messages, so when they frisked me, they did not find any incriminating papers on me. I was then taken to another room and told to wait. The sudden and unforeseen turn of events had made me panic and tremble, and my heart beat like mad, but I now got a moment’s respite and did my best to calm down. Worrying whether the terror I felt would be obvious, I sought to compose myself. I also thought about how best to deal with the impending interrogation.

When he was arrested by the Harbin Public Security Bureau in December 1949, Yang X was thirty-one years old and working as a teacher in one of the most prestigious middle schools in the city. A former member of the Guomindang intelligence and security services, the Juntong, he no longer maintained any active links to the organisation that in 1946 had become the Republic of China’s Ministry of National Defence Protection of Secrets Bureau, but he remained in touch privately with some of his old colleagues. While he was in police custody, officers from the Political Protection Division developed a profile of him and, after just over half a year, they concluded that he would be amenable to an attempt to be recruited as an agent. Below is the handwritten memorandum deposited in Yang’s Agent Personal File that documents the hands-on advice his rookie recruiter took from a final pre-recruitment pep talk by a senior officer on how to conduct the all-important elicitation talk with Yang.

This chapter discusses the relation between ‘Morals’ (Sitten, Moral) and ‘Right’ (Recht) in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Two questions should be distinguished: (1) Are Kantian Morals necessary for Kantian Right in the sense that the latter presupposes Kant’s specific account of morality? (2) Is Kant’s account of Morals sufficient to justify his conception of Right, in the sense that the fundamental principles of Right can be derived from, or normatively justified by, the Categorical Imperative (or some other element of Kantian Morals) without additional normative principles? With respect to the first question, it is argued that Kantian Right presupposes a central aspect of Kantian Morals: the idea of moral universality, where moral rights and duties are the same for all. This idea must be distinguished from the Categorical Imperative introduced in the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. Concerning the second question, it is argued that only when applied to individual juridical (coercible) rights does the idea of moral universality result in a Kantian conception of Right. Thus, Kant’s conception of Morals alone is not sufficient to derive juridical rights and duties.

Kant is often read as being committed to the idea that morality is within our control, leading him to develop an ethical theory in which there is no room for moral luck. Kant’s political and legal philosophy, by contrast, is taken to be concerned with external actions, in particular with their effects on the freedom of others, and thus seems to be far from immune to luck. From this perspective a significant chasm opens up between ethics and right, making it hard to see how right could be derived from ethics and how both of them could be integrated into a unified theory based on a single supreme principle. This chapter argues that the role of luck in Kant’s practical philosophy needs to be reconceived and that considerations of luck do not stand in the way of a unification of ethics and right.

At the heart of this chapter lies the following question: how can the fact that lawful behaviour can be enforced be explained against the background of Kant’s moral philosophy? I argue that without grounding Right in morality we cannot even understand coercion as a normative problem. The reason is that for Kant coercion becomes problematic only vis-à-vis persons, because they – being ends in themselves – can legitimately claim not to be coerced (1). This does not mean, however, that coercion is completely inadmissible according to Kant. For by defining equal, relational freedom as a sphere of non-domination, the law also defines a sphere in which coercion is permissible because it is morally unproblematic and requires no justification (2). Tracing back coercion to the limits of autonomy, however, does not only explain why coercive force is ‘deducible’ from moral autonomy (and the Categorical Imperative as its principle). Even more, this requires us to reconsider whether Kant can consistently argue against the external enforceability of internal perfect duties (e.g. the prohibition of suicide) (3).

A framing case study examines a debt dispute between a Wall Street investor and Argentina that resulted in the seizure of an Argentine warship in Ghana. Then the chapter tackles the topic of upholding international law. The chapter discusses: (1) international legal enforcement, including major bodies, when these bodies refuse to rule, and access to non-state actors; (2) domestic legal enforcement, including jurisdiction and various forms of immunity; and (3) political enforcement via coercion and persuasion.

A key source of CPC power is its control of the armed forces, which it can mobilize not just for national defence but also to preserve the regime. This chapter examines the CPC’s evolving relationship with its military wing – the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In previous decades the PLA has enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from the CPC’s civilian leaders. The Central Military Commission (CMC), which oversees the armed forces, has maintained a status commensurate with the Politburo, partly as a result of the fragmentation of control mechanisms. Since coming to power Xi Jinping has worked to bring the armed forces under his direct authority, but it remains unclear the extent to which direct control mechanisms can be institutionalized. This chapter examines the new features of CPC–PLA relations in the Xi era.

Chapter 7 studies how Kasımpaşa, nearby the Arsenal, transformed into working-class neighborhoods, focusing on the complicated connections between migration networks, labor coercion, industrial production, and urban modernization.Utilizing wage and population records, it demonstrates how shipbuilding was central to the district’s demography and culture, and how regional and occupational networks were significant in settlement patterns. It investigates the connections between forced labor draft (particularly from the Black Sea coasts and Alexandria/Egypt), the increasing visibility of bachelors, the settlement of working-class families, and the urban policies and elite perceptions towards the district. It investigates the social, cultural, and economic divergence between Kasımpaşa and the adjacent Galata-Pera axis in Istanbul, the epicenter of urban reforms in the Tanzimat Era. It highlights the emergence of a working-class culture, and analyzes the proletarian experiences of working-class families and the increasing contention between working-class men and women and the Ottoman state, by focusing particularly on strikes and petitioning.

From the late sixteenth century, foreign engineers promoted new hydraulic technologies in England. Yet, their techniques were not alone sufficient to implement wetland improvement at a grand scale. Drainage projects generated local controversy almost everywhere they were proposed. Disputes pivoted on thorny questions about who was empowered make decisions about the management of water and land, and by what means. Under the early Stuarts, the crown and its ministers began to act as instigators and facilitators driving forward fen projects. The use of increasingly coercive methods to suppress and circumvent local opposition became entangled in wider constitutional controversies about the limits of royal authority and definitions of the public good. Wetland communities were active participants in debates about the economy and morality, environments and justice, consent and legitimate authority. Customary politics proved a powerful force, unravelling a litany of proposed projects in the early seventeenth century. This impasse was broken when Charles I launched the first state-led drainage project in Hatfield Level in 1626, yoking coercive authority to transnational expertise.

Cuba’s current economic struggles are due to a number of factors. These include an economic structure resulting from colonialism and neocolonialism and Cuba’s geopolitical alliance with the Soviet Union, which had mixed results in terms of economic performance. In the twenty-first century, there have been attempts in Cuba at market-oriented structural reforms, without a great deal of success. Thus far, these reforms have not shown major significant macroeconomic effects. However, it cannot plausibly be denied that Cuba’s post-1959 development strategy has been severely impacted by the system of unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the US. The US’s system of unilateral coercive economic sanctions disrupts Cuba’s international economic relations by making it expensive and risky for other countries to do business with the island and causing Cuba’s investment in infrastructure to perform below expectations. Sanctions create obstacles to accessing new technologies and foreign direct investment for key sectors of the Cuban economy, such as biotechnology and tourism, both of which are important elements of Cuba’s development strategy. Consequently, the US system of unilateral coercive measures affects Cuba’s overall economic health, has inflicted considerable damage to the Cuban population, and has interfered in many ways with the realization of Cuba’s development goals, violating the island nation’s right to development.

This chapter concludes the book with a discussion of how China’s model of digital governance applies to China post-Covid and after the anti-trust campaign. Popular corporatism emerged from policy decisions aimed at addressing the digital dilemma and is shaped by reflections on and learning from the past. These decisions involved conversations with technology companies and their profit-seeking innovations, which offered solutions to concrete policy problems. However, such conversations were not devoid of contestation when interests misalign. The anti-trust campaign reveals the challenges in reducing corporate influence while reaping the benefits of data concentration. Citizens are not easily fooled either, as seen in protests against the abuse of government-led social credit ratings in enforcing China’s zero-Covid policy. Since the logic of popular corporatism is not unique to China, the chapter discusses implications for understanding the role of Chinese, Russian, and US-based technology companies in other authoritarian contexts. An important precondition for the application to other contexts is the state’s economic resources. Concluding with an eye on liberal democracy, the chapter emphasizes one key lesson from China’s digital governance – the power of a positive vision in uniting the interactions between the state, platform firms, and citizens.