This chapter begins by exploring the concept of legitimacy, which the CCP regime seeks to achieve in part through its project of legal construction. It employs official data and primary documents to present multiple aspects of access to justice nominally afforded by the legal system: training of a cadre of legal professionals, provision of institutions for dispute resolution—including mediation, petition, and litigation, establishment of state-sponsored legal aid, and implementation of an official campaign to imbue Chinese citizens with legal consciousness. It concludes with an assessment of China’s model of legal development, reviewing arguments about law and order, order maintenance, pure legality, normative and prerogative aspects of the dual state, and legal dualism. The illiberal system of law is a powerful tool in the hands of the party-state.

Chapter 4 uses original survey data to test the book’s theoretical claims. The first set of findings focuses on property rights. Disputes over state land takings are concentrated where land values are greatest: close to urban centers. The second set of results focuses on how the legal system channels conflict; grievances of rural residents over state land takings often go unresolved. In the wake of state land takings, rural residents use law to fight village leaders and neighbors in order to get a bigger share of limited state compensation for lost land. The data also reveal which villagers are more likely to take action in the face of land grievances. Possible actions include mediating, petitioning, litigating, protesting, and contacting media or a local People’s Congress deputy. Personal connections to the party-state are key, while legal knowledge and party membership have no effect. The third set of results focuses on the official project of legal construction. Data analysis shows that state legal programming changes citizens’ legal consciousness and increases regime legitimacy, as measured by trust in the party-state, for the majority of citizens. Fourth, for the minority of the population that directly experiences grievances over land, trust in the state declines.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

Food security is a common term within the region, but its meaning is unclear. This chapter argues that the term is a means to demarcate the Gulf’s access to food from the rest of the region; it submits it as a form of biopolitics that rationalises circulation, access and consumption. It shows how food imports are central to economic growth and development and how this is managed by governments. It also argues that food security is a basis for political legitimacy and the identification of problem and solution is a performative act.

This chapter presents a neo-Aristotelian account of stakeholder deliberation, arguing that a range of virtues is needed to ensure that consensus among stakeholders with large power imbalances is based on trust and authentic deliberation rather than zero-sum competitive interactions. We identify three stylized phases of stakeholder deliberation that highlight how the need to cope with vulnerability drives interactions with other stakeholders that, in turn, foster the development of a range of deliberative virtues. In the first phase, involving the acknowledgment of dependence and vulnerability, the virtues of justice, mercy, and benevolence help mitigate stakeholder myopia by enabling weaker voices to be heard. In the second phase, involving the establishment of common ground, the virtue of benevolence plays a crucial role in overcoming differences in modes of discourse by creating trust and goodwill between stakeholders and preventing deliberative processes from devolving into merely self-interested posturing and negotiation. In the third phase, the virtues of justice, courage, honesty, and practical wisdom reduce the risk of decoupling, ensuring that deliberative processes promote the flourishing of diverse market actors.

Chapter 2 opens the study of free speech in a globally networked digital environment by clarifying the meaning of the term ‘constitution’. Under the heading of transnational constitutionalism, intense discussions have taken place in recent years about constitutional thinking that seeks to break free from statehood and formalism. The question of the constitutional subject is of great importance here. In the twenty-first century, nation-states are still the primary constitutional actors, as they have been since the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contemporary era has also witnessed the emergence of transnational corporations, which have developed into powerful players within a globalised economy. As telecom service providers, equipment manufacturers, or platform operators, they have a particularly significant influence on the conditions governing freedom of expression. According to Gunther Teubner, transnational corporations should be conceived of as constitutional subjects. But what does this mean on the theoretical and practical levels? How can factual developments on the Internet be related to processes of producing constitutional norms? How should the relationship between state-centred and societal constitutional legitimacy be conceptualised? These questions are addressed within the framework of transnational legal theory.

This chapter analyzes how social policy in China has contributed to the well-being of the middle class and their trust of the government. The author argues that if we examine not just China’s earlier reform period (1978–2003) and the fast-growing era (2003–2012), but also the sharp Left Turn in recent years (2012–present), it is hard to fit China’s social policy into the theories of productivism or developmental welfare state that are often associated with the East Asian countries. China’s welfare system is an instrumentalist model which is centered on maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party of China. With this in mind, social policies have been actively used in the past few years to support two mutually independent but intersecting intermediate goals: maintaining economic development and social stability. Both are vital to the party’s authority.

A careful examination of the idea of democracy suggests that democracy is not best understood as a form of government that is unconditionally responsive to the preferences of the majority. In particular, a will-based conception of democracy—which assigns effectively unlimited power to the majority—can claim support neither in the intellectual history of democracy nor in a plausible interpretation of the idea of democracy. The western democratic tradition is contractualist, and that tradition works from the foundational intuition that legitimate power derives from the consent of the governed. That intuition justifies majority rule as an important element of social choice, but it also requires the entrenchment of rights protections as an element of any acceptable set of political institutions. If entrenched rights are to provide effective protections to liberty interests, they must be enforced by an institution that is not subject to majority control; a “constraint” on the will of the majority that is controlled by the majority is no constraint. Democratic institutions must therefore include an institution independent of majority control whose purpose is to enforce rights protections against the majority.

The “democratic” character of the representative legislature is routinely contrasted with the undemocratic character of courts administered by unelected judges. Since the legislature allegedly possesses a democratic pedigree while the courts allegedly lack such a pedigree, it is argued that the courts should defer to the legislature on questions regarding fundamental social values. I argue that this view does not survive a careful examination of the history and character of representative government and the judiciary. Representative government was designed to assign decisive political power to elites whose qualities distinguish them from the average citizen. The legislature, therefore, hardly possesses an impeccable democratic pedigree. The democratic pedigree of courts exercising the power of judicial review, on the other hand, is stronger than has been generally appreciated. The democratic pedigree of the Constitution is superior to that of statutory law because the Constitution represents a more fundamental and direct expression of the public will than statutory law. The courts, in exercising the power of judicial review to enforce constitutional requirements, can therefore plausibly claim a democratic pedigree—within their areas of competence—at least equal to that of the legislature.

How were seventeenth-century projects of wetland improvement remembered and revived in the centuries that followed? What remnants of wetlands past persist in popular memory, troublesome spirits, floodwaters, and nature reserves? This chapter traces afterlives of the turbulence and tumult generated by fen projects. In doing so, it weaves together the key strands of this book. First, new intellectual and political tools were needed to define and implement wetland improvement, reconceiving the scale of environmental thought and action in early modern England. Second, customary politics proved a powerful force in the negotiation of improvement as commoners intervened in the flow of water, the exercise of property rights, and the practice of sovereignty. Finally, coercive projects of environmental change expanded cracks in the exercise of central authority, becoming entangled in civil war conflict and imperilling the stability of improvement. It concludes by asking what conflict over early modern wetlands can tell us about the environmental politics of the Anthropocene.

What should we make of the dramatic appearance of the Leveller leader John Lilburne in Hatfield Level in 1651, at the height of a decade of anti-improvement riots? This unusual contact between central radicalism and rural unrest destabilises binaries between a zealous minority driving civil war conflict and indifferent provincial subjects. Fen projects instead expose the pluralism of political ideas in seventeenth-century England. These crown-led ventures polarised notions of justice and became entangled in the events and debates propelling the English civil wars. In Epworth Manor, commoners across the social spectrum asserted an inalienable ‘just right’ to wetland commons in the face of royal and republican coercion. The strength of customary politics extended far beyond the parish, becoming a powerful means to articulate opposition to improvement in conflicts that moved between wetlands and Westminster. Central governors ultimately struggled to exercise a monopoly over legitimacy or violence in Epworth, where collective action across almost a century repelled efforts to turn their commons into theatres of state power and national productivity.