Britain’s constitutional evolution falls within the mainstream of European constitutional traditions, but the gulf between its governing practices and those adopted in the European mainstream has grown progressively wider. While most European nation-states have adopted written constitutions at critical moments of modern history, Britain continues to adhere to the traditional conception of a constitution as a set of laws, customs and practices that continuously evolve in response to social, economic and political change. This is one reason why Britain’s involvement in the venture of creating a European Union has always been rather awkward. In this chapter, I sketch the main constitutional tropes that have emerged in British thought and show how they express a constitutional identity antithetical to the assumptions driving the project of continuing European integration. I first introduce a series of constitutional stories through which the English have sought to explain themselves as a nation and a state and then consider how these accounts have evolved with the expansion of the English state into a British imperial state. Finally, I will indicate how these legacies ensured that Britain could never become an active participant in the European federal project.

It has been said that countries in East-Central Europe have their own brand of constitutionalism which celebrates the idea of national sovereignty. I shall argue that, when the question of sovereignty is treated in the framework of cultural imaginaries, we realise that this region’s constitutionalism is actually much less archaic than it might seem. Despite all the diversity encountered in East-Central Europe, there is a recurring cultural theme running through it: the idea of being a small nation that has suffered great historical tragedies. Yet no political or legal position with respect to sovereignty follows from the mere observation that the nation is small and in need of protection. As the history of East-Central Europe shows, depending on the kind of threats that are thought to besiege the nation, state sovereignty may appear either as a protective shield or an obstacle precluding membership in some larger political community. Even supposing that countries in East-Central Europe share a collective mentality centred on the category of the nation, it does not follow that they should be especially attached to state sovereignty in any traditional sense.

From the medieval to the modern, King Arthur is habitually but not neccessarily associated with white male sovereignty authorised by violence against racially Othered peoples. Arthur is always raced but he is not essentially white. This chapter is interested in both the lacunae and the articulations of ‘race’ in Arthurian scholarship, and in what emerges when we pay attention to the racial Self as well as Others in medieval and modern Arthuriana. Situated in premodern critical race studies, and exploring African American Arthuriana in particular, the essay argues that paying attention to the embodiment of Arthur once again reveals the protean nature of race itself.

Abraham Lincoln's political writings were the works of a practical politician, not a political philosopher. Yet, his understanding of American politics was deeply informed by wide and penetrating reading in 19th century liberal political economy. This reading convinced him to be a determined opponent of slavery, and a vigorous promoter of henry clay's 'American system.' both of these programs retained their hold on Lincoln, and when, after his election to the presidency of the United States in 1860, the republic was plunged into civil war over slavery, Lincoln guided the nation toward the erasure of legalized slavery and to an economy favourable to commerce and manufacturing. His victory in the civil war, cut short by his assassination in 1865, nevertheless changed the political culture of the nation for the next sixty years, and set the country on the slow but inexorable path of civil equality for the freed slaves.

Anglophone Arthurian films (including television) continually restage the triumphant break from the medieval that serves as the constitutive myth of origin for modernity.  The divinely appointed absolute monarch (Arthur) returns, but only to figure a sovereignty invested in the people.  Medieval Arthurian narratives explore the nature and exercise of political authority, providing ideological legitimacy for political institutions and defining the individual’s obligations within those institutions.  This chapter examines how modern Anglophone film and television remediate Arthurian legends, projecting contemporary notions of sovereignty back onto the Middle Ages.

This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.

The Declaration of Independence, usually regarded principally or even exclusively as a manifesto about certain “inalienable rights,” is better understood, especially historically, as a complex argument about popular sovereignty. Who exactly were “the people” who were entitled, as in the America of 1776, to secede from the British Empire and then claim their own rights of “self-determination”? The Declaration begins with the assertion that Americans were “one people.” But that was demonstrably false, even in 1776, and has become even more so since then. After all, James Madison, in Federalist 10, emphasizes the plurality of interests, including, religion and property, that generate “faction” and the possibility of tyranny of governing elites. Does the Declaration, even if complemented by the Constitution, supply enough of an “American creed” to supply the basis for genuine unity and political amity or does it instead plant the seeds for further division and even secession in the name of self-determination and government by consent of the governed?

This chapter examines the narrative of cybersecurity in China’s mass media, with a focus on the domestication of cybersecurity and its subsequent challenge to democracy. While much ink has been spilled over cybersecurity in (Western) democracies, less is known about the narrative and discourse of cybersecurity in an authoritarian context and its implications for global Internet governance and security. This chapter fills this gap by exploring news narratives on cybersecurity in China’s domestic mass media after the enactment of the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2017. Drawing on computer-assisted semantic network analysis of 9,094 news articles and commentaries, this chapter uncovers how the Chinese regime is adopting a discourse of cybersecurity to legitimize and consolidate its control over the Internet and to counter the challenges of global Internet connection. This domestication discourse is further utilized to place blame on the West for cyber threats. This chapter concludes with thoughts on the domestication of cybersecurity by authoritarian regimes like China and the challenge of defending cybersecurity.

This chapter examines rights, authority, and autonomy under the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in seventeenth century Southeast Asia. Exploring how the Company managed its employees, Asian treaty partners, and diverse populations under its rule, this chapter is divided into three sections. The first delves into the instruments that granted the Company a range of powers, including the Company charter, commissions, as well as employment and disciplinary contracts. In the 1640s these were later supplemented by the Batavian Statutes. The 2nd section explores the VOC’s interactions with Asian rulers by focusing on treaties and alliances. These treaties curtailed the liberty of Asian rulers, compromised their sovereignty, and reinforced their dependency on the VOC. The 3rd section shifts attention to the VOC’s administration of ethnic and religious communities under its rule.

The early modern period was a formative time for rights of asylum as older forms of sanctuary came to be replaced by new rules and practices. Various forms of sanctuary had already existed in the ancient world. Both ancient Greece and Rome knew ‘sacred and inviolable spaces’, often associated with particular gods, where the law did not hold and the persecuted were able to hide. In early Christianity too, sacred places of worship served as places of asylum – a concept that was carried over into the Middle Ages, where church sanctuary could protect an individual from the force of the law and thus contributed to establishing the Church as a separate jurisdiction. This competing jurisdiction came increasingly under attack with the Protestant Reformation, when secular rulers centralised power in their own hands and church sanctuary was successively restricted and finally abolished.

When early modern writers invoked the right of resistance their intentions were generally directed at addressing two fundamental ideas in the conceptual catalogue of political philosophy: sovereignty and liberty. Both of these concepts have played a major role in the history of political thought, each undergoing a crescendo in the late medieval period to become the dominant actors on the stage of early modernity. But their historical development cannot be separated from the dawn of certain ideas about resistance, which evolved in parallel and served as a fulcrum for debates about the origin and nature of political authority, as well as the boundaries and implications of subjection to political power. It was precisely through the construction and appeal to a right of resistance that many contemporary thinkers canvassed the fundamental questions of what is the state and what is its ultimate raison d’être.

Emperors generally did not worry that pardoning crimes and revoking associated punishments would constitute an injustice to victims or erode the legality of the law, as sovereignty was often understood not only in relation to the body politic but also through the framework of parenthood. When individuals of flesh and blood were translated into aggregations of nameless parts of a unity which was represented by the emperor, the suffering inflicted on the victims and the suffering inflicted on offenders by punishment were metaphysically equivalent – both were detrimental to the whole body. Whereas the emperor punished offenders primarily to maintain the order of the whole, he could also pardon offenders on behalf of his people – the parts of the whole – if it served the interests of his empire. Furthermore, Han emperors also claimed to be the mother and father of their subjects, whose compassion compelled them to grant imperial amnesties to all under Heaven. Therefore the justice that protected individual interests was required to be compromised with mercy and love. However, frequently pardoning culprits on a large scale directly paralyzed the justice system.

In exploring the politics of corporate versus small-scale mining of rubies and the ongoing struggles over a potentially enormous rare earth element (REE) deposit, this chapter hinges upon a critical analysis of transparency, opacity, and the politics of sovereignty in a country that is increasingly framed as a synecdoche for climate change in this century. Recent decades have seen the growth of two emergent forms in the international aid industry: (1) transparency and accountability initiatives (TAIs) that endeavor to bring aid organizations in line with standard expectations around their operations; and (2) modest, small-scale do-it-yourself (DIY) aid projects that emerge from and depend on trusting relationships between benefactors and beneficiaries. This chapter considers the ambiguous coexistence of these forms, drawing from ethnographic research with a small-scale healthcare project in Madagascar to illustrate how DIY aid can be effective (for better or worse) despite operating outside the purview of TAIs.

Between the 1570s and 1680s, England established more than two dozen overseas colonies and trading posts throughout the world. In mainland North America, the colonies included Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and several other New England colonies, North and South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, colonies were founded in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Barbados, among several others, to which Jamaica was added by conquest in 1655. Various trading posts, or factories, were established—usually with the permission of the local populations—in Hudson’s Bay, India, Africa, and the East Indies. As a result of these activities, by the end of the seventeenth century, more than half a million English subjects, or about ten per cent of the nation’s population, lived across the seas.

The expression ‘divine right’ might sound obsolete to modern ears; indeed, it might recall images of an archaic and irrational society. In early modern Europe, things were far from it. As we shall see, divine right represented a systematically argued philosophical theory at the centre of which stood the justification for strong, earthly, power. Divine right is here understood in a specific political sense since it mainly concerns the authority of monarchs (not of bishops and not of republican governors). Such theory argued that God had given power ‘directly and immediately’ to kings, not to the people. Hence the ruler was accountable to none but God; had always to be obeyed; and held unlimited power (consequently, no form of resistance was legitimate). Divine right theory had at its core the idea, and the practice, of the individuality of kingly right, not of people’s individual rights. It expounded a subjective right, not an individual one.

Since Richard Tuck published his influential study The Rights of War and Peace in 1999, the works of the Italian civil lawyer and Regius professor of civil law at the University of Oxford, Alberico Gentili (1552-1608), have received much scholarly attention. Tuck presented Gentili as the foremost representative of the ‘humanist’ tradition in the domain of the law of war, and he also attempted to show that the early political writings the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1643) wrote as ‘a major apology for the whole Dutch commercial expansion into the Indies’, were very much in this same tradition. Although Tuck referred in this context mainly to De Indis as well as to the first edition of De jure belli ac pacis of 1625 and conceded that Grotius introduced a different, more substantial account of human sociability in the later editions of his main work, his assessment of Grotius’ natural law theory has triggered numerous critiques and prompted scholars to compare Gentili’s and Grotius’ position on various issues.

This chapter lays out the book’s argument in two parts. First, it first develops the concept of self-determination as understood by state and non-state actors in the Global South to apply to the legitimate exercise of power in the international system. Rather than requiring strict sovereignty and exclusion of outside actors, self-determination is about the nature of cooperation and international involvement. It requires that people, through their governments, be able to domestically affirm international rules and to meaningfully participate in their enforcement. The second part of this chapter explains how establishing regional organizations as an authority over issue areas can be a strategy for realizing self-determination and why, in the case of human rights, it necessitated compromising on the norm of non-interference. This strategy is effective at deterring pressure from Western governments because it combines and appeals to widely held beliefs about the legitimacy of self-rule with beliefs about the importance of exercising power through international organizations.

Why have regional organizations become authorities over human rights and international intervention, and what explains the differences in regional authority across different regions? Why did leaders in some parts of the Global South go from rejecting any interference to arguing for the central role of regional organizations in international interference? This chapter introduces the central questions addressed by this book and provides an overview of its core argument, focusing on the creation of new regional authority at one important moment: the emergence of regional organizations as authorities over human rights. This was the first time when leaders in the Global South changed from arguing for complete non-interference to arguing that legitimate interference should be carried out by or with the involvement of regional organizations. They did so as a strategy of subtle resistance to new challenges to self-determination, in the form of economic enforcement of human rights by Western governments. In regions targeted by this enforcement, leaders responded by establishing their regional organizations as authorities over human rights, accepting regional interference for the first time.