Chapter 7, Language and Psychology, begins with a review of theories about the evolution of human language, focusing on biolinguistic and usage-based theories. The body of the chapter is devoted to the study of contemporary language use: How people use words to do things, usually things that involve other people. Such study is often based on the so-called action tradition in language studies. It focuses on language use as arising in people’s joint activities, including how meaning is typically negotiated and determined through both linguistic and nonlinguistic social interactions. Central concepts in these studies are joint activities, coordination, interactive repair, common ground, and social accountability. The chapter also contains a discussion of two ways of conceiving of how words get their meanings: the classical view and the anthropological view. After a discussion of different styles of thinking about language, we end the chapter by presenting suggestions for the psychological study of people’s talk and language use in social situations.

This conclusion pulls together the previous chapters. Arendt’s moral philosophy is, first and foremost, a moral psychology that turns on the concepts of thinking, judging, and common sense, and the catastrophic consequences of their absence. Its normative core lies in respect for human dignity, which she roots in the human conditions of plurality and natality. The chapter explains why Arendt’s early ambivalence about morality rests on mistakes. It then returns to four issues catalogued in Chapter 1: the problems of incongruity between person and act; the problem of principles and particulars; the problem of judgment; and the problem of moral realism. The chapter summarizes and expands on the solutions Arendt offers to these problems. It concludes by explaining the connections between Arendt’s moral thought and her ideas about international law. Holding perpetrators accountable for core crimes is one crucial way of acknowledging human dignity and of realizing the “idea of humanity.” Although Arendt is objectionably purist about the mission of international criminal justice, her contributions to its theory are impressive. They include a deep analysis of the crime of genocide, a critique of sovereign immunity, a recognition that states can be criminals, and an understanding of why some crimes are of international concern.

This chapter presents perseverance methods – science-based strategies to help you follow through, even when motivation fades. Instead of blaming procrastination on personal weakness, Life Design treats it as a normal part of the creative process. The Core Method, Nudging Nuggets, applies behavioral economics to create small cues and supportive structures that reduce friction and make action easier. Two additional methods target inner and outer support systems: DJ of the Inner Sound helps you tune into your internal self-talk and shift unhelpful voices, while Social Support Map visualizes and activates a personal network of people who energize, encourage, and hold you accountable. Together, these tools offer a more compassionate, strategic way to move forward – not with pressure, but with momentum, playfulness, and smart design.

This chapter explores when shipmaster conduct triggers Flag State responsibility. While individual acts are not attributable to States, exceptions arise from special State-individual relationships. Influenced by the shipmaster’s traditional role as agent and navigator, the modern role includes a range of internationally codified duties. If stemming from Flag State obligations, the shipmaster fulfills them, supported by two ARSIWA exceptions to non-attributability: (1) when individuals act under State control; (2) when the State fails to prevent conduct. Flag State responsibility for shipmasters’ conduct evolves in rescue violations. It arises when States fail to ensure shipmasters assist persons in distress where reasonably possible without endangering lives onboard, or when rescued persons face treatment violating international refugee law, including human rights law. This chapter re-assesses Flag State responsibility by examining whether shipmasters’ conduct is attributable based on their humanity or presence onboard. It also evaluates when private conduct is attributable to the Flag State, based on (1) organ/agent status under ARSIWA and (2) the State’s due diligence in preventing unlawful acts. Attributability depends on vessel ownership, breached obligations, and the State’s role in prevention. The chapter expands ARSIWA attribution analysis to autonomous ship operations, where shipmasters are absent or replaced by decision-making artificial intelligence.

This chapter lays the foundation for a theory that integrates external accountability (pressures from financiers and transparency regimes) and internal accountability (electoral competition and coalition maintenance) to explain the distributive politics of development finance. It also provides an overview of the data sources and mixed-methods research design employed in this book outlines the book’s core contribution, and offers a concise preview of the subsequent chapters to guide readers through the unfolding narrative.

The chapter analyses how the climate change action plan developed by the European Central Bank (ECB) as part of its monetary policy strategy review in 2020-2021 is aligned with the ECB’s mandate set out in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the Treaty on European Union. The Treaties require the ECB to integrate climate change considerations into its monetary policy and to contribute to the EU’s objectives regarding climate change, as established by Regulation (EU) 2021/1119, the European Climate Law. However, there are also legal limits on the action the ECB can take in this field. The chapter examines the key measures proposed as part of the plan from a legal perspective, including measures related to macroeconomic forecasts and models, the collection of statistical information for climate change risk analysis, the enhancement of risk assessment capabilities, asset purchase programmes, and possible changes to the collateral framework. It also considers the questions regarding the ECB’s democratic legitimacy and accountability that arise in this context.

The hypothesis at the outset of this contribution is that the position of central banks as independent non-majoritarian institutions needs to be reconsidered to the extent that they actively engage in climate change mitigation activities. It is argued that greening monetary policy calls for a reassessment of the democratic legitimacy of central banks, where the constitutional position of central banks has been informed by the model of the conservative independent central banker and justified by the specificity of their mandate and the vulnerability of monetary policy to political tempering. This also applies to the European Central Bank, whereby the question arises whether climate change mitigation should be delegated to independent central banks in the first place and, if so, what the challenges are in securing their democratic legitimacy for engaging in such activities. It is argued that a clear task must be left for the democratic institutions to take the necessary political decisions and to undertake the necessary balancing of interests in making the distributional choices necessary to effectively address climate change. The latter must not be left to non-majoritarian institutions.

This chapter summarizes the book’s main findings and discusses five major contributions to the study of transitional justice (TJ) as a powerful force to prevent criminal wars in new democracies: (1) the importance of conceptualizing organized crime as a hybrid field of state–criminal networks, where state specialists in violence play a central role; (2) TJ’s power to influence peace and war in the criminal underworld by exposing and sanctioning state specialists in violence; (3) the crucial role of state accountability for the development of peaceful democracies; (4) the importance of dismantling violent counterinsurgent states by means of justice before electoral competition becomes routinized in new democracies; and (5) the dangers that the survival of the counterinsurgent state and its militarized public security practices, and the persistence of criminal wars, pose for the integrity of democratic regimes. The book ends with a reflection on Third Wave democracies. In the mid 1980s, scholars of democratization warned elites and societies to renounce (or at least postpone) demands for accountability for past atrocities to avoid a military backlash that would compromise democratic stability. Accountability Shock draws a different conclusion: Failure to address a repressive past paves the way for a future of democratic instability, large-scale violence, and gross human rights violations.

This chapter develops the theoretical explanation of why transitional justice processes and the reckoning of a repressive history can prevent the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence in new democracies. It first discusses a new conception of organized crime where complicit state specialists in violence are central players in illicit economies and in the production of large-scale criminal violence. It suggests that these engagements often emerge in autocracies, where autocrats allow military and police forces to capitalize on their repressive power to kill political dissidents and on their de facto impunity to control the criminal underworld. If left unaccountable, authoritarian specialists in violence can become leading actors in the production of criminal violence in democracy by defecting to fight turf wars or defending organized criminal groups from positions of power or spearheading Wars on Drugs, Gangs, or Crime. It claims that when new democratic elites expose and sanction authoritarian specialists in violence through robust truth commissions and criminal trials, they unleash a powerful accountability shock that breaks state impunity and deters security forces from using state coercive power to control illicit economies through lethal force. Failure to reckon with a repressive history, and the survival of the violent state, sets new democracies on trajectories of power abuse and criminal wars.

This chapter uses the Latin American case studies presented in the previous chapters to identify general cross-national patterns and historically ground the theory and statistical findings about transitional justice’s (TJ) violence prevention effect. It first shows that during the Cold War all six countries developed counterinsurgent states with striking similarities under autocracy. In all cases, authoritarian specialists in violence capitalized on their power to kill with impunity to dominate the criminal underworld. It then discusses how TJ was a fork in the road. The adoption of robust TJ processes, combining strong truth commissions and criminal prosecution of perpetrators, allowed Argentina, Peru, and Guatemala to dismantle counterinsurgent states, preventing criminal wars and reducing violence and gross human rights violations. But the persistence of state impunity and the survival of the counterinsurgent state led to Wars on Drugs or Gangs or Crime and to turf wars that resulted in mass atrocities in Mexico, El Salvador, and Brazil. The final section discusses how in cases with robust TJ the institutionalization of accountability policies can contribute to the development of self-sustaining peaceful democracies, and how a reformulated TJ toolkit can serve democracies with persistent impunity, trapped in deadly criminal wars, enter into paths of peaceful reconstruction.

This chapter introduces the questions and puzzles that drive the book’s research, outlines the theoretical argument, explains the research design and multimethod approach, and summarizes the main empirical findings. By examining the contrasting experiences of post-authoritarian development in Mexico and Peru, it establishes two paths that Third Wave democracies followed: criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence or relatively peaceful development. Existing explanations focusing on poverty and inequality, state capacity, and history of political instability, predict that Peru would experience significant violence in democracy while Mexico would follow a path of relatively peaceful development. Yet by adopting an ambitious transitional justice (TJ) process to reckon with its repressive history, Peru prevented the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence and criminal wars while Mexico did not. The chapter presents the building blocks of the theoretical explanation. It discusses why we need a new definition of organized crime and large-scale criminal violence that places violent states and authoritarian specialists in violence at the center. It then explains why developing peaceful democracies requires dismantling the violent state and why TJ mechanisms are uniquely suited to this task. It concludes with a discussion of the multimethod strategy for theory-testing and the findings and their implications for the study of peaceful democracies.

Chapter 6 addresses the second theme outlined in the introduction. It first analyses whether the capacity to impose discipline as an organizational requirement for the status of party to an armed conflict implicitly presupposes the capacity to impose penal sanctions over members of the armed group. Moreover, it discusses to what extent an obligation to punish conduct with penal sanctions can be derived from the doctrine of command responsibility under ICL and whether the customary law duty to prosecute and punish war crimes, as applicable to states, can be extended to armed groups. The chapter argues that while courts and penal sanctions administered by armed groups might be a legitimate way to ensure respect for IHL and to avoid individual criminal responsibility on the basis of command responsibility, this conclusion does not translate into a positive obligation of armed groups as a collective to employ penal sanctions, let alone to set up judicial institutions. This conclusion notwithstanding, the chapter points out that there is increasing state practice requiring armed groups to ensure accountability within their ranks.