During multisite fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019, across two wholesale trading hubs in the midstream pipeline of the diamond industry (Antwerp and Mumbai), diamond brokers voiced a confounding claim: they know nothing about the diamonds they broker. I argue that this reveals a core contradiction of diamond brokers: their trustworthiness depends upon their ignorance of a diamond’s value to be deemed an impartial third actor to the transaction, while their utility as a search function depends upon their knowledge of diamonds to connect buyers and sellers in the market. In the current regime of pricing transparency, standardized diamond certificates, a pricing index, and e-commerce websites now instantly reveal diamond grades and prices, upending the necessary fiction of ignorance upon which brokers rely. These technologies are not mechanistically replacing the role of human middlemen, but rather are revealing the very structural instabilities and ideological contradictions at the heart of brokerage.

This chapter analyses the different procedural grounds of review and to what extent they may lead to annulment of an administrative decision by an international administrative tribunal. It shows that principles initially developed for court proceedings now play a crucial role also in administrative procedures. Although terminology and application may vary among IATs due to differences in administrative practices, there is mutual influence in their approaches.

This chapter reads scenes of judging and judgment in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54) in the context of debates about the nature and scope of equity as well as the value and limits of the laws regulating familial relations. Through Sir Charles’s and Harriet’s interventions in disputes concerning marriage, custody, and inheritance, the novel affirms the value of equity as the basis for judgments in the Court of Chancery while showing the need to apply equitable principles to everyday life. The central principle underlying Richardson’s equitable jurisprudence is impartiality. Sir Charles’s and Harriet’s ability to assume other perspectives allows them to mediate conflicts in fair and flexible ways without issuing arbitrary or subjective decisions. Richardson’s commitment to equity shapes his experiments with epistolary form, prompting readers to examine conflicts from multiple points of view. Through his accounts of domestic disputes and his formal experiments, Richardson shows the need to extend the era’s equity jurisprudence to rectify injustices enshrined in and fostered by English common and statutory law.

Despite being nearly universally recognised as a virtue, judicial independence has been challenged in almost all parts of the world. Some commentators even consider it to be so open to differing interpretations as to be a useless concept, that should be unpacked to its smaller components to be studied meaningfully. We are less cynical about the idea. According to our theory, judicial independence exists where powerful actors are unable or unwilling to inappropriately interfere with the workings of the judiciary. Judicial independence is thus a relational concept and always results from the interplay between the capacity and willingness of powerful actors to inappropriately interfere with the judiciary, and the capacity and willingness of judicial actors and their allies to withstand such actions. We distinguish three levels of judicial independence: de jure institutional independence, de facto institutional independence, and decisional independence. Courts are thus independent when powerful actors do not consistently impose their preferences in disputes they have a stake in, either by capturing the courts through formal changes of laws governing the judiciary, through rigging these laws in their favour, or by skewing judicial decision-making. By contrast, a dependent judiciary is the one that is captured, rigged, or skewed.

Impartiality as a property of government is central to many of the major constitutional concerns of liberal democracy. This essay tersely considers the nature and implications of impartiality in three main areas: the rule of law; the distinction between the right and the good; and freedom of speech. Because of constraints of space, each of the discussions in this paper is no more than a sketch of the complex matters that are at issue in debates over impartiality.

According to the value-free ideal of science, scientists should draw their conclusions in a manner free of influence from value judgments. This ideal lends itself to a variety of interpretations and specifications. The ideal also faces numerous challenges that call into question not only whether it can be achieved but whether it really constitutes an ideal scientists ought to use to guide their actions. The chapter considers whether and in what conditions the value judgments of scientists might prevent or facilitate the achievement of scientific objectivity. From the role of value judgments in science the chapter turns to the closely related question of the appropriate role of scientists in the formulation of public policies. In many situations, the consideration of scientific evidence and scientific research bears importantly on questions of policy. The chapter then considers the complicated relationship between the reliance of policymakers on scientific expertise and the goals of democratic accountability and the public good.

This chapter examines the brief but formative pontificate of Benedict XV, the most important in the early twentieth-century history of the papacy: Benedict’s return to the policies of Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) and, above all, his responses to the challenges of the First World War and its aftermath, transformed the scope and impact of Vatican diplomacy, restoring its prestige and influence on the international stage. More broadly speaking, Benedict set the agenda of the next two pontificates, those of his successor Pius XI (r. 1922–39) and Pius XII (r. 1939–58). They continued the policy of seeking to implement the new Code of Canon Law, and where possible by concordats with states, they would continue to seek reunion with the Orthodox Churches and Benedict’s postcolonial vision for the missionary outreach of the Church. They would also continue to follow the broad outlines of his initiatives in Vatican diplomacy through his commitment to seeking to play a role in international peace and security. Benedict’s policy of impartiality in war was not a passive one, but active and constructive, aimed both at providing humanitarian relief to victims and encouraging peace negotiations between the belligerents. His peace-making and humanitarian efforts reflected new forms of papal humanitarian diplomacy and have become a permanent feature of the papacy’s role in promoting international peace and security.

Chapter 9 concludes the book by highlighting implications that are relevant for academic researchers as well as policymakers. The book’s findings suggest at least three areas for future research. First, a more comprehensive analysis of the sources of perceptions of bias in conflict settings would productively inform scholarship and practice. Second, future work should investigate the conditions under which communal peace aggregates up to the national level. Third, scholars should examine whether governments and their partners succeed in leveraging gains from localized peace enforcement into states with robust institutions. The book also has two important implications for the practice of peacekeeping. First, given the importance of perceptions, policymakers must ensure that peacekeepers remain impartial. International actors perceived by local populations as relatively impartial are much more effective at promoting intergroup cooperation and facilitating the peaceful resolution of communal disputes. Second, given that communal peace in the analysis relies so heavily on the presence of UN peacekeepers, the international community must consider how to design peaceful transitions out of PKOs.

Chapter 3 presents localized peace enforcement theory. It first discusses the challenges facing individuals involved in a communal dispute. Reflecting on these obstacles to peaceful dispute resolution, the chapter outlines a formal micro-level theory of dispute escalation between two individuals from different social groups who live in the same community. It explains how international intervention shapes escalation dynamics. The chapter then shifts the focus to local perceptions of intervener impartiality, which the theory posits are a key determinant of whether a UN intervention succeeds in preventing the onset of violence. The identifies the importance of multilateralism, diversity, and the nonuse of force as critical factors shaping local perceptions and, as a result, UN peacekeeping effectiveness. Critically, the theory does not suggest that UN peacekeepers will always succeed, or that all kinds of UN peacekeepers will succeed. Indeed, perceptions of UN peacekeepers vary depending on the troop-contributing country and the identity of the civilians involved in the dispute. The chapter closes with a discussion of the most important hypotheses derived from the theory.

This chapter examines local-level peacekeeping operations in a cross-national context. The analysis draws on a dataset of nearly 400,000 georeferenced troop deployments in sub-Saharan Africa from 1999 to 2019. Consistent with the theory’s predictions, it demonstrates that increases in the number of peacekeeping troops deployed to local communities are strongly positively associated with decreases in the onset of communal violence. Since cross-national data of this sort cannot directly measure local perceptions of peacekeepers cross-nationally, the study tallies the number of peacekeepers from former colonial powers and neighboring countries deployed to each area as a proxy for perceptions of bias. The patterns further vary in ways that support the logic of localized peace enforcement theory. Specifically, the evidence shows that there is no relationship between the deployment of these two types of peacekeepers and levels of communal violence. The analyses presented in the chapter also detect a strong negative association between all other types of peacekeepers, likely to be perceived as impartial, and the onset of communal violence.