An ongoing structural problem for the normative political theory of punishment concerns the question of ‘just deserts in an unjust society’, explored here as the question of the guilt of the victim who victimises another. While political theory cannot justify punishment in such circumstances, the possibility of a moral and psychological sense of guilt still exists. This chapter juxtaposes liberal theory’s impasse with a moral psychology of guilt drawn from the psychoanalytic perspectives of Melanie Klein and Jessica Benjamin. Based on complex love and reparation, this account of guilt is an important way of understanding what is at stake in human violation. Classical political views of the impasse are explored in Kant and Hegel, while Antony Duff’s theory of punishment as communication is seen as seeking to go beyond these but remaining constrained by them. Klein’s account of guilt as a reparative emotion is linked to Benjamin’s ideas of the ‘doer’ and the ‘done to’ and the possibility of reconciliation through recognition. This deeper sense of guilt cannot cure the problem in political theory but shows how an alternative moral psychology of guilt is available even where such theory is exhausted.

It is often assumed that private international law is disconnected from geopolitical events. Scholars of private international law assume this because they generally perceive their field as neutral and apolitical. Scholars of public international law are unaware that the two fields were enmeshed in geopolitical debates. This chapter revisits the history of private international law to expose the reckoning of a variety of actors with the way in which the field was impacted by and could respond to the geopolitical events of the day. Puzzles surrounding questions of jurisdiction and choice of law would be used to translate aspects of state succession, conflicts of nationality, vested rights, statelessness, capitulations, conflict of laws and jurisdiction in the mandates or the extraterritorial application of Russian and then Nazi laws, into familiar questions of private international law. Some of these interwar questions have contemporary parallels. Engaging with the history of private international law can offer valuable lessons when considering private international law’s current role in geopolitical events.

The conclusion highlights the book’s main theoretical contributions and briefly sketches avenues for further research. It develops the monograph’s contribution to existing constructivist scholarship, which consists in demonstrating how international relations’ macro-concepts originate from ordinary and extraordinary interactions. The book’s primary focus is on the visual gaze. Yet representants can target other senses, and more research is necessary to direct attention to other sensory stimuli. Second, the Conclusion stresses the book’s contributions to the booming literature on recognition and misrecognition. The monograph can provide new perspectives for studying processes of colonization and decolonization as moments of misrecognition and recognition. It can also guide the analysis of struggles of recognition over sovereignty claims in the contemporary era. Concerns about recognition are crucial for questions about the future of the liberal international order. The chapter directs attention to representants for interpreting the efforts of major players from the periphery and the semi-periphery to acquire something akin to great power status. Other, hitherto more marginalized international actors, such as indigenous communities, and some terrorist networks are equally seeking changes in representants. The Conclusion also opens questions about how changes in communication technologies might trigger changes in representants that can have broader systemic effects.

The witholding of equal public recognition of national, cultural and language identity often causes severe anguish to sub-state peoples and sometimes leads to war. For this reason, political philosophy has an important responsibility to think through the moral grounds and the appropriate means of recognition. This chapter draws a moral map of the recognitional debate, outlining three normative camps: nonrecognition, monorecognition, and recognitional pluralism. I argue for recognitional pluralism, in two steps. The first step establishes, contra nonrecognition, that nations, cultures and languages are recognition-worthy, and that this is so for two reasons: they give people access to cultural life-worlds, and they are sources of dignity. The second step builds the case for a pluralistic means of according public recognition. To do so, I argue, against monorecognition, that egalitarian recognition of life-world access and dignity is to be the driving principle. Within the pluralist camp, I argue for the principle of equal services, which implies that the state accords comparable cultural services to the cultural groups that share a state or territory. Examples of this can be found in equal language rights regimes, egalitarian public holiday systems, as well as in multinational federalism.

Consociationalism is a distinct regime-type that is designed to deal with the problem of deep diversity, that is, a society divided by differences that are salient enough to consistently polarise groups over time in ways that makes governing together difficult. The defining goal of consociational regimes is social and political stability in a manner consistent with democratic values. The unifying feature of the various measures advocated to achieve that goal is the protection of salient social groups (or segments) from blunt majority rule, especially in areas of particular concern for those groups. But can consociational regimes become sufficiently stable over time? The way in which recognition tends to be prioritised in consociations above other democratic values, we argue, results in democratic deficits that provide resources to actors who would seek to challenge the regime from within. This observation serves as the basis of our claim that consociations are inherently unstable in the sense that they face the permanent risk of evolving into regimes dominated by the majority or into a spiral of progressive disintegration. Without making prescriptions, this conclusion leads us to briefly consider an alternative to consociationalism as a solution to the problem of deep diversity, namely centripetalism.

This chapter analyzes the norm impasses over the status of Kosovo after its declaration of independence in February 2008 and over the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia following the 2008 August war. Both cases happened within quick succession, revolved around the same well-established norms in the United Nations (UN) Charter – the rights to territorial integrity vs. self-determination – and showed an interesting reversal of sides: While the United States (US) and European states recognized Kosovo’s statehood and rejected Russia’s emphasis on Serbian territorial integrity, the US and European states rejected Russia’s support of South Ossetia’s statehood and emphasized Georgian territorial integrity. These norm impasses became protracted because each side received social support from key audiences, or at least only muted criticism, for their interpretations, lowering the cost of disagreement. These disputes show both the power and limits of international law: The US’s sui generis frame and Russia’s quasi-legal argumentation indicate that there is a strong collective expectation regarding using international law to justify claims. Yet these cases also indicate that protracted norm impasses weaken individual norms: Unclear norm meaning gives leeway for interpretation, which can be used to craft interpretations that appeal to important audiences and thereby reduce pressure to abandon contested norm interpretations.

Here I move from historical analysis to philosophical explication of the concept of liberty, and I introduce the main conceptual components of the idea of freedom I defend.

This chapter argues that freedom requires certain modes of social recognition of the status and activities of free persons. I explain this claim and contrast it with similar views of thinkers such as Axel Honneth.

Chapter 5 argues that in Burney’s Evelina and The Wanderer hats become a kinesthetic means for women’s metamorphosis and for asserting rights laws do not ensure when characters employ them to hide their faces and thereby establish some security from aggressive male intrusion and threatening social expectations, a use which reveals consumption’s positive aspects by linking fashion and necessity. This chapter explores how, in both novels, hats positively facilitate nonrecognition by shrouding or changing the face, allowing women to assert the right to privacy: the liberty they experience allows for self-recognition. Smith’s Desmond, in contrast, offers instances in which characters fail to recognize and to belong with the human and nonhuman, while their very lapse inspires other characters’ (and readers’) recognition of how vital that communion is, especially regarding ecological preservation. One of this chapter’s largest concerns addresses the relationship between characters’ ability to pay attention to things and their potential capacity to secure justice for themselves.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Avishai Margalit’s misrecognition-based theory of political humiliation. For Margalit, humiliation is primarily understood as the culpable denial of self-respect. Margalit notes that political humiliation usually takes one of three forms – removing people from the human community (as when we liken them to animals), the negation of control (as in torture), and ignoring or looking through others. After providing an account of this theory, we argue that Margalit does not sufficiently consider the contagious nature of political humiliation nor the possibility that the feeling might be present even when recognition is offered or, conversely, that we might be humiliated even by those whose recognition we don’t want. We also look at the conceptual differences between humiliation, shame, and embarrassment. We note that despite these clear differences the way these emotions are experienced sometimes feels similar. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the effect of technology and, in particular, social media on the character of contemporary political humiliations.

An often overlooked, but important, influence on human memory is prior testing. In this chapter, search of associative memory (SAM) and retrieving effectively from memory (REM) models of effects of memory testing are described, as applied to recall and recognition procedures. In addition, problems associated with not taking into account the consequences of testing are illustrated through a discussion of ongoing research on the von Restorff effect.

Coriolanus manufactures his unbending martial spirit through both a life-and-death struggle for recognition (Hegel) against Aufidius and a life-defining opposition with the masses. Both oppositions seek to annul the other. By alienating our sympathies, first from Coriolanus and then the people, the play calls for our dialectical political thought. It asks us to see a mutuality, and hence a vision of justice (Plato), that those onstage cannot. We see them in failure and deadlock. His family’s love invades Coriolanus as a foreign force and shatters his self-sufficient oneness. He “melt[s]” before his wife’s silent “dove’s eyes”. In such moments, the subject (indeed the sovereign) becomes an other to itself. It observes itself from a point of estrangement and sees a previously obscured truth. Coriolanus breaks from his warrior-god role (and the master-slave deadlock) and is opened to something intersubjective: he is “not / Of stronger earth than others”. In Hegel’s terms, the masterful subject endures an experience of bondage, whereby “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The chapter argues that Shakespeare turns his alienated audience into the “bondsmen” (or “slaves”) who must “work” on the play and think through its estranging oppositions.