This chapter treats the aesthetics of human action. It begins by taking up athletic contest in particular, for insofar as the performance of athletic action serves to make conspicuous how an otherwise given, natural body becomes the vehicle for a striking realization of spirit’s freedom and autonomy, its eventful unfolding can serve as a kind of aesthetic standard for assessing the other forms of action as well. However, most of our actions prove to be rather lackluster in comparison, and when Hegel turns to the aesthetic prospects of practical life in the context of modern civil society and the state, he finds only what is prosaic, action here being defined on all sides by contingency, dependence, and exposure to external forces. Hegel would have us see that the aesthetic limitations of practical life are rooted in inherent, ontological limitations of practical life itself – what this chapter calls the tragedy of the practical – implying that there is no question of seeking a higher form of practical life that would be free of such limitation. This limitation is surpassed only by redefining ourselves, not exclusively in practical terms but in the terms of “absolute spirit,” whose first form is art.

This chapter reviews the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s (WGAD) approach to issues of evidence and burdens of proof. It aims to provide a useful point of comparison with the UNTBs’ evidentiary procedures. The WGAD has developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to evidence, providing strong incentives for other decision-making bodies to take up its conclusions and procedures. In this chapter, the following arguments are substantiated: first, that the Working Group’s increasingly formalised and standardised approach to evidence reflects the maturing of the Working Group and its entrenchment in the ecosystem of human rights bodies; second, that its nuanced evidentiary approach can serve to enhance its credibility with states and claimants, in order to increase compliance rates; and third, its detailed approaches to evidentiary standards and challenges could provide precedents for UNTBs with individual claims mandates to follow a similar approach.

A popular belief in democracy as the core value of the Constitution has contributed to several innovations that circumvent the Framers’ constraints on democracy. Primary elections for selecting candidates including for the president have empowered the political parties and their core constituencies. The Supreme Court’s one-person-one-vote mandate for all state legislative elections has disempowered local communities, gerrymandering has become the norm for the creation of representative districts, and the 17th Amendment has diminished the influence of states as distinct political entities. Direct democracy in the form of referenda and initiative has compromised the filtering benefits of representation.

From the founding of the Constitution, there has been a steady expansion of national power and an erosion of state powers. Notwithstanding the enumeration of its powers, Congress has enacted legislation impacting almost every aspect of American life. The Supreme Court has, with rare exceptions, accommodated the Congress’ intrusions on the powers of the state governments.

As the Framers anticipated, factions remain a powerful force in American politics. The founding generation disagreed about much, but there was a broad consensus that factions, the inevitable companions of democracy, lead to democratic excess and the abuse of power. Ironically, the factor most responsible for the continued influence of factions and particularly for the dominant influence of majority faction has been the steady democratization of the American constitutional system. The Framers would not be surprised. The best prospects of constraining the negative influences of faction are restoration of the balance between state and national powers and acceptance of the need for constraints on simple majority-rules democracy.

The Framers’ overarching theories for the control of faction included representation as a filter of popular passions, union, and an extended republic to limit the influence of factions by multiplying the number of distinct and competing interests, and divided sovereignty between the state and national governments. The theory of representation was familiar from their British heritage, but their theories of an extended republic and divided sovereignty between the national and state governments diverged from accepted political principles of the eighteenth century.

Failure to adequately constrain factions is reflected most prominently in partisan gridlock in Congress, Congressional abdication of constitutional authorities and responsibilities, the political divide in the appointment of federal judges, the perception of partisan influence on judicial decisions, and the growth of the administrative state.

Although Thomas Hobbes is often portrayed as an egoistic and atomistic thinker, his political philosophy has a great deal to say about vulnerability and relational equality. This chapter draws out four insights from his political philosophy to apply to contemporary political philosophy. First, he outlines a compelling psychological theory that connects our ontological and social vulnerability. Second, he argues the best strategy for minimising our ontological and social vulnerability is to establish a society of equals, thus asserting a vital connection between vulnerability and relational equality. Third, he identifies some key powers that states must possess to establish and maintain equal relations among people and assuage our vulnerabilities. Fourth, he offers a unique justification for relational equality arguing that it is valuable not so much because it represents an authentic expression of our basic human equality as because it is instrumentally necessary to tamp down our anxieties and promote peace.

This chapter moves from low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats to higher-ranking officials and their ‘great projects’ (al-masharī‘ al-kubra) – the revolution’s signal achievements in governmental media. The chapter describes how this type of achievement was considered extraordinary, given the struggle to coordinate across fragmented and conflicting state institutions. Moreover, the chapter analyses one of the Ministry of Culture’s greatest and longest-lasting projects: to build a new Egyptian human being (binā’ al-insān al-miṣri). I argue that the need to cultivate the Egyptian masses was not purely born from a desire to civilise, but by a political imperative to build a new people to be governed by the revolutionary command. In contrast with Younis’s pejorative description of the people envisaged by the Revolution as a ‘mass’ (gumū‘) or a ‘herd’ (qatī‘), this chapter presents the meliorative side of the same project: the yet-to-exist People as a collection of ‘righteous citizens’ (muwaṭinīn ṣāliḥīn).

The introduction begins with the book’s central argument: Egyptian cultural and media institutions have constructed a coherent state project after the 1952 revolution through a praxis of ‘achievement’ (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). Inspired by the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state, the book intervenes in the longstanding historiography on the Nasser era to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance have worked to create a unified state-idea after 1952, while constituting a bureaucratic corps on a similar ideological basis. Such bureaucrats, as well as higher-ranking officials and ministers, are central actors in the book’s narrative. The introduction also reviews the book’s main sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival visits in institutional repositories and personal libraries, as well as regular dives into the second-hand book market in Cairo.

At the turn of the twentieth century, agriculture in the Gulf was characterised by pastoralism, oasis horticulture, and irrigation systems. As a result of the emergence of the region’s nation states and the oil economy, these activities underwent decline and were replaced by forms of agribusiness and large-scale agriculture. The most conspicuous result of this was the establishment of large enclosures in which members of the ruling class were allocated large areas of land and water resources. The scale of these projects was vast and ambitious. This frontier provided an opportunity for enormous enrichment, but it also led to the exhaustion of non-renewable water reserves. As a result, domestic production was scaled down by the 2000s, leading to an impetus for a greater emphasis on external imports.

Soon after independence, the relationship between private enterprise and the state changed. The industrialization policy made certain sectors of high priority – machines, metallurgy or heavy chemicals – and made it easier for them to access scarce capital and foreign exchange. On the other hand, traditional businesses in textiles, plantations and commodity trades were deprived of access to capital and modernization opportunities, or even banned, along with moneylending. As some of the highly protected priority industries failed to become profitable, and bankruptcy accumulated in the low-priority sectors like textiles, the strategy became unsustainable. After a sharp break around the 1980s or 1990s, private enterprise faced a more liberal environment where it was easier to access capital and technology abroad and invest in offbeat fields. New patterns of inequality in the corporate sector developed again, now due to the challenges of operating in a globally connected and integrated world. The chapter presents this two-stage transition in a chronological narrative.

Although rarely acknowledged, Buddhist monastics are among the most active lawmakers and jurists in Asia, operating sophisticated networks of courts and constitutions while also navigating – and shaping – secular legal systems. This chapter surveys the entanglements of Buddhist monastic law and state law in Sri Lanka while also providing a general overview of Sri Lanka as a multi-religious, multi-legal site. It introduces readers to the key methods and arguments advanced in this book, including arguments about how and why one should analyse legal pluralism ‘as a practice.’

How is monastic law practised in modern-day Sri Lanka? How do contemporary monastic jurists reckon with multi-legality? This chapter draws on archival and ethnographic research with Sri Lanka’s third-largest monastic community, the Rāmañña Nikāya, to answer these questions and explore the operation of monastic law today. It introduces readers to the Rāmañña constitution, court system, judicial training materials, jurisprudential texts and other features of monastic legal practice. It argues that monastic judges practise legal pluralism in ways that both resist and embrace the parallels between monastic and state law, engaging in a form of ‘double speak’ that, on the one hand, places monastic law ‘on the scale’ of Sri Lankan law while, at the same time, highlighting its superior, more-than-human status.

How should scholars and policymakers think about legal pluralism? In this Conclusion, I reflect on that topic, insisting that analysts should move beyond the question of whether laws, themselves, are or are not compatible. Instead, they should look at the practices of legal pluralism that make such compatibility seem natural or permissible, exceptional or impossible. I argue that inter-legal harmony is not a technical feat, but a social, political, and emotional achievement – one that is often precarious. Legal pluralism, therefore, implicates more than just the ‘stuff’ of law, but involves the shifting and recursive processes that help us to assemble normative worlds, reckon with diverse obligations, and find meaningful pathways forward through a changing and complex life.

Various critics have labeled Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah as a dictator novel, a dictator-novel, or a novel about dictatorship, forcing the questions that inform this chapter: isn’t there a well-defined genre where Anthills fits unproblematically? Is the African novel that thematizes dictatorship a sub-genre, or the unwieldy name for the genre from which the African dictator novel emerges? Or are they co-existent genres? If genres “change when new topics are added to their repertoires” (Fowler 233), I explore the germinal novels of disillusionment in the 1960s, the imprecise “dictatorial literature” and “dictator” novel descriptors used in the early 1990s for clues that illuminate the difference between the dictator novel and novels about dictatorship. Playing off Derrida’s argument that the word “genre” establishes a “limit,” a line of demarcation (57) that simultaneously creates “an edgeless boundary of itself” (81), I argue that this indeterminacy fits the African novel variously labeled as the dictator novel or the novel about dictatorship, and the delimitation should be flexibly located in the “edgeless boundary” defined by the themes and function the novels serve. Further, the rise of increasingly authoritarian rulers globally lends currency to the African dictator novel in unmasking their rhetoric of dictatorship.

Sri Lanka is the only Buddhist-majority country in the world without an official state-recognised monastic legal system. This is in spite of the fact that an entire section of the county’s constitution is dedicated to such a venture. How can one explain this? And why does Sri Lanka remain in this impasse? This chapter answers these questions by tracking a significant (and ongoing) series of attempts made by Sri Lanka’s leading intellectuals, educators, politicians, monks and legislators to ‘legalise’ monastic law (S: nītīgata kirīma) by creating some form of statute, tribunal or legal body that could blend monastic and state legal authority. Drawing on an un- and under-studied body of political and legal documents, it explains how a particular approach to legal pluralism – one motivated by a ‘purist’ approach to law – both motivated and sabotaged successive efforts to formally recognise monastic courts and constitutions in state law.

Why do similar conditions of legal pluralism lead to conflict in one setting and compromise in another? This chapter addresses this question by approaching legal pluralism not as an empirical condition – a multiplicity of legal orders that individuals navigate – but as a set of practices that bring order, structure and meaning to the obligations, codes and norms that one confronts. Drawing on three relatively recent case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the same set of normative artefacts – the same texts, norms, institutions, and authorities – can be assembled, interpreted, and mobilised in profoundly divergent and even agonistic ways. The first case study involves a monk’s attempt to gain a driving license. The second involves the issuing of identity cards for Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs). The third relates to a parliamentary bill designed to recognise monastic constitutions (katikāvatas) in law.