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Judging Through Narrative explores the normative frames, or judicial narratives, that non-Muslim courts construct when adjudicating Muslim Family Law disputes. The book examines how these narratives shape the rule of law, gender reform, and public trust in the justice system. Drawing on over 400 interviews with judges, lawyers, and litigants, and an analysis of nearly 3,000 judicial decisions from Ghana, India, Israel, and Greece, the book reveals how coherence and fragmentation in judicial storytelling influences legal legitimacy and reform. Introducing the concept of 'narratival (in)cohesion', this work offers a new framework for understanding how courts mediate between religion, rights, and state authority. Bridging law, political science, and socio-legal studies, it is an essential resource for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how judicial narratives shape the lived experience of law in diverse, multi-religious societies.
Does democracy matter for urban protest? Africa is the fastest urbanizing region in the world, with more citizens every day requiring access to goods like housing, energy, food, and transportation. At the same time, citizens across the continent have also indicated declining satisfaction with democracy. Thus, many citizens have turned to strategies like protest to meet their basic needs. Yet for urban communities fighting for access to these goods, does democracy still make a difference? Drawing on a decades-long comparison of urban protest in Cairo, Lagos, and Johannesburg, We Have the Rights challenges the conventional wisdom of the social movement literature, by showing that even when democratization has not altered the prevailing forms of protest, it can significantly improve protest outcomes. These findings suggest that democracy can empower urban communities, not by enclosing citizen participation, but by expanding the avenues and boundaries of institutional engagement.
Intellectual property (IP) rights have long faced strong legitimacy criticisms. As the vaccine debates during the COVID-19 pandemic showed, IP is often seen as a problematic asset of powerful private companies and developed economies. This book addresses these criticisms by focusing on a renewed interpretation of the TRIPS – the key international treaty for IP. By combining international law analysis and political theory, this work presents the TRIPS as the structuring agreement of the international IP regime rather than treating it as a technical trade instrument. Drawing on the ideal of freedom defined as protection against domination, the book develops a legal philosophy of the TRIPS, revisiting its foundations and proposing a renewed interpretation of its key norms. This reframing highlights how the treaty can potentially provide consistency and foreseeability in a conflict-ridden global multilateral trade system where weaker trade partners are often at a disadvantage. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This book delivers an in-depth doctrinal analysis of the right to science under Article 15 ICESCR, focusing on the novel concept of its core content, as well as on its rights holders and duty bearers. Monika Plozza challenges the entrenched dichotomy between economic, social and cultural rights on the one hand and civil and political rights on the other, demonstrating that the right to science is fully justiciable. Situating it within the wider framework of international human rights law, she traces its connections with a broad range of related rights. In doing so, this book equips scholars, practitioners, and policymakers with the legal tools needed to invoke and implement the right to science in judicial and policy contexts. Timely and rigorous, it establishes the right to science as a vital legal framework for confronting global challenges ranging from climate change and disinformation to artificial intelligence. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
The planetary boundaries framework examines the profound risks human actions pose to Earth's stability and resilience. Since its introduction in 2009, and through subsequent updates, the framework has become one of the most influential ideas of our age, yet it has not been put to close ethical scrutiny. This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to the ethics of the planetary boundaries, ranging from international law to Indigenous knowledge and from science to art, and political ecology. The editors introduce each boundary before two chapters examine the reach, limits, and ethical stakes of each of the nine planetary boundaries. This volume comes at a critical moment, when unprecedented environmental challenges demand new approaches, tools, and perspectives to address questions of epistemology and justice. It is a valuable resource for students, citizens, and academics concerned with relationships of knowledges, ethics, and environments. This title is available Open Access through Cambridge Core.
Will capitalism bring about the end of the world or is a different future possible? In this book, Daniel P. Rhodes diagnoses the dystopic reign of capital in the contemporary world. He shows how it captures politics and history while colonizing the state and its subjects under its dominion, for the purpose of constructing a (dis)order that achieves extravagant wealth for a few at the top by enabling exploitation of and extraction from an expanding lower class. Surveying Marxist and theological utopian alternatives, Rhodes then recovers an apocalyptic, theological politics drawn from the person and work of Jesus Christ and argues for an ecclesial vision of social renewal. The Church, by acting in a way that reflects Christ's fundamental humanity, can be a site and source of radical solidarity, material and spiritual forgiveness, justice-infused deliberation, and creative peace-making. It can also offer a powerful foretaste of an alternative future that, eschatologically, will last.
The book provides valuable insights into the landscape of women's rights in West Africa through the transformative decisions made by the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice (ECOWAS Court). Originally established to foster socio-economic integration, the ECOWAS Court has evolved into Africa's premier regional human rights court. With nearly 90% of its decisions addressing human rights issues, the ECOWAS Court now surpasses the African Commission – the continent's longest-standing human rights body – in the number of human rights cases it handles. It offers a compelling analysis of the ECOWAS Court's women's rights jurisprudence, an often-overlooked but essential aspect of the Court's human rights mandate. Grounded in the due diligence principle and the Maputo Protocol, the book sheds light on how adjudicating women's rights cases promotes the global gender equality agenda and challenges state actions that undermine human rights.
The Classic Maya civilization (250–925 CE) in Mesoamerica innovated a hieroglyphic script that was written and read by people spread across hundreds of square kilometers and dozens of autonomous kingdoms over the course of more than a millennium. Yet, unlike other regions of the ancient world where writing was independently invented, the Maya area was never politically unified. In Religion, Writing, and the Shaping of the Classic Maya World, Mallory E. Matsumoto draws on hieroglyphic texts, imagery, and archaeological finds to reconstruct interactions through which the Classic Maya exchanged knowledge about their hieroglyphic script and how to use it. She argues that religion and ritual practice were central contexts for maintaining a coherent, mutually intelligible writing system in the absence of political centralization. The Classic Maya case challenges long-standing assumptions about the social forces underlying the origins of early writing. It also reveals religion's potential to shape human culture and technology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The methodology of metaphysics has come under severe scrutiny from critics who claim that, while metaphysics aims to uncover deep non-conceptual truths regarding reality, its standard methodology is incapable of giving us justified beliefs regarding which metaphysical theses are true. In this Element I investigate whether this criticism of metaphysics is on the right track, by way of an opinionated introduction to the methodology of metaphysics. I give an overview of recent debates concerning the methodology of metaphysics, with special attention paid to the epistemic credentials of appeals to intuitions and non-empirical theoretical virtues. I also examine alternative proposed aims of metaphysics other than that of uncovering deep non-conceptual truths, and with what sorts of methodologies those aims might be associated. These alternative proposed aims of metaphysics include achieving practical benefits, achieving understanding, discovering stable equilibria among possible metaphysical views, and the aim of analyzing and/or engineering our concepts.
Linguistic imitation is not mere repetition, but is instead a foundational mechanism of language use. It underpins the engagement and categorisation of meaning as a conceptual pact among speakers. This book redefines imitation as the creative engine of human communication, showing how language evolves through our engagement with what others say. It discusses dialogic resonance – the reuse and reshaping of communicative constructions – as a unifying framework that bridges pragmatics and construction grammar. Combining evidence from first and second language acquisition, intercultural communication and neurodiverse interaction, the book highlights the crucial role of imitation in shaping social conformity, engagement, categorisation and innovation. It combines detailed qualitative case studies with innovative corpus-based and statistical analyses to provide new theoretical insights and methodological tools. It is essential reading for scholars and students of linguistics, psychology, education and sociology, and for anyone interested in how language emerges from the creative interplay of human voices.
Bubbles have unique properties that make them of great importance in disparate fields such as energy production, acoustics, chemical engineering, material processing, biomedicine, food science and a host of others which, on the surface, appear to have little in common. Bringing together information scattered in many hundreds of sources, this book provides a unified treatment of the subject, illustrating the roots of this surprising versatility with a wealth of examples. The emphasis is on physics, explained with words and images before introducing a limited mathematical apparatus. Building on the foundation of the compressible and incompressible Rayleigh-Plesset equation, the treatment continues with the volume oscillations of gas bubbles and associated scattering and emission of sound, the diffusion of dissolved gases and of heat, boiling, nucleation and the behavior of bubbles in elastic and visco-elastic media. The book concludes with chapters on biomedical applications, sonochemistry, acoustic and flow cavitation and bubbly liquids.
This Cambridge Companion offers a rich range of contexts for studying the literary histories of New Orleans. Some of the essays offer a deep focus on the significance of iconic figures such as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Kate Chopin. Other essays detail long traditions of writing not widely known beyond the city but that complicate our understanding of American literary history in new ways, as in the chapters on queer writers or Mardi Gras or the Asian presence in the city's literary imagination or how deadly nineteenth-century epidemics continue to shape the ways the world has come to read the city as a capital of Gothic horror fiction. These fresh perspectives on one of the most storied cities in the world are an essential resource for those who seek to piece together their own understanding of New Orleans as an historic and living flashpoint in the global literary imagination.
Unemployment in British and American Literature since the 1930s explores the literary history of unemployment-from the Great Depression to today-arguing that the feelings culturally associated with unemployment shape its political use. The literature analyzed in the book spans a wide array of contexts and formats: from Depression-era Britain, to the American Rust Belt. Through readings of British and American novels and ethnographies by Walter Greenwood, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, Alan Sillitoe, James Kelman, Sarah Smarsh, Douglas Stuart, and others, the book interrogates the feel of unemployment and connects it to changing economic conditions, cultural representations, and political struggles.
While intergroup relations research has expanded globally, few resources offer a comprehensive grounding in its major theories. This book bridges that gap by providing critical assessments of the major theories of intergroup relations, their applied implications, and the empirical research that tests them. It traces the development of the field by examining major theories of intergroup behavior – from identity-based, materialist, and irrationalist perspectives to theories centered on justice, conflict, evolution, and system justification – and also critically assesses assimilation, multiculturalism, omniculturalism, and intergroup contact. The book concludes by showing how integrating existing theories with feminist frameworks, allyship, and intersectionality can help build more powerful and coherent models for understanding intergroup relations. By systematically analyzing these approaches and their practical applications, Theories of Intergroup Relations deepens our understanding of intergroup dynamics and supports the development of strategies for fostering more harmonious relations among diverse groups.
Palermo was an active participant in the global dynamics of early modernity, a role that shaped its remaking as the capital of the Habsburg viceroyalty of Sicily. Situating the sixteenth-century city within the broader landscape of Spanish colonialism, Elizabeth Kassler-Taub positions Palermo as a model for understanding how capitals at the edges of empire were made and imagined, inhabited and described. Architecture and Urbanism in Early Modern Palermo: Building an Elastic City introduces readers to monuments and sites absent from mainstream histories of early modern Italy and Spain, highlighting the experimental design models and building practices developed in response to, and defiance of, the city's entanglements across both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Kassler-Taub conceptualizes Palermo's capacity for change and adaptation as an index of its 'elasticity.' She shows how the city's centuries-long colonial condition generated remarkable resilience: Palermo was able to withstand tension and to reshape itself without violating its basic form and identity.
Hope is a vital force in politics, nourishing our visions of the future when things seem irredeemably bleak. Contemporary philosophy is trapped within a view of hope as an everyday desire empty of ethical and political content. Much political theory defers to philosophy and appears unable to appreciate the value of hope as a political attitude. Through an interpretive conversation with Richard Rorty, Robert Lamb shows how Rorty uses Hegel to develop a compelling, alternative understanding of hope as the yearning for a better future amidst a contingent social world and fragile political inheritance. Commitment to political hope – an enemy of despair, optimism, and certainty – invites a reorientation of philosophical reflection and involves a demanding civic ethos to sustain communities fragmented by pathological individualism. Rorty's interpretations of John Rawls, feminism, and the redemptive potential of history show the relevance of hope for the urgent challenges facing twenty-first century liberal democracy.
Differential topology uncovers the hidden structure of smooth spaces –the foundation of modern geometry and topology. This book offers a clear, rigorous introduction to the subject, blending theory with concrete examples and applications. Beginning with the basics of manifolds and smooth maps, it develops essential tools and concepts such as tangent spaces, transversality, cobordism, and tubular neighbourhoods, before progressing to powerful invariants like the Brouwer degree, intersection numbers, and the Hopf invariant. Along the way, readers encounter landmark results including Whitney's embedding theorem, Brouwer's fixed point theorem, the Pontryagin construction, Hopf's degree theorem, and the Poincaré–Hopf index theorem. Each chapter combines intuitive explanations with precise and detailed proofs, supported by exercises and detailed solutions that deepen understanding. Ideal for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers, this text provides a gateway to one of mathematics' most elegant and influential fields – where analysis, geometry, and topology meet.
Why are most contemporary autocracies concentrated between Siberia and Central Africa while other regions remain largely democratic? This book uncovers the deep historical forces behind that divide, tracing how geography-particularly the vast steppe grasslands-and political-economic conflicts between nomadic and sedentary societies shaped enduring patterns of power. These structured conflicts reinforced authoritarian persistence across half the globe, creating a binary world with starkly different opportunities and threats. The result is a long-standing geopolitical fault line that continues to shape global politics today, exemplified by the autocratic axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Combining insights from geography, history, and political economy, this book offers a compelling explanation of why authoritarianism thrives -and why democracy prevails elsewhere.