Chapter 2 explores the constitutive elements of global environmental governance. International environmental governance works when states fulfill the commitments they undertake under international law, such as the obligation to exchange information on transboundary environmental risks and impacts and the duty to notify and consult with other states with regard to such risks and impacts. Mechanisms of global environmental governance include also environmental impact assessments and strategic impact assessments. The chapter examines, furthermore, how the monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) of compliance with international environmental obligations has been modernized by the wide application of technologies. It explores whether green democracy has become a universal aspirational principle, and how the system for the protection of human rights has been used as a tool for the protection of the environment, lending support to the emergence of a right to a healthy environment. Whether nature, as a legal entity, should be accorded rights and have a say on the development plans of states is also analyzed.

In the coming decades, cities and other local governments will need to transform their infrastructure as part of their climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. When they do, they have the opportunity to build a more resilient, sustainable, and accommodating infrastructure for humans and non-humans alike. This chapter surveys a range of policy tools that cities and other local governments can use to pursue co-beneficial adaptations for humans, non-humans, and the environment. For example, they can add bird-friendly glass to new and upgraded buildings and vehicles; they can add overpasses, underpasses, and wildlife corridors on transportation systems; they can reduce light and noise pollution that impact humans and nonhumans alike; they can use a novel trash policy to manage rodent populations non-lethally; and more.

The epilogue muses on the complications underlying the popularity of Turkish TV series in Iran and the secret gold-for-oil deals made in defiance of US sanctions as touchpoints in a vision beyond triangulation and comparativism.

Chapter 10 examines the protection and allocation of shared water resources. Freshwater resources are not global common resources. They are, instead, shared among states in a region. This chapter examines the UN Watercourses Convention and the UNECE Water Protection Convention and their influence on the regional instruments for the protection and allocation of water resources. Issues of equity in water allocation, efficiency, demand-led management, and water quality are examined as they have been elaborated in various regional fora, such as Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa, Central and West Africa, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, ASEAN, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. The chapter examines the role of international river basin organizations in facilitating integrated water resources management. We also analyze the international protection of aquifers and groundwater resources and the adoption of regional agreements that regulate their extraction and protection.

Use Case 4 in Chapter 7 explores the regulation of MDTs in the context of employment monitoring under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Equality Acquis, the Platform Work Directive (PWD), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). Article 88 GDPR serves as a useful foundation, supported by valuable guidance aimed at protecting employees from unlawful monitoring practices. In theory, most MDT-based practices discussed in this book are already prohibited under the GDPR. Additionally, the EU’s robust equality acquis can effectively address many forms of discrimination in this sector. The AIA reiterates some existing prohibitions related to MDT-based monitoring practices in the workplace. However, a core challenge in employment monitoring lies in ensuring transparency and enforcement. There has long been a call for a lex specialis for data protection in the employment context, which should include a blacklist of prohibited practices or processing operations, akin to the one found in the PWD. Notably, processing and inferring mind data should be included among the practices on this blacklist.

This chapter offers a new way of understanding the workings of the Indian Constituent Assembly. We move beyond studying the script, or the published Constituent Assembly debates, making visible the labour, infrastructure and ideas that went into the staging and the atmospherics of the assembly itself as a public and a lived space. The procedural rituals, the pulse of the debates, and the physical setting of the Constituent Assembly building enabled and shaped the constitution-making process. We follow a few actors from the Constituent Assembly as they moved across different assemblies in India and abroad while the constitution was still in the making. In doing so, we reveal the Indian constitution’s part in an emerging international regime of human rights and practice of comparative constitutional law and reconstruct a sense of the everyday ordinary life of the Assembly, which was deeply connected with the Indian public and the world outside.

At the core of regulating cumulative environmental impacts is understanding and articulating what and who we want to protect or restore from conditions of unacceptable cumulative harm. This central thing being protected or restored is the "matter of concern." Rules have an important role to play in articulating and formalizing the matter of concern. This chapter begins by analyzing how matters of concern vary, from an individual species, to a sacred site, to environmental justice, and how this variation affects how difficult it is to conceptualize the matter of concern. Addressing cumulative environmental problems requires rules to help in conceptualization by providing for articulating the environmental and human aspects of the matter of concern; describing its spatial boundaries; specifying cumulative threshold conditions, any further change from which would be unacceptable; and providing for adapting these things while avoiding "shifting baselines" that mask cumulative harm.

The following account of telepresence surgery is the collective perspective of a few individuals who witnessed and participated in its development from initial inception at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to commercialization at Intuitive Surgical as the da Vinci® system. It should be noted that there are several differing accounts of the history of telepresence surgery, and while there are factual elements in each version, none of the accounts to date has benefited from the perspective of the team that spanned the early days of the development of telepresence surgery at SRI to the early days of development of da Vinci at Intuitive Surgical.

Chapter 2 examines the history of Leo Kari and other Scandinavian volunteers in the International Brigades. It takes issue with the long-standing depiction of the voluntary army in Spain as ’Comintern mercenaries’ or as essentially the sole invention of international communism. In addition, the chapter follows the trajectories of different members of the resistance movements in Denmark and Norway and examines why historians have typically overlooked the fact that the core of World War II sabotage groups were nearly all former volunteers of the civil war who used their military expertise from Spain to position themselves as leaders of the resistance. Most former war volunteers were completely marginalised in the Cold War climate emerging after 1947–1948, yet some of them still insisted on a third military adventure. The anti-colonial struggles were seen as a new opening, as is evident from Leo Kari’s renewed efforts to mobilise a voluntary army for the Algerian war of liberation in the early 1960s.

This chapter reconsiders the road novel, not as a genre of Americanness and the frontier West, but rather as the privileged genre of US hegemony. Specifically, the chapter argues that the road novel does important work in critically mapping the expanding and shifting commodity frontiers of US hegemony, but through the lens and ideologies of automobility and what Matthew Huber has identified as the petro-driven ‘American way of life.’ To illustrate these claims, “Oil, Commodity Frontiers and the Materials of the Road Novel” offers a brief survey of three emblematic road novels that emerged during crucial moments of capitalist transition within the arc of US hegemony: Jack Kerouac’s paradigmatic western road novel, On the Road (1956) and the petroization of American life, Iva Pekárková’s post-socialist transition road novel, Truck Stop Rainbows (1989), and Samantha Schweblin’s neo-developmentalist soya-frontier road novel, Fever Dreams (2017). Taken together, the chapter reads the road novel as following the arc of US hegemony.