The most commonly cited argument for CBDCs is that they would help promote financial inclusion. However, this claim is a myth that is devoid of any empirical support.

CBDCs do not address the causes of financial exclusion, and alternative methods (e.g., reducing regulatory barriers that discourage financial innovation) would better promote financial inclusion.

To the extent that financial inclusion is even an issue in the developed world, it is an issue only in the US. Even there, many people are financially excluded because they wish to be or because government regulations make bank accounts unattractive. Financial inclusion is a more important issue in the developing world, but even there, there are much better ways to achieve financial inclusion than establishing a CBDC. Recent developments there suggest that non-CBDC digital currencies, in particular innovations driven by the spread of Quick Response (QR) transactions technology and market competition, are already drastically increasing financial inclusion and will likely eliminate the problem before CBDCs make any impact on it.

This Chapter is devoted to aspects of the traditional morphological typology, and looks at Baker’s (1996) proposals for polysynthesis and Huang’s (2015) “deep” analyticity, concluding that these two morphological types are determined by the incidence of syntactic head movement.

Isaiah Berlin’s essay explores and criticises a conception of human freedom that identifies it with knowledge and, especially, with self-understanding. Even on this conception, freedom seems to require a power to change or reform one’s self – some power of self-determination through choice or decision, through will or volition. But this involvement of self-determination through the will then raises the issue of determinism. Are our choices or decisions antecedently determined? Knowledge and freedom may both be goods, but they are importantly distinct goods, and they may be in tension. Berlin’s reflections on freedom and knowledge are part of a wider project of understanding conceptions such as freedom in terms of their intellectual history and of exploring plurality within goodness and tensions between its various forms. The discussion will explore the relation between two very different forms of freedom – freedom as a form of power, a capacity to produce or prevent outcomes, and freedom as liberation, a desirable condition of fulfilment. It is freedom conceived as a power that seems threatened by determinism.

This chapter introduces the concept of promissory representation: the idea that democratic accountability hinges on political actors making and keeping campaign promises. We trace the development of this concept through key scholarly contributions, distinguishing between mandate and trustee models of representation, and arguing that the former provides stronger mechanisms of accountability. We also address several critiques: that voters may not remember promises, lack the information to evaluate fulfillment, or prioritize other factors. Drawing on comparative research, particularly from the Comparative Pledges Project, we show that election promises remain central to democratic politics and that voters do consider promise fulfillment when evaluating parties. We also discuss how ideology and partisanship shape these assessments and argue that promissory representation remains a valuable framework for understanding the effects of globalization on democratic accountability.

This chapter sets out the fundamentals of CBDCs.

We start by defining a CBDC and comparing it to various existing near substitutes, and explain the difference between token and account CBDCs.

We explain that a CBDC could be, but will not be, anonymous, for essentially political reasons.

We then explain the difference between wholesale and retail CBDCs, observing that wholesale CBDCs raise no new policy issues that are of any particular interest to us.

Focussing then on retail CBDCs, we set out the difference between direct retail CBDCs and indirect CBDCs and explain that the central bank does not have the capability to manage direct CBDCs itself. Thus, the only practical way to deliver CBDCs is indirectly, through other financial institutions.

However, indirect retail CBDCs would pose the problem of who would pay for the costs of those institutions maintaining CBDC accounts for their customers: neither the customers nor the financial institutions have any incentive to bear those costs themselves. Such considerations suggest that retail CBDCs would be opposed by both the public and the banks and that CBDCs would need to be subsidised by the central bank if retail customers are to be induced to hold them. They also suggest that CBDCs are a more expensive payment system than one based on traditional deposits which, in turn, tells us that CBDCs are an inefficient payment system.

We then discuss the fraught, even intractable, questions relating to the payment of interest rates on CBDCs.

Finally, we discuss the various instabilities to which CBDC systems are prone.

We have here multiple compelling reasons for CBDCs to be dismissed.

The chapter responds to movements in international human rights law to articulate Indigenous rights to the environment. Specifically, the chapter draws upon critical Indigenous literature to identify Indigenous concerns regarding international human rights approaches. The analysis provides a brief background on prevailing international law approaches to Indigenous environmental rights, along with an overview of Indigenous critiques of international law for Indigenous peoples. The chapter extends the analysis to international human rights. The analysis reviews of jurisprudence in international law that extends international human rights to protect Indigenous rights to the environment. The analysis follows such review with a critique drawn from the commentaries of Indigenous scholars who view the existing international human rights system as being problematic for Indigenous peoples. The analysis finds that while international human rights law presents potential opportunities to protect Indigenous rights to environment, Indigenous critics still see human rights approaches as being problematic for Indigenous peoples.

This article examines Mapuche law (az mapu) through the lens of socio-environmental rights and explores its role in a transmodern discussion of legal pluralism. Challenging Western legal norms, the authors assert that Indigenous resistance is a fundamental right undermined by liberal positive law. They trace the colonial history of Indigenous peoples in Abya Yala and Wallmapu, advocating for alternative conceptions of justice and law to address entrenched asymmetries and colonial violence originating in the conquest of America. A transmodern framework is offered to envision Indigenous rights beyond Eurocentric colonial metaphysics. Within Latin America and Abya Yala, proponents of positive law confront a critical juncture regarding Indigenous rights, their existence, and revival. The dynamics of az mapu in Wallmapu are analyzed via transmodernity and legal pluralism, revealing the interconnected dimensions of environmental justice essential in the early twenty-first century. Ultimately, the authors link the Indigenous rights debate to the broader climate crisis—marked by eco- and ethnocidal threats such as global warming—and propose a decolonial understanding of justice. This approach reconfigures human-nature relationships and emphasizes that the severe socio-environmental crisis demands responses grounded in contextual rights like Mapuche az mapu and its intrinsic bond with itrofillmogen (all living things).

I systematically review what is known about the neurosciecnce of group mind phenomena including recent “hyperscanning” studies, group identity studies, in-group bias studies, out-group hostility studies, and so forth. Networks traditionally associated with the “social brain” appear again and again in these studies, but the simultaneous linking up of several brains to produce emergent neural and cognitive phenomena is turning up new neural models and associations for social cognition.