The response provides examples of children’s voices have been promoted in classrooms. The first example from the University of Cambridge Primary School is a Class Congress that is designed to be inclusive and involves weekly discussion sessions between all children and the senior leadership team. It builds on the well-established Oracy and Dialogue curriculum at the school and helps to develop the children’s sense of agency. The second example is Project Dhun, an initiative from the Dhun School for Now in India. The school is built on three pillars: Self, Community and Planet. These pillars encourage students to connect with their individual skills, collaborate with their community and engage with the natural world. The school emphasises experimental, project-based learning. It features unique spaces, such as a nature lab, in which the role of the teacher is evolved to be a facilitator.

Chapter 4 critically examines how the ECtHR has conceptualised the technological conditions of freedom of expression in its case law. The ECtHR’s practice only superficially acknowledges differences between the various technological media, treating technology as a ‘black box’ rather than analysing in depth the interactions between the technological medium and the process of receiving and transmitting information. While this may have been unproblematic in the age of the press and broadcasting, it needs to be revised now that the Internet is the leading medium, requiring a shift in perspective from legal doctrine to the social sciences. Correspondingly, this chapter reviews two leading approaches to the relationship between technology, society and law: the media theory of law and STS. The media theory of law provides a remarkable general explanation of how the historically dominant means of information dissemination influence the law, but takes an uncritical view of the technology involved and underestimates normative social structures in the digital environment. In contrast, the strength of STS lies in its use of detailed case studies involving complex interactions between society and materiality/technology via the concept of co-production, but offers a dissatisfactory treatment of the role of law.

Chapter 3 focuses on liberty and servitude, and the way in which these conditions – defined in Roman law in terms of the status of individual persons – are predicated of collective bodies described as civitates and populi in Roman political philosophy. Machiavelli’s relationship to this particular conception of liberty has been at the centre of much recent literature on classical, early modern, and contemporary republicanism, but his theory of freedom requires closer scrutiny, not least because of its relationship to a line of thinking about popular self-government which had been used by humanists to articulate a theory of popular sovereignty from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century in Renaissance Florence. This chapter shows how the key concepts of this thesis come from Cicero’s philosophy, which conveys to the humanists an influential account of how to constitute the entity which he calls the populus as the ultimate bearer of public authority. Cicero’s view of ‘the people’ as the master of its own affairs informs his definition of the res publica as res populi – literally, a ‘thing of the people’ – and this chapter shows how it informs the very basis of the classical republican tradition which Machiavelli inherits and reworks.

The individual experiences of the post-war European plebiscites varied; however, in all cases the commissions organising them faced challenges in ensuring fair votes with limited resources and entrenched local administrations, something exacerbated by the American rejection of the peace settlement and consequent termination of involvement in its plebiscites. The traumatic plebiscite in Upper Silesia left the deepest impression, and during the Lausanne Conference of 1922–1923, the plebiscite was rejected by the British statesmen leading the negotiations with the new Turkish republic, with compulsory population transfer advocated instead. For her part, Sarah Wambaugh observed what she saw as a better way to conduct international relations when she briefly worked in the secretariat of the League of Nations. Following this Wambaugh would visit all of the plebiscite zones soon after they were held and conclude that future plebiscites needed to be conducted along more rigorous scientific lines.

Contracts awarded to brewers suggest the existence of local beer monopolies. However, the beer industry was a very decentralised sector, involving many brewers, as well as full- and part-time sellers supplying local markets. Such local networks were difficult for the state to penetrate, hence the use of local intermediaries who were themselves active in the industry. The fiscal contracts concerned the administration of state revenues derived from the village beer industry. Their most significant component was the farming of a craft and sales tax. In addition, contractors were involved with the distribution of state-supplied barley. A comparison with bakers shows that these artisans were not supplied with wheat, which could be profitably exported. The motivation for the sale of state barley was thus the conversion of revenue in kind into cash. Royal breweries existed, but their significance is unclear, and private individuals and temples owned breweries as well. Temples were, moreover, frequently the lessors of contracts, underscoring their role in the Ptolemaic economy and fiscal system. Missing variables complicate the assessment of the impact of the institutions on economic performance.

Chapter 2 opens the study of free speech in a globally networked digital environment by clarifying the meaning of the term ‘constitution’. Under the heading of transnational constitutionalism, intense discussions have taken place in recent years about constitutional thinking that seeks to break free from statehood and formalism. The question of the constitutional subject is of great importance here. In the twenty-first century, nation-states are still the primary constitutional actors, as they have been since the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contemporary era has also witnessed the emergence of transnational corporations, which have developed into powerful players within a globalised economy. As telecom service providers, equipment manufacturers, or platform operators, they have a particularly significant influence on the conditions governing freedom of expression. According to Gunther Teubner, transnational corporations should be conceived of as constitutional subjects. But what does this mean on the theoretical and practical levels? How can factual developments on the Internet be related to processes of producing constitutional norms? How should the relationship between state-centred and societal constitutional legitimacy be conceptualised? These questions are addressed within the framework of transnational legal theory.

The Coda foregrounds the literary implications of the book’s argument by reflecting on the idea of the Indian Ocean as a comparative literary space. Through an example from Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), it illustrates a comparative practice wherein the historical, the geopolitical, and the literary come together. The mutual imbrication of the geopolitical and the literary in contemporary Afro-Asian fiction generates the Indian Ocean as a space of comparison where historical relationalities become legible within the exigencies of the present.

The choice to confront racial injustice was available to the whole charitable humanitarian sector. In 1969, the World Council of Churches launched the Programme to Combat Racism. This attempted to mobilise the Churches against all forms of racism and was accompanied by a Special Fund to support those who ‘combat racism, rather than welfare organisations that alleviate the effects of racism.’ As an offshoot of the Council, Christian Aid was well placed to take up the cause. However, it and the other agencies did not do so during the 1970s, preferring to divert their radical energies towards liberation theology and the conscientisation movement emanating from Latin America rather than the Black Consciousness Movement in Southern Africa. Fearful of the regulations of the Charity Commissioners and the effects on fundraising among their more conservative supporters, the charities remained largely silent on race until the 1980s. Instead, they embraced the ‘basic needs’ agenda of the non-aligned movement and the New International Economic Order. It took the agencies beyond charity, but it also brought it closer to the agendas of the official development industry such as the World Bank.

This manifesto argues that education should incorporate philosophical exploration to help young people address existential questions and find meaning and purpose in their lives. The manifesto suggests that to understand the meaning of one’s life, one must consider personal existence and consciousness and the reality beyond the here and now. It proposes that education should provide a neutral forum for discussing these big questions, without bias towards any particular belief system, and incorporating both scientific and spiritual perspectives. By engaging in such philosophical discourse, young people can develop a clearer sense of self and purpose, fostering resilience, mental well-being and a commitment to values and moral behaviour. This can support them to survive and thrive through the opportunities and challenges of the future.

This chapter considers the afterlives of slavery in the Indian Ocean through Mauritian writer Shenaz Patel’s Le silence des Chagos (2005), about the expulsion of the inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago from their islands in the wake of late twentieth-century Indian Ocean militarization. Images and narratives circulating in the global media often portray the suffering of Chagossians as a human rights violation, abstracting the event from the particular legacies of slavery, colonialism, and anti-Blackness that continue to weigh on the displaced community. By contrast, Le silence des Chagos tells the story of their expulsion by adapting Chagossians’ testimonies into a novelistic form. Patel’s testimonial fiction constructs a repository of images that enables a sensory and subjective experience of the past. As a composite of these images, the exilic consciousness uncovers Chagossians’ most recent experiences of exile as an extension of the racialized violence in the past. The novel remaps the Indian Ocean enabling a position to critique geopolitical networks of power in the region and identify convergences with Black diasporic accounts of Atlantic crossings.