The recent recognition of the Rights of Nature (RoN) in the legal sphere presents significant challenges in its implementation. In modern States, justice is predominantly a human domain, based on the assumption that only in this realm can objectivity supersede subjectivity, rationality override emotionality, and the social transcend the natural. Consequently, the recognition of the Rights of Nature has required judicial systems to strive to overcome anthropocentric perspectives in order to advance biocentric and ecocentric frameworks. However, a critical question arises: How can non-human entities be formally recognized as subjects of justice? What poses a challenge for Western justice systems seems to be inherent in Indigenous justice systems, where the spiritual, human, and natural realms are not compartmentalized. The nature-culture nexus has been integrated from the perspectives of communities that maintain direct relationships with and dependencies on land and water sources, highlighting the relevance of worldviews that transcend segmented anthropocentric perspectives. To shed light on these challenges, this chapter proposes a theoretical-methodological analysis grounded in political ontology and the biocultural approach, aiming to facilitate dialogue between State legal systems and Indigenous customary law. We argue that biocultural rights and the recognition of legal pluralism offer the advantage of recognizing the role of communities as interactive participants in their territories, presenting an alternative for the decolonization of the Rights of Nature.

Chapter 3 delves into the material facet of China’s image-making or attraction through tangible offerings. Drawing on the analysis of China’s core diplomatic initiatives in Ethiopia, namely elite training and education diplomacy, Confucius Institutes, and media outreach, the chapter illuminates how offering access to opportunities and resources is at the heart of initiating participants into China. It also examines the uneven deployment of “tangible enticement” by demonstrating how Chinese actors, including embassy personnel and Confucius Institute directors, amongst others, are at once strategic and methodical about presenting targeted opportunities, as well as spontaneous and hands-off in promoting and allocating resources. The chapter then analyzes the reception from Ethiopian target audiences, finding a mix of opportunistic engagement and negotiation of China’s offerings.

Four load-bearing concepts delineate the specificity of wantonness in eighteenth-century Britain: motion, causality, selfhood, and form. This Introduction defines the literary sensorimotor as an array of ancient and modern theories about how words conjure vivid kinetic and proprioceptive imagery for readers. The critic John Dennis argued that powerful motor imagery depended on a reader not being able to pin down the causes of their intense and immersive reading experience. Johnson’s Dictionary defines movement that does not spring from clear causes or intentions as “wanton” motion: neither beautiful nor terrifying but nevertheless vibrant and irregular. Historically, legal wantonness fell somewhere between negligence and recklessness on the spectrum of intentionality. In opposition to the notion that deportment “discovered” a person’s true self, Landreth’s theorization of vital impersonality embraces non-normative embodiment and resists narrative norms of literary interiority. How a character or plot moves might be more important than why.

Chapter 7 summarizes the core findings of this book and positions them in a larger comparative context by examining how they translate to other contexts in Africa and in the Global South. The chapter further discusses future research pathways in the field of China’s soft power in the Global South, including comparative directions, and provides some practical considerations for policymakers.

A key life history trait among human beings, that is, the trait that influences all other life history variables in the standard catalog of life history traits (e.g. average lifespan, body size, length of juvenile period, gestational period, inter-birth intervals, fertility rates, etc.) is brain size and complexity. Within the evolutionary sciences, the most applicable selective forces that influence group mind phenomena come out of the fact that we evolved within group contexts and adapted for group-living. I use lineage fitness theory, sexual conflict theory, multi-level section theory, costly signaling theory, and major transitions in evolution theory, as well as theories of cultural evolution, to illuminate topics in group mind. I argue that they all predict that various levels of group mind phenomena must occur. I also adopt and assume some, but not all, of the claims of “4E cognitive science,” namely that the mind is embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended, but I add to it a 5E account by showing that our understanding of group mind must also be rooted in evolutionary theory. Mind is also an evolved phenomenon. A final background framework I assume and adopt in this book is the so-called predictive-processing framework.

This article examines the relationship and conflicts between the Rights of Nature (RoN) framework and the Indigenous right to territory. While RoN has gained recognition across several jurisdictions as a response to the global ecological crisis, it often stems from Western moral-philosophical perspectives supported by conservationist and scientific debates. By contrast, the right to territory of Indigenous peoples represent a struggle for the recognition of ontological and relational plurality arising with the Indigenous peoples-environment nexus. Through analysis of diverse ecocentric frameworks and their legal applications, the article assesses the extent to which the recognition of rights to nature does not always align with Indigenous claims about territory. Additionally, it cautions against the risks of imposing Western ecocentric categories onto Indigenous struggles, which may replicate colonial logics underlying dominant ecocentric approaches. The article concludes by proposing an interpretation of RoN that embraces epistemic plurality and the ontological-relational representation of nature of Indigenous peoples to create spaces for equitable dialogue and strategic alliances between the right to territory of Indigenous peoples and RoN in the fight against anthropocentrism in courts.

I examine the extent to which the clinical effectiveness of group psychotherapy depends on the formation of a group mind (and find that it does). Group cohesion, which is a measure of group mind, predicts the effectiveness of group therapy