At the crossroads of international law and global military history, this chapter revises the traditional story of violent encounters between Japanese guards and American prisoners of war (POWs) during the Second World War. It resituates those relationships within the shifting contours of international humanitarian law, highlights their position within a broader transnational dynamic of captivity that evolved between the two nations, and recontextualizes them within the Japanese Empire’s management of prisoners throughout the wider Asia-Pacific region before and during the conflict. It shows that there was nothing inherent to “Japanese” character or culture that led to the inhumane treatment of POWs. Although Japan increasingly disregarded international legal protections for POWs throughout the 1930s, it was ultimately institutional inadequacy and deteriorating material conditions in the besieged Japanese Empire that explained prisoners’ mistreatment.

Human rights were not absent in the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Conference). The Stockholm Conference’s preparatory works, the participants’ statements, and the 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment all exhibit elements of a human rights-based approach. However, the legal arrangements on chemicals and wastes concluded in the decades that followed did not articulate principles of transparency, participation, and accountability for the realization of the right of every person to a non-toxic environment. Despite the progress that these agreements signify, they have not reversed the grave toxification of the planet and its people, nor have they achieved the global goals on chemicals and wastes management. Moving forward, international environmental law should change trajectory and embrace the human rights-based approach already apparent in the principles of the Stockholm Conference in order to secure the full realization of the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

The outbreak of the 1641 Rebellion is the focus here. The chapter traces events leading up to 22–23 October but is especially concerned with how immediate understandings and assumptions about the rebellion were crucial in shaping it as a religious conflict. In particular, the testimony of Owen O’Connolly as the plot discloser, and the reaction of the Dublin government, especially its proclamation blaming ‘evil-affected Irish Papists’ for the rising, is examined as being fundamental for casting events in a religious light and for sowing early fears of sectarian massacre and expulsion. Those early days, weeks and months would be foundational for the course of the rebellion and subsequent conflict.

One of the targets related to Sustainable Development Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production is to achieve sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources. Minerals are an important one of these resources. The demand for mining on land and in frontier territories, such as the deep seabed and outer space, presents vast challenges for international regulation. Mining faces local opposition, and its entire chain of production increases the material footprint on the environment. This chapter examines how the international regulation of mining has evolved in the 50 years since the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the extent to which international policy and law have reduced the environmental and other impacts of mining in a broad sense. This examination of the difficulties associated with the international regulation of mining provides an illustrative case of the legal complexities related to achieving sustainable production and consumption.

In November 1945, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey set out across Hiroshima to find eyewitnesses who could speak to their experience of the atomic bomb. This surreal scene of dropping a weapon of mass destruction and then going about with clipboards asking residents how they felt about it encapsulated the many contradictions and ironies inherent of the American way of war. Yet the encounter in Hiroshima was also the result of a convergence of several historical trajectories and developments that were shared across all Second World War belligerents. Central to this history was the notion of “morale” and the transnational idea that the goal of bombing civilians was to break their “will” to fight. During the bombing campaign, “the target,” as one air commander put it, “had become the Japanese mind.” Furthermore, morale surveys, this chapter argues, set the stage for a later encounter by the psychological professions with the atomic bomb. This encounter further connected to studies done on Japanese-American internees, American occupation reforms, and the rise of psychological science as a pillar of Cold War struggles over hearts and minds, making it a pivotal moment in early Cold War history.

This chapter examines Simón Bolívar’s political legacy through the lens of Romantic aesthetics, arguing that the myths surrounding “the Liberator” ultimately obscure the true nature of revolutionary change. By situating Bolívar within the cultural currents of his time, it traces how his life and actions were framed in a messianic light, portraying him as a redeemer. This process of mythmaking, it contends, conceals the popular agency that was the essential force driving struggles for freedom. Drawing on a critical tradition that challenges the cult of Bolívar, the chapter concludes that ritual devotion to his messianic figure generates a powerful yet hollow symbol, one that embodies the central contradictions of modern politics and the unfinished business of the Romantic-era revolutions in the Americas.

The Army upheld religious observance and conformity. This was as true of the Hindu milieu of the Brigade of Gurkhas as it was of the Christian character of the wider Army. The Army’s ‘Christendom’ culture endured much longer than in civilian society: soldiers were expected to profess a religious affiliation, and mandatory worship did not disappear with the notional abolition of Sunday church parade in 1946. Only from the turn of the twenty-first century, and under the aegis of a New Labour government, did this situation begin to change. While the goal of making the Army more representative of society led to an increasing accent on recruiting from Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities, under the banner of equality, diversity and inclusion, Humanists began to challenge the Army’s Christian ascendancy. However, and although the proportion of soldiers professing ‘no religion’ (in fact, a remarkably varied category) grew in the early years of the twenty-first century, most notably after the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan, the appetite for fundamental religious change remained very limited, with Humanist aspirations being assimilated by the Army’s established culture of religious pluralism.

This chapter presents relationships between processes of both internal and international migration as a signature feature of Los Angeles literature. Through works by Facundo Bernal, Carlos Bulosan, Laila Lalami, and Nayomi Munaweera, Manizza Roszak reflects upon LA’s status a node of global migration. In the works of John Fante, Walter Mosley, Michele Serros, Charles Yu, Percival Everett, and Tommy Pico, meanwhile, questions of transnationality still surface, but are recontextualized by processes intranational migration both historical and contemporary – reflecting LA’s longstanding image as a destination of promise and opportunity. When racial or ethnic marginality inflects experience of the city, however, hopes for renewal and self-remaking rapidly turn to disappointment and frustration. Nevertheless, inter-diasporic solidarities remain.

The Conclusion reflects on how digital technologies have become inseparable from the rhythms, identities and power structures of the Brussels Bubble and the European Union itself. Drawing on Stefan Zweig’s vision of technology as both a unifier and disruptor, the chapter argues that the EU is now a virtual social field – a polity where governance, diplomacy and community are co-constituted by digital infrastructures. Through ethnographic insights, it reveals five key transformations: the EU as a digitally mediated space; social media as a symbolic economy of insider recognition; diplomats and officials as cyborgs, their bodies and selves extended by devices; the everyday negotiation of digitalisation, where technology is not imposed but adapted and contested; and the necessity of a practice turn for understanding global governance in the digital age.

The chapter underscores that digital tools do not merely facilitate EU politics – they reshape its boundaries, hierarchies and temporalities. From WhatsApp groups to virtual meetings, technology is both a site of empowerment and vulnerability, challenging ideals of transparency, equality and sovereignty. Ultimately, the EU’s future will be negotiated at the intersection of human agency and digital mediation, where the ambivalence of progress and disruption mirrors the complexities of European integration itself.