Protecting human rights and safeguarding the environment, along with maintaining peace and security, are fundamental values of modern international society. The first two topics emerged as matters of international concern several decades apart, and the earlier development of human rights law encouraged international lawyers and activists as early as the 1972 Stockholm Conference to explore and attempt to understand the interrelationship between human rights and environmental protection. As this understanding has grown, the two fields have increasingly interacted. Since the Stockholm Conference, constitutional provisions and related litigation on environmental rights have spread around the globe. At the same time, differences in goals and priorities have demonstrated the obstacles to merging them or integrating either subject entirely into the framework of the other. The current focus on climate change has been accompanied by new efforts to enforce environmental goals that impact the enjoyment of human rights.

This chapter takes stock of the evolution of the trade-environment nexus, focusing on the legal protection of the atmosphere. It offers a brief historical overview of the trade-environment debate, zooming in on the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. It then discusses the rationale, functioning, and legality of (1) multilateral trade measures incorporated in the 1987 Montreal Protocol and (2) unilateral trade measures adopted with a view to protecting the climate. The main conclusion is that, while much has changed since the Stockholm Conference – with new international legal regimes coming into being and many more trade-related environmental measures being adopted – some things have stayed the same, with North-South tensions continuing to form the main backdrop for trade-environment interactions and continuing uncertainty about the forum in which these interactions should be addressed.

According to Beauvoir’s existentialist philosophy, human beings have no essence; they must create themselves through their actions and choices. Projects are central to our very humanity. But does it matter what these projects are intended to achieve? Is it up to each individual to choose their own projects and goals? Can the commitment to a project, and its goal, become unethical? Chapter 2 explores these questions and examines Beauvoir’s answers in The Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus and Cineas. These works mark the beginning of Beauvoir’s journey away from her youthful individualism. While exploring human freedom and asserting the moral imperative to exercise one’s freedom, they also start to investigate the limits of freedom, a theme that looms large in her subsequent works.

In this chapter, we use the classification of the root systems with all roots of the same length to determine the graphs G whose adjacency matrix A(G) has least eigenvalue −2 or larger. This classification includes the Shrikhande graph and gives us another, quite different, proof of Shrikhande’s Theorem.

Note that if G is a graph with at least one edge, then the sum of the eigenvalues of A(G) is zero (the trace of A(G)), and hence G has both positive and negative eigenvalues. So, for non-null graphs, the smallest eigenvalue is negative.

This chapter details the self-inquiry of a language teacher educator (LTE) examining emotional exchanges during mentoring sessions over a semester. It focuses on the LTE’s emotion work of providing empathy and discomfort to guide a teacher learner (TL)’s critical inquiry into her emotions for professional development. Data included the TL’s weekly reflective journals and feedback, Zoom meetings, and the LTE’s field notes. Results indicate that critical inquiry into emotions fosters the TL’s emotional reflexivity and agency. However, the process demanded the LTE carefully balance creating discomfort and providing support to ensure the TL’s emotional well-being, causing significant emotional challenges. Discomforting the TL made the LTE feel vulnerable and face ethical tensions about the appropriateness and responsibility of creating discomfort for educational purposes and its justification. The LTE’s emotional experiences are further discussed in relation to her beliefs and identity. The chapter suggests that incorporating emotion as critical inquiry in teacher education foregrounds LTEs’ emotional experiences, highlighting emotion as pedagogy.

Violence against religious objects is the chief subject of this chapter. It considers Irish Catholic violence against the Protestant Bible, arguing that its status as a heretical object was central in explaining hostility and destruction; however, its anglicising power was also targeted, with implications touching language, the law, imperialism and more. Protestant iconoclasm also receives some attention, though the chapter notes its relative paucity in the sources; when it occurred however, it was a powerful statement against perceived idolatry, superstition and the believed inherent violence of Catholicism, especially the clergy. The chapter concludes with a reconsideration of massacre in light of iconoclasm and material violence, arguing that the body could be understood as a form of ‘sacred image’, and thus, interpersonal attacks must be viewed and understood as part of a continuum of violence against symbols of faith, giving a new perspective to long-running debates concerning massacre in the rebellion.

The First World War has recently been reinvented in the West as the grand stage to play the anthem of “multiculturalism”: A colonial and violent past often gets sanitized and instrumentalized for a political agenda of social cohesion. This chapter uncovers this story through a focus on South Asia, which contributed 1.5 million soldiers to the war. In the process, it examines the color of war memory and practices of remembrance, the archive and the digital revolution, and diversity and recolonization, as well as the work of literary and artistic imagination in interrogating the colonial past.

An organic linkage exists between the international environmental law-making process and the design of the architecture of international environmental governance (IEG). The prognosis of the global environmental problematique from the 1972 Stockholm Conference to the 2022 Stockholm+50 Meeting and beyond shows the workings of a marathon global environmental regulatory enterprise. Still, after more than 50 years, the nature, content, quality, and actual workings of the legal instruments are worrisome. In a state-centric global order, we need an honest introspection on the architecture of IEG. What will it take to overhaul the existing structures to secure our planetary future? Is it possible without a de novo entity? Can we revive and repurpose the UN Trusteeship Council with a new mandate for the environment and global commons? Within the limits of time and space, this chapter looks back in order to ideate and look ahead to secure a robust IEG architecture for our common planetary environmental future.

Philosophers, philologists, and poets of the Romantic period showed a distinct attentiveness to language as a nontransparent medium of thought and expression. Working in the wake of Locke’s 1689 Essay concerning Human Understanding, with its third book entitled “Of Words,” Horne Tooke, Rousseau, and Herder developed theories about the origins and histories of languages. Friedrich August Wolf inaugurated modern philological study by approaching classical antiquity through historicist methods of textual editing and verification, and Orientalist scholars such as William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel expanded the study of languages and textual traditions to include those of Persia and India, with such an enterprise entangled, in varying ways, with the apparatus of European colonialism. Breakthroughs in hermeneutics (the branch of knowledge dealing with interpretation) and translation theory by Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, among others, took place in the context of the historicist and relativist turn in the approach to language and languages. William Wordsworth’s aim to write poetry “in the real language of men” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s caution that language may die for “the nobler purposes of human intercourse,” should no new poets create associations afresh, likewise evince a critical relationship to language.