As economies become more complicated with increasing interdependence tied to exchange and specialization, inequality appears as an outcome of dispersed versus concentrated flows and accumulations of value that affect differences in well-being, power, and institutional formations. We look at the complicated institutional arrangements that favor or limit inequality, perhaps the most important of which is the development of institutional property and how it allowed control over production and distribution. The theoretical and empirical breadth of inequality is vast. For this comparative effort, we formulate an approach that can analyze inequalities in wealth and property from widely different social formations, including the segmentary societies of Pare, Tanzania, and Zuni in the American Southwest, chiefdoms in the Scandinavian Bronze Age (BA), and advanced states and empires such as Rome and the Inca. Within this broad spectrum, differences in the control of wealth, prestige, ranking and/or ascribed rank are intertwined but not necessarily overlapping. Our approach focusses on how access to and control over material wealth is distributed in our sample.

The United Nations Operation in the Congo’s (ONUC) mandate was progressively expanded in the 1960s to include elements of international administration. In this case, like many others, a strict reading of the mandate fails to give a sense of the effective authority displayed by UN officials.The focus of this chapter will be on two specific aspects of the UN presence in the Congo in the early 1960s. First, I will focus on the role played by the UN Secretary-General in the Congo and the UN mission in general during a specific moment, generally referred to as ‘the Constitutional Crisis’. The collapse of the Congolese government enabled the UN to display assertiveness in the country, taking opportunity of this moment of exception. Second, I will analyse the Civilian Operations Programme, an unprecedented effort through which UN technicians controlled segments of the public administration of the country, which is truly interesting from the point of view of authority devoted to the UN. I argue here that the UN displayed sovereignty practices in the Congo, notably through the enterprising Hammarskjöld, who managed to position the UN in position of authority in the country, autonomising itself to a certain degree both from member states and from local Congolese elite.

This chapter explores three kinds of unsupervised task: clustering, density estimation and dimensionality reduction. Cluster analysis aims to group similar observations together. The K-means algorithm does this by repeatedly reassigning each point to the nearest cluster centre, reducing or maintaining the clustering inertia at each step. Density estimation involves learning a probabilistic model of a data-generating process. Gaussian mixture models represent the distribution as a weighted sum of multivariate normal components. The EM algorithm fits these models by alternating between assigning each component a responsibility for each point and updating component locations using responsibility-weighted averages. Cross-entropy measures how well an estimated density approximates the true one and is minimised when the two match. Dimensionality reduction compresses data into a lower-dimensional latent space via an encoder, with a decoder reconstructing the original data. Principal component analysis uses linear encoder–decoder pairs to minimise reconstruction error, offering a simple yet powerful form of dimensionality reduction.

The mandate of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) doesn’t seem to hint at an international administration in Haiti, yet the setting up of the peace operation opened up a period where it is commonly understood that ‘the international community was no longer working behind the scenes in Haiti to impose a government but rather worked overtly to impose its will’. This chapter will highlight the complex sovereignty arrangement at play in Haiti, focusing on political authority claims by international actors with the repercussions this has for accountability claims from local actors. If public transcripts in Haiti generally focus on the legal trappings of sovereignty of Haiti, with theatrics such as pictures of the Haitian president with counterparts shaking hands in front of their flags in a seemingly egalitarian way, the unequal nature of power relations in Haiti is hardly difficult to detect. Through a combination of the analysis of the leaked Hillary Clinton emails as well as interviews with prominent actors in Haitian politics, I trace situations of exception in Haiti, discussing what this reveals for practices of sovereignty in Haiti. I will be focusing the analysis on the 2010-2011 elections and its aftermaths, especially the attempt to remove René Préval from the presidency following the first round of the presidential elections.

This chapter looks at some of the experiments of international governance by the United Nations typically listed as cases of international administrations (West Irian, Namibia, Cambodia and Eastern Slavonia). These United Nations peace missions have been considered as international administrations by numerous scholars, in the same category with Kosovo and Timor-Leste and sometimes on par with these two experiments in terms of effective authority deployed by international officials. I will be arguing that contra this opinion generally based on the reading of the mandates, international officials have displayed only limited political authority over these territories. Through archival work conducted in the United Nations Archives, revealing in specific instances the hidden transcripts of the time, I will be analysing each of these cases in turn, and adding a few other cases as well including Cyprus, El Salvador, Mozambique, Western Sahara and Somalia.

Chapter 6 traverses a test veteran group action against the British Ministry of Defence as it moved through the High Court of England and Wales, the Court of Appeal, to a final ruling in the UK Supreme Court. According to the legal principle of limitation, test veterans needed to offer the courts life histories proving ignorance of nuclear risk. The MoD’s legal counsel argued that an individual’s obligations to anticipate and understand injury were unrelated to the pragmatic enactment of such knowledge. In witness stands, test veterans recontextualized their knowledge of injury in ways that animated state, medical, and legal actors as powerfully capable of stymying their knowledge. In this case, claimants experience a series of unjust legal reversals and ironies. First, the actions and duties of claimants, not those accused of injuring them, became the subject of moral and legal judgement. Second, claimants’ long-running quests for knowledge about their health became the very legal rationale to deny them justice. And third, such legal processes imposed strict time limits on claimants’ actions, while also making claimants wait as appeals stretched over years.