This chapter explores political rights under international human rights law. It covers the right to self-determination, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of association and assembly, electoral rights, and the right to participate in public affairs. The chapter examines the legal frameworks and standards for protecting these rights, the obligations of states to ensure their effective exercise, and the role of international bodies in monitoring and enforcing compliance. It also highlights the challenges in promoting political rights in different political and cultural contexts and the importance of fostering inclusive and participatory governance.

This chapter explains why the norm against torture and inhuman and degrading treatment dramatically expanded in the period after 1998. Relying on the theoretical framework, it assesses the conditions that made the Court audacious enough to effectuate these resource-intensive positive obligations. First, as a full-time court with compulsory jurisdiction, the new Court came to enjoy a wide discretionary space. This attribute conferred it with judicial courage to issue audacious rulings across the board and recognize a range of important positive obligations under Article 3. Second, there was a growing need for positive obligations in European societies, especially in the aftermath of the Eastward enlargement. Positive obligations were necessary for both the Western and Eastern European countries alike. They served a supplementary role for the protection of rights in Western Europe and played a crucial role in inducting Eastern Europe into a rule of law tradition. Last but not least, creating positive obligations was less likely to raise eyebrows because they were already established in the jurisprudence of other courts and were actively promoted by civil society groups.

Civil society in the Arab region successfully mobilized dissent during the 2011 uprisings. In particular, youth and women movements, surprised many international and domestic audiences by leading massive peaceful protests against their authoritarian regimes. Despite their initial success, these movements failed to bring liberal reforms or facilitate democratic transitions and soon lost their momentum and popular support. Chapter 5 highlights how civil society in most parts of the Arab world was undermined and why it failed to play a more consequential role in constitution-making and democratization. It first examines why the characteristics of constitution-making process matter if civil society is to succeed in its democratizing role. The chapter also looks at both endogenous and exogenous factors impacting civil society’s failure that persist across the region. The endogenous factors hindering the work of most CSOs in the region include lack of organizational capacity as well as lack of public legitimacy. The two exogenous factors that contributed to civil society’s failure in playing a more prominent role in democratization are the negative impact of societal cleavages and conflict on the work of civil society as well as the undemocratic forces of the military or international interventions.

Intuitively, much research in commons research focuses on collaborative governance of environmental resources. At the same time, due to the pressures of climate change, the number of natural disasters will only increase, and humanitarian crises are already on an uptake. As a result, I aim to extend this line of inquiry in my discussion of humanitarian aid as a shared and contested common resource. I take the example of the 2013–2016 West Africa Ebola Epidemic, which occurred along the border of three countries with different institutional histories.Drawing on interviews with 100 civil society organizations and domestic NGOs, I illustrate how top-down management of the 2013–2016 Ebola Response by governmental and international organizations led to policy failure, only until local organizations were involved. Ebola unveils the inefficiency of neglecting local actors, typical in international humanitarian response. In addition, contestation of humanitarian aid resources viewed as “commons” by recipients and “private” by international aid organizations fuels tensions in the aid relationship, and particularly during a crisis where local buy-in is essential.

This chapter applies the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework conceived by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom in 1990 to the institutional arrangements that structure and organize the operating environments for civil society organizations (CSOs). We begin by defining what is meant by “civil society” and “CSOs,” and highlighting their essential attributes, followed by a discussion of the importance of the legal and regulatory frameworks that underlie the existence and operations of CSOs. We then briefly review Garett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis before discussing the role of CSOs in preventing such tragedies from emerging. After presenting the types of rules that inform every IAD action situation and applying them to the existing research on CSO laws, we conclude by reconceptualizing CSO regulatory regimes through the lens of Ostrom’s IAD framework and analysis.

Section II of this volume centers on the collective mnemonic invocation of the two watersheds under review. The focus in this part lies on national memorial days – Yawm al-Nakbah (Arabic: Nakba day) and Yom ha-Shoah (Hebrew: Holocaust day) – and on places of commemoration. Through differentiating between non-physical and physical mnemonic acts, the two chapters that make up this part testify to the different mnemonics that have arisen as a result of the diverging political reality that exists in both societies under review. Within the 1948 borders, access to former Palestinian villages has meant that Nakba commemorations encompass physical mnemonics that center on former Palestinians localities, whereas restrictions on Palestinian movement into Israel have meant that non-site-specific commemorative acts dominate in the West Bank. The existing political circumstances have created a further disparity in the official nature of the Israeli and Palestinian institutes and organizations involved in commemoration. In the Israeli context, the three main Holocaust memorial institutes under examination in Israel, namely Yad Vashem, Lohamei Hagetaot, and Yad Mordechai, conform with the official state narrative. Conversely, the absence of Palestinian governance in Palestinian society inside the 1948 borders and post-Oslo hostility toward the PA has meant that an overt state-sanctioned narrative has largely remained absent in Nakba commemorations, leading civil society organizations on both sides of the Green Line to adopt a dominant role in mnemonics.

− ESG–Agency scholarship highlights the fragmented, expanding, and complex forms of authority that prescribe, steer, and govern behaviour on environmental issues. − Agency scholarship on earth system governance covers interdisciplinary debates in four broad areas: the types of agents, the ways authority is exercised, the nature of agents’ influence, and the varieties of governance structures or architectures within which agents act.− Even with increasing scholarship into the fragmentation of authority and multiplication of the types agents to include nonstate, transnational, and subnational actors, states continue to be the centre of agency scholarship. Future research is needed on agency theory and the theoretical nature of relationships between actors and within differing geographic, economic, and political contexts.