This chapter offers a new way of understanding the workings of the Indian Constituent Assembly. We move beyond studying the script, or the published Constituent Assembly debates, making visible the labour, infrastructure and ideas that went into the staging and the atmospherics of the assembly itself as a public and a lived space. The procedural rituals, the pulse of the debates, and the physical setting of the Constituent Assembly building enabled and shaped the constitution-making process. We follow a few actors from the Constituent Assembly as they moved across different assemblies in India and abroad while the constitution was still in the making. In doing so, we reveal the Indian constitution’s part in an emerging international regime of human rights and practice of comparative constitutional law and reconstruct a sense of the everyday ordinary life of the Assembly, which was deeply connected with the Indian public and the world outside.

Chapter 7 frames Kenyan attempts of archival retrieval as a matter of decolonization at the international, bilateral, and national levels. Importantly, it also draws attention to how the concealment of the “migrated archives” affected political activity not only within Kenya but also in England, as a country undergoing its own re-nationalization process at the end of empire. The process of recovering records from the UK provided the Kenyan Government a framework in which to invoke a sovereign and unified Kenyan polity as the rightful home for the “migrated archives,” while dissent over Kenyatta’s centralized authority grew within the country. Meanwhile, British engagement with the “migrated archives” throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the consolidation of postcolonial archival secrecy with other European partners as evident in the voting blocs formed in the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts.

Law-making is not a straightforward process in international law. This chapter focuses on the various law-making processes and structures available for creating international law. It first considers the traditional sources of international law as set out in art 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice generally and the concept of hierarchy of norms and relative norms before considering each of the art 38(1) sources in turn. The chapter concludes by considering alternative sources of international law not covered by art 38(1): 'soft law' including that created by non-State actors, and the role of the UN in creating international law.

Human rights are commonly invoked by States and individuals alike. Most recently there has been a spate of cases with a State accusing another of acts of genocide. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) is the first human rights treaty which the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted in 1948. As an example, it gave South Africa the basis for accusing Israel of acts of genocide for their activities against Palestinians living in Gaza even though it had no immediate and direct interest in the situation. Since the Genocide Convention a host of other treaties have been adopted and ratified by States and the United Nations machinery for administering them is now complex and sophisticated, despite the traditional enforcement mechanisms that domestic lawyers are accustomed to having behind them.

This chapter is a short intellectual biography focusing on my interest and engagement in questions of political legitimacy over the years. The chapter is organized into three parts. I begin by discussing how the issue of legitimacy has been one of my key intellectual concerns ever since I started to do research on politics, initially in the context of the study of political and legal regimes in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). Next, I highlight my understanding of political legitimacy as a responsibility and what this means for the evaluation and judgment of politics. This understanding builds on one of my previous books, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility. Finally, I focus on how, gradually, in particular in connection with my work with the United Nations (UN), I became interested in the question of political legitimacy at the international level.

An international authority is necessary for the features of international legitimacy—that is, international membership, rights holding, fundamental principles of international law and hierarchy of rights holding, and rightful conduct—to be identified and operationalized, to become the expression of legitimacy and legitimacy in action internationally. Since the end of World War II, the United Nations (UN) has embodied this international authority. Having been established by the will of states and the UN Charter, the UN serves as the international authority of the time, the framework in which most of the construction and evolution of international law—be it through lawmaking treaties, the resolutions of the UN Security Council, or the work of the UN General Assembly and other UN organs—has taken place since the end of World War II. In the process, it has played a central role in determining what is and is not legitimate in international life.

This chapter concentrates on the conditions of access to and the nature of membership in the international system as established by international law—specifically, three issues. The first issue is the type of society that is presented as a legitimate collective member of the international order. One of the first steps that international law takes to determine legitimacy at the international level is to identify the criteria necessary for a collective actor to be viewed as a full-fledged legitimate member of the international community. The second issue is that after World War II and the creation of the United Nations (UN), access to international membership in the international order moved toward a form of universality that has been relatively pluralistic. The third issue is that despite this movement toward a pluralistic universality, there are limits to the universality and pluralism of international membership in the international system as defined by international law.

As the first chapter in Part One (which describes the book’s two main characters – sustainable development and the World Bank exemplifying the IFIs – and narrates how their paths meet), chapter 1 maps the international community’s varied and evolving understandings of sustainable development, drawing particular attention to how these understandings overlap with and echo themes from early attempts to reform international economic law, ie the legal rules governing the global economic order, and the contemporary efforts to codify the human right to development.

This chapter explores the relationship between Holocaust and genocide, beginning with the the emergence of the concept of genocide and its relationship to prior law on war crimes. The chapter offers a close examination of Lemkin’s evolving thinking, and that of other contemporaries on the relationship between the Jewish experience under Nazism and other mass atrocities. It argues that Lemkin’s genocide concept blurred some critical distinctions, notably whether genocide necessarily implied biological extermination. This ambiguity was, however, critical to its political utility in the early postwar context, but the resulting law and terminology has become a political weapon, often obscuring the reality of the violence it purports to describe.

When reflecting on this book’s insights, a key question is highlighted: What is the prospect for effectively preventing and resolving armed intrastate conflicts globally? The threat of such conflict erupting remains a constant risk for policy-makers and researchers to investigate, and to prepare for constructive intervention. As discussed throughout this text, the challenges inherent to establishing effective peacekeeping policies and resolving intrastate conflict remain. Furthermore, this chapter addresses how areas of non-violent conflict, but high tension, threaten to escalate in the future. Is it possible to successfully intervene and to deescalate future intrastate violence? From the timing of intervention to international cooperation, the debates and critical lessons that we conclude with here will encourage thought-provoking discussions on formulating effective policies to prevent and end intrastate violence.

In addition to right representation, our new framework for democratic global governance must comprise global circles of participation chosen by global sortition. We must make something new work for the world by giving new life to human institutions at every level of governance. To accomplish this, we must employ random selection to create an interlinked network of global participation that will be a central part of a new system of democratic global governance. We must establish, globally, multiple levels of multidimensional and multiconnected circles of participation through random selection, reflecting the diversity of views in the entirety of the world, ascending and descending through interaction at different tiers of governance, linking, overlapping, and jointly acting in different sectors and on different subjects of governance, in an ongoing expression of human imagination and democratic will. Among these sortition circles must be circles for nature and circles for the future. We must make these global circles into rings of human action in which everyone throughout the world will have an equal opportunity to participate.

Women are eligible to serve in virtually all roles in the Australian Defence Force and the Canadian Armed Forces. The contributions of women at home and abroad reach back to the establishment of women’s services during the Second World War, and to nursing services during the First World War and other conflicts such as the Korean and Vietnam wars. More recently women have served in numerous conflict zones, including on the battlefields of Afghanistan. While there are notable differences in the historical journey, there are also important similarities that have shaped the experiences of women in the militaries of Australia and Canada.