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International humanitarian law (IHL) is struggling to catch up with military technological development. The international community is increasingly alarmed at the prospect of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) operating without a human interface. The international community’s concern with autonomous enabling technology in weapon systems is whether weapon systems with the ability to identify, select, and attack military targets with little to no human control can comply with existing IHL rules and be morally and ethically acceptable.

This chapter explores an expanded concept of social licence to operate (SLO) to regulate the development of LAWS. The authors believe that it is more efficacious to take a preventative and precautious approach by holding the developers accountable to IHL during the gestation period instead of following a post facto approach. The authors argue that the process involved in issuing or revoking an SLO for the developers of LAWS is already beginning to emerge in IHL. The SLO is only effective during the developmental cycle and would continue as soft law form in regulating the use of LAWS until a more concrete, treaty-based response emerges. In this sense, the SLO can be seen as a catalyst towards a concerted international response to regulate the development, deployment, and use of LAWS.

Purpose – This chapter illustrates how an economic sociology of work exposes the deeply embedded nature of the informal economy and the social and political lives of its growing mass of unprotected workers under globalization. In particular, the premises of economic sociology offer a comprehensive definition of the informal economy that I term, “relational.” In contrast to definitions based on modernization and neoliberal assumptions of isolated economies, relational definitions of the informal economy expose the structures, networks, and political institutions that intertwine informal workers with the formal economy, society, and the state. Operationalizing the relational definition in labor surveys ensures the inclusion of previously invisible informal workers, especially those who operate at the intersection of the informal and formal economy. As well, it ensures the collection of data on the precise ways in which informal workers are socially and politically embedded, including their collective action efforts, the meaning they attach to their labor, and the social networks that determine their life chances.

Methodology – To illustrate this point, I apply a relational definition of informal labor to the case of India, using the National Sample Survey on Employment and Unemployment, as well as findings from interviews with organized informal workers.

Findings – By doing so, I provide an internationally comparative measure of India's informal workforce, illustrate informal workers’ social conditions relative to those of formal workers, highlight the expansion of the informal workforce since the government enacted liberalization reforms, and expose the unique political action strategies Indian informal workers are launching against the state.

Implications/Originality – These findings help us understand Indian informal workers in an internationally comparative context, yielding empirical insights on their social conditions and political organizations for the first time. As well, they call for an important refinement to existing definitions of the informal economy that to date have relied only on Latin American and African experiences.

As recent events in the Middle East and North Africa suggest, nonviolent revolutionary movements may represent an oppressed population's most promising path to ridding itself of an authoritarian regime. But as the diverging experiences of Tunisia and Egypt on the one hand, and Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen on the other suggest, nonviolent victory is never a foregone conclusion. This chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of nonviolent revolutionary success through an analysis of one of the world's first nonviolent revolutions, that of Iran in 1977–1979. Based on historical evidence, I argue that friendly international relations between the United States and Iran is a key factor in explaining both the revolutionaries’ preference for nonviolent tactics and the government's inability to repress the movement. Jimmy Carter's human rights framework served as an important incentive for revolutionaries to remain nonviolent while ensuring that state repression of unarmed protesters would come at a political price high enough to discourage the government from resorting to overwhelming violence.

In Japan, virtual exchange and mobility are regarded as an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic and as alternatives to international learning through physical mobility. International educators express concerns that online international learning methods may fade away after physical student mobility resumes on a larger scale. However, it is crucial for universities to leverage newly developed online learning tools after the pandemic in order to offer inclusive international education which reaches the larger student pool who are unable to study abroad. Now is the time to reflect on how international education policy and practice have relied excessively on cross-border student mobility. In turn, it will be important to position ICT-based educational practices as an opportunity to create new value and meaning for international education in an environmentally friendly and low-cost manner in the new normal world. Also, in Japan, internationalization at home was not addressed to any great extent before the pandemic. However, there is an increasing awareness that ICT-based international education can effectively contribute to the expansion of internationalization at home. Adapting to the new normal situation requires a new modality of internationalization, and it will have a significant impact on the attractiveness of higher education in the country.

This chapter summarizes both volumes of A Socio-legal History of the Laws of War. It reexamines the key themes and how they are interconnected. It closes with a consideration of the value of international law, especially the laws of war, and what may lie ahead.

This chapter discusses the creation, structure, and functioning of the International Criminal Court. It also examines its operations to date and addresses many contemporary criticisms of the court.

In this chapter, we aim to illustrate some of the forms taken by informal employment in the global south and how these can best be understood by adopting a wider analytical lens than has been applied in much of the precarious employment literature. We draw on the findings of a recent study of the working conditions of urban informal workers from 10 cities in the global south. The study consisted of focus groups (15 in each city) conducted through the framework of a participatory informal economy appraisal as well as a survey of 1,957 home-based workers, street vendors, and waste pickers. Our findings illustrate a number of ways in which these three groups of informal workers are embedded within the formal economy. While they are not engaged in wage employment, they play subordinate roles to both formal sector firms within global production networks and unequal production relations and to the state through, inter alia, constrained access to public spaces and regulation. In order to interpret these findings, we apply Agarwala’s (2009) “relational” lens to demonstrate how risks and costs are transferred to workers who constitute the “real economy” in much of the global south. Given the often disguised connections between informal employment and the formal economy, this approach also provides a bridge to understanding precarious working conditions and the effects of globalization outside of the industrialized north.

This chapter describes the nature of higher education funding and student support in the Republic of Ireland. Ireland represents an interesting case-study because of the abolition of student fees in the mid-1990s and the way in which the current crisis in higher education (HE) funding has prompted debate about the appropriate way to fund the sector. The chapter begins by providing a brief outline of the structure of Irish HE and the funding regime before examining HE admissions processes and the kinds of supports available to students. The chapter concludes by looking at trends in participation and the current debate about the future direction of funding.

This paper presents a mixture of linear models (or hedonic regressions) for defining housing submarkets. Two different mixture models are considered: the first model allows all the regression coefficients to vary among the clusters (random coefficients); and the second model allows only the intercept term to change (random intercept). The model with a random intercept can be seen as a linear mixed model where the random effects distribution is estimated via non-parametric maximum likelihood (NPML). The models are illustrated using a real data set of 293 properties in Pamplona, Spain. These mixture models provide a classification of the dwellings into homogeneous groups that determine the structure of the submarkets.