Requests can sometimes create reasons for action, and sometimes obligations. Request norms explain their reason-giving force, as being able to create reasons for others is valuable for us.

In this book, Peter Schaber explores the normative force of requests. The epistemic view holds that by informing the requestees of what the requester desires, the requester may draw the requestee's attention to an already existing reason to comply with the request. In contrast, Schaber argues that requests themselves possess normative force if certain conditions are met. Requests create reasons for the requestee to honor if and only if the requested act is good or at least not sufficiently bad, and if it is good to take the request as a reason for action.

In some cases, requests do not merely create reasons but impose obligations. Requests can create obligations even though the requester does not intend to impose an obligation on the requestee, unlike in the case of an order, where the prescriber communicates the intention to impose an obligation on the addressee of the order. Whether a request creates reasons or obligations is determined by request norms, which can be framed as follows: "If and because A asks B to do x, B has a reason to do x". The request might trigger an obligation, thus imposing an obligation on B to honor the request. Alternatively, the reason might not trigger an obligation, and thus B is not obliged to honor the request.

Request norms hold if and because it is valuable to follow. Certain requests are not reason-giving because it would not be valuable for us if they were, but the practice of making requests is essential for living respectfully with others.

This book uncovers how video game contracts act as monologues of power, moulding players to align with proprietary ideologies.

In the era of interactive technologies, the player emerges as a vital yet curiously overlooked figure. While copyright law governs the creation and distribution of these technologies, it sidesteps the player, leaving private contracts to define their role and obligations. Using video games as a case study, this book fills the gap left by copyright law, offering an innovative socio-legal methodology to interrogate and challenge harmful contractual norms.

By analysing contracts as a form of critical discourse, the book exposes the contradictions and idealisations embedded in these agreements, which often serve to reinforce industry priorities. It is an essential resource for scholars in intellectual property law, video game studies, and socio-legal research, contributing to pressing debates on user rights and the shifting balance of power in interactive industries.

With its fresh perspective on the interplay of copyright, contract, and cultural participation, the book redefines the player's role in a rapidly evolving digital landscape, offering new tools to understand and critique the legal frameworks shaping this most interactive of industries.

In a world, where cyber threats evolve daily, the line between hacker and hero is thinner than you think.

Hacking is no longer just a shadowy underground activity-it's an essential part of our digital world. The Future of Hacking explores the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, ethical hacking, and digital defense, revealing how hackers protect as much as they attack. Drawing on extensive research and expert interviews from around the world, Laura Scherling uncovers the real-world impact of cybercrime, internet freedom, and digital policy. This accessible yet deeply researched book challenges misconceptions about hacking, highlights the work of those defending our digital future, and helps readers understand why cybersecurity is now everyone's concern. The future of hacking is here.

This book traces the historical development of key sites of knowledge creation in science and technology and the robust traditions of scholarship around their origins, exploring commonalities, divergences, and transnational features of knowledge-making cultures from the 18th century to the present.

The "space of inquiry" is a meeting of knowledge, labor, and public policy that explodes beyond the confines of lab, campus, and corporation. It is a distinct site connected, formally or informally, to pursuing, teaching, or sharing knowledge - practices that have taken many different shapes across time and around the globe. The space of inquiry ranges from microchips in one scientist's computer to the factory that builds and sells those microchips around the world. In the Internet age, the spatial aspect of inquiry approaches immateriality, yet knowledge is still produced by people, in communities, in specific places. Through vivid case studies of place-making from East Asia to Europe to North America, this volume documents the historical processes of modernization via scientific and technological intensification in new spaces for knowledge production.

Scholars of science, technology, and institutional practices will find this book essential, and its open-access chapters are accessible for use in a variety of undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

Why do some international courts wield broad authority while others face pushback or fade into irrelevance? This book provides novel theoretical and empirical insights into this question. It offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the authority of international courts, drawing from law, political science and behavioural research.

It develops, in Part I, a theoretical model and analytical framework for assessing these questions. The model explains how authority relationships between courts and their audiences - such as states, NGOs, individual applicants, and domestic courts - are formed, maintained, or contested. In Part II, the book applies this analytical framework to in-depth case studies of two selected international courts: the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States. These studies not only provide deeper insights into the authority of these courts but also demonstrate how the analytical framework can be applied to other international courts to generate an enhanced understanding of international court authority.

The book sheds new light on why some courts enjoy enduring authority and others face pushback, offering powerful tools for understanding the behaviour of international courts and their audiences.

Tracing the history of philosophy from ancient Greece to the Postmodern world, this introductory textbook introduces students to Western thought while also highlighting the contributions of marginalized people, groups, and non-Western traditions.

The Path of Philosophy characterizes the discipline of philosophy as a never-ending quest, driven both by wondrous curiosity and by a distressing realization that ultimate truth always evades our grasp. Threads running through the text demonstrate how philosophy is distinct from, and yet interrelated with, religion, science, and art. The second edition includes a new chapter on Postmodern philosophy to introduce students to key debates in twenty-first century thought.

Written in a lively, accessible style, and featuring original, eye-catching artwork, this book offers a clear introduction to the essential concepts, themes, and debates in philosophy, while also emphasizing its relationship to other disciplines, practices, and to our everyday lives.

Discover the complexities of the Afghanistan War, the United States' longest military operation and a conflict with far-reaching impacts in Afghanistan and around the globe.

In this accessible ready-reference encyclopedia, more than 200 entries highlight key people, groups, battles, and concepts and provide valuable insights into the causes, course, and legacy of this lengthy conflict. Cross referencing and further readings accompany each entry, helping readers make connections and pointing them toward resources for additional study. The main text is complemented by a chronology that provides an at-a-glance overview of important events, allowing readers to trace the evolution of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

The 2001 U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, launched in response to 9/11, aimed to dismantle Al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban regime. While the initial invasion achieved these goals, the war transformed into a long and costly struggle against insurgents. Despite efforts to build a new Afghan state, the conflict quickly became a stalemate. The 2021 withdrawal by the United States and NATO and the subsequent return to power of the Taliban ended a war with a complex legacy. The protracted conflict reshaped the United States' role in the world, highlighted the challenges of nation-building, and has left the future of Afghanistan uncertain.

"This is a big book, with big themes and an author with the necessary experience to back them up." - Law Quarterly Review (review of the 1st edition)

Volume 1 of this new edition covers the roots and foundations of private law, the different origins, structure and orientation of civil and common law, and the social and cultural forces behind it. It analyses the practical needs and market forces behind the emergence of a new transnational commercial and financial legal order, its international finance-driven impulses, concepts, and operation; the theoretical basis of the transnationalisation of the law in the professional sphere in that order; and the autonomous sources of the new law merchant or modern lex mercatoria derived from the method of public international law, as well as its relationship to domestic and transnational public policy and public order requirements.
This magisterial work is made up of six volumes. Used independently, each volume allows the reader to delve into a particular topic. Alternatively, all volumes can be read together for a comprehensive overview of transnational comparative commercial, financial and trade law.

"It stands alone in its field not only due to its comprehensive coverage, but also its original methodology." - American Journal of Comparative Law (review of the 1st edition)

Volume 3 of this new edition deals with the transnationalisation of contract law. It compares common law and civil law concepts, noting the origin of the one in commercial law and of the other in consumer law, and identifies the different attitudes to protection, risk management and risk distribution.

The volume also explores future directions in international commerce and finance, as well as the potential, effects, and challenges of e-commerce, blockchain, and the emergence of the smart contract.

This magisterial work is made up of six volumes. Used independently, each volume allows the reader to delve into a particular topic. Alternatively, all volumes can be read together for a comprehensive overview of transnational comparative commercial, financial and trade law.

"Remains a must read for practitioners and academics interested in more than the substantive law of trans-border commercial activity." - King's Law Journal (review of the 5th edition)

Volume 2 of this new edition covers the transnationalisation of dispute resolution, especially arbitration, and contains a critical analysis of the main challenges to its success, continuing credibility and effectiveness.

The volume distinguishes between commercial, financial and foreign investment arbitration and concentrates on the status, role and reasoning of international arbitrators, their limited powers especially in matters of public policy and in property matters, the threat of judicialisation, and the need to connect with mediation and a settlement ethos.

This magisterial work is made up of six volumes. Used independently, each volume allows the reader to delve into a particular topic. Alternatively, all volumes can be read together for a comprehensive overview of transnational comparative commercial, financial and trade law.

Iran's nuclear program remains one of the most contentious issues of modern international politics. This book is the first to trace the evolution of Iran's nuclear strategy (program) in the broader context of its relationship with the United States, from the early days of total US support in the 1950s to the staunch opposition that followed the Iranian revolution, and its reconstitution.

The account covers the pivotal moments including initial meetings to pursue uranium enrichment in Iran, key internal debates, the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Donald Trump's controversial withdrawal and the latest efforts to revive the agreement. The book shows that because the strategic logic of the nuclear program transcends the regimes type, dismantling the Iranian nuclear program is not viable policy option for the United States. Instead, the US must learn to live with a nuclear threshold state and make it a priority to keep Iranian capacity as far away from the bomb as possible.

The research is based on American declassified documents and often marginalized Iranian primary sources including political memoirs, diplomatic correspondences, oral histories from Iranian nuclear officials and exclusive one-on-one interviews with Iranian scientists and national security officials. The account and its findings have important implications for both scholars of nuclear non-proliferation and for policymakers.

For readers with an insurance or commercial background, this book provides a high-level accessible introduction to the rules that govern the legal relationship between the parties to reinsurance contracts while simultaneously presenting a concise, in-depth analysis of contemporary developments for specialist and non-specialist readers alike.

This is the first book to approach the analysis of the legal relationship between the parties through the lens of the balance of interests between reinsurer and reassured: while the Insurance Act 2015 was introduced to redress the former imbalance of interests between assured and insurer, it applies equally to reinsurance contracts. A text of this size must be selective about the range of legal rules it focuses on. The book is divided into six chapters: the presumption of back-to-back cover, Follow the Settlements clauses, damages for late payment of claims, claims clauses, the aggregation of losses, and the allocation of losses. These guide the reader through the main components of the parties' legal relationship, focussing on two recent reforms - section 13A and, to a lesser extent, section 11 of the Insurance Act 2015 - as well as contemporary developments including the aggregation of Covid-19 business interruption losses and the allocation of losses viz The Fairchild Enclave at the reinsurance level.

Written for legal professionals with a connection to, or at least some prior knowledge of, the insurance industry, and recognising that overseas courts frequently refer to English law as representing international market practice, this book will find many readers worldwide including legal practitioners, industry professionals, and scholars.

Women and Politics: The Pursuit of Equality is a comprehensive text examining women's use of politics in pursuit of gender equality. The book is organized around the paradox of gender equality: the need to reconcile demands for equality with biological differences between women and men. Resolving this paradox has proceeded along two paths: the legal equality approach relies on the law to make women and men "the same," while the fairness approach recognizes differences and works to ensure women are not disadvantaged relative to men. The text's in-depth analysis and clear presentation of theory and history lead students to think critically about the challenges faced by women today and in the past. Extensive coverage of diversity among women and consistent attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and gender identity is found throughout the text.
The fully revised fifth edition includes significant updates to the scholarship, including figures and tables, feature boxes, and current challenges to gender equality. The text explores new critical perspectives and recent political events including the 2024 presidential election and Kamala Harris's candidacy, the Dobbs Supreme Court decision overturning 50 years of precedent on abortion rights, the ascendancy of conservative women, Executive Orders defining gender and eliminating DEI initiatives, the wage gap, the fight for paid leave, and women's gains in political representation, employment, education, and the military.
Students are invited to engage with the text through critical thinking and analysis questions related to gender politics and policy in the United States and abroad.

The Linguistic Carnival of Thought: Comparative Philosophy and the Dynamics of Language argues that the practice of philosophizing is significantly influenced by linguistic structures. Against the widespread view that all languages are reducible to the same matrix on a deep-structural level, Rein Raud presents ample evidence to the contrary, demonstrating how different strategies of predication, postulation, negation, individuation, and so on vary greatly and present incompatible combinations in natural languages, which are nonetheless suitable for precise and rational argumentation.
This book compares the views of language presented by Plato, Kongzi/Xunzi, and Bhartrhari; discusses "pansemioticism," or the view that reality itself is significant (addressing Yijing, East Asian Buddhism, the Kabbalah, the philosophies of Peirce, Derrida, and others); juxtaposes the set-theoretical ontology of Badiou and the mereological worldview of Huayan Buddhism; and discusses various critiques of the idea of "truth" (Wittgenstein, Deleuze, Foucault) and a way to accommodate them through the logic of Dignaga, among other topics. With examples from languages and philosophical traditions across the world, the book is an ideal introduction to the problematic for monolingual speakers of English and a scintillating exploration for polyglots.

Where most English-language works on Jankelevitch have almost exclusively centered around the topic of forgiveness, this book fills a gap by bringing to light other aspects of Jankelevitch's oeuvre that deserve attention.

Although Jankelevitch is increasingly considered an important French moral theorist, there remains relatively little English-language scholarship on his thought. Jankelevitch's writing, especially on ethics and forgiveness, served as touchstones for works by Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas, among others. Jankelevitch is known for the novelty of his style of writing and lecturing, as well as his analyses of subjects and topics that were not necessarily "in style" at the time. Having been forced into hiding during the German occupation of France because of his Jewish heritage, the Shoah and its aftermath made Jankelevitch reexamine, and largely renounce, the role of German thought and ideas in his own work, leading to an even greater separation between his own thought and the climate of philosophy in France during the 1950's and '60's. Many of the contributors to this volume were, themselves, students of Jankelevitch and, as such, can bring firsthand knowledge of Jankelevitch to bear.

Through labelling theory, Crime and Marginalisation: Young People in World Cinema examines how stigma affects marginalised youth across global societies by analysing key films that reflect broader social trends.

Moving beyond Anglophone perspectives, it explores diverse contexts, including First Nations dispossession, Global South dynamics, and China's displaced youth. The analysis reveals how cinema reflects racial disparities, colonial legacies, and neoliberal inequities while demonstrating that perceptions of delinquency are reductive and that universal characteristics are elusive. It further explores themes of alienation, survival, and resistance in hostile environments.

Challenging notions of traditional juvenile justice, Crime and Marginalisation: Young People in World Cinema will appeal to students and scholars of crime and popular culture, crime and media, and youth crime and justice.

Drawing on empirical research that examines how processes of victim identification unfold in relation to cases of child criminal exploitation in the UK, the book explores four different qualities of the concept 'victim'. Specifically, the book provides ways of thinking about the concept of 'victim' as: incorporeal, in that efforts to convert victim recognition into meaningful impact are often extremely difficult to realise; binary, in that the victim is defined and constructed in opposition to the figure of the offender; relational, in that its emergence is heavily influenced by interactions; and precarious, in that the category 'victim' is often time-limited and subject to ongoing scrutiny.

These insights demonstrate that the social construction of victim status is fraught with frustration, resistance, and exclusion. Existing research and advocacy work has often followed the assumption that the solution to this is that more people need better access to the label 'victim'. But what if there are fundamental flaws within the conceptual category of 'victim' itself? Accordingly, this book considers possibilities of moving beyond the category 'victim' and finding alternative approaches of acknowledging and responding to harm in meaningful ways.

This book will therefore be of interest to students and scholars of criminology and victimology. It will also be useful resource for professionals in policing, youth justice, and victim support.

What is the process for a successful criminal investigation? Finding the Truth with Criminal Investigation is intended to answer all of the questions of who, what, where, when, why and how a violent crime occurred and/or was committed. It is intended for students in the field of criminal justice who wish to become criminal investigators-exposing them to the tools and processes needed to conduct a proper criminal investigation, but also the reality of working to support others as a team. Author Daniel A. Reilly spent a great deal of his professional life working on homicide cases, and he offers students his expertise in criminal investigation by successfully incorporating real-world context throughout this book.

Updates to this Second Edition include:
- Updated illustrative cases reflecting current police investigations, to support theories and opinions about investigative steps and best practices
- Additional content on crime scene investigation
- Updated scholarship and supporting data
- New images, charts, and graphs

Without deference to any one religious tradition, Philosophies of the Self makes cross-cultural analysis possible by introducing a multitude of understandings about ourselves that change how we think not only about philosophy of religion but philosophy in general.

This is a guide to the many different concepts of the self found in traditions around the world. Ideal for independent study or classroom teaching, Philosophies of the Self represents a break with the orientalist problems around the "East-West" dichotomy. By refusing to defer to any religious tradition, it allows you to learn about and evaluate philosophical conceptions of the self from a broad range of cultures.

Covering Shinto, Afro-Brazilian, Jain, Nyaya, Daoist, Nguni, as well as specific philosophical paradigms developed by Iqbal, Ifeanyi Menkiti, and Jacques Derrida, each chapter systematically explores conceptions of self that are specific to a philosophical tradition. Bringing together an international team of contributors, each chapter situates the concepts' definition, philosophical significance, historical context, and the relevant works or cultural locations in which they appear.

From broad, high-level comparison to in-depth, close reading, the structure allows you to engage with the different concepts in a variety of ways. You are able to compare foundational ideas, draw on suggestions for further research and choose a combination of chapters for an in-depth cross-cultural study.