This book challenges the simplicity, predestination, and self-evident nature of contemporary narratives of transitional justice.

Transitional justice is the field of study that examines how states should reckon with massive human rights abuses. The book upends these assumptive narratives on three crucial fronts. The first front is that of innovations. Here, the book questions the ability of transitional justice to deliver tangible successes in an era of rapid and overwhelming technological change and contestation over what constitutes human memory, communicative dialogue, and reliable evidence. The second front involves boundaries. Here the book confronts the professed superpower of transitional justice to do more and more, in an endless concatenation of additives. While there is cause for optimism, this book also suggests that transitional justice remains awkward in how it copes with the existential pressures of environmental, health, and cultural crises. On its third front, refractions, this book identifies how transitional justice addresses racism, misogyny, and democratic backsliding. How the prism of transitional justice interventions refracts these scourges remains inadequate. Throughout, the book asks readers to imagine where the field and practice of transitional justice could go from here-what new innovations are required, what boundaries must be stretched or retrenched, and what perspectives need to be considered due to new ways of seeing current and past atrocities.

Accordingly, this book will be of considerable interest to academics, practitioners working on post-conflict reconstruction, and students at all levels ranging from undergraduate to post-doctoral in the areas of law, politics, cultural property, criminology, human rights, international relations, and technology studies.

This book critically examines how the international norm of the Responsibility to Protect has been effectively limited by its interpretation by liberal states.

Under the Responsibility to Protect, states agree to use 'diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful means' to help protect populations - often refugees - from mass atrocities when the state is 'manifestly failing' to do so. Through an analysis of official discourse, as well as interviews with government officials and civil society representatives, this book examines how the Responsibility to Protect articulated by UK and US governments was understood in the case of Syria. As the book demonstrates, the aspirations relied upon in the advocacy of the Responsibility to Protect are in constant tension with states' conceptual understandings and practice of this norm. As the Syrian case indicates - and in a way that the book maintains as more generally representative - the Responsibility to Protect is routinely interpreted and modified in ways that effectively limit both its meaning and its implementation. In conclusion, the book's analysis contributes to realising a more coherent government policy on atrocity prevention and response that does not undermine humanitarian protection and international consensus on the Responsibility to Protect.

This book will appeal to scholars, research students, practitioners, and policymakers in the areas of international law, human rights, international relations, peace and conflict studies, and refugee studies.

This book explores the use of Third-Party Funding (TPF) in Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a transformative yet controversial instrument that implicates procedural fairness, the commodification of justice, public interest, and state sovereignty in investment law.

TPF is a topical, yet underexamined topic within international arbitration. With the TPF market now estimated to exceed USD 15 billion, its role in enabling investors to pursue expensive, high-value investment claims has attracted attention. The book comprehensively analyses the use of TPF in the context of the ISDS system, highlighting issues such as influence on the decision to settle, conflicts of interest, effects on procedural fairness, wealth transfer, and the commodification of justice. It argues that attempts to reform TPF have mainly focused on a narrow set of issues that may arise during arbitral practice, specifically the issue of potential conflicts of interest between funders and arbitrators, resulting in regulatory gaps. Amid recently completed and ongoing reform efforts by institutions such as UNCITRAL, this book offers a timely and critical analysis of the use of TPF in ISDS. It will combine theoretical insights, real-world examples, case law, and a comparative overview of current and proposed regulations to provide practical policy and regulatory suggestions.

The book will be of interest to researchers in the field of international arbitration and investment law.

In what is routinely described as a 'knowledge society', this book argues that contemporary knowledge is systematically filtered and distorted by the requirements of the bureaucratic-managerial organisations that constitute the structural core of hypermodernity. As knowledge becomes increasingly politicised, almost every 'fact' with which we are presented serves an agenda.

This book traces the historical and conceptual foundations of 'governmental knowledge'. It examines how problematisation, mediation, informationalisation, and substitution translate human life into abstract representations that can be managed, manipulated, and retrojected back onto social reality. The proliferation of experts and managerial intermediaries institutionalises these processes across domains as diverse as public health, education, corporate management, and everyday digital interactions. It argues that, far from being neutral, expert knowledge instrumentalises liminality and subordinates social life and individual conduct to the algorithmic logic of managerialism. Technocracy thus systematically filters out the dimensions of meaning, participation, and embodied existence, constructing a 'second reality' that blinds us to whole ranges of human experience.

A compelling study of the politics of knowledge, Technocracy: Knowledge and Power in the Information Age sheds light on the way a certain type of knowledge is used to lay claim to authority, status and resources, and how the endless expansion of such knowledge reshapes society. It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and social theory with interests in the sociology of knowledge.

Highlights crime eyewitnesses who use digital technologies to record, share, and watch crime online

In the digital age, crime and efforts to control crime have been transformed by the ability of ordinary citizens to "witness" crime remotely and intervene through smartphones and computer screens. Crime Gone Viral shines a spotlight on the digital witnesses who record, share and watch crime online to elucidate how their responses impact crime outcomes. With the ability to see crime for themselves and digitally intervene from afar, digital witnesses play outsized roles in social control as both capable guardians who help, and as incapable guardians who make matters worse. Digital witnesses also play important roles as storytellers who inform and shape public perceptions about crime and criminal justice.

By placing crime witnesses front and center, Weiss provides a bold and critical framework that challenges existing criminological research that assumes third parties deter crime by virtue of their presence and problematizes traditional ways of thinking about third party social control. Drawing from original survey data and providing examples of real-life criminal cases from both traditional news media and social media to illustrate and analyze digital responses to crime, Weiss identifies three digital witness types: Samaritans, Voyeurs, and Vigilantes. Together, these witness types form the basis of a theoretical framework meant to provide a more nuanced understanding of third-party participation in social control and punishment in the digital age. Ultimately, Crime Gone Viral provides a necessary and comprehensive understanding of crime in the 21st century aimed at developing a theoretical, empirical, and practical understanding of what it means to witness crime in a digital age.

For over four decades, the US federal government has undertaken efforts to police and prosecute environmental crimes to protect public health and the natural environment. Yet, we still know very little about how US federal agencies have monitored and sanctioned water pollution violations and if these actions actually deter crime. In Rivers on Fire and Corporate Liars, Joshua Ozymy and Melissa Jarrell Ozymy examined over one thousand federal water pollution investigations and prosecutions undertaken by the US EPA and Department of Justice from 1983 to 2023 to answer these questions. Their analysis provides the most comprehensive empirical examination to date of how the criminal enforcement of water pollution has evolved over time, patterns in prosecutions, and how criminals were sanctioned.

Designed for use in American government courses, Politics in Action encourages students to take a critical approach to contemporary events and consider the impact of politics on this Republic and its citizens.

The book offers short in-depth cases that enliven the teaching of political concepts and help students grasp key issues shaping their lives. Each of the 15 chapters work as self-contained stories drawing attention to important and current actors, events, and issues in American politics. This edition highlights conflicts such as A Woman for President?, Trump vs. the Press, Re-presenting the Climate, Partisan Federalism: The Battles Over Immigration, The Politics of Abortion, Trying to Steal Georgia's 2020 Election: Republicans Dissent, The Fight Over Fighting Words on Campus, and The Best and the Brightest in the Afghanistan War, to illustrate polarized public affairs in America. Taken together, these concise reader-friendly stories go beyond the headlines to reflect the energy, debates, and realities of modern politics.

Features

• A three-part and 15-chapter organization echoes an introductory American Government syllabus, allowing for seamless integration into teaching the course
• The chapters begin with an introduction that frames the discussion, connecting it to significant issues and players
• A "Concepts to Consider" box ends each chapter to aid understanding of the key topics presented by the case stories

Politics in Action provides short case stories to complement undergraduate courses on American government, as well as informing readers following contemporary politics.

Black communities in America have a long history of constructing sanctuaries amid oppression, from the secret hush harbors of slavery to the digital refuges created in response to the resurgence of white supremacist violence in the Trump era. These havens have offered places to grieve and to gather, to imagine freedom when the world denied it, and to practice care and resistance in the face of constant danger. They remind us that even in the darkest moments, Black people have made space to grieve, rest, heal, strategize, and imagine new futures.

In Hush to Harbor traces this enduring sanctuary-making through both historical memory and contemporary expression from the legacy of Freedmen's Towns and Green Books for Motorists in the Jim Crow era as testaments to Black mobility and mutual protection to present-day digital activism and grassroots organizing that reimagine safety in the public sphere.

Blending literary criticism, cultural history, and ethnography, Scott demonstrates that sanctuary is not merely a place of retreat but a political and spiritual practice that calls forth a collective act of making space when none is offered. In Hush to Harbor offers not just a chronicle of survival but a blueprint for sustaining Black refuge in a time of urgent need, redefining what it means to be safe in a nation that has never guaranteed safety for Black life.

This is the first systematic theorization of digital modernity, arguing that the digital age cannot be understood apart from the long historical arc of modernity.

Bridging digital humanities, critical theory, sociology, philosophy, and global history, Digital Modernity demonstrates that contemporary digital systems are continuations rather than ruptures of the modern project. It offers a robust conceptual framework for examining how technological infrastructures intersect with democracy, governance, colonial legacies, and the public sphere. Across nine chapters, the book moves from conceptual foundations to future-facing proposals. Topics include the cultural logic of Silicon Valley, digital colonialism, digital infrastructure, and the epistemic crisis of the digital public sphere. It also engages philosophical questions about emergence, historicism, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on applied digital humanities, the book rejects technological determinism while offering accessible accounts of computing's technical and political histories. Readers benefit from a coherent theoretical lens that integrates history with socio-technical critique, enabling a clearer understanding of digital modernity's present and future stakes.

This book is intended for scholars and students across digital humanities, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, sociology, the philosophy of technology, and modern history. Its interdisciplinary scope also supports research and teaching in software studies, critical AI, infrastructure studies, and global modernities. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses, it will be especially valuable for researchers seeking to historicize digital systems while advancing critiques grounded in cultural theory, political economy, and postcolonial perspectives. By placing the digital within a longer history of modernity, the book offers both a foundational text and a springboard for further research in critical digital studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

Every day in the United States, an average of three people are killed by police officers. Black and Indigenous victims are disproportionately represented, and their stories are too often distorted by courts and media to justify their deaths and exonerate police actions.

In Complex Innocence, Lisa Marie Cacho examines five police killings that occurred between 2012 and 2019 across the continental U.S., Hawai?i, and the Muckleshoot Nation. Many of the victims - queer people, women of color, and other multiply marginalized individuals - had prior encounters with law enforcement, leading their deaths to be framed as deserved or inevitable. Cacho challenges these narratives by interrogating the legal, cultural, and historical frameworks that determine which acts of self-defense are protected and which are criminalized.

Drawing on self-defense law, Supreme Court cases, anti-resisting arrest statutes, and policing practices, Cacho reveals how "self-defense" as a right has been repeatedly redefined to privilege police officers while denying protection to victims of state violence. Through careful analysis of reports, testimonies, and media portrayals, she demonstrates how people of color's efforts at self-preservation are recast as threats, while officers' violence is framed as justifiable.

By reclaiming the complex innocence of those killed, Complex Innocence exposes the racial, sexual, and colonial foundations of policing. It offers an urgent critique of how U.S. law and culture sustain the cycle of sanctioned state violence.