This paper explores interpretations of the Japanese parliament by governmental actors in the Qing empire, most importantly the commissioners for constitutional research Li Jiaju 李家駒 (1871–1938) and Dashou 達壽 (1870–1939). It shows that, within a theoretical framework formed in dialogue with their Japanese constitutionalist colleagues, these actors…[Read more]

The period of masonic internationalism in the last third of the 19th and first third of the 20th centuries saw the most visible – and controversial – attempts to organisationally model the “cosmopolitan imperative” of freemasonry. The various freemasonries in Europe saw themselves as links in a world-spanning “chain of brothers” forged by the…[Read more]

With US economic sanctions against Russia in recent years, the Nord Stream Gas Pipeline project in Europe that links Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea came under considerable global attention. Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has only increased uncertainties around the Project, arguably one of the world’s most consequential submarine pip…[Read more]

The freedom of transit in international trade law originally involved the movement of goods across borders without any arbitrary or unnecessary hindrance. In this era of network-bound energy systems requiring the permanent establishment of fixed installations such as gas pipelines and high voltage power transmission grids to facilitate access to…[Read more]

How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general…[Read more]

Freemasons often referred to an ideal of “humanité” (Humanität, umanità, humanity) in order to bridge all differences separating mankind. In doing so, they rendered these differences all the more visible, especially in the international arenas. This was definitely the case when freemasons tried to deduce from this ideal “universal” standards…[Read more]

The article outlines how comprehensive works on the history of Europe conceptually deal with religion – with regard to the relationship between religion, society and culture, the handling of the theory of secularisation and the significance of religion for the construction of Europe.

Der Beitrag skizziert, wie Gesamtdarstellungen zur Geschichte…[Read more]

This paper seeks to identify and understand the legal framework and models that undergird the regional gas pipeline networks being established in our times, against the backdrop of the evolving legal norms and business practices. It further seeks to examine the ways in which the competing rights and interests of different stakeholders in the…[Read more]

The concept of return is an intoxicating analytic for scholars, for several reasons. The idea that migrants return home creates opportunities to reclaim them from the hegemony of the bordered nation-state. For diaspora theorists, return works as a rebuttal to the field’s preoccupations with exile and loss. Migrants return home all the time, t…[Read more]

Government of India: Ministry of Education,
National Mission on Education through ICT, e-Pathshala PG Programme, Course on International Human Rights Law,
Module on Rights of the Child under International Law
July 2015

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions,…[Read more]

This chapter analyses Global Byzantium by situating the medieval empire of New Rome in the history of statehood’s generalisation worldwide. Arguing that statehood remains the implicit mental furniture of History at a macro-civilizational scale, and so more or less at the micro too, the chapter proposes the dual concepts of hegemony and c…[Read more]