Expanding the Legal and Political Boundaries of ‘Sanctuary’ Through Practices of Compassionate Migration in the American Context

The First Amendment - and its guarantee of free speech for all Americans - has been at the center of scholarly and public debate since the birth of the Constitution, and the fervor in which intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary citizens approach the topic shows no sign of abating as the legal boundaries and definitions of free speech are continually evolving and facing new challenges. Such discussions have generally remained within the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution and its American context, but consideration of free speech in other industrial democracies can offer valuable insights into the relationship between free speech and democracy on a larger and more global scale. Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr. compares the First Amendment with free speech law in Japan, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom - countries that are all considered modern democracies but have radically different understandings of what constitutes free speech. Challenging the popular - and largely American - assertion that free speech is inherently necessary for democracy to thrive, Krotoszynski contends that it is very difficult to speak of free speech in universalist terms when the concept is examined from a framework of comparative law that takes cultural difference into full account.

ABSTRACTThe guano frontier originated as a geographic space for a socio-cultural resource central to the identity, lifestyle and worldview of the indigenous Peruvians. Colonisation in combination with advances in understandings of plant nutrition and fertiliser science, however, shifted guano’s meaning from its original roots and turned it into a globally tradable commodity. The geographical frontier, under the influence of post-independence politics and nationalisation, firstly became an economic frontier and, secondly, a political boundary. With discoveries on Ichaboe and other neighbouring islands on the southwest coast of Africa, this frontier shifted and a race for monopoly control ensued. The dynamics of the struggle for monopoly control over the guano frontier on the Namib coast challenges some of our fundamental historiographic tenets of frontiers, their very natures, triggers and movements. This article suggests the extension of a socio-ecological model in which resource demand and depletion, coupled with changes in the extension of knowledge and legal boundaries, all played roles.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the experience of crossing legal, political, and socio-cultural boundaries by Japanese migrant women in international marriages in Australia. The data is drawn from oral history interviews with 16 Japanese women living in Australia and married to Australian citizens or permanent residents. Australia is one of the most popular destinations for Japanese emigrants. For Japanese women in particular, applying for permanent residency as a spouse of an Australian citizen or permanent resident has been a popular settlement path. I analyze the women’s negotiations between their perceptions of socio-legal systems constructed in Japan and their newly experienced social reality in Australia. The women’s negotiations reflect their individual ways of crossing boundaries. Their practices of the Japanese socio-legal custom of changing one’s surname at the time of legal marriage provide a focus for the article. I argue that individuals’ experiences of crossing boundaries are shaped by, and embedded in, their personal histories constructed in their land of origin. In this sense, their act of ‘crossing’ means creating a connection between both sides whereby the rigidity of these boundaries is blurred.

The surge in domestic violence (DV), akin to a lurking shadow, coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This ‘shadow pandemic’ prompts me to explore the intricate interplay of spatial dynamics between DV and the COVID-19 containment measures. Mirroring the spatial patterns seen in DV, the pandemic restrictions too encompass physical and social isolation in cramped living spaces, as well as exclusion from the public sphere. In this contribution, through my engagement with the Foucauldian concept of the ‘political dream’ in a plague-stricken town, I put forth an account of ‘invasion’ as an audacious act of trespassing boundaries, particularly the transgression of citizens’ privacy during lockdowns. This concept of invasion, I argue, entwined with and starkly juxtaposed against the passive ‘non-invasion’ of DV victims in the guise of marital privacy rhetoric, leaves DV victims in a significantly more precarious position in the global epidemic. Unsettling the rigidity of the private/public; personal/political boundaries, Chinese feminists launched ‘Anti-Domestic Violence, Little Vaccine’ campaign during the Wuhan lockdown. It is in my examination of their performative intervention that I propose my second account of ‘invasion’ – invasion as trespassing a prior boundaries. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of the Habermasian public sphere theory, I delineate that the AVLV campaign is an act of invasion performed on the edges of the fixed spatial, political and legal boundaries, thereby blurring these pre-established lines.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel written by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The title of the book takes its reference from the flag of the former, short-lived, Republic of Biafra, which consisted of a horizontal tricolour of red, black, and green, with a golden rising sun over a golden bar. The author unfolds to the reader the impact and the ugliness of the Biafran war of independence as it meanders through the lives of the interdependent main characters: Ugwu, Olanna, Kainene, Odenigbo and Richard. The events that climaxed into the civil war gradually tore apart the day-to-day routine serenity of the main characters, requiring continuous adjustment in the lives of each character to the reality of war. The harrowing experience of the war drastically changed their lives. The present contribution draws inspiration from thes novel to engage with the construction and definition of social, political and legal boundaries in post-colonial Nigeria, focussing in particular on the relevance and impact of international law norms and principles in the events that unfolded between 1967 and 1970.

Sex scandals involving UN peacekeepers have ignited media attention since the late 1990s. In order to reclaim its reputation, the UN has committed itself to the Zero Tolerance policy embodied in the Secretary-General’s Bulletin of 2003, which has been subject to detailed analysis. This paper’s aim is to reconsider the policy’s genesis and problems from the perspective of discordance between politics and law. I argue that the Zero Tolerance policy can be understood as the UN’s attempt to resolve discordance between political and legal lines which separate the UN (internality) from non-UN elements (externality). The political boundary internalises broader conduct and tasks within the UN. The legal boundary, however, externalises much of the conduct and tasks that are internalised by the political line. The place of the Zero Tolerance policy is therefore to substantially remedy such ‘discordance’ between politics and law, by aligning the policies of externalities with those of the UN.

Carbon monitoring and above ground biomass trends: Anchor forest opportunities for tribal, private and federal relationships

We are living in a world that is increasingly interconnected. Countries and their social, constructed, and natural environments demonstrate emerging interdependencies that must be considered in planning and selecting engineering projects. Immediate access to information is everywhere and, in many respects, geographic proximity is becoming less important to the success of a project. Engineers will need to deal with ever-increasing globalization and find ways to prosper within an integrated international environment, and meeting challenges which cross cultural, language, legal, and political boundaries, while respecting critical cultural constraints and differences. Sustainable engineering practice should meet human needs for natural resources, industrial products, energy, food, transportation, shelter, and effective waste management while conserving and protecting environmental quality and the natural resource base essential for future development. This paper addresses the issue of sustainable engineering practice in the context of globalization. It is based on the efforts made by the members of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)-Body of Knowledge (2 edition) committee in ensuring that a civil engineer of 2020 and beyond will have the requisite understanding of globalization and sustainable engineering practices to enter into the practice of the profession. Specifically, the paper addresses the critical aspects of a sustainable civil society sought by the global profession of civil engineering; and the approach to realization within ASCE.

Abstract. It is generally accepted that a political entity that has reached a certain level of maturity evolves from the ‘frontier era’, characterized by an absence of regulation and a kind of anarchy, to the ‘boundary era’, characterized by order and stability. However, my article shows that the European Union (EU) has initiated a certain return to the ‘frontier era’ in its security relation to the external world. First, at the internal level, the borders between Member States are hardly more than administrative divisions, whose interest in terms of security tends to fade. Second, the external outline of the EU is a legal and political boundary, that is the external limit of the sum of the Member States. Its defence is currently guaranteed, and its value in the framework of the new security policies is limited by the fact that security should now be searched upstream, outside this boundary. Third, there exists a very frontier between the EU and the outer world, a wide space (mainly maritime) separating the EU from the rest of the world. Its strategic depth should contribute to the security of the Union (projection), but as the fi rst frontline, this marginal zone should also be secured itself against incoming transnational threats. The aim of the article was to discuss the way the EU exercises its power beyond its external boundary, as well as to consider the evolving EU’s geopolitical vision. Thus, my research leads to a refl ection on the geopolitical implications of a broadened security agenda for the EU.

The following text explores the relationship of symbolic, performative and discursive exchange in the public sphere and the effect it has on the practices and processes of cultural and legal signification. We shall consider the mutually interdependent relationality between law and (public) art, understood as a contest over meanings, modes of interpretation and knowledge-production, with an eye to examining how artistic activities contribute to ongoing legal, political and cultural discussions in society. This chapter will in particular consider whether and how street art, graffiti art and performance art can produce new concepts and ideas, and whether they are able to re-shape existing symbolic, legal and political boundaries by first producing new (symbolic) spaces and secondly reinterpreting existing ones.

Under the Occupation, the French Jewish Statute made no provisions for an intermediary status for individuals of mixed heritage (who the administration called “half-Jews”), to the contrary of Nazi legislation in Germany. Consequently, there were no first- or second-degree mixed-heritage people in France; one was either Jewish or not. But the criteria for defining whether or not “half-Jews” were of “the Jewish race” varied between German and French texts, case law, and the practices of specialized bureaucrats. The boundary between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” was tenuous, often arbitrary, and shaped by religious affiliation, a divorce, a marriage, or other fact of life. Being classified on the “good” or “bad” side of the “barricade” (according to the formulation of George Montandon, the ethno-racial expert of the Paris Prefecture of Police and the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs [CGQJ]) was very often a matter of life or death. The administration (mainly the “Jewish Service” of the Prefecture of Police and the CGQJ) and the courts had to rule on thousands of “ambiguous cases.” The CGQJ delivered over 11,000 “Certificates of Non-Belonging to the Jewish Race” after painstaking investigations. This article considers the categories that agents of the State used to sort out these borderline cases, and tries to understand the root causes of this dogged quest to determine the legal and political boundary between “Jew” and “non-Jew.”

This special issue addresses the problematic nature of space, whether psychic, symbolic or material, from an inter-disciplinary standpoint. The diverse articles are concerned with legal, psychical, cultural, social and political boundaries. Spaces with legal meanings are the product of such boundaries, and the relation of law and space as explored by the legal geography literature underpins this collection, which investigates these issues at a range of spatial scales, from the scale of the self to the global. In considering the continuum of tension between fear and desire manifest in individuals’ internalized boundaries, we need also to make use of theories developed in psychoanalysis and social psychology. Kleinian ‘splitting’, for example, offers an explanation of law’s role in the creation and maintenance of strong boundaries which exclude ‘othered’ groups. Law’s power as a discourse is challenged by internal contradictions at the international scale, when human rights arguments confront state territorial jurisdiction; while at the other end of the scalar spectrum, regulation of conduct depends both on accepted legal notions of the self-governing individual and on assumptions of shared moral values. Other articles in this issue emphasize the nature of boundaries as liminal spaces full of attendant ambiguity, which, although legally established and enforced, prove in fact to be remarkably permeable. The interdisciplinary perspectives developed in this issue demonstrate the need to further problematize boundaries and to acknowledge the complexity of material, social and mental spaces.

The Charles N. Brower Lecture on International Dispute Resolution was given at 4:15 pm, Thursday, April 10. The speaker was Sundaresh Menon, Chief Justice of Singapore. THE TRANSNATIONAL PROTECTION OF PRIVATE RIGHTS: ISSUES, CHALLENGES, AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS * In the wake of the two wars that rocked the order in the twentieth century, the right of nations to self-determination was enshrined in Article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations. (1) Among the most important developments of the post-war era was the disintegration of colonial empires and a consequent massive increase in the number of states and polities. (2) With this came a proliferation of borders, inside of which were different sovereign legal systems and laws. At the same time, the rebuilding and reconstruction of the post-war created both the impetus and the opportunity to focus on development and economic growth. (3) So even as the number of discrete states and polities increased, the witnessed a rapid increase in the connectedness of its economies and its cultures. Thomas Friedman observed in his bestseller, The World Is Flat, (4) what might now be accepted as conventional wisdom: that increased connectivity has resulted in the accelerated flattening of the world, facilitating the phenomenon of globalization. But globalization occasions the need for a more homogenous and harmonized legal framework that can accommodate the vast increase in economic relationships which cross borders that might not previously have existed or have been quite so firm. With the fragmentation of colonial empires and the birth of scores of new states in the so-called Third World, (5) developed and developing countries found themselves separated by massive gulfs in terms of their relative states of social, economic, and political development. Under these circumstances, there were always going to be difficulties in attaining transnational harmonization in law, policy, and practice pertaining to commercial transactions. At the dawn of a new millennium, we face the challenge of dealing, on a global scale, with movements in opposite directions. On the one hand, the emphasis on decolonization and self-determination in the post-war era has seen a movement toward building barriers and fixing legal and political boundaries between jurisdictions. On the other hand, globalization sees a movement to break economic barriers and transcend boundaries. While the first movement sees growth in the number of individual systems of law, the second calls for laws and legal systems that are not so tightly constrained by jurisdictional boundaries so that they can more effectively support the immense growth in transnational trade and commerce. My focus today is on the legal protection of private economic rights in the transnational arena. The term international economic law has been adopted as a shorthand reference for regulation in this immense field. (6) For conceptual and analytical clarity, I propose to approach my subject by considering the regulation of transnational economic relationships at three different levels: First, where a party's rights are not regulated or governed by any contract, but where there is nonetheless a need to protect one's interest or rights in commercial property; Second, where there is a contract between the parties, by which they look to protect their rights as between themselves; and Third, where a foreign investor looks to protect its investment against unlawful interference by a host state. These are not exhaustive of the range of regulatory mechanisms that affect transnational economic relationships. For instance, even though international trade law (or world trade law) (7) relates to rules and conventions that seek to manage trade relations between states, these still have a direct impact on individual actors. …

This article carries out an interdisciplinary analysis of five MOOC courses developed by the University of Valladolid and offered on higher education platforms between 2020 and 2024. This research is based on the study of the lexical categories used by the informants participating in these courses, establishing a correlation with the theoretical and practical debates surrounding the definition of heritage and the frameworks of contemporary heritage education. Through a metalinguistic approach, the semantic limits of the emerging lexical categories are examined, paying attention to their ambiguity, polysemy and contexts of use, both from a formal linguistic perspective and from a hermeneutic approach. The analysis is based on natural language processing tools, complemented by qualitative techniques from applied linguistics and cultural studies. This dual approach, both scientific–statistical and humanistically nuanced, allows us to identify recurrent discursive patterns, as well as significant variations in the conceptualization of heritage according to the socio-cultural and geographical profiles of the participants. The results of the linguistic analysis are contrasted with the thematic lines investigated by our research group, focusing on cultural policy, legacy policies, narratives linked to the culture of depopulation, disputed scientific paradigms, and specific lexical categories in the Latin American context. In this sense, the article takes a critical look at discursive production in massive online learning environments, positioning language as a key indicator of the processes of cultural resignification and the construction of legacy knowledge in the Ibero-American context. The findings of my scientific article underscore the pressing need for a multiform liberation of the traditionally constrained concept of heritage, which has long been framed within rigid institutional, legal, and disciplinary boundaries. This normative framework, often centered on materiality, monumentalism, and expert-driven narratives, limits the full potential of heritage as a relational and socially embedded construct. My research reveals that diverse social agents—ranging from educators and local communities to cultural mediators and digital users—demand a more flexible, inclusive, and participatory understanding of heritage. This shift calls for redefining legacy not as a static legacy to be preserved but as a dynamic bond, deeply rooted in affective, symbolic, and intersubjective dimensions. The concept of “heritage as bond”, as developed in contemporary critical theory, provides a robust framework for this reconceptualization. Furthermore, the article highlights the need for a new vehiculation of access—one that expands heritage experience and appropriation beyond elite circles and institutionalized contexts into broader social ecosystems such as education, digital platforms, civil society, and everyday life. This approach promotes legacy democratization, fostering horizontal engagement and collective meaning-making. Ultimately, the findings advocate for a paradigm shift toward an open, polyphonic, and affective heritage model, capable of responding to contemporary socio-cultural complexities.

The paper examines how the current evolution and growth of ICTs enables a greater number of individuals to communicate and interact with each other on a larger scale: this phenomenon enables people to cross the conventional boundaries set up across modernity. The presence of diverse barriers does not however disappear, and we therefore still experience cultural, political, legal and moral boundaries in the globalised Information Society. The paper suggests that the issue of boundaries is to be understood, primarily, in philosophical terms, in order to explain in what sense the fundamental historicity and situatedness of human beings does not necessarily prevent them from being able to cross the boundaries of their own experiences and to communicate with other human beings. Our line of reasoning is based on the idea that the epistemic and moral subject is neither a pure universal subject always transcending the limits of its experience nor the mere product of the context in which it find itself embedded. By virtue of its continued existence and experience of any given context, the epistemic and moral subject is asked to respond to the constraining affordances of data and to account for the moral calls of the other. This intertwinement of responsiveness and accountability towards what is "over there" confers us an original understanding of what is "here".