The rise of remote work and work-from-home, accelerated by the COVID pandemic, is reshaping and disrupting the social dimension of work—that is, the incidence of cooperation, sociability, and solidarity (as well as conflict) among co-workers. Most discussion of the trend toward remote work centers naturally on its impact on firms (especially in terms of productivity) or workers (especially in terms of work-life balance). This essay focuses instead on how remote work and work-from-home might affect the social underpinnings of political life outside the workplace. The quotidian experience of working together—traditionally, face-to-face, and often across salient lines of social division—generates weak and strong interpersonal bonds that can strengthen the foundations of a democratic society. The cumulative societal benefits of co-worker interactions are at risk if remote work thins out and weakens workplace ties. That is especially likely because those societal benefits are “public goods” and spillover benefits of workplace interactions. Those social benefits may thus be neglected by analysts and observers. This essay develops that thesis and then reflects briefly on whether and how the conventional institutional arsenal of labor and employment law might be deployed to increase the production of such public goods.

The spirit of the age is defined as the friend, the harbinger, and the servant of Humanity, but also as the ruler of the age. Martin Luther’s writings on education as well as his exegesis of the Psalms are cited to elaborate on his thoughts on government, and the change of government, particularly his denunciation of the tyranny of monarchs and what he called the rabble. Luther’s praise of German honesty and forthrightness is cited in order to position faith and loyalty as the cornerstone of human society. Klopstock’s poem on the naval warfare between Britain and France is cited in order to argue for the necessity of fairness and reason in all aspects of government. The ability of enlightened monarchs to uphold the spirit of the age is called into question, and Frederick the Great’s correspondence with Voltaire is further cited as evidence of a monarch’s struggles with his own human shortcomings. This is answered with a call for reform of education and politics. The inherent nature of human beings is described in its relationship to society and government, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s dialogue on Freemasonry is cited to elaborate on the importance of reason in civil society and the state.

This chapter explains the third strategic dimension of lawfare: externalities. As a form of strategic legal action, hegemonic environmental lawfare aims to create projective externalities, referring to the consequences that seek to be borne by environmental movements beyond the actual legal cases. The chapter is divided into two subheadings: (a) Leadership Decapitation, which discusses the outcomes of hegemonic environmental lawfare targeting those who are regarded as the central figures or leaders of environmental struggles, and (b) Creating Externalities, which elaborates on the impacts of lawfare beyond lawsuits concerning environmental movements in the countries.

This chapter focuses on the role of civil society in shaping the debate on nuclear sharing across four of the five NATO host nations (excluding Turkey, where no significant civil society activity on the issue is observed). It centres on the activities of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), with particular attention to its flagship initiative, the Cities Appeal, which seeks support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) from local governments. The chapter analyses the extent to which the Cities Appeal has gained traction in each country and explores the factors that explain its varying levels of success across different national contexts.

Chapter 3 presents the political contexts of the United Kingdom (UK) and Sweden ahead of the Iraq war, demonstrating how the foreign policies of each host country affected diasporic state-building. While the UK’s involvement in the intervention opened the doors for the diaspora to join in the post-2003 governance and institution building of Iraq, Sweden’s anti-war stance and lack of involvement diverted mobilisation largely towards civil society building and transporting the tradition of democracy from the bottom-up. The chapter introduces the Iraqi opposition groups who mobilised and collaborated with the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency in the United States, and Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK. It explores the divergences between the groups and how they shaped the coalition’s thinking ahead of the intervention, as well as laying the foundations of the post-2003 state. It also investigates the diasporic groups and actors in Sweden and how they mobilised through civil society. Sweden’s anti-war movement and global protests against the Iraq War galvanised a very different locus of political activism and mobilisation towards preventing the war from taking place and curbing Sweden’s role in the intervention. It thus diverted involvement towards supporting Iraq’s civil society and its democratisation process.

The book’s introduction draws the reader to the unique case study of the Iraqi diaspora and its involvement in state-building following military intervention in 2003. The chapter introduces the book’s puzzle, which questions why diasporas have thus far been ignored in analyses of state formation and state-building. Contextualising the book within the diaspora and state-building literature will also delineate the book’s unique contribution to both fields and its wider appeal to policymakers, the media, and thinktanks. The chapter then underlines the book’s original conceptual and empirical contribution to the study and understanding of the role of diasporas in state formation and state-building processes, which also includes the role of civil society in weak, postcolonial, post-conflict states. This is then followed by an outline and breakdown of the book to guide the reader.

Chapter 1 discusses the main concepts of the book, including diaspora and transnationalism, providing an understanding of the cross-border connections that link people and nations across time and space under modern processes of globalisation, facilitating diasporic political engagement. This is then followed by introducing the conceptual framework of diasporic state-building, which is drawn from three theoretical discussions related to the state, state-building, and civil society literature. The framework captures how diasporas are engaged in this process through an original conceptual and typological framework that operationally captures the two categories associated with building a state: firstly, diasporic mobilisation towards building the apparatus of the state and, secondly, supporting and challenging the state through civil society. This original conceptual approach to state-building captures the plethora of activity that is shaping the evolution of conflict, post-conflict, and post-colonial states. The framework guides the reader as well as demonstrating the multiple domains in which diasporas are influencing state formation under modern processes of globalisation.

What effect do economic sanctions have on civil society participation in target (sanctioned) countries? Do sanctions help or hurt civic activism in target societies? This chapter explores the degree to which economic sanctions affect the extent of civil engagement in target countries. It is argued that sanctions are likely to contribute to the deterioration of civil society participation in target countries through making non-state groups targets of state repression and impairing those groups’ organizational capacity. To substantiate the theoretical claims, cross- national sanctions data for the period 1989–2015 are combined with data on civil society participation. Results offer robust support that sanctions are detrimental to civil society and the suggested impact of sanctions is likely to be higher in the early rather than later years of sanctions imposition.

This chapter analyses the public and private governance structure of the EU AI Act (AIA) and its associated ecosystem of compliance and conformity. Firstly, the interaction of public and private governance in the making of AI law meant to concretise the rules in the AIA is analysed. Secondly, the focus shifts to the interaction of public and private governance in the Act’s enforcement through compliance, conformity and public authorities. Thirdly, it is argued that the EU legislature has neither fully developed public private governance nor the interaction between the two. As a result, there are many gaps in the involvement of civil society in compliance, conformity and enforcement of private regulations, in particular harmonized technical standards, Codes of Practice and Codes of Conduct. Moreover, the extreme complexity of the AIA’s governance structure is likely to trigger litigation between AI providers and deployers and the competent surveillance authorities, or more generally in B2B and B2C relations.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It sets the stage by highlighting contrasts in India’s economy, democracy, and society. It then discusses the main topics covered in the book – democracy and governance, growth and distribution, caste, labor, gender, civil society, regional diversity, and foreign policy. The chapter also outlines the three themes that comprise the main arguments of the book. First, India’s democracy has been under considerable strain over the last decade. Second, growing economic inequalities that accompanied India’s high-growth phase over the last three and a half decades are associated with the country’s democratic decline. Third, society has reacted to changes from below but there are limits to societal activism in contemporary India.

Chapter 3 focuses on Hegel’s critique of liberalism. It starts by discussing the preface to the Philosophy of Right in order to challenge the widespread assumption that Hegel is averse to robust social criticism. Afterwards, the chapter considers two main causes for the limited recognition of his work’s critical dimension. The first is the tendency to read Hegel’s book as a horizontal progression, fuelled by the accumulation of different aspects or layers of freedom. This kind of approach misrepresents the qualitative transformation that is at stake in the transition from civil society to the state, which only a vertical reading can adequately convey. Second, the Philosophy of Right’s critical import has also been obfuscated by some of Hegel’s own philosophical positions. Despite his intended sublation of the stage of civil society, his account of the state remains wedded, in important ways, to the former’s underlying logic. As the chapter seeks to show, if we accept Hegel’s claim that a rational state must synthesize the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, we must reject some of his political options as partly or wholly un-Hegelian.

Chapter 4 reassesses Hegel’s views on property and its role within a rational state. In the Philosophy of Right’s initial stage, devoted to ‘abstract right’, each person is defined as an independent legal agent, with the right to own and exchange property. From this standpoint, the political sphere is but a prolongation of the legal sphere and the state is reduced to an external authority, charged with regulating existing property relations. As the progression unfolds, however, this legalistic framework is called into question: it turns out that individual rights are not the true foundation of the state, but a part thereof, subordinated to a wider commitment to the common good. Yet while this commitment is clearly affirmed by Hegel, it is at odds with the priority he accords to private property, in the progression’s later stages, over other forms of ownership. Taking a different path, the chapter argues that a Hegelian theory of property entails a critical revision of Hegel’s actual treatment of property rights. If the state is to bring together the citizens’ particular interests and the common good, the ownership of society’s productive resources must be shared by all of its members.