To carry out its action, the Israeli state must ensure the support of its Western allies and contain criticism from its adversaries or new partners in the Arab world, whose public opinion is highly critical of Israel. To achieve these political objectives, Tel Aviv implemented an unprecedented communication strategy to disseminate its narratives and content to the widest possible audience.

This chapter examines the introduction of new lay participation systems in Asian countries. Focusing on Russia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, I explore the social and political contexts and goals of the policymakers that motivated the incorporation of citizen decision-making into the legal systems of these countries. In each of the four countries, the adoption of new systems of lay participation occurred during periods of political democratization. Those who argued in favor of citizen involvement hoped that it would promote democratic self-governance, create more robust connections between the citizenry and the government, and improve public confidence in the courts. Policymakers drew on the experiences of other countries, including other Asian nations, to develop a distinctive model that incorporated some features of lay participation systems elsewhere, and modified them to suit the specific circumstances of their own countries.

A framing case study describes Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Then the chapter provides an overview of law on the use of force. The chapter begins by describing the historical movement to prohibit the use of force. It then discusses the use of force with UN Security Council authorization. Next, it examines the complex topic of self-defense, including how states can respond to armed attacks, whether they can prevent armed attacks, and how they can protect themselves against non-state actors. Finally, the chapter probes whether the use of force is ever legally justified for other reasons, including: protecting nationals abroad; humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect; and when states consent to intervention.

This chapter examines the US and Canadian government’s programs that allow for the sanctioning of countries as State Sponsors of Terrorism. The chapter also provides views into why countering countries engaged in state sponsorship of terrorism efforts are so difficult to counter.

A framing case study compares military action involving two hospitals in two different wars: an Israeli raid on Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza in November 2023, and Russia’s bombing of Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Ukraine in July 2024. Then the chapter examines the law of armed conflict. The chapter first discusses major principles of armed conflict and the historical evolution of treaty law. It next discusses protected people by describing how international law distinguished between civilians and combatants, and how this law provides certain protections to each group. The chapter then discusses various laws regulating military conduct, including: how states choose targets; methods of war; weapons; and the rules of belligerent occupation. Finally, the chapter briefly surveys the specialized rules that apply to non-international armed conflict.

This chapter explores the impact that participation in bureaucratic corruption has on citizen activism in an autocracy. Using an original survey of Russian adults (N = 2350), we find that when citizens feel extorted, they are most likely to engage politically – likely, because they resent having to pay bribes. Yet we also find that Russians who give bribes voluntarily are also more politically active than those who abstain from corruption. To explain this finding, we focus on social relationships within which corruption transactions occur and embed them into political structures of an autocracy. Our analyses reveal that, relative to citizens who abstain from corruption, personal networks of bribe-givers are more extensive, mobilizable, and strong. Such networks, we argue, sustain meaningful encounters among “birds of a different feather,” facilitating citizen collaboration across social cleavages. In unfree societies then, corruption networks build a structural platform that can be utilized for collective resistance.

A framing case study examines Russia’s 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia. Then the chapter examines how states break international law. The chapter first discusses the law of state responsibility, including: (1) determining responsibility by assessing attribution and wrongfulness; and (2) the consequences of state responsibility, such as cessation, prevention, and reparation. The chapter then examines various theoretical accounts of why states break international law, including the enforcement, managerial, and flexibility perspectives.

Explores the origins of rump states and the reasons why they have been among the most aggressive states of the last 100 years.

In this chapter we discuss the case of the Russian unicorn Yandex, also known as the ‘Russian Google’. The company has become one of the largest information technology (IT) champions in Russia over the years and seemed to be unaffected by government, political interests and geopolitical tensions. In 2022, after the military conflict with Ukraine triggered severe economic sanctions on Russia, the company experienced political pressures both from the sanctioning countries and its home country government. We analyse the journey of Yandex, which started as a national IT unicorn, and shed light on its transformation into a state-affiliated enterprise in a dynamic situation of geopolitical reshuffling.

Russian imperial nationalists demand Ukrainians accept they are a Little Russian branch of the pan-Russian nation and will never accept a Ukraine independent of Russia with a right to decide its own memory politics, language, foreign and security policies. Since 1991, Russia has found it very difficult to accept an independent Ukraine. The Soviet Union included a Ukrainian republic and recognised Ukrainians as a separate people, although forever bonded with Russians. Putin reverted to the Tsarist imperial denial of the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians. Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 made imperialism and nationalism the driving forces of Russian foreign policy. During the decade between Russia’s two invasions of Ukraine, from 2014 to 2021, Russian imperial nationalism became a dominant force in Putin’s Russia, providing ideological justification for the Kremlin’s plan to destroy the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian identity.

The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

Chapter 6 closes with several forward-looking discussions about the impact of Trump’s overt challenges to the law of war. Section 6.1 highlights practical takeaways from the book for IHL policymakers and practitioners. Section 6.2 explores what, if anything, can be done to curb the impunity agenda at its source. Sections 6.3 and 6.4 examine the future of Trump’s impunity agenda, both in America and globally, including in major conflicts involving Russia and Israel. Section 6.4 poses questions for further research.

The significance of Russian culture for the Bloomsbury group and their role in its dissemination in Britain is the focus of this chapter. British fascination with Russian culture peaked in the 1910s and 1920s and, because this was precisely when members of the Bloomsbury group came to prominence in their respective fields, their interpretation of Russian culture had considerable influence. Particular attention is paid to Boris Anrep’s curation of the “Russian Section” for Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912); the role of the Ballets Russes in Bloomsbury conceptions of “civilization”; the 1917 Club, founded by Oliver Strachey and Leonard Woolf; John Maynard Keynes’ and Leonard Woolf’s engagement in political debates about post-revolutionary Russia; and the significance of Russian literature to Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press.

In the terms of the present volume, ‘Rus’’ is an anachronism. The Land of Rus’ was a collection of principalities united (or frequently disunited) under the Rurikid dynasty and owing at least theoretical allegiance to the senior prince with his seat at Kyiv, to which some of the other princes could aspire to succeed. The people of the land were nevertheless united not only by a vague Rus’ identity, but by their Orthodox Christian faith and by their use of an East Slavonic vernacular; it is this cultural community that will be the subject of the present chapter. Nor was ‘travel literature’ a concept with which this community was familiar, and the texts grouped under this heading from a modern perspective are very disparate. The tradition of embedding geographical or anthropological information in works of history goes back to Herodotus, and was maintained by the Byzantine chroniclers, some of whose works were translated into Slavonic and formed the model for native historiography. The chronicles, therefore, provide a frequent context for descriptions of travel of all kinds. Unusually for Slavonic literature, this was the limit of Byzantine influence.