Although a natural process, human actions and extreme climatic events can accentuate slope instability, leading to disastrous slope failures and loss of life, like the one that occurred in the Brazilian city of Petrópolis on February 17, 2022. Over 200 people died in the mudflows, caused by intense rainfall (258 mm in three hours) and the deforestation of upslope areas. Understanding how and why materials move downslope helps geomorphologists to predict where and when future mass movement events may occur.

Except for perhaps volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, the most impressive (and deadly) geomorphic “events” involve the downslope movement of rock, debris, and sediment – referred to as mass movements because the material moves en masse. In their simplest sense, mass movements represent the downslope transport of rock and soil materials. Examples range from massive, fast-moving landslides and debris flows, to the inexorably slow process of soil creep.

The author of this chapter is a member of the Upper House of Japan who proposed and established the Hate Speech Elimination Act: a philosophical law that includes no penalty provisions because if punishments were imposed on the grounds of the content of expression, then the government would have the authority to decide which expressions were to be subject to punishment – an obvious violation of the ‘freedom of expression’ provided for under the Constitution of Japan. In this chapter, the author discusses the importance of empowering a society in which everyone spontaneously raises their own voice and acts to eliminate hate speech, rather than prescribing a society in which people think, ‘Hate speech will not disappear unless it is punished.’ Through the effects of the Act, local governments and judiciaries were finally able to define hate speech as ‘unacceptable’ and use their own discretion to implement measures accordingly. Even though it is a philosophical law, the Act has therefore raised public awareness and inspired a mass movement seeking to eliminate discrimination voluntarily.

In 1989, those demanding human rights to reform the system versus those who fought to leave it combined to create an explosive crisis for the SED. Human rights served not just to rally a heterogeneous coalition of dissidents, but also provided an ideological justification for SED officials to dismantle their own power structure and abolish the party’s monopoly on power in the face of mass demonstrations and mass emigration. In planning for a new East Germany, former SED officials worked with dissidents to draft a constitution that would secure liberal democratic rights and freedoms alongside rights that would preserve the ideals of the socialist project. In 1990, however, the joint hopes of dissident activists and reform communists were dashed as the realities of East German economic collapse turned the population away from new utopian ideas towards realising human rights through reunification with the Federal Republic. The idealistic anti-capitalism of the dissident elite alienated a population that wanted both democracy and prosperity through human rights. While the dissidents were successful in ending state-socialist dictatorship through their campaign for human rights, they ultimately failed to expand upon the narrow and unsatisfactory human rights system of the capitalist West.