This chapter engages with critiques about international criminal tribunals that centre on dissatisfaction with justice. It argues that reframing the debate to focus on the bearable level of injustice would invite reflection over and help revise expectations of justice. Engaging with legal and transitional justice scholarship, the chapter analyses Raoul Peck’s film Sometimes in April and Kitty Felde’s play A Patch of Earth together with the ICTR case Prosecutor v. Nahimana et al. and the ICTY case Prosecutor v. Erdemović. These reflective narratives complicate the limits of criminal accountability, and the chapter approaches them through the themes of responsibility, blame and agency. Differentiating between justice and justness, the chapter demonstrates how perceptions of just justice are subjective and dependent on who else is held accountable and how. The chapter also moves outside of the ICTY and ICTR to examine alternative pursuits of justice: impunity through silence and revenge. This reveals that some gaps in justice processes are acceptable while others are unbearable.

Chapter 1 lays out the democratic stakes of local independent expenditures. After Citizens United and SpeechNow, outside groups can spend unlimited sums, while municipal candidates face strict contribution caps. Local races offer a high return on a small investment, and many sponsors operate far from the communities they target. In low-visibility contests, even modest outside spending can swamp candidate budgets, redefine reputations, and discourage residents from running. The chapter shows how these interventions erode public trust, distort representation, and nationalize conflicts once rooted in neighborhood governance. It explains why IEs have outsized impact when local journalism declines and voters rely on mailers, ads, and texts for cues, enabling misleading claims with limited accountability. Across cases, these dynamics can push city politics toward oligarchic outcomes and away from citizen self-governance.

The three chapters in this section offer critical diagnoses of how algorithms govern through their interactions with and beyond data. Each focusses on a particular technical practice of algorithmic governance, provides an account of its logics, and seeks to reveal the consequences of embedding such practices in assemblages of governance: ‘proxification’ (Phan and Wark), the ‘human in the loop’, (Goldenfein), and commercial techniques of machine learning in public administration (Yeung). In this short intervention, we offer, first, some reflections on what these papers share along three distinct axes – the analytical, the methodological, and the political – before, second, seeking sympathetically to extend them, including by identifying novel questions raised by their analyses.

Human oversight of automated decisions has become regulatory orthodoxy. Scholars and policy makers frequently turn to the human to ameliorate automation’s disruptive potential. But there is little empirical evidence that human oversight or a human in the loop improves decision outcomes. This suggests that the regulatory value of human oversight is more political than it is empirical. This chapter accordingly asks what political work do legal requirements for human oversight perform, and what kinds of political configurations do they enable? Through analysis of cases invoking human in the loop in administrative contexts, this chapter argues that, in the name of recuperating rule of law values, the human in the loop is deployed as a versatile legal technology that enables troubling distributions of accountability and inhibits a richer legal conceptualisation of automated decision systems.

Why do individuals embedded in organizations act corruptly? Functionalist and economic approaches to corruption have had limited success in explaining why individuals choose corruption where there are strong institutional constraints, including monitoring systems, high costs, and strong punishments. The persistence of corruption despite such constraints has prompted researchers to consider more seriously the individual psychological drivers of corruption. This chapter reviews evidence on the psychology of corruption, finding that power, ethical leadership, personal gain and self-control, loss aversion and risk acceptance, rationalization, moral ambiguity and disengagement, learning, and emotion all influence an individual’s propensity to act corruptly within an organization. Anti-corruption measures that constrain these drivers include transparency, participation, and accountability measures that reduce incentives and opportunities for corruption. Organizations can also implement ethical measures like codes of conduct, anti-corruption training, attend to cultural dynamics, and use nudging interventions to incentivize clean behavior.

This chapter shows how to use meetings and feedback as core tools for making steady progress in a PhD. It explains how to structure advisor meetings so they create continuity, clarify priorities, and turn discussions into concrete next steps. It then reframes feedback as a collaborative process: asking targeted questions, seeking clarification, and responding thoughtfully across revisions. The chapter also encourages building additional feedback channels beyond the advisor, while learning to weigh comments critically. Common pitfalls such as hiding problems, passivity, defensiveness, and isolation are discussed, with practical ways to avoid them.

This chapter examines Britain’s efforts to identify, interrogate and prosecute perpetrators of war crimes in the aftermath of the Second World War. While public memory tends to focus on the major figures tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the vast majority of prosecutions concerned those who had directly committed atrocities, including guards, policemen and soldiers of all ranks. Britain faced a uniquely complex challenge, with more than half a million German prisoners of war held on its soil, many of whom had witnessed or participated in crimes across Europe. To address this, specialist teams were tasked with gathering the evidence needed for trial. The chapter focuses on the main team based in Britain, known as the War Crimes Interrogation Unit. Their work illustrates the sheer scale and unevenness of post-war justice. In some cases, their efforts led directly to prosecutions; in others, equally thorough investigations never resulted in a trial. This chapter considers what those outcomes reveal about the limits of post-war justice.

This chapter describes the “global health system” as the organized social response to cross-border health risks. The global health system is comprised of actors whose primary intent is to improve health, along with the rules and norms governing their interactions. The system should perform four essential functions: producing global public goods, managing externalities, mobilizing solidarity and providing stewardship. However, the ability of the system to do so is impeded by three types of governance challenges – the sovereignty, sectoral and accountability challenges. This chapter calls for stronger global health governance.

Calls for international administrations are still present in contemporary international relations, from the war in the Middle East to the Ukraine. This chapter summarises the main argument developed in the book, notably the necessity to apprehend international administrations through the reality on the ground. This means to pay special attention to the confluence of claims of political authority deployed by international officials and concomitant claims of accountability such practices of authority elicit. Finally, I discuss the various possibilities to strengthen accountability mechanisms for the UN (and for other international organisation).

Chapter 2 introduces the concept of Accountable Design and provides a detailed exploration of the terms accountable and design. It draws on extensive scholarship from human–computer interaction (HCI), design research, technology law, and science and technology studies. It advocates for a human-centred framing of accountability and explores the various challenges of achieving more accountable Clever Computing systems. It advances three broad framings of design within Accountable Design, namely, design as a critical lens to help speculate and reflect on futures we want to build; design as an instrumental lens to engineering solutions to problems; and design as creative practice and methods. Normative concerns around design as a regulatory tool are presented, such as the legitimacy of designers’ role alongside the speed and the nature of the enforcement of rules through design. Analysis focuses on how to reconcile legal and design perspectives by exploring how to account for legal values in human-centred technology design processes.

This chapter introduces the main approach developed in International Leviathans through (1) a sociological understanding of sovereignty and (2) the concept of international administration. First, the chapter presents a new take of the debate between Kelsen and Schmitt around sovereignty and presents the sociological understanding of sovereignty by unpacking sovereignty practices. It makes the case for analysing the socio-political or socio-legal struggles happening between competing claims of political authority and accountability. It then discusses and theorises the concept of ‘international administration’, pointing out the limitations of two strands of the literature: the functionalist approach, defining international administrations through the functions they ought to perform as underlined in their mandate, and the normative approach, focusing on self-proclaimed goals and objectives. I posit that sovereignty practices deployed by international officials are social practices which cannot be understood solely through mandates or stated goals – they need to be understood through the reality on the ground, created by claims of political authority deployed by actors and the concomitant claims of accountability these practices elicit.

This chapter presents the central claim of the book, arguing that sovereignty practices emerge at the confluence of struggles – on the one hand, by actors asserting the political authority over a specific territory and, on the other hand, through resistance to this move by actors pursuing accountability and the responsibilisation of sovereign actors. I claim that practices of political authority – expressed through effective rule over territory – are central, constitutive acts of world politics, entailing specific obligations. Broadening the study of sovereignty practices beyond state relations, I argue that understanding how specific actors such as international organisations act as sovereign actors opens up new perspectives on international accountability and obligations in world politics.

In this chapter, we start by looking at the form of Parliament. We introduce the concept of the separation of powers – legislative power, executive power and judicial power. We then discuss the fact that in Australia we do not follow the classical process of separation of powers. Instead, we have a system called the Westminster system where the executive government and the legislature overlap, because the Cabinet is composed of the most senior members of both arms of government. We then look at the impact of political parties on Parliament.

In the second half of this chapter, we turn our attention to the functions of Parliament. We look first at its legislative function, working our way through the process by which Parliament makes legislation. We then look at the specific processes which Parliament has developed in order to fulfil its responsible government function, by holding the government accountable. Finally, we look at how Parliament functions as a symbol: how it operates as both a national forum and a focus for our community.

Three concepts associated with ‘good governance’, referring to the quality of governance processes and outcomes, are examined in this chapter: accountability, legitimacy and trust. For each concept, definitions are reviewed and characteristics identified. The chapter investigates accountability through key themes of complexity and challenges associated with delivering on downward accountability in the context of decentralisation. Complexity arises from the number and range of actors involved in co-management, situated at different administrative levels, with multiple demands on and mechanisms for accountability. Different forms of legitimacy and trust are introduced and reviewed, including input, output and throughput legitimacy and dispositional, rational, affinitive and procedural forms of trust. Challenges to delivering and maintaining legitimacy and trust in the context of co-management and solutions to these are identified.

The conclusion synthesizes the book's argument and reflects on its implications for law, business, and democratic governance. It reiterates the central claim that corporate decisions now shape public life before law can respond. In this environment, the quality of corporate decision-making becomes a matter of public concern.

The conclusion explains why corporate ordering cannot replace democratic institutions. Corporations lack electoral legitimacy and cannot resolve value conflict. Yet as long as they exercise power, their internal governance structures matter.

The chapter emphasizes a shift from outcome-based debates to process-based evaluation. Rather than asking whether corporations pursue the correct goals, the focus should be on whether they deliberate responsibly under conditions of disagreement.

The conclusion calls for scholars and policymakers to study corporate governance as a site of norm creation. It highlights transparency, institutional design, and monitoring as emerging foundations of accountability.

The book closes by framing corporate ordering as neither celebration nor condemnation. It is a descriptive and normative account of how power is exercised in a world where consensus is rare and delay is costly.

Chapter nine translates the book's insights into a proposal for legal reform. It argues that fiduciary duty should evolve to require deliberative capacity when corporate decisions have significant social effects.

The chapter does not propose new substantive obligations. Instead, it focuses on process. Boards should be required to establish governance structures that allow informed inquiry, justification, and independent review. Failure arises only when no such structures exist or when deliberation is cursory.

The chapter shows how this approach fits within existing doctrine. Courts already evaluate processes in areas such as mergers and compliance oversight. Extending this logic to social governance preserves deference while improving accountability.

The chapter addresses concerns about judicial overreach and managerial paralysis. By focusing on capacity rather than outcomes, the proposal avoids asking courts to resolve social disputes.

This chapter offers a practical path forward that aligns corporate governance with contemporary realities while respecting institutional limits.