According to the English monk and historian Matthew Paris, when King Louis IX fell horribly sick to the point of death in 1244, his sorrowful mother Queen Blanche prayed to the Lord to preserve her son and the kingdom of France along with him. Placing relics of the True Cross, the crown of thorns, and the Holy Lance into contact with his body, she made a vow in his name that he would ‘assume the cross’ and journey to the Holy Sepulchre if he recovered his health (Figure 3.1). When Louis made a miraculous recovery, of his own free will he ‘solemnly took the sign of the cross on his shoulders’ and swore that he would undertake the journey to the Holy Land, assuming that the counsellors of his realm agreed with this plan.

Chapter 9 reflects on the authors’ approach to redescribing the Cold War and its relationship to international law. It challenges conventional narratives by presenting the Cold War as a subject rather than an object, exploring its multiple manifestations and impacts on global legal and political landscapes. The chapter addresses three key themes: redescription, periodisation, and aftermath. It emphasises the plurality of international laws and Cold Wars experienced worldwide, disrupting the notion of a monolithic, bipolar conflict. The authors discuss the complexities of periodisation, highlighting how different perspectives can yield varying start and end dates for the Cold War. The chapter also explores the Cold War’s legacy in the present, arguing that its influence persists in contemporary global politics and international law. It challenges the idea of a clean break in 1989, suggesting instead that many Cold War dynamics continue to shape current events and legal frameworks. Finally, the authors present their work as both a critique of conventional Cold War narratives and a retrieval project, aiming at uncovering forgotten or marginalised perspectives on international law and global politics during this period. They call for a renewed appreciation of the legal experimentation, political non-alignment, and revolutionary possibilities that emerged during the Cold War era.

This chapter examines narratival conflict within Greek courts over the legitimacy and scope of Muslim Family Law (MFL) in Thrace – the only European jurisdiction formally recognizing Islamic law. It identifies three competing judicial narratives: the Protective Narrative, which upholds the mufti’s jurisdiction as a treaty-based obligation; the Restrictive Narrative, which narrows that jurisdiction under constitutional and human-rights principles; and the Liberative Choice Narrative, which affirms minority exit rights and voluntary recourse to civil law. Drawing on content analysis of case law and extensive fieldwork, the chapter demonstrates how narratival incohesion between higher and lower courts has produced chronic legal ambiguity, undermined procedural justice, and eroded minority trust. It argues that Greece’s securitized approach to Islamic law – shaped by historical tensions with Turkey – has stifled harmonization and prevented internal reform within the mufti system. Ultimately, narratival conflict, rather than fostering pluralism, has entrenched uncertainty, alienation, and the double failure of both religious and civil justice.

Whatever law offers, it never does it alone. It always does whatever it does within societies where a lot else is going on. Law has to make its way in various terrains full of obstacles, rivals, and alternatives. Chapter 9 explores some of the consequences of this ever-present buzz, movement, and competition for the ways law works in societies. Above all, it stresses the complexity of social causality that lawyers often ignore. Law sends messages. Once sent, they compete with messages from other sources, often more salient for many people, and they will be variably received, interpreted, and acted upon depending in part on the relationships between the centre and various ‘semi-autonomous fields’ and ‘indigenous orderings’ that occupy the society. In many of these fields other sources of norms and settlements will be available and sought. This is not a pathology but a reality. Those concerned to temper power need to take it into account.

This chapter explores the concepts of territory and jurisdiction in the Greek and Roman worlds, challenging modern assumptions rooted in the state-centric, post-Westphalian model of international law. It argues that ancient understandings of space, sovereignty and legal authority were fluid, overlapping and shaped by networks of cities, trade routes and personal affiliations rather than fixed territorial boundaries. The chapter examines how jurisdiction operated through principles of personality and polity, with legal pluralism prevailing across empires. Roman legal innovations, such as the concept of jus gentium and the universal jurisdiction of emperors, are analysed as early forms of supranational legal authority. The chapter also addresses the limits of jurisdiction, including the treatment of pirates and the emergence of humanistic legal protections. By tracing the evolution of spatial and legal thought from the polis to the Roman Empire and into late Antiquity, the chapter reveals how ancient practices laid conceptual foundations for modern international law while remaining distinct in form and function.

This chapter shows that the CBD regime contains provisions on benefit-sharing, consent-like rights, and the recognition of indigenous and community conserved areas (ICCAs) that help implementing Indigenous rights to land, natural resources, cultural rights, FPIC, and self-determination, and complement protection thereof in the context of biodiversity protection. This contribution also argues that the CBD regime gives rise to four new categories of collective rights of Indigenous Peoples that are not (fully) protected under IHRL: the right to benefit-sharing, the right to genetic resources, the right to traditional knowledge (TK), and biocultural rights. These rights bear a good potential for additional protection of collective rights because they apply to situations that would otherwise not be covered under IHRL, illustrative being the entitlement to genetic resources. In terms of the theoretical contribution of these rights, this chapter demonstrates that the CBD legal framework contributes to reinforcing legal pluralism, by assessing Indigenous Peoples’ entitlements to TK and, indirectly, to genetic resources in light of Indigenous customs, practices, and procedures. The chapter concludes that Indigenous Peoples’ rights protected under the CBD framework do not perfectly coincide with the categories of environmental rights due to their main object and substantive nature.

This article examines Mapuche law (az mapu) through the lens of socio-environmental rights and explores its role in a transmodern discussion of legal pluralism. Challenging Western legal norms, the authors assert that Indigenous resistance is a fundamental right undermined by liberal positive law. They trace the colonial history of Indigenous peoples in Abya Yala and Wallmapu, advocating for alternative conceptions of justice and law to address entrenched asymmetries and colonial violence originating in the conquest of America. A transmodern framework is offered to envision Indigenous rights beyond Eurocentric colonial metaphysics. Within Latin America and Abya Yala, proponents of positive law confront a critical juncture regarding Indigenous rights, their existence, and revival. The dynamics of az mapu in Wallmapu are analyzed via transmodernity and legal pluralism, revealing the interconnected dimensions of environmental justice essential in the early twenty-first century. Ultimately, the authors link the Indigenous rights debate to the broader climate crisis—marked by eco- and ethnocidal threats such as global warming—and propose a decolonial understanding of justice. This approach reconfigures human-nature relationships and emphasizes that the severe socio-environmental crisis demands responses grounded in contextual rights like Mapuche az mapu and its intrinsic bond with itrofillmogen (all living things).

The recent recognition of the Rights of Nature (RoN) in the legal sphere presents significant challenges in its implementation. In modern States, justice is predominantly a human domain, based on the assumption that only in this realm can objectivity supersede subjectivity, rationality override emotionality, and the social transcend the natural. Consequently, the recognition of the Rights of Nature has required judicial systems to strive to overcome anthropocentric perspectives in order to advance biocentric and ecocentric frameworks. However, a critical question arises: How can non-human entities be formally recognized as subjects of justice? What poses a challenge for Western justice systems seems to be inherent in Indigenous justice systems, where the spiritual, human, and natural realms are not compartmentalized. The nature-culture nexus has been integrated from the perspectives of communities that maintain direct relationships with and dependencies on land and water sources, highlighting the relevance of worldviews that transcend segmented anthropocentric perspectives. To shed light on these challenges, this chapter proposes a theoretical-methodological analysis grounded in political ontology and the biocultural approach, aiming to facilitate dialogue between State legal systems and Indigenous customary law. We argue that biocultural rights and the recognition of legal pluralism offer the advantage of recognizing the role of communities as interactive participants in their territories, presenting an alternative for the decolonization of the Rights of Nature.

This chapter delves into the concept of ‘Rights of Nature’ (RoN) through a semiotic lens; in particular, the ethnological semiology of Jean Baudrillard has significantly influenced this contribution. RoN challenges conventional anthropocentric legal paradigms by integrating Indigenous cosmovisions in Western jurisprudence. By examining legislative examples such as New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua Act and Australia’s Yarra River Protection Act, this chapter assesses whether these recognitions faithfully reflect Indigenous viewpoints or merely adapt nature into pre-existing Western ontological (legal) philosophies.

RoN frequently intersects with Indigenous cosmovisions, suggesting a profound, metaphysical significance beyond Western legal constructs. This discussion illuminates the evolving character of RoN and its interplay with legal pluralism. The incorporation of RoN into Western legal systems unveils a dynamic where Indigenous knowledge is recognised but simultaneously streamlined to conform to established legal structures.

The chapter further contemplates the possibility that RoN may simply codify Indigenous rights without capturing the full depth of Indigenous perspectives. Ultimately, RoN signifies an endeavour to broaden the legal recognition of nature and its purported intrinsic values, albeit at the risk of misrepresenting Indigenous knowledge as mere extensions of Western legal ontology. In doing so, RoN adorns itself with the Indigenous symbol and ritual to advance environmental politics.

As the French empire expanded throughout northern and western Africa and from Pondicherry in India east to Royal Vietnam, a new secular mission came into being, one married to the contradictions of aggressive imperialism, a revolutionary past, and democratic governance. Civilisation was elevated to the rarefied realms of imperial law. French colonial administrators and jurists equipped with the prejudices of the metropole carried with them a powerful vision of republican empire to the Mekong, the great river system that lies at the proverbial heart of mainland South East Asia. Yet republican colonialism was undermined by below. In Indo-China, young radicals, jurists, politicians, journalists and scholars engaged in bitter fighting with the creation of a panoptic model of state surveillance, economic exploitation, political repression, racism and the ambiguities of French republicanism. From the creation of the Indo-Chinese Union in 1887 to its demise in 1954, the multiple transformations of legal boundaries in Indo-China reflected the evolving international relations and anti-colonial agitations in Asia. They formed a crucial conjecture in the history of international law.