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.

This chapter examines representationalism and the concept of representation. Representationalism is a philosophical orientation whose central tenet is the commitment to the epistemic and semantic value of representations. While the concept of representation can take many forms, it typically refers to the reflection or mirroring of states of affairs in the non-linguistic world by sentences and their components.The chapter argues that representationalism faces several difficulties as a theory of meaning and knowing: the placement problem, the non-factualist character of much language, the Myth of the Given, the non-relational nature of meaning, and the absence of a universal grammar across ordinary language.The chapter explores an inferentialist alternative to representational correctness. Jaroslav Peregrin’s restrictivism is particularly useful. On this view, rules are not prescriptive, but rescriptive. They establish a kind of bounded ‘inner space’ of discursive behavior, within which agents operate, both enabling and constraining permissible action. When we attempt to act outside these bounds – linguistically or otherwise – we metaphorically ‘bounce off’ the normative limits.

The chapter examines the role of the UN Charter in shaping the Cold War’s ideological and legal landscape. The chapter begins with Winston Churchill’s 1946 ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech, which highlighted the duality of the post-war world: the creation of the United Nations and the emerging division between East and West. The UN Charter, while promoting sovereign statehood and universality, also formalised the Amero-Soviet rivalry, embedding ambiguities that allowed ideological contestation within a lawful framework. The Charter’s emphasis on sovereign statehood and the nation-state form provided a template for decolonisation, yet left space for rival interpretations and political agendas, particularly from Latin American, African and Asian states. The chapter explores how the Charter’s ambiguities facilitated US–Soviet competition, focusing on representation, intervention and self-determination. It highlights the Charter’s role in enabling covert US–Soviet rivalry and its impact on global order, decolonisation and the stabilisation of property ownership. The chapter concludes by setting the stage for the next chapter, which will explore the Amero-Soviet project of world-making through the UN Charter and its broader geopolitical implications.

As co-management often involves resource-using community participation, understanding of what is meant and understood by the concept of community is critical. The chapter therefore begins by recognising the contested nature of the concept of ‘community’, noting critique of assumptions regarding shared interests and priorities, and reflects on different forms of community, how communities may emerge over time and recognition of ‘delocalisation’ of communities in relation to natural resource governance. Different bases of social cohesion are then considered and forms of the related concept of social capital reviewed. Insights from research into how cohesion and social capital influence co-management emphasise the centrality of relationships. Given that co-management may involve multiple and diverse communities, representation of actors is generally necessary. The section on representation considers what representation implies and what bases of representation have been found within the experience of co-management.

Chapter 5 examines the domestication of queer desire and generic traditionalism in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. For a novel written on the eve of Stonewall, by an openly gay author, and narrating the explosive obliteration of the citadel of the heteronormative family by two pathologized protagonists, there has been remarkably little agreement about the place, or even the presence, of same-sex desire in the text. Similarly, Capote’s generic innovation in creating the nonfiction novel has ultimately been overshadowed by the text’s classification as simply a heavily factual return to nineteenth-century realism. This chapter offers an explanation for these contradictions by reading them as a function of Capote’s challenge to the binaries informing both desire and literary representation at the moment. On this account, the hetero/homo binary that constituted the period’s framework for thinking about desire and the truth/fiction binary around which debates about New Journalism centered were both inflected by a heteronormative impulse to consider homosexual desire fiction and heterosexual desire fact. Ironically, disrupting the fact/fiction dyad itself, we might reappropriate this mapping by recasting heteronormative desire as an ossified, repressive status quo and queer desire as the exploration of as-yet-unseen possibilities of imagined alternatives.

Chapter Two sets the scene, providing the context of regional networks within which global circulations of law were elaborated. The chapter shows how Malay elite figures such as Abu Bakar navigated regional and familial networks to make space for themselves in imperial and colonial hierarchies. Abu Bakar’s story encapsulates the ambition, sense of self-invention and possibility that accompanied Malay elite exploration of the world in the nineteenth century, explorations made both possible and needful by colonial and imperial encounter. These explorations also gave rise to a welter of new and pressing anxieties around recognition, authority and legitimacy, and representation. Tensions proliferated, between belonging and innovation, authority and representation, recognition and invention. Where textual archives often served to efface or resolve these tensions, visual material often captured them, in all their creativity, anxiety, and alterations. Chapter Two places these archives in conversation, in order to explore the critical utility of elite biography as a problematic for global Islamic history, against an imperial backdrop.

Chapter Three traces the Sultan of Johor’s trajectory alongside other Asian rulers, performing sovereignty and courting recognition in the shadow of global imperial orders. His travels provide a unique vantage point from which to observe a ‘princely international’ in the nineteenth century, in which Asian rulers played a central role. In encounters with the rulers of Hawaii and Japan, we see elaborations of ideas of Asian sovereignty as a counter to Western imperialism; in Chicago and London, we see these ideas play out against the backdrop of the racial and imperial hierarchies of the international. In Constantinople, the Sultan of Johor’s encounter with the Ottoman Sultan required recalibrations of status against ideas of global Islamic empire. Each served as a lesson in international and domestic politics for others, consolidating a language and repertoire for the international anchored in translation and retranslation, recognition and misrecognition. Chapter Three argues that princely repertoires for performing and representing Asian sovereignty were learned through the material experience of global encounter, and made in between empires: a nested sovereignty.

Decisions by international organizations typically neglect the interests of non-human animals. The chapter investigates whether and how animal interests can and should be brought to bear in the decision-making of IOs. It works through cognate concepts ranging from animal citizenship over animal representation to animal consideration and animal deliberation. The physical limits of human-animal communication foreclose responsiveness and accountability to the animals themselves. The chapter therefore prefers the term animal ‘consideration’ rather than animal ‘representation’. After this groundwork, the chapter briefly canvasses some proposals for bringing animal interests to bear in in democratic political processes. With due modifications, some schemes could be applied to the work of international organizations. These range from animal ombudspersons, strengthening the voice of pro-animal CSOs through compulsory notice-and-comment procedures and extended speaking rights in the organizations, mandatory animal welfare impact assessment, and more. All attempts for upstepping the existing rudimentary schemes in the direction of a better and stronger consideration of animal interests in human politics will require deep cultural and social change, to a large extent beyond the purview of the law.

These conclusions do not intend to summarize and even less to close the debate but instead to revert to the main issues addressed during the conference and maybe identify further issues for research. All contributors agree that not only a discussion on democracy and representation in and by international organisations is not purely speculative or theoretical, but that it seems necessary today. Despite this, contributors are not all in agreement on the need to use the concept of representation when discussing democratization of international organizations. Some question the link between democracy and representation, or whether using representative systems is even feasible in international organizations. This, in turn, leads to the various definitions of the concept of representation in political science and in law. A multiple international representation system (MIRS) as proposed by Besson and Marti is based on a strict concept of democratic representation and contrasts with other more flexible concepts such as ‘descriptive’ or ‘mimetic’ representation. In the end, the chapters address the merits of various systems, including in existing processes of global governance, for further democratizing international organisations.

This paper proposes demoicratic representation as a subtype of representation in international organizational practice. It develops a social ontology of the People and theory of representation which underpins the thesis that the People is represented only by all the different types of representative persons who act within different types of governmental institutions and procedures of the People. A further important tenet of the paper is that democratic Peoples are accountable to each other as Peoples and to each other’s citizens. In a union of Peoples whose representatives act under any decision rule there is a possible second-order consent-deficit about the decision rule. Consequently, in demoi-cratic representation IOs ought to embody all the representative institutions of the People in their organization or be part of a system of mutual accountability and thereby assure demoicratic representation by IOs. Demoicratic representation ought not to be understood as working exclusively under the principle of consent. Rather it is the representational space in which the consent-deficit about the decision rule of inter-People relations is addressed and calibration sought.