How to communicate in meetings and be heard, how to get credit for your work, deal with inappropriate comments, navigate romantic relationships at work, and handle “bro” culture.

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.

This chapter examines the distribution of foreign affairs powers, arguing that the Constitution’s text sufficiently allocates authority between Congress and the President without requiring unenumerated or inherent presidential powers. It rejects both formalist claims of a residual executive power and functionalist assertions of necessity-driven authority, asserting that the President’s powers, such as appointing ambassadors and treatymaking, cover essential functions like managing international relations. Historical episodes, including Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation and the Monroe Doctrine, illustrate that presidential actions rely on enumerated powers, not a broad policy-setting prerogative. The chapter argues the President does not have unilateral or exclusive authority to recognize foreign governments or to terminate treaties. Treaties are necessary for long-term international obligations and to bind state courts under Article VI, but executive agreements are constitutional if Congress has delegated the relevant authority to the President. While Congress holds most foreign affairs powers, the President’s role is robust but constrained by the Constitution’s formal structure. This formalist approach ensures a balanced separation of powers in foreign affairs.

This chapter examines the concept of recognition. It discusses the recognition of states in the light of the competing constitutive and declaratory theories and the differing views taken by states, together with the consequences of non-recognition internationally. This is followed by a reference to the recognition of governments in the light of doctrine and practice. Various kinds of recognition from de jure and de facto to premature, implied and collective recognition are noted as well as the withdrawal of recognition. The concept of non-recognition is referenced. The chapter then turns to the legal effects of recognition, both internationally and internally, including the relevance of state immunity and standing. UK practice is examined in the light of extensive case law. The chapter turns to US practice concerning the legal effects of recognition or non-recognition.

The human body is tied to a distinctive form of natural beauty, for Hegel proposes that there is something about the human body in its given, natural form that makes it uniquely capable of manifesting self-conscious spirit or mind. Since, ontologically speaking, the being of spirit is of a higher order than anything in nonhuman nature, the capacity to give off the distinctive look and sound of a spiritual way of being amounts to the human body’s capacity for a higher, fuller beauty as well. This chapter focuses primarily on the naturally given, predominantly involuntary ways in which the human body allows spirituality to appear. Because Hegel characterizes artworks generally as involving a “spiritualizing” of otherwise natural forms, we are encouraged to think of the human body’s distinctive, spirit-manifesting demeanor as a kind of root aesthetic vocabulary with which all of the more developed “languages” of art are familiar and from which they grow. But it also seems that for Hegel it ultimately takes art, and in particular classical sculpture, to reveal the purportedly natural beauty of the body, and this complicates the sense in which bodily beauty is natural after all.

This chapter focuses on the law relating to sovereign territory. The concepts of territory and of territorial sovereignty are examined. The manner in which additional territory may be acquired is analysed. Mechanisms such as boundary treaties and boundary awards are noted, and then the methods of acquisition are discussed. These include an analysis of discovery, accretion, cession, the former use of force and conquest, and the exercise of effective control, including occupation of terra nullius and prescription. The impact of the concepts of the critical date and intertemporal law is noted. Attention then turns to the role of subsequent conduct, such as recognition, acquiescence and estoppel. The principles of territorial integrity and of self-determination in this context are then discussed, together with the doctrine of uti possidetis, both as to the colonial context and more generally. The role of subsequent practice is noted and the importance of sovereign effective control in the circumstances (‘effectivités’). The chapter continues by noting the relevance of leases and servitudes, then turns to international boundary rivers, and then the polar regions. The chapter concludes with a section on the law of outer space.

Chapter 4 examines local concepts of right(s), dissecting the ways in which brokering and begging were viewed as charitable compensations for the lack of government protection for disabled people, but claimed by the recipients as forms of work. Aspiring to have their activities recognised as rights, they spoke a local language of entitlement that conflated the value of independent work with the ethical and political right to care, asserting obligatory rights or taxes, against the donors’ perception of gifts. The language of ‘rights’ is a space of mutual evaluation, a rich and powerful language for discussing issues of inequality, membership, personhood, welfare, and power in Kinshasa today. It is perhaps most significant as a claim for distribution than as a legal premise of entitlements. Here, the question of a rightful share becomes pertinent, as givers and receivers evoked differing views on the same transaction that expressed contradictory aspirations and values. In the absence of formal institutions to enforce informal disability privileges, people had to recognise the right to be beggars or brokers on an interpersonal level, requiring constant value tests on whether claims to assistance were legitimate. The chapter thus disrupts the classic Maussian focus on giving and production to consider the moral and political controversies associated with asking and distribution.

This chapter deals with the subjects of international law. The meaning of international legal personality is noted. The primary subject of the international system is the state and the conditions for the creation of statehood are examined (permanent population, defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with other states). Each of these conditions is examined. The role of self-determination in the context of the criteria of statehood is discussed, as is the function of recognition. The fundamental rights of states, such as independence and equality are noted. There then follow sections on particular kinds of states, such as protectorates and federal states, and then sui generis territorial entities, for example, mandated and trust territories in the past, territories under international administration, and entities of disputed status such as Taiwan, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic, Kosovo and Palestine. Special cases such as the Sovereign Order of Malta, the Holy See and the Vatican City, and international corporations are covered before the right of peoples to self-determination is examined.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize my arguments for the study of the global politics of religion, international political theory, and the study of colonial, postcolonial, and de-colonial politics. In the field of religion and politics, I illustrated the productive power of the exclusion narrative and reconstructed the concept of ‘religion’ at work in the rehabilitating narrative of recognition. In the field of IR theory, I emphasize the need to study the costs of recognition and argue for a greater attentiveness to its conditions of possibility, that is to say, the processes through which the subjects and objects of global politics become intelligible, or recognizable, as such. In the field of colonial history, I show how the entwined histories of Pakistan and Israel both structured the possibilities of and were structured by the capacious concepts of ‘religion’, the ‘Muslim’, and the ‘Jew’.

The third chapter is the theoretical centrepiece of the book and argues that efforts to ‘recognize religion’ in global politics remain ignorant of the costs involved. Building on this argument, it asks if the troubles with recognizing religion reflect more basic qualities of the grammar of recognition. Following the work by Jacques Rancière, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, James Tully, and Jens Bartelson it shows that recognition has two faces and that along with its frequently acknowledged empowering aspect, it also comes with costs. This is significant because it shows that the problems accompanying the ‘engagement’, ‘inclusion’, or ‘recognition’ of religion do not stem from academic ignorance, ideological bias, or conservative politics but rather are part of the conditions of possibility of recognition. The chapter thereby argues for the importance of understanding the conditions of possibility for recognition, that is, the epistemological politics of recognizability. To understand the costs of recognizing religion in global politics, therefore, one must study in detail the processes by which religion became intelligible as such. This is addressed in Chapters 4 and 5. Finally, I argue that being attentive to costs of recognition enables us to better understand choices of unintelligibility and the privileges of invisibility.

Chapter 1 conceptualizes a primary form of racial doubt: questioning the equation of blackness with slavery. It is built around the testimony of Ben Newton, who declared he was born free in the United States, kidnapped at the age of ten, and subsequently enslaved in Cuba for several decades. It explores the degree to which racial doubt was intrinsic to the tension between racist agnosia (the social practice of actively ignoring exploited, racialized people) and anti-racist recognition (whereby some of these people could make themselves seen or heard). As Ben Newton pointed out when he reached the US consulate in 1853, “almost everybody” knew his story, but neither his owners nor the local authorities had felt pressured to liberate him. When he told this same story in a new context, recognition and freedom became less elusive. Through a focus on Ben’s testimony, the chapter charts the legal, practical, and linguistic terrains in which captives challenged their enslavement.

The introductory chapter presents an overview of the classical doctrine of civil war and discusses some of the reasons for studying them. It argues that some doctrine of civil war is an inevitable component of any international legal system. Observing how the doctrine of civil war that existed in the age of sail and steam has come to seem rather opaque and remote in the present day, this study aims to offer modern readers a valuable review of that past tradition and to help them remember how such a doctrine once came to be and what happened to it. At the same time, the purpose of the book is not to argue for a revival of or return to the classical law, but rather to better understand the aspirations and limitations of the law of past generations, which may not be too unlike those of our own times.

This chapter concludes the book by revisiting its key findings and by reflecting on their meaning from a broader perspective. The first half of the chapter consists of a summary of the rise and fall of the classical doctrine of civil war as explained in the preceding chapters. The second half assesses the overall legacy of the classical doctrine in the light of modern legal theory, and observes how the classical law was hardly better able to overcome the problems of indeterminacy and recognition than current principles are. Yet this does not mean that the classical doctrine would have been meaningless, as its practical utility may have been based precisely on its limited effectiveness and inevitable ambiguity.