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This chapter looks at Arendt's historical analysis of a form of war that still shapes the contemporary world. In particular, the chapter assesses her farsighted and prescient claim that late 19th-century wars of imperial conquest helped sow the seeds of 20th-century total war in Europe. The implications are potentially great for how we might think through the social and political processes unwittingly unleashed by various forms of violence, including so-called ‘small wars’. Arendt's writing on imperialism and European total war also reveal some of the flaws in conventional military history and strategic studies which has understood these practices as unrelated. Arendt points us toward relationships that are much closer to Clausewitz's more fundamental insight about war as a social process that transcends the nation-state. Moreover, Arendt may have been the first to articulate what today we call ‘blowback’ and she termed the ‘boomerang effect’.

This chapter seeks to explain the poor performance of public policy tools in Turkey through strategic planning and performance auditing utilising the “boomerang effect” concept mainly used in communication studies. For this analysis the study follows the steps of the heuristic public policy cycle model. After clarifying the transfer process of strategic planning and performance auditing to the Turkish administrative system, the study focuses on the implementation of these policy tools. Demonstrating the poor performance of these tools with reference to some empirical studies, the chapter discusses four reasons of non-implementation of policy tools, namely the exposure of political power to public scrutiny, Turkish administrative culture, lack of domestic contribution and the leverage power of international and regional organizations.

This chapter explores the limits, tensions, and possibilities of cross-border organizing using the case of International Rivers and the local struggle of activists in Lesotho challenging a mega-dam water scheme, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). It privileges the perspective of one local NGO, the Highlands Church Action Group (HCAG), constituted by Basotho activists who see themselves as working on behalf of communities affected by the LHWP and not necessarily as global or antidam activists. It uncovers often-overlooked internal dynamics of the boomerang effect, a political strategy in which organizations form transnational advocacy networks to leverage pressure against targeted institutions to implement reforms or enforce laws or policies. As activists pursue this boomerang pattern, however, there is a risk of privileging the interpretations and identities of transnational allies, potentially leading to “border distortions”—rooted in failures to bridge social movement frames across structural chasms, from local to transnational advocacy networks—which can erode the resonance and strategic communication needed for the boomerang's full force to be effectively implemented.

In Chapter 3, communications scholar Robert C. Hornik gives a brief history of the health communications field and outlines insights and pitfalls relevant to human rights communications efforts. In addition to ensuring that messages are well-tailored to and will receive sufficient attention in the target audience, he also outlines several counterintuitive findings including the need to be mindful of “boomerang effects”—the risk that any given communication will, in fact, worsen the behaviors the message was intended to fix.

This chapter looks at the concept of the technics of the politics of North-South relations. It begins with the notion of the periphery as a laboratory of social and political technologies for the core—exemplified by Michel Foucault's concept of the “boomerang effect.” This is followed by a discussion of the way technology—from liberation technology to cyber-utopianism—is treated and imagined in relation to the global South. It then proceeds to a study of the history of the development of fingerprinting that explicitly connects technologies used to identify individuals with colonialism while pointing to the constitutive, and globally interconnected, effects of such kinds of standardizing technical innovations. The main part of the chapter examines the applications of digital power in a case study of Demobilisation, Demilitarisation, and Reintegration (DDR) and Security Sector Reform (SSR) programs in Liberia (2003–10). These programs lend themselves well to the thematic focus of this book because they have particular information technology requirements. They are, for the main part, executed by foreign interveners; occur in geographic territories which, in a very short timespan, mix different modes of the technics of politics; and have as one of their primary, but overlooked, outputs a stable regime of individual documentation.

Evocative terrorism news may scare the public into supporting counter-terrorism policies by causing citizens to overestimate the risk of future terrorism. Yet, few studies explore how terrorism news influences threat perceptions in a politicized context. Using two experiments, this chapter demonstrates that citizens’ threat perceptions are structured not only by what they see on television but also by partisanship. The chapter explores the reactions of Democrats to threatening terrorism news during a Republican presidency. Politically sophisticated Democrats demonstrate reactance to threatening terrorism news and actively resist threatening messages. That is, Democrats were motivated to deny threat when they perceived the news as manipulative.When the threat of terrorism was new and not yet captured by the political parties, threatening media coverage was able to convince citizens of both political parties.However, when terrorism was politicized, it became harder to persuade citizens who identified withthe opposite party of the president (i.e. Democrats, liberals) of imminent threats, and evocative messages led to a backlash among these citizens.These findings may be a relief for those who are concerned that the news media and political elites can manipulate the public through fear, but also raises questions about citizens’ motivations to maintain prior beliefs in the face of legitimate risks.

This chapter examines codes of conduct and factory certification in the Indonesian apparel and footwear industry. With democratization, independent unions, and relatively progressive law on the books, Indonesia seemed poised for the growth of responsible factories. And yet certification to the leading standard (SA8000) proved rare. Unions and labor NGOs engaged in bottom-up monitoring of codes of conduct, using the reputations of Nike, Adidas, and other brands as leverage. But the modest improvements that followed were overshadowed by the loss of orders and the migration of the industry within and across national borders. Ironically, while factory-centered labor standards have been fairly weak, the Indonesian labor movement has proven stronger than expected in other arenas. Using qualitative and quantitative evidence, this chapter reveals the muted significance of codes of conduct, the ways in which activists sought to amplify them, and the reasons for their limited success.

Chapter 6 analyzes the MST’s engagement with public schools in Ceará in the late 2000s, in a very different context, when the movement’s educational initiatives are already recognized nationally. During this period, MST activists in Ceará win access to four high schools in their settlements, specifically designated as escolas do campo (school of the countryside). Chapter 6 shows how the national context, while not determining of regional trajectories, directly influences local relations between movement activists and local state officials. More specifically, a conservative government in Ceará agrees to work with the MST due to increasing external pressure. In contrast, São Paulo was able to deflect this national advocacy, illustrating that high-capacity states can still override the influence of national trends. This chapter also shows the evolution of the MST’s pedagogical practices and what the MST’s contentious co-governance of public education looks like in the contemporary context.

This chapter provides an overview of the means through which international human rights law is translated into domestic law, policy, and practice. To have an influence on public health, international human rights law must be translated into domestic action. As international human rights law is largely state centered, it relies upon national and subnational governments to implement it—to promote and protect human rights and to provide remedies to victims of human rights violations. Based upon international rules on domestic implementation, there are four general approaches to translate international law into domestic action: human rights education, policymaking, judicial actions, and engagement with international human rights mechanisms. National and subnational governments use these four approaches to translate international human rights law into domestic law, policy, and practice for health, while nongovernmental organizations and international human rights mechanisms play important roles in monitoring these processes.

It would seem only fair that an author who places a question in the title of a book should be expected to answer it directly. So who does rule the earth? The answer is Napoleon. He did, after all, leave behind a legal code that, as we saw in chapter 1, continues to guide the behavior of billions of people throughout the world today. And then there’s June Irwin, the country doctor who convinced the town of Hudson, Canada, to create rules banning nonessential pesticides and spawned a nationwide movement for change. And let’s not forget her foes in the pesticide industry, who raced across America passing state preemption rules that deny local communities the right to regulate these poisons. The earth is ruled by the Roman Emperor Justinian, who created the legal precedent for public access to beaches (discussed in chapter 2), as well as the real estate developer David Gottfried (chapter 3), co-inventor of the rulemaking system for green buildings known as LEED. The list most certainly includes Edmund Muskie and Philip Hart, the senators who spearheaded passage of the US Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in the early 1970s. But it also includes José Delfín Duarte, whose local water association is empowered to decide how water resources are managed in his small corner of Costa Rica—an effort that required revising rules at local and national levels. Whether famous figures like Jean Monnet, founder of the European Union, or tenacious groups of citizens like Portland’s Bicycle Transportation Alliance, whether working at the level of empires or that of neighborhoods, the people who rule the earth are those who leave behind a legacy of rules that shape the actions and opportunities of generations to come. If we so choose—if we can put aside for a moment the “little things” we do for the earth, and think about the larger, lasting changes that result when people come together and rewrite the rules they live by—then the group of rulemakers also includes you and me.