Guarantor institutions (such as electoral commissions and anti-corruption watchdogs, which supposedly comprise the so-called ‘fourth’ or ‘integrity’ branch of the state) are increasingly of interest to constitutional scholars. In a given political context, a guarantor institution is a tailor-made constitutional institution, vested with material as well as expressive capacities, whose function is to provide a credible and enduring guarantee to a specific non-self-enforcing constitutional norm (or any aspect thereof). Arguing that guarantor institutions are more trustee-like than agent-like in character, this chapter defends the claim that the design of any guarantor institutions should seek to ensure that it has: (i) sufficient expertise and capacity to perform its functions effectively; (ii) sufficient independence from political, economic, or social actors with an interest in frustrating the relevant norm it is meant to guarantee; and (iii) sufficient accountability to bodies with an interest in upholding the relevant norm.

The demise of the League of Nations did not lead to the end of colonial membership at international organisations. Chapter Six examines how the League’s legacy of colonial membership continued under the United Nations. Despite not being fully independent, the Indian National Congress would appoint India’s delegation at the first General Assembly in 1946, resulting in a very different international personality. No longer constrained and gagged by British appointees and the imperial conference, India would aggressively pursue its longstanding grievances against South Africa, destroying the ideal of inter se, and effectively ending the British ideal of colonial membership at international organisations. Instead, this chapter reveals how the end of the legacy of colonial membership went beyond the British Empire, and was replicated by the Soviet Union in the accession of Soviet Belorussia and Ukraine. Neither of these member states would become independent until 1991.

As the Irish Free State came into being, Egypt too was declared independent. Whilst in Ireland, League membership was rapidly forthcoming, negotiations for Egypt’s accession were protracted, with Egypt acceding in 1937, the last member state to join the League. Chapter Five investigates why Egypt, which was never formally a colony of the British Empire and from 1922 deemed an independent state, was obstructed by Britain from joining the League for fifteen years. This chapter examines the contested relationship between the Egyptian nationalist Wafd party, that sought Egyptian independence, and Britain, that sought Egyptian acquiescence to a treaty of alliance. Egypt’s contested accession to the League reveals the risks that colonial membership to the League posed to British imperial policy, and how Britian could act as a gatekeeper for the accession of their colonies to the League. Finally, this chapter reveals how the actions of another imperial party, Italy, and its growing encroachment into North-East Africa would ultimately lead to a compromise that would see Egypt’s accession to the League.

Chapter 7 is the conclusion of the book and traces how trends set by imperial historians of the nineteenth century framed the Tailors’ conspiracy as dangerous and as an isolated phenomenon while championing the 1789 conspiracy in Minas Gerais as foundational to Brazilian independence. Historians of the twentieth century rightly combated those efforts and fought to establish the conspiracy as equally significant as the plot in Minas Gerais. The book ends with the proposition that historians of the Tailors’ Conspiracy no longer need to do this kind of work. Instead, this book demonstrates the richness that comes from studying the conspiracy in an empire-wide context and in studying it from the vantage point of relations and not simply from the vantage points of ideology and rhetoric.

There were practical limits to these political imaginaries and projects. People needed to work, and the war was a source of employment for many displaced people. This chapter explores the parallel systems of governance in Khartoum that southern militia-running businessmen (including Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, Paulino Matip, Abdel Bagi Ayii Akol, and others) organised in Khartoum, including their own prisons, barracks, and offices. Many residents drew on their jobs, sympathetic policing, and ‘traditional’ courts, but these rebel authorities also propagated their own ideas of future structures of political community based on regional zones of ethno-political authority. This is an unrecorded history of militia governance, looking beyond these authorities’ immediate mercenary aims and exploring their leadership’s and members’ own critiques of governance and models of power. This sets a challenge to current studies of rebel governance systems, which rarely examine pro-government proxy militias. It also outlines how the more creative, inclusive, and imaginative intellectual work detailed in this book was undermined (and ultimately buried) by these wartime exigencies and practical (if mercenary) structures of militia work and ethnic self-defence.

The conclusion surveys the core interventions of the book: its conceptual and methodological work to open new pathways in African intellectual history beyond decolonisation through postcolonial civil wars to the present, among working-class migrants and war-displaced people, within the multiple discursive worlds (at home, in Sudan, and globally) accessible to them. This chapter challenges atheoretical interpretations of southern and South Sudanese politics, reasserting the place of political imagination in this history and demanding close engagement with everyday conversations over political ethnicity, wealth, class, and power. The chapter ends with a reflection based on conversations over 2015–23 with many of the same activists, teachers, and writers in South Sudan, on opportunities lost, and on continuing projects of political creativity today. As a history in the aftermath, the project was built during a time of a loss of optimism and political freedom, and is currently a history of possibilities lost.

Political possibilities closed down as the war ended in 2005. With the negotiation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the death of the SPLA’s leader John Garang – which sparked riots and racialised murder across Khartoum – many people’s connections and trust in inclusive intellectual and political projects were broken. This chapter briefly surveys the aftermath of the riots and peace process, which saw a massive movement of well over a million Khartoum residents to the south, where they reconstructed a very different set of neighbourhoods that in the late 2000s were often known as New Khartoums. The secession of South Sudan in 2011 was not a panacea or end goal of the long conflicts for many of these returned Khartoum residents. Reflecting discussions with returning residents over 2012 and 2013, the chapter examines the lost possibilities of the projects they undertook in Khartoum, and the closing space for political projects and democratic communities that they discussed and worked for during the war.

Conclusion: a reckoning. Liberty used to be defined as absence of dependence. Nowadays it is usually defined as absence of restraint. But the underlying aim of this book has been to establish that there are several reasons for thinking that the ideal of liberty as independence is to be preferred. We gain from it a better sense of how the mere fact of living in subjection -- whether or not we are restrained -- takes away our liberty. We also gain from it a more helpful way of thinking about fundamental rights. Rather than conceiving of them as universal moral claims, there may be good reasons for preferring to think of them as the creation of specific independent communities. Above all, the ideal of liberty as independence helps us to see the importance of cherishing the value of autonomy in relationships between states as well as individual citizens. It is difficult to see how the requirements of justice can be met in the absence of a commitment to the ideal of liberty as independence.

INTRODUCTION. When and why did it come about that one prevailing way of understanding what it means to be free was replaced by a strongly contrasting account that came to be no less widely accepted, and still remains dominant? The argument of the book is that, in Anglophone political theory, the change happened quite suddenly in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Before that time it was generally agreed that what it means to be free is that you are not subject to, or dependent on, the arbitrary will and power of anyone else. Liberty was equated with independence. But by the early nineteenth century it had come to be generally accepted that liberty simply consists in not being restrained from acting as you choose. What prompted the change, the book argues, was not the imperatives of commercial society, as has often been argued. Rather it was a growing anxiety, in the face of the American and French Revolutions, about the democratic potential of the ideal of liberty as independence.

Chapter 22 analyzes whether and to what extent sustainability can be integrated into EU fit and proper testing for members of the management body of banks, insurers and investment companies. It concludes that (prospective) members should indeed have sufficient knowledge, skills and expertise in sustainability, both as a collective and individually. The extent to which this knowledge is required depends on the institution and the specific role and responsibilities of the director. However, every director must have basic sustainability knowledge and expertise to adequately perform his or her role. It is argued that EU supervisors, including the ECB, should use the fit and proper test, or at least engage in serious dialogue with financial institutions, to ensure that there is sufficient ESG expertise in the management body. This is well within their mandate since core prudential values such as the solidity of the institution and stability of the financial sector may be at stake. To ensure a level playing field within the EU, it is recommended that EU regulators set out more specific requirements regarding ESG expertise in Level 1 or 2 legislation. This would also provide greater legal certainty for financial institutions and (proposed) members of the management body.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.

This chapter explains how the artificial creation of the Nigerian state – spurred principally by colonialism – drove colonial and eventually Indigenous officials to promote a system of regionalism to accommodate the creation of a federal system of government. In doing so, the concept of ethnicity was arbitrarily and crudely introduced to the complex and diverse patchwork of peoples inhabiting what would become Nigeria. Regionalism fostered self-interested political groups, whereby the individual interests of Nigeria’s three principal regions (North, West, and East), each dominated by one of three major ethnic groups (Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo), competed amongst one another for power, leading to extraregional conflicts. Complicating this system was the presence of many hundreds of other, much smaller, minority ethnic groups. The promotion of regionalism would ultimately give rise to ethnonationalism, in which Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups were given precedence over minority groups, leading to intra-regional conflict. The concepts of regionalism and ethnicity would become inseparably intertwined and would significantly hamper decolonization and efforts at building a consolidated and equitable state.