The driving force of the dynamic development of world legal history in the past few centuries, with the dominance of the West, was clearly the demands of modernisation – transforming existing reality into what is seen as modern. The need for modernisation, determining the development of modern law, however, clashed with the need to preserve cultural identity rooted in national traditions. With selected examples of different legal institutions, countries and periods, the authors of the essays in the two volumes Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. I: Private Law and Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. II: Public Law seek to explain the nature of this problem. Contributors are Judit Beke-Martos, Jiří Brňovják, Marjorie Carvalho de Souza, Michał Gałędek, Imre Képessy, Ivan Kosnica, Simon Lavis, Maja Maciejewska-Szałas, Tadeusz Maciejewski, Thomas Mohr, Balázs Pálvölgyi, and Marek Starý.

The driving force of the dynamic development of world legal history in the past few centuries, with the dominance of the West, was clearly the demands of modernisation – transforming existing reality into what is seen as modern. The need for modernisation, determining the development of modern law, however, clashed with the need to preserve cultural identity rooted in national traditions. With selected examples of different legal institutions, countries and periods, the authors of the essays in the two volumes Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. I:Private Law and Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. II: Public Law seek to explain the nature of this problem. Contributors are Michał Gałędek, Katrin Kiirend-Pruuli, Anna Klimaszewska, Łukasz Jan Korporowicz, Beata J. Kowalczyk, Marju Luts-Sootak, Marcin Michalak, Annamaria Monti, Zsuzsanna Peres, Sara Pilloni, Hesi Siimets-Gross, Sean Thomas, Bart Wauters, Steven Wilf, and Mingzhe Zhu.

Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond analyses perpetration and complicity under National Socialism and beyond. Contributors based in the UK, the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel and Chile reflect on self-understandings, representations and narratives of involvement in collective violence both at the time and later – a topic that remains highly relevant today. Using the notion of 'compromised identities' to think about contentious questions relating to empathy and complicity, this inter-disciplinary collection addresses the complex relationships between people's behaviours and self-understandings through and beyond periods of collective violence. Contributors explore the compromises that individuals, states and societies enter into both during and after such violence. Case studies highlight patterns of complicity and involvement in perpetration, and analyse how people's stories evolve under changing circumstances and through social interaction, using varying strategies of justification, denial and rationalisation. Each chapter also considers the ways in which contemporary responses and scholarly practices may be affected by engagement with perpetrator representations.

These contributions offer fundamental insights into how literary works address and reconceptualize issues of nationalism, groupism, belonging and denationalization in selected European contexts. Various critical perspectives are employed here to highlight modern social and political processes as registered and, to a certain extent, also fashioned by contemporary literary discourses. 'Reimagined communities' emerge from literary redescriptions of existing or imaginary sociopolitical configurations in several European states or regions. All the contributions share a heightened sensitivity to the individual as enmeshed in oppressive geopolitical circumstances. Thereby, literary expressions of how individuality is constrained by social pressures may offer inspiring blueprints for emancipation.

Over the past thirty years the comparative study of policy agendas under the aegis of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) has become one of the fastest growing sub-field in policy research. Yet, similarly to policy studies in general, most of the agenda-setting literature focuses on well-established democracies. This edited volume offers a ground-breaking analysis of a hitherto less examined topic in comparative politics: the dynamics of policy agendas in Socialist autocracy and in hybrid regimes. We propose that policymaking in authoritarian and illiberal regimes is different from the practices of democracies which we analyse based on a unique historical policy agendas database built by the Hungarian CAP team at the Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. We find that punctuated equilibrium theory offers a good description of policy dynamics regardless of policy regimes, yet punctuations are more pronounced in autocratic and illiberal settings. These regime types also share a tendency towards centralization, a less efficient use of public information and a suppression of democratic participation in the policy process. This book may be of interest to scholars and students of policy studies, agenda-setting and the politics of authoritarianism.

This book addresses the relevance of the state of exception for the analysis of law, while reflecting on the deeper symbolic and jurisprudential significance of the coalescence between law and force. The concept of the state of exception has become a central topos in political and legal philosophy as well as in critical theory. The theoretical apparatus of the state of exception sharply captures the uneasy relationship between law, life and politics in the contemporary global setting, while also challenging the comforting narratives that uncritically connect democracy with the tradition of the rule of law. Drawing on critical legal theory, continental jurisprudence, political philosophy and history, this book explores the genealogy of the concept of the state of exception and reflects on its legal embodiment in past and present contexts – including Weimar and Nazi Germany, contemporary Europe and Turkey. In doing so, it explores the disruptive force of the exception for legal and political thought, as it recuperates its contemporary critical potential. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of jurisprudence, philosophy and critical legal theory.

The monograph by Michał Gałędek presents the process of rebuilding administrative structures on the eve of establishment of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815, in connection with the plans of tsar Alexander I to grant a liberal constitutional political system to the Kingdom.

This book addresses the variety of right-wing illiberal populism which has emerged in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Against the backdrop of weak institutional traditions, frequent and profound transformations, and deep historical traumas affecting the law, politics, economy and society in the region, the book critically examines the entanglements of legality in the region’s transformation from state socialism to neoliberalism and Western-style democracy. Drawing on critical legal theory, as well as legal history, legal theory, sociology of law, history of ideas, anthropology of law, comparative law, and constitutional theory, the book goes beyond conventional analyses to offer an in-depth account of this important contemporary phenomenon. This book will be of interest to legal researchers, especially of a critical or socio-legal perspective, political scientists, sociologists and (legal) historians, as well as policy makers seeking to understand the regional specificity and deeper roots of Central and Eastern European illiberal populism.

The driving force of the dynamic development of world legal history in the past few centuries, with the dominance of the West, was clearly the demands of modernisation - transforming existing reality into what is seen as modern. The need for modernisation, determining the development of modern law, however, clashed with the need to preserve cultural identity rooted in national traditions. With selected examples of different legal institutions, countries and periods, the authors of the essays in the two volumes Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. I: Private Law and Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. II: Public Law seek to explain the nature of this problem.

Approaches to legal pluralism vary widely across the spectrum of different disciplines. They comprise normative and descriptive perspectives, focus both on legal pluralist realities as well as public debates, and address legal pluralism in a range of different societies with varying political, institutional and historical conditions. Emphasising an empirical research to contemporary legal pluralist settings in Muslim contexts, the present collected volume contributes to a deepened understanding of legal pluralist issues and realities through comparative examination. This approach reveals some common features, such as the relevance of Islamic law in power struggles and in the construction of (state or national) identities, strategies of coping with coexisting sets of legal norms by the respective agents, or public debates about the risks induced by the recognition of religious institutions in migrant societies. At the same time, the studies contained in this volume reveal that legal pluralist settings often reflect very specific historical and social constellations, which demands caution towards any generalisation. The volume is based on papers presented at a conference in Münster (Germany) in 2016 and comprises contributions by Judith Koschorke, Karen Meerschaut, Yvonne Prief, Ulrike Qubaja, Werner de Saeger, Ido Shahar, Katrin Seidel, Konstantinos Tsitselikis, Vishal Vora and Ihsan Yilmaz.