Introduction: Global Human Rights Law and the Boundaries of Statehood

The contributions collected in this Special Issue are the outcome of a colloquium on Global Human Rights Law and the Boundaries of Statehood held at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in South Africa in March 2015. The colloquium is the first in a series of topics to be addressed within the STIAS research project, Boundaries and Legal Authority in a Global Context, coordinated by Hans Lindahl and Louise du Toit. We would like to express our gratitude to STIAS for the funding and logistics of the colloquium. Our particular thanks are due to the director of STIAS, Hendrik Geyer, for hosting our colloquium, and to Nel-Mari Loock and Maria Mouton for their friendly and diligent assistance with its organization. Daniel Augenstein has conducted much of the work in preparation of this Special Issue during a research leave at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin funded by the German Humboldt Foundation, whose support he gratefully acknowledges. Last but not least, we would like to thank the editors of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies for their commitment and editorial assistance in seeing this collective research project through to publication

The role of human rights and environmental due diligence legislation in protecting women migrant workers in global food supply chains

This research policy study examines the role of human rights and environmental due diligence legislation in protecting women migrant workers in global food supply chains. It considers in detail a recent proposal by the European Parliament for an EU Directive on Corporate Due Diligence and Corporate Accountabilit

Implementing the UNGPs in the European Union : towards an open method of coordination for business and human rights

The paper examines the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the European Union via National Action Plans (NAPs). We argue that some of the procedural and substantive shortcomings currently observed in the implementation process could effectively be addressed through the Open Method of Coordination – a governance instrument that the EU has already successfully used in other policy domains such as employment, social protection and education. Section two sketches out the polycentric global governance approach envisaged by the UNGPs and discusses the institutional and policy background of their implementation in the European Union. Section three provides an assessment of EU Member State National Action Plans on business and human rights, as benchmarked against international NAP guidance. Section four relates experiences with the existing NAP process to the policy background and rationale of the Open Method of Coordination and discusses the conditions for employing the OMC in the business and human rights domain. Against this background, section five make some more concrete proposals for developing an Open Method of Coordination on Business and Human Rights

Impacts of urban real-world labs

Ways of evaluating the societal impact of real-world labs as a transdisciplinary and transformative research format are under discussion. We present an evaluation approach rooted in structuration theory, with a focus on structure-agency dynamics at the science-society interface. We applied the theory with its four modalities (interpretation schemes, norms, allocative and authoritative resources) to the case of the Mirke neighbourhood in Wuppertal, Germany. Six projects promoted the capacity for co-productive city-making. The effects of the projects were jointly analysed in a co-evaluation process. Previously proposed subcategories of the modalities as an empirical operationalisation were tested and confirmed as being applicable. Five new subcategories were generated. The use of the modalities seems appropriate for co-evaluation processes. The tool is practical, focused on real-world effects, and suitable for transdisciplinary interpretation processes. We encourage further empirical testing of the tool, as well as development of the subcategories.</p

Adapting Neural Link Predictors for Data-Efficient Complex Query Answering

Answering complex queries on incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task where a model needs to answer complex logical queries in the presence of missing knowledge. Prior work in the literature has proposed to address this problem by designing architectures trained end-to-end for the complex query answering task with a reasoning process that is hard to interpret while requiring data and resource-intensive training. Other lines of research have proposed re-using simple neural link predictors to answer complex queries, reducing the amount of training data by orders of magnitude while providing interpretable answers. The neural link predictor used in such approaches is not explicitly optimised for the complex query answering task, implying that its scores are not calibrated to interact together. We propose to address these problems via CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$, a parameter-efficient score \emph{adaptation} model optimised to re-calibrate neural link prediction scores for the complex query answering task. While the neural link predictor is frozen, the adaptation component -- which only increases the number of model parameters by $0.03\%$ -- is trained on the downstream complex query answering task. Furthermore, the calibration component enables us to support reasoning over queries that include atomic negations, which was previously impossible with link predictors. In our experiments, CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$ produces significantly more accurate results than current state-of-the-art methods, improving from $34.4$ to $35.1$ Mean Reciprocal Rank values averaged across all datasets and query types while using $\leq 30\%$ of the available training query types. We further show that CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$ is data-efficient, achieving competitive results with only $1\%$ of the training complex queries, and robust in out-of-domain evaluations