Sustainable innovation: key conclusions from Sustainable Innovation Conferences 2003–2006 organised by The Centre for Sustainable Design

The following is taken directly from the introduction. This booklet summarises the key conclusions from the 2003–2006 conferences on Sustainable Innovation organised by The Centre for Sustainable Design (www.cfsd.org.uk). The conclusions are drawn from the respective conference presentations, papers and discussions. The publication has been sponsored as part of a ‘Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Innovation & Design’ project awarded to The Centre for Sustainable Design by the South-East England Development Agency (SEEDA)

Dynamics, dephasing and clustering of impurity atoms in Bose-Einstein condensates

We investigate the influence of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) on the properties of immersed impurity atoms, which are trapped in an optical lattice. Assuming a weak coupling of the impurity atoms to the BEC, we derive a quantum master equation for the lattice system. In the special case of fixed impurities with two internal states the atoms represent a quantum register and the quantum master equation reproduces the exact evolution of the qubits. We characterise the qubit dephasing which is caused by the interspecies coupling and show that the effect of sub- and superdecoherence is observable for realistic experimental parameters. Furthermore, the BEC phonons mediate an attractive interaction between the impurities, which has an important impact on their spatial distribution. If the lattice atoms are allowed to move, there occurs a sharp transition with the impurities aggregating in a macroscopic cluster at experimentally achievable temperatures. We also investigate the impact of the BEC on the transport properties of the impurity atoms and show that a crossover from coherent to diffusive behaviour occurs with increasing interaction strength.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, some typos correcte

Ambivalence, anxieties / adaptations, advances: conceptual history and international law

Scholars of the history of international law have recently begun to wonder whether their work is predominantly about law or history. The questions we ask — about materials, contexts and movements — all raise intractable problems of historiography. And yet despite this extensive and appropriate questioning within the field, and its general inclination towards theory and theorising, few scholars have turned to the vast expanses of historical theory to try to think through how we might go about addressing them. This article works towards remedying that gap by exploring why and how we might engage with historiography more deeply. Part One shows how the last three decades of the ‘turn to history’ can be usefully read as a move from ambivalence to anxiety. The major works of the 2000s thoroughly removed the pre-1990s ambivalence to history in general, with brief considerations about method. Efforts in the last decade to build on those works have led to the present era of anxiety about both history and method, raising questions around materials, contexts and movements. And yet far from a negative state, this moment of anxiety is both appropriate and potentially creative: it prompts us to rethink our mode of engaging with historiography. Part Two explores how this mode of engagement might proceed. It reconstructs the principles and debates within conceptual history around the anxieties of materials, contexts and movements. It then explores how these might be adapted to histories of international law, both generally and within one concrete project: a conceptual history of recognition in the writings of British jurists. Part Three concludes by considering the advances achieved by this kind of engagement, and reflects on new directions for international law and its histories

The representation of non-linear stochastic systems with applications to filtering

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A conceptual history of recognition in British international legal thought

This article examines the development of the concept of recognition in the writings of British jurists. It first outlines methodologies of conceptual history as applied to international legal concepts, before examining four strands of development of the concept of recognition from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It shows how the concept of recognition moved from examining intra-European diplomatic disagreements, to a focus on Christianity, civilisation and progress that barred non-European communities, to a late colonial-era emphasis on technicalities of government and territory, and eventually a state-centric account that normalised inferiority into difference, before emerging in the interwar period as a ‘basic concept’ of international law: intensely debated and closely tied to a range of political projects. The article concludes with reflections on why British thinking turns away from recognition in the 1950s, as the decolonising world turns to a new international law and self-determination

The 'international' and 'domestic' in British legal thought from Gentili to Lauterpacht

Since the end of the Cold War, the relationship between international and domestic law has become one of the most pressing conundrums in legal theory and practice. But this is an old problem of politics, society and law within and between states. Despite the current urgency, no comprehensive historical study of the concepts of ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ has been produced. This thesis fills one part of this significant gap. It examines how and why these ideas, as linked terms, emerged in the works of jurists writing in the British Isles. That development is most clearly understood as a product, response and justification of projects of empire and the kinds of legal subjecthood that empire required. This history is presented in four parts. Chapter One contends that the ‘domestic’ emerged from sixteenth and seventeenth century efforts to channel natural law and imperial jurisdiction into territorial authority for the early English imperial state. Chapter Two argues that the ‘international’ appeared in the late eighteenth century to demand the rational reorganisation of the domestic laws of all states, to further commerce, check revolution, and articulate national independence. Chapter Three shows how the domestic and international became entwined in a variety of Victorian-era projects tied to the independence of absolute imperial sovereignty and the interdependence of the globalising world. Chapter Four argues that in the interwar years the domestic and international became central to juristic attempts to transform the collapsing British Empire and wider international order, culminating with general theories of the rule of law within and between states that underpinned the post-1945 settlement. This history reveals a much more diverse set of roles and projects for the domestic and international than is imagined in current theorising. The contingency of these past meanings forms one pathway for unsettling and remaking them for today’s projects