bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Pandemic to Apocalypse—Nuclear War as Terminal Disease
Authors: Beres Louis René
Published: February 2022

Though the COVID-19 pandemic presently comes to mind as the most serious global disease, the onset of a nuclear war could sometime prove to be the most terminal “pathology” of all. This article by Professor Louis René Beres systematically examines pertinent nuances of such prospective war-pathology in the Middle East, with special reference to Israel’s nuclear strategy, US foreign policy, expanding international law controls and a still-aspirational human “oneness.”
Responding to the Global Food Fraud Crisis
Authors: Dutfield Graham , Suthersanen Uma
Published: February 2022

This chapter concerns food fraud, including what it is, what is being done to counter it, and what we might do to counter it better. The concept of food fraud has tended to be overshadowed by other food-related terms like food security and food safety. Nowadays, food inauthenticity is not just about the content of what we are eating. The ways that food can be inauthentic has increased, encompassing where it comes from and how it is produced. The more information a product carries, the greater the opportunities for deceit. Non-product-related production and process methods are of as much interest to many consumers as what they are made of, as is product origin. We claim that geographical indications (GI) as signs promoting club goods may be helpful as a means of countering certain forms of food fraud, and as such forms one of this chapter’s original contributions to the food fraud literature. Although GI-protected products like Champagne and Scotch whisky are of course traded around the world, the way that they exalt localness and non-industrial production may be important in the present context. One socio-economic matter requiring further reflection is that quality and authenticity indicators, even as their usage expands, still tend to be associated with niche products and those that are more than averagely expensive. However, in the long term, a turn to localism, which GIs represent and promote, will most likely benefit all consumers, rich and poor.
Globalization and Post–COVID-19 Public Health Order
Authors: Wang Guiguo
Published: February 2022

The outburst and rapid worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have become the single greatest challenges to humankind today. The adverse impact of the pandemic on the world economy and social order raises the question of whether the existing international public health order is capable of meeting the needs of humankind facing serious infectious diseases like the COVID-19 pandemic. The WHO-led international public health order was formulated at the end of the Second World War and reflected the culture, tradition, and perception of security of Western countries. Stimulated by the process of globalization, national states’ perception of sovereignty, human rights, and interdependence has undergone profound changes. By the very nature of public health, it is closely related to trade and intellectual property, which encouraged and enabled the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, and the World Intellectual Property Organization to cooperate closely. Hand in hand with the ever deepening of globalization, public health has become a genuine and important international issue drawing collaboration of many international organizations and ad hoc bodies such as the G20. “There are sure to be bad years following the movement of great armies.” The current international public health order has revealed certain weaknesses and shortcomings that require actions. The system is bound to be reviewed and reformed, which must take into account the interests, cultures, and traditions of the developing countries in the context of global collaboration.
Appendix of the Part—Topics Covered in the Previous Issues (2008–2019)
Authors: Ziccardi Capaldo Giuliana
Published: February 2022

Beginning with the 2008 issue, the Yearbook includes this part that aims to explore the emerging global policies (and the norms implementing them) in various sectors of public activity and their increasing importance in building a global law.

Our goal is to cover the majority of areas of public activity most affected by global policies and to group under various headings homogeneous contributions to give an overall picture of the development of global law....
The Three Dimensions of Rights Protection in Europe’s Multi-Layered System of Governance
Authors: Tolley Michael C.
Published: February 2022

Europe’s national, supranational, and international governance structures produce parallel and often overlapping systems of rights protection. After more than sixty years’ experience with the European Convention on Human Rights, the advent in 2009 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights added new complexity to the human rights system. Examined here are the three dimensions of rights protection in this multi-layered system and the challenges resulting from this complexity, including: (1) uncertainty and confusion over the scope and level of rights protection, (2) general lack of uniformity in the recognition and enforcement of rights from one country to the next, and (3) questions over who has the last word on the protection of rights in Europe. Assessed in the conclusion are how and to what extent the unique interactions of national courts, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Court of Justice of the European Union affect outcomes such as the protection of fundamental rights.
Introductory Note
Authors: Seatzu Francesco
Published: February 2022

In 2019, the international administrative tribunals saw a number of significant developments in their handling of complex and perennial issues. Reference is made in this chapter, in particular, to the Nasir and the L. (No. 6) cases, where, respectively, the UN Dispute Tribunal and the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization delivered two noteworthy judgments on procedural and substantive issues of primary importance such as the doctrine of acquired (or vested) rights and the doctrine of res judicata. In the FC case, a decision was handed down by the World Bank Administrative Tribunal (WABT), which addressed issues involving the standards and burden of proof indispensable for ascertaining the existence of sexual harassment at the workplace. Here the WABT took a novel and more “guarantistic” approach for the applicant’s role and interests when it stated that “[i]n cases of sexual harassment where direct evidence is difficult to obtain, circumstantial evidence such as accounts to third parties at the time of the events in question becomes especially important.”
Panentheistic Cosmopsychism
Authors: Medhananda Swami
Published: February 2022

Chapter 9 concerns what contemporary philosopher David Chalmers has called the “hard problem of consciousness”—the problem of explaining how conscious experience arises. The chapter provides an in-depth reconstruction of Vivekananda’s Sāṃkhya-Vedāntic solution to the hard problem of consciousness and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary philosophical debates. The chapter first outlines Ramakrishna’s mystically grounded views on consciousness and the views of five of Vivekananda’s prominent Western contemporaries: John Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, William James, W. K. Clifford, and Alfred Russel Wallace. It then examines Vivekananda’s own approach to the hard problem of consciousness and his critique of modern materialist theories of consciousness. Combining elements from Sāṃkhya, Advaita Vedānta, and the teachings of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda defends a metaphysics of panentheistic cosmopsychism, according to which the sole reality is Divine Consciousness, which manifests as everything in the universe.
Introduction
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver , Nanay Bence , Riggle Nick
Published: February 2022

Aesthetic life encompasses engagement with design, fashion, food, ideas, and nature, as well as folk art, the popular arts, and the fine arts. Understood broadly, almost all human beings enjoy detailed and rich aesthetic lives. Moreover, it matters to us that we do. A central task of philosophy is to explain how aesthetic life matters—how it contributes to well-being, a life well lived, or a meaningful life. Traditionally, philosophers have taken aesthetic engagement to contribute pleasure or to provide valuable experience. The traditional answer is sufficiently unsatisfactory to motivate a search for alternatives. Three alternatives are briefly summarized.
Unlocking Experience
Authors: Nanay Bence
Published: February 2022

Experiences don’t just happen to us. An important aspect of understanding aesthetic experience is to understand what we do when we are trying to have it. Trying to have an aesthetic experience is often a mental action. And we learn from an early age how to perform these actions and which action is to be performed under what circumstances. This is an important reason why aesthetic experiences vary wildly depending on our personal and cultural background. It also explains an important sense in which aesthetic phenomena matter to us personally. And it also captures an important aspect of how aesthetic endeavors can serve as a social glue.
The Contested Science of Yoga
Authors: Strube Julian
Published: February 2022

Perceptions of yoga as an occult science prepared the setting for the “Bengali intervention” in the 1880s. The Theosophical conceptualization of yoga was significantly shaped by Indian viewpoints, which claimed the superiority of Indian occult science over Western mesmerism. Crucially, the Theosophists’ conceptualization of yoga was not fixed but subject to controversies among learned Indians. It is in that context that the Bengali intervention introduced Tantric elements into Theosophical understandings of yoga, challenging the viewpoints of both Western orientalists and Indians such as Dayananda. The resulting controversies allow for instructive insights into the ambiguous power dynamics between Western Theosophists and their Indian partners, as well as into the problems of translating and comparing notions such as occultism, occult sciences, and yoga.
The ‘First Chapters’ as Original to the Codex
Authors: Hill C. E.
Published: February 2022

The majority position at present, at least among Anglophone scholars, is that the early chapter numeration in the codex, the Capitulatio Vaticana, is not the product of the original scribes but represents a system which is alien to the internal divisions of the books, and which was added by scribes later in the fourth or in the fifth century. This chapter establishes, on the contrary, that the CapVat numbers were supplied to the books as part of their original transcription, by two scribes, one a copier of the text (Scribe B; Numerator 2), the other a scribe who seems to have exercised a supervisory role (Numerator 1). New evidence for this conclusion is found in the characteristic letter forms of the scribes, the sets of books each scribe numerated, the coordination of numerators with quire beginnings, and certain peculiarities of the red ink used by Numerator 2.
Conclusion
Authors: Amaral Patrícia , Cantero Manuel Delicado
Published: February 2022

This chapter provides a summary of the main findings of the book. It offers an overview of the chronology of the changes undergone by all the nouns and constructions investigated, and highlights similarities and differences between the Portuguese and Spanish data. It then reassesses the way in which this study bears on the questions regarding recategorization, compositionality, and mechanisms of change affecting complex constructions in Ibero-Romance and across languages (e.g. analogy). Finally, it builds on the findings to highlight the relevance of historical data to theories of syntactic and semantic change and to a better understanding of the category noun, especially with respect to nouns denoting events and results.
Abstraction in Post-War British Literature 1945-1980
Authors: Ferris Natalie
Published: February 2022

This book traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical, and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors, and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalized context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives, and Art & Language, and bringing a wide range of previously unexplored archival material into the public domain, this book offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional, and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel. The post-war period, this book suggests, was witness to the intensification of the meeting between spatiality and visuality in literature.
South Africa
Authors: Aboobaker Adam , Naidoo Karmen , Ndikumana Léonce
Published: February 2022

The chapter examines the mechanisms, actors, enablers, and institutional environment that have facilitated capital flight from South Africa and the attendant accumulation of offshore private wealth. It describes how capital flight has accelerated during the modern era of economic liberalization and rapid integration into the global economy. It highlights the systematic failure of the country’s regulatory system, which has been compromised by “state capture” orchestrated by an intricate network of private enablers with deep connections within the government and the global economy. It illustrates this phenomenon with the story of the Gupta family, which built its fortune by forging connections with key figures in government and parastatal companies in the mining and energy sectors and used a complex network of opaque transactions to move money out of the country. The chapter then discusses the adverse effects of capital flight on economic development, state institutions, and governance.
Conclusions
Authors: Boyce James K. , Ndikumana Léonce
Published: February 2022

This chapter summarizes the main messages from the book and distils key policy recommendations. The scale of capital flight from Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa is large relative to the size of these economies, and it constitutes a drain on national resources, a handicap to economic growth, and a manifestation of the “resource curse.” Capital flight is the outcome of plunder by a network of actors and enablers, both domestic and foreign, facilitated by the opaque international financial system. The nexus between plunder and capital flight is not purely an internal problem of African countries; nor is it purely an international relationship in which an imperial power preys on faraway lands as in earlier centuries. Rather it is a transnational phenomenon that spans national boundaries, operated by a network of individuals and institutions who are bound together by mutual gain regardless of nationality. It is therefore clear that addressing the problem of capital flight requires a global strategy.
Juvenal’s Second Satire
Authors: Sapsford Tom
Published: February 2022

Juvenal’s second satire provides the most detailed literary description of cinaedi in antiquity. This chapter uses the poem’s central image of a double contagion—the mange spread among a herd and the blight passed between fruits—to execute a double reading of Juvenal’s text. It first explores the cinaedus’ legibility as a pervert, a significance which has been particularly generative for scholars of the history of sexuality, by exploring how the satire’s exhortation to seek out secret cinaedi resonates with the production of knowledge termed “the epistemology of the closet” by Eve Sedgwick, and by asking to what extent cinaedi constituted a clandestine subculture in early imperial Rome. It then mines the text for performative cues to argue that echoes of various forms of kinaidic speech can be found throughout the satire. Such echoes affirm that the cinaedus’ occupational and ontological significances are ultimately enmeshed and inseparable—a feature most clearly evidenced by the status category of infamia, a limitation of rights applicable to cinaedi whether they performed onstage, undertook sex work, or, as Roman men, allowed themselves to be penetrated.
Conclusion
Authors: Sapsford Tom
Published: February 2022

This chapter compares the appearance of the kinaidos in Greek sources and the cinaedus in Roman ones to argue that this figure draws upon anxieties particular to each cultural context. In classical Greece, the kinaidos displays a level of luxury and elitism which is troublesome to a culture which values commonality; in the hierarchically structured society of Rome the cinaedus is of more lowly status. Whereas participation in theatrical performance at classical Athens is a civic duty, professional performers are societal outsiders at Rome, where the cinaedus’ lascivious dancing draws much notice and debars him from full civic status. The evidence from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, while offering some glimpses into the lived lives of individuals adopting this identity, in the end highlights the obstacles to reconstructing this figure completely. Yet across all contexts certain characteristics adhere to the kinaidos/cinaedus (and his verse form the Sotadean): plasticity, flexibility, and virtuosic performativity.
Chinese
Authors: Shi Jie
Published: February 2022

The inseparable relationship between Japan and China spans 1,400 years from the kentoshi (official envoys from Japan to China) and kanbun kyoiku (漢文教育‎)—the study of ancient Chinese literary works, an essential part of the Japanese school curriculum. An increasing population of Chinese residents and visitors signifies a cultural ‘tilt’ towards Chinese in Japanese society. The linguistic landscape includes multilingual signs, public information, Chinese language manuals and restaurant menus, and Chinatowns (Yokohama, Kobe, Nagasaki). There is dialectal and generational language variation in the bilingual Huaqiao 華僑‎(overseas Chinese) community. Heritage language maintenance is a major concern. Newcomer parents mostly abandon teaching Chinese to their children. The boom in Chinese language learning worldwide has led to numerous standardized proficiency tests; half a million students are engaged in Chinese language study in 86% of all Japanese universities.
Spanish
Authors: Quintero Daniel
Published: February 2022

Spanish has a global projection in terms of demographic presence, as well as to transnational, cultural, human, economic, and social value. How have historical and socio-economic parameters coalesced in the Asian-Pacific, and more specifically within Japan? The Spanish-speaking community in Japan is heterogeneous, linguistically and by national background. It includes the most numerous, e.g. ethnically Japanese-descended migrants, Nikkeijin but also others such as ethnically non-Japanese migrants, Japanese returnees, and students that hold Spanish as a L2 in Japan. Spanish is typically the language of blue-collar factory workers. Spanish is widely taught in language schools, in some secondary schools for children of Latin American heritage and in higher education supported by professional associations. Spanish is found in the Internet and print media as well as the language of (Catholic) church worship. There is widespread code-switching and mixing among long-term residents.
Turkish, Kurdish, and Uyghur
Authors: Maher John C.
Published: February 2022

Turkic language communities of Russian and Tatar background appeared in the 1920s with the émigré diaspora led by Bashkir political activist Muhammed Kurbangaliev. Turkey and Japan established close political relations in the 1890s. The first mosque was established in 1924 in Tokyo with a school for Japan’s Muslims (1927), and publications in Turkish and Arabic. Turkish is studied widely in universities and spoken in ethnic shops and restaurants. Trans Asian migrant flows have led to a Japanese language culture in the Ordu province of Turkey. Trilingual Kurds (Kurdish, Turkish, and Japanese) and Uyghur-Chinese speakers live in small communities mostly in the Tokyo area. Kurdish and Uyghur are taught informally by activists to the children of ethnic families, and spoken in shops and restaurants. Courses in these languages are offered at some universities. Diasporic trilingualism is common in these communities.
Tracking R-facts
Authors: Miller Kristie , Norton James
Published: February 2022

In this chapter, the case is made that the three novel accounts of the R-relation proposed in chapter 5 are epistemically tractable. In order to do this, the chapter points to evidence that we have cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the reliable detection of these relations. These are the correlation detection mechanism, the interventional affordance detection mechanism, and the causal/dependence filtration mechanism. The chapter points out that this account also goes some way towards providing an epistemology of grounding, but does not show how we could detect which, of a pair of grounding-related facts, is the ground of which.
The skilling practices of the Mexican firms and their outcomes for workers and firms
Authors: Sancak Merve
Published: February 2022

This chapter presents the findings of the micro-level analysis on the skilling practices of the Mexican auto parts-automotive industry suppliers. It discusses how the governance structures in auto parts - automotive value chains and national institutions in Mexico affect auto parts suppliers’ strategies to find workers with skills necessary for them. It evaluates the outcomes of skilling strategies for firms and workers, which then helps to realise the high-road development prospects of Mexico. The chapter shows that the institutional complementarities of the Mexican skill system, in which the state’s involvement is low, leads to several types of skilling practices in Mexican auto parts-automotive industry firms. Such variation of skilling practices, moreover, limits the mobility of workers from disadvantaged backgrounds, creates inequalities between smaller and larger firms, and restricts smaller firms’ competitiveness in global auto parts-automotive value chains. Therefore, the chapter argues that the Mexican skill system is not likely to lead to high-road development in the country.
Our inner defense systems
Authors: Lekander Mats
Published: February 2022

The chapter describes the central functioning of the immune system, making clear how the substantial threat from microorganisms needs to be handled through a multitude of mechanisms. The basic principles of innate and acquired immunity are explained in everyday language from a functional perspective, as well as the for this book central process of inflammation. Striking similarities between the immune system and the central nervous system are pointed out, providing a basis for understanding interactions between the immune system on the one hand and the brain and behavior on the other. In the perspective of how the immune system and the brain can regulate each other’s activity, some “truths” in the relation between stress, sleep, and health are scrutinized.
Can you affect your perceived health?
Authors: Lekander Mats
Published: February 2022

In this chapter, factors that influence health perception are scrutinized from the perspective of malleability. Can—and if so how—subjective health be improved? From hypochondriasis, via the importance of mindset, psychological interventions, and over to brain function, the chapter discusses and reviews evidence on how one’s perceived health can be improved. The chapter presents numerous examples related to health anxiety that teach us how our subjective health is related to our behaviors, and how the mere fact that we think about symptoms can make us judge our general state of health to be worse than it really is. All these are clear examples of how malleable health is even after bodily messages have reached the brain.
How society affects our health
Authors: Lekander Mats
Published: February 2022

Because health involves strong subjective elements as a consequence of how the brain works, health must also be a general social issue of relevance beyond what we associate with standard healthcare. The view of health affects objective and perceived health in several ways. Where society in a given moment draws the boundary between healthy and sick has consequences for care and for individuals’ right to benefits. How health is explained and how ill health is described affects how the brain interprets symptoms, how they are experienced, how they are presented to care providers, and how diagnoses are formed. In addition, health is a lifestyle that is closely related to consumption, which may push citizens to search for signs of illness. But how do we take subjective symptoms seriously—since they are so strongly linked to harsh outcome measures that no one can ignore—without making matters worse by encouraging people to fixate more on their health and on how they experience their bodies? Drawing from history and anthropology in a perspective of neuroscience, the chapter discusses societal determinants of health.
A new perspective on syntactic change in French
Authors: Wolfe Sam
Published: February 2022

This chapter provides a detailed synthesis of the descriptive content and analysis offered in the preceding chapters, as well as considering the broader implications of the analysis and where French sits within a comparative Romance syntactic typology. It is argued that the majority of case studies presented in the book constitute cases where a mesoparametric property undergoes reanalysis as a micro- and then nano-parametric property, with the meso- to micro- transition frequently mediated by information structure-related features. The overall analysis is that Modern French generally and colloquial varieties specifically have seen the successive loss of movement operations to all portions of the clause and that Feature Economy and Input Generalization have been pivotal in conditioning such changes. In the final two sections of this chapter, it is argued that the extent to which this holds true is unique within a broader Romance context.
Non-Narrative Sources
Authors: Foss Clive
Published: February 2022

Sources other than the Tradition can be exploited for information about Osman and Orhan—notably coins, inscriptions, and documents. Osman struck no coins but Orhan did—in a great variety. The ephemeral Sasa who conquered lands in the Maeander and Cayster valleys—well attested in the sources—struck coins in the name of the Ilkhans, Mongol rulers of Iran, and most of Asia Minor. Inscriptions confirm the extravagant titles that Orhan assumed and indicate growing wealth in the Turkish emirates in the fourteenth century while documents illustrate the relative poverty of Osman’s domains compared with those of Orhan. One of them, of 1324, gives some insight into the Ottoman family and its power in the Sangarius region.
Osman and his Neighbors
Authors: Foss Clive
Published: February 2022

This chapter looks at Osman in the context of the Turkish emirates of western Asia Minor, formed as the marauding tribes settled down in the early fourteenth century. It attempts to define Osman’s domain and his relations with his neighbors, especially the powerful emirate of Germiyan. It examines the extent of Osman’s conquests and the regions that had vast reserves of tribesmen. It presents the other emirates, with special attention to the rich maritime Aydın and Menteşe and concludes with the Ilkhans, their activity in Asia Minor and their relations with Byzantium, focusing on Ghazan, first governor then ruler at the time when Osman appeared on the scene. An appendix attempts to determine when Osman died.
Final Thoughts
Authors: Foss Clive
Published: February 2022

Since the sources do not permit a definitive conclusion, these final thoughts seek to bring together the material that has been presented. It stresses the limited possibilities of the small and relatively poor Ottoman homeland, emphasizes the importance of the Tradition despite its faults, and points out the conrast between the growing but still limited domain of Osman and the great power of Orhan, who can be seen as the real founder of an empire. The problems of the sources have led to a variety of explanations, summarized here. Some factors are adduced to contribute to the discusion: that Osman was fighting infidels and so could call on warriors for the Faith; that Byzantium was in constan decline; that other Turcoman and Mongol Powers were occupied with their own wars; that Osman and Orhan built for permanence, incorporating conquered territories and their fighters into Ottoman lands, rather than just raiding. In sum, Osman and Orhan were in the right place at the right time.
Mother, Here Is Your Stone
Authors: Bonsu Samuel Kwaku
Published: February 2022

Susu is an ancient cooperative system of mobilizing all kinds of resources in Ghana, even though it is primarily used for financial services. The Susu system refers to the deliberate act of people to collectively organize and to come together to pool money. The author remembers his own ancestors, who have for generations belonged to Susus, and it is a tradition embedded into local life. Despite the efforts of extreme forms of capitalism to push for individualized banking through structural adjustments, the Ghanaian people counter neoliberal policies by engaging in these banking coops called Susus. The author has carried out empirical work and interviewed members of the Legon West Susu Association (LEWSA), as well as traders in Tema, Cape Coast, and Accra’s Makola market, to further understand the social dimension of the Susu banks. The findings reveal that the Susu system is subtly working to transform the conventional banking sector by making space for traditional cooperative systems. The Susu in Ghana is one that is built on reciprocity, trust, and community bonding in a post-capitalist world that is operating beyond the contemporary neoliberal capitalist order.
Money Pools (Hụi/Họ) in the Mekong Delta
Authors: Dao Nga
Published: February 2022

Across Vietnam, and for poor people in particular, there is demand for loans that are below market rates and less risky than those given by private lenders. The rural financial sector in Vietnam presently has three sub-sectors: formal, semi-formal, and informal. All of these sub-sectors have provided poor households with microfinance services in different forms and approaches. While examining rural finance in Vietnam in general, this chapter pays particular attention to one aspect of it—the informal sub-sector. Through hundreds of years, informal saving has existed in every corner of Vietnam, from rural to urban, and is getting more diversified in its structure. However, until 2006, rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) were not recognized as legal activities. While ROSCAs or money pools have brought positive results to a number of people, they have also been seen as an evidence of trust degradation and a rotten morality in many other cases. Based on interviews with local people, focus-group discussions, and government and non-governmental organization (NGO) documents, the authors examined the ROSCAs system in Vietnam. Findings show how popular ROSCAs have been in rural Vietnam, especially in the Mekong Delta, and that even though incidents happen, ROSCAs remain a good way for women in that region to create an income and to help their families out of poverty. This practice will keep proliferating through time, and help strengthen tight connections among local communities.
Keralite Women’s Collective Finance in South India
Authors: Christabell P. J.
Published: February 2022

Kerala has had a long legacy of self-help groups and cooperatives, from the 1800s in the British Raj to modern-day India. In the 1990s, various self-help-group movements emerged and spread throughout the landscape in an unimagined momentum to reach financially excluded poor women. Affirmative actions by governments played a significant role in all these developments, as conscious efforts were taken to intervene in financial markets. One good example is Kudumbashree, where an anti-poverty and women-empowerment program was implemented by the State Poverty Eradication Mission of the Government of Kerala. Conscientious, progressive government policies engaged women’s groups to rethink formal finance. Tracing the timeline, however, shows that this is not the first such event in the regional economy. Chit funds are the indigenous rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), and were widely prevalent in all the cultural milieu of society, cutting across caste, religion, economic class, and gender, thus penetrating deeply into the minds and hearts of the people. However, with the rise of ROSCAs during an era of modernization came serious challenges, with new issues of defaults and corruption. People’s power, coupled with local democratic movements, forced the state governments to take up the self-help-group cause and to regulate ROSCAs in the formal economy. In this paper, the whole evolution from informal collectives called Chit to formal Chit banks is tracked. This formalization of ROSCAs protects the users and sends a powerful message that ROSCAs belong side-by-side with diverse financial systems.
China as a ‘Partial’ Environmental Great Power
Authors: Yeophantong Pichamon , Goh Evelyn
Published: February 2022

How do we recognize an ‘environmental great power’ when we see one? How do great powers wield ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ power in the contested realm of global environmental governance against the background of ever deeper pluralism in international society? This chapter analyses how and to what extent China defines and acts on its environmental responsibilities as a great power and examines its record in two prominent issue-areas: global climate change and the ‘greening’ of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with a focus on its renewable energy projects. While China may appear to be an obvious environmental great power due to its capability to cause environmental harm or provide environmental goods, we argue instead that China is a partial environmental great power. That is, while China’s ‘negative’ or structural power in the global, regional, and national environmental realms is stark and clear, its ‘positive’ power or potential to act in favour of environmental responsibility is less obvious and as yet indeterminate. This is due to China’s ‘identity paradox’—it is both a great power and a developing country; and Chinese actors are at once major perpetrators as well as significant victims of environmental degradation. Hence, China’s record of promoting environmental protection and governance is chequered because its decision makers must constantly balance between multiple constituencies and interests that impinge on how China adopts and acts on its environmental responsibilities both at home and abroad.
Great Power Ambitions and National Interest in Russia’s Climate Change Policy
Authors: Averchenkova Alina
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores whether Russia can be considered as a great power in international environmental politics, focusing on action to address climate change. It analyses the evolution in Russia’s position and behaviour in the international climate change negotiations and its stance towards leadership in this area over time and discusses the factors that have contributed to these changes. It concludes with discussion of the role of great power framing in Russia’s stance in the domestic and international debate on climate change. The chapter finds that, possessing key structural characteristics of positive and negative environmental power, Russia has actively drawn on great power framing in the formulation of its climate change strategy. While there is a clear ambition to act as a great power, overall Russia’s efforts on climate change are not framed in the context of joint global action and common responsibility, but rather emphasize its national interests. Political perceptions of its own interests in turn have changed over time, influenced by a combination of a domestic economy highly dependent on fossil fuel extraction and export, prominence of climate sceptics and anti-climate economic lobbyists, as well as overall internal and international political dynamics.
Cyclical History and Roman Decline
Authors: Hunter Evans Jasmine
Published: February 2022

Chapter 4 examines how Jones’s emerging philosophy of history was shaped by the cyclical historical movement which rose to prominence in the early twentieth century. Contextualising his rejection of linear progress and his belief in the fundamental similarity of cycles occurring across world history—particularly between Roman and Western decline—demonstrates the impact of this movement on Jones’s thought and art. Out of this engagement, and through his dependence on the works of Oswald Spengler and Christopher Dawson, Jones would come to reimagine time as a dynamic relationship between past and present. This chapter charts Jones’s reliance on cyclical methodologies and compares his approach to those of his literary contemporaries. It examines the complex vision of history that emerges in his poetry, in which cyclical concepts (such as, typological repetition and patterns of civilisational rise and decline) are subsumed within an ongoing teleological movement towards the end of time.
Reimagining Cultural Decline
Authors: Hunter Evans Jasmine
Published: February 2022

Chapter 10 explores Jones’s sense of Welsh identity. While he had felt Welsh since childhood, Jones’s association with Wales became far more politicised across the later decades of his life. As an Anglo–Welsh writer—who lamented his inability to master the language—Jones was in some ways an outsider. Nevertheless, he fought alongside Welsh friends and contemporaries for the protection of the Welsh language and landscape. This chapter contextualises both Jones’s fear for the decline of Welsh culture and his responding decision to argue for a unique Roman inheritance for Wales, within the wider dialogues shaping twentieth-century Welsh nationalism. It demonstrates not only the similarities between Jones’s ideas and those of key members of Plaid Cymru—such as his close friend Saunders Lewis and Gwynfor Evans—but also highlights the ways in which these conceptions of Wales’s Roman origin were used to challenge prevailing assumptions around the value of English and Welsh inheritance.
Rewriting Welsh History
Authors: Hunter Evans Jasmine
Published: February 2022

Chapter 11 explores Jones’s participation in a movement involving historians, such as Arthur Wade Wade-Evans, and prominent members of Plaid Cymru, which strove for a radical revision of Welsh history. Wales, in their estimation, was a nation that emerged from the Roman Empire, preserved its Roman religion and traditions, and upheld this unique inheritance into modernity. This chapter traces Jones’s deep engagement with Welsh nationalist ideas around Wales’s Roman origins. It highlights the reasons why these arguments challenged accepted visions of the Welsh as a historically defeated people and examines how Jones interweaved these provocative claims into his essays, poetry, paintings and letters. It pursues this analysis across key areas of his thought, including his characterisation of Welsh historical figures—such as Cunedda and Llywelyn the Last—his assertion of a Catholic tradition in Wales, and his belief that Welsh myth and literature preserved the remnants of Rome in Welsh culture.
Cultural Dynamics
Authors: Hunter Evans Jasmine
Published: February 2022

Chapter 12 explores Jones’s visualisation of cultural heritage as a Bridge between past and present and his belief that Welsh culture held an integral position in British and Western tradition. This chapter traces the ways in which Jones embedded this concept of cultural inheritance into his artistic works—including The Lord of Venedotia (1948) and CARA WALLIA DERELICTA (1959)—and established it as a structural principle in his poetry, for example in The Sleeping Lord (1974). It interrogates Jones’s attempt to foreground the unique nature of the relationship between Rome and Wales so as to justify the continuance of Welsh culture in modernity before turning to a discussion of the crucial role he allotted to poets in a period of decline. In this construction, Jones felt it was his duty to preserve and rejuvenate Welsh heritage for the benefit of all the inhabitants of Britain and all who share in the Western cultural tradition.
Phrasal verbs
Authors: Dixon R. M. W.
Published: February 2022

This chapter provides a background on the hundreds of complex verbs in the English language, each consisting of a simple verb and one or two prepositions or adverbs called phrasal verbs. It highlights the meaning of a phrasal verb that cannot be directly inferred from the basic meanings of its component words, so that each phrasal verb is, in effect, a separate lexeme and must be accorded its own entry in the dictionary. The meaning of almost every phrasal verb relate to the meanings of the words making it up, albeit in an indirect way. The chapter demonstrates how the meanings of phrasal verbs hang onto, live on, hit on, and turn against can be explained in terms of extensions from the basic meanings of the verb and preposition involved. The meaning of a phrasal verb clearly relates to the basic meaning of the component simple verb.
Do it your way
Authors: Dixon R. M. W.
Published: February 2022

This chapter considers language as a human attribute and in some ways like a human organism that lives, fulfils its obligations, responds to new circumstances, and is ready to deal with every sort of demand made upon it. It reviews the nature and organisation of a language that is determined by the language itself and by its community of users. Each person speaks their language in an entirely natural manner, seldomly thinking of what they’re doing when they are speaking. The chapter mentions people that ruminate on how a language is structured and suggest changing bits of the grammar to make it ‘neater’, ‘more logical’, and ‘more graceful’. Others might survey English to consider which parts of the grammar appeared to be rather unkempt and could be tidied up to improve matters.
John Wallis
Authors: Beeley Philip , Wardhaugh Benjamin
Published: February 2022

Reading, writing, and doing mathematics in turbulent times, John Wallis (1616–1703) became the Savilian Professor of Geometry in unpromising circumstances, but held that position for longer than any other. Taking seriously the founder’s injunctions to study, edit, and publish the ancient mathematical texts, as well as to teach mathematics, he also enjoyed a long career as a robust and combative mathematical author. In this chapter we consider Wallis’s achievements as a reader, writer, and shaper of mathematics in the early modern world. In the long history of the Savilian professorships at Oxford, John Wallis’s tenure of the Geometry chair is unique.
From Michael Atiyah to the 21st century
Authors: Kirwan Frances
Published: February 2022

This chapter looks at the four holders of the Savilian chair of geometry in the second half of the 20th century – Michael Atiyah, Ioan James, Richard Taylor, and Nigel Hitchin – concentrating mainly on the first of these. Michael Atiyah was Savilian professor for only six years, from 1963 to 1969, but he spent most of the following two decades in Oxford as a Royal Society professor, and his impact on the field of mathematics, in Oxford, in the UK, and internationally, was immense.
What Men Could Learn from Women
Authors: Stenger Jan R.
Published: February 2022

This chapter addresses the relationship between education and gender in late antique literature. It deals with the strong presence of women intellectuals in the discourse on learning and formation. Ancient intellectual culture and schooling were dominated by men, and the mechanisms of education contributed to social reproduction, that is, the stabilization of primarily male values and norms. However, a considerable number of late antique texts feature exceptional women who made inroads into this territory and attained recognition for their learning and wisdom. These portrayals shine light on types of intellectual and ethical formation situated outside the institutionalized schools. This was intended to challenge the dominant male model of formal education that placed a premium on the external effects and social dividends of schooling. By looking at education from the perspective of women, the portraits adumbrated an alternative to the principles of established schooling: an inward-looking model of education that shifted the balance toward self-transformation and self-perfection.
The boundaries of inflexion and periphrasis
Authors: Smith John Charles
Published: February 2022

This chapter discusses what counts as inflexion and what counts as periphrasis. The discussion is intended as a contribution to general linguistic theory, and data are drawn from a variety of languages, but the main focus is on Romance. Structurally, inflexion and periphrasis are distinguished by a simple typological parameter: inflexion is synthetic, whereas periphrasis is analytic. However, whilst this is a necessary condition, it is by no means a sufficient one. Although several criteria have been adduced to define inflexion and periphrasis, different criteria may produce different results when applied to a given form or construction, and even individual criteria may sometimes prove ambivalent, yielding boundaries that are fuzzy. Monolithic definitions of both inflexion and periphrasis are elusive, and an adequate approach to the issue must recognize the scalar nature of these phenomena. Case studies of gender, number, vocatives, and constructions involving auxiliary verbs reveal that the data which serve to define several key concepts in both inflexional morphology and periphrasis are subject to structural and sociolinguistic variation, with the result that notions such as clitic, affix, morphome, defectiveness, overabundance, and paradigmatic intersectivity, and hence inflexion and periphrasis themselves, must be regarded as linguistic variables.
Conditioned epenthesis in Romance
Authors: Aronoff Mark , Repetti Lori
Published: February 2022

The factors influencing the insertion of non-etymological material (epenthesis) may extend beyond phonetics and phonology to include morphological and morphosyntactic considerations. We analyse cases from a wide variety of Romance languages where more than one epenthetic segment may satisfy a phonological constraint. We show that the choice of segment may be influenced by morphology or morphosyntax. We also investigate the insertion of a meaningless syllable where there may be little or no phonological motivation for insertion, but morphology plays a role in its distribution. In all of the cases examined, the inserted material (segment or syllable) has no semantic value and so is not a morph. Many of these phenomena have been accounted for in terms of lexically listed allomorphs; however, such an approach misses generalizations about the form and presence of the epenthetic material. We conclude that the notion of epenthesis should be broadened to include morphological and morphosyntactic conditions.