bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How to build a habitable planet: an interview with Charles H. Langmuir
Authors: Xu Yi-Gang
Published: February 2024

Earth is the only known habitable planet in the solar system. Understanding how Earth developed its unique habitability has been the frontier of Earth sciences and has become one of the main themes of current deep-space explorations. What are the decisive factors that led to a habitable planet? What is the role of solid Earth processes in the origin of life and in modulating the surface environment? Are Earth's habitability studies relevant to current challenges that human beings face? These questions have attracted the interest of both scientists and the public alike. NSR spoke to Prof. Charles H. Langmuir from Harvard University in the USA, who is a solid Earth geochemist who carries out research on diverse aspects of the plate tectonic geochemical cycle, including ocean ridges, convergent margins and intraplate volcanism. Prof. Langmuir is the author of the book How to Build a Habitable Planet (www.habitableplanet.org), one of the best Earth science books published in 2012.
National Heritage in the Netherlands
Authors: Campbell Elizabeth
Published: February 2024

Due to an extended occupation period, which only fully ended with the German surrender, the Dutch claimed in postwar negotiations they had suffered more than any other occupied country. Compared to the other two countries, the Netherlands most aggressively pursued restitution to bolster the national treasury, without regard for the particular plight of Shoah victims. Dutch authorities exacted substantial fees from claimants and required payment for works that had been sold to the enemy, even in forced sales. These measures deterred claims and some descendants, such as members of the Goudstikker and Gutmann families, lacked the means to recover hundreds of valuable artworks. This chapter examines the selection and distribution of more than four thousand items in the Dutch custodianship.
Restoring Belgian Artistic Heritage
Authors: Campbell Elizabeth
Published: February 2024

Compared to France and the Netherlands, Belgium had fewer large, Jewish-owned art collections at the beginning of the war. Nazi art plunder thus was less extensive here, and the MFAA repatriated fewer museum-quality pieces. Yet Belgian archives reveal similar procedures in the creation of an art custodianship, as the state asserted a right to retain items purchased by the enemy, even when sold by Jewish owners under duress. This chapter examines the selection process and debates among curators over the distribution of more than six hundred works, and public sales of several hundred lots of less valuable pieces. Compared to the other two countries, the Furniture Operation proportionately had a more significant impact in Belgium, targeting lower-income Jewish communities, many of whom were immigrants and also more vulnerable for deportation.
Resources and Social Justice in Meso- and Macro-Level Environmental Conflict
Authors: Opotow Susan
Published: February 2024

This chapter considers meso- and macro-level resource issues in environmental conflict as well as their just resolution. It examines how resources and social justice connect when the Foas’ resource exchange framework is applied to environmental issues. The chapter notes that pairing the Foas’ adjacent resource classes yields three kinds of resource contexts—physical (e.g., goods and services), societal (e.g., information and money), and individual/psychological (e.g., status and caring)—and these three environmental contexts work well as a typology of environmental resources. Turning to the relationship between social justice and environmental resources, the chapter observes that exclusionary policies that curtail access to resources for individuals, groups, or regions do so by legitimizing unjust, even cruel treatment of those positioned as outside the scope of justice and therefore as nonmembers of one’s moral community.
Before Venice
Authors: Romano Dennis
Published: February 2024

This chapter lays out the geographical, geological, and historical conditions in the northern Adriatic zone in the long period before Venice came into existence. It begins with a consideration of the many foundation legends or origin stories that the Venetians told. The chapter explores the history of the Venetian lagoon, especially the constant interaction of the mainland rivers and the Adriatic Sea that created Venice’s unique amphibious environment. It examines the history of the area during the Greek and Roman periods, including the founding of the town of Aquileia, where Saint Mark purportedly evangelized. It then examines the first Germanic invasions and the end of the Roman Empire in the west and the division of Venetia into mainland Venetia and maritime Venetia. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Cassidorus’s famous letters to the leaders of Istria and Venetia, including his letter to the tribunes of the maritime provinces, the first literary description of life in the lagoons.
Between Empires and Beyond-the-Sea
Authors: Romano Dennis
Published: February 2024

This chapter opens with the story of a formerly enslaved man and the upward mobility of his family. It charts the dramatic growth of Venetian commerce and the development of new business techniques, in what is often referred to as the Commercial Revolution, as well as the variety of goods which the Venetians traded. This spectacular growth was in large measure due to trade concessions that the Venetians got from the Holy Roman and Byzantine empires. At the same time, Venice faced new challenges from the Normans in the southern Adriatic. A minor participant in the First Crusade, Venice emerged nevertheless by the end of the twelfth century as the primary naval power in the eastern Mediterranean. The Peace of 1177 that Venice mediated between the pope and Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa became one of the bases of Venice’s claims to independence and sovereignty.
The Industrial and Ceremonial City
Authors: Romano Dennis
Published: February 2024

During the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, industry replaced commerce as the center of the Venetian economy. The city became a major center of wool and silk cloth production and in luxury industries like glassmaking. Venice was in the forefront of printing, the new information technology, and became a major center of communication. To support its industries, Venice asserted stronger control over two essential mainland resources: water and wood. Management of the lagoon took on new urgency as water came to be seen as a threat to commerce and trade. Rituals and ceremonies assumed new significance in Venetian life as writers, architects, painters, composers, and others celebrated Venice. While Venice still looked to Byzantium for cultural models, Gasparo Contarini helped create the image of Venice as the model republic.
Late Renaissance Venetian Society
Authors: Romano Dennis
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores Venetian society in the sixteenth century, including family and sexual relations, social networks, minority groups, and immigrants. Significant attention is paid to women’s lives and the options available to them including marriage, the nunnery, or prostitution. Late Renaissance Venice was home to two large minority groups: Greek immigrants and Jews. Early in the sixteenth century Jews were finally allowed to settle permanently in the city, although they were confined to the Ghetto. The nobles shifted their family strategies as they placed increasing emphasis on preserving rather than growing their wealth. They restricted marriages and purchased mainland agricultural estates.
Roman Venice and the End of the Renaissance
Authors: Romano Dennis
Published: February 2024

Following the League of Cambrai disaster, Venice remade itself in the image of ancient Rome. This is most apparent in building as architects such as Sansovino and Palladio gave Venice a classical veneer. At the same time, Venice actively resisted the policies of papal Rome, limiting the influence of the Inquisition and trying to protect the printing industry from censorship. A new division emerged within the nobility between those nobles with close ties to the papacy and those who favored indigenous religious traditions; and between the Council of Ten and Senate and the Greater Council. The government increased its surveillance and control of the population. The conflict with the papacy came to a head in the Interdict Crisis, a political communication battle in which Venice presented itself as the protector of republican liberty against papal absolutism. This marks the end of the Venetian Renaissance.
The Transformative Seventeenth Century
Authors: Romano Dennis
Published: February 2024

During the seventeenth century, often viewed as a period of decline, Venice underwent a radical transformation as it emerged as a cultural leader in a variety of spheres. Although it continued to serve as an example of the model republic, a darker vision of Venice as a place of control, terror, and secrecy also took hold. In a long and brutal war with the Ottomans, Venice lost Crete, its most prized overseas possession. The cost of the war forced the nobles to start selling membership to the Greater Council. Culturally the city was vibrant as academies flourished and a new form of entertainment, commercial opera, emerged. Venice gained a reputation as a libertine city characterized by Carnival, casinos, courtesans, masking, and free thought. Industry shifted to greater reliance on female and child labor, as tourism (the Grand Tour) became an increasingly important component of the economy.
Ecclesiology
Authors: Gribben Crawford
Published: February 2024

In a religious census, in the late 1830s, brethren were first identified as “Catholics.” The term was a good one, as it reflected their hesitation about adopting any non-Scriptural descriptor. Brethren eluded denominational categories by refusing to take sides in long-standing Protestant debates. In the earliest phase of the movement, adherents were only required to confess faith in the Trinity. The division of the brethren movement in the later 1840s was, in part, a contest about how an effort to achieve catholicity should best implement discipline. The formation of the exclusive network provided Darby with a second chance to realize his catholic hopes. Darby’s catholic principles pushed the exclusives into more radical versions of separatism and shaped the environment in which Darby developed his wider dispensational agenda.
Dread
Authors: Valmiki Omprakash
Published: February 2024

Part I of Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature contains short stories by Dalit authors addressing the theme of hidden identity. The second of these is Omprakash Valmiki’s ‘Dread’ (Bhay), published in 2000 and translated from Hindi by Joel Lee. The story is set first in a Valmiki basti of Dehradun and later in a residential colony for middle-class government employees elsewhere in the city. Traversing these spaces that correspond to his family’s past and present, the central character Dinesh attempts to meet his mother’s demands to maintain a Dalit ritual tradition, demands that threaten to upend his carefully constructed life.
New Custom
Authors: Navaria Ajay
Published: February 2024

Part I of Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature contains short stories by Dalit authors addressing the theme of hidden identity. The fifth of these is Ajay Navaria’s ‘New Custom’ (Naya Qayda), published in 2000 and translated from Hindi by Laura Brueck. ‘New Custom’ is the story of a highly educated, middle-class urbanite who stops for a cup of tea at a bus stand on his way to a wedding in rural north India. When asked in interviews, Navaria has explained that what unfolds in the story relates closely to his own experience when visiting the village in Rajasthan from which his family hails.
Sandstorm
Authors: Valmiki Omprakash
Published: February 2024

Part I of Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature contains short stories by Dalit authors addressing the theme of hidden identity. The ninth of these is Omprakash Valmiki’s ‘Sandstorm’ (Andhar), translated from Hindi by Joel Lee. ‘Sandstorm’ appeared in Valmiki’s first short story collection, Salaam, published in 2000. It portrays a prosperous middle-class couple who have severed ties with family and community and raised children who do not know their caste. News that a beloved uncle has died compels the family to contend with its secret.
Waiting for a Visa
Authors: Ambedkar Bhimrao Ramji
Published: February 2024

Part II of Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature contains autobiographical writings by Dalit authors addressing the theme of hidden identity. The first of these is a selection from Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s essay ‘Waiting for a Visa’, which he introduces as an attempt to help foreigners understand untouchability, ‘to realise how oppressive it is in its actuality’. In the selection, Ambedkar relates his experience when, having returned to India from his studies abroad in the 1910s, he journeys to the princely State of Baroda to take up government service in fulfilment of a condition of his scholarship. The problem of lodging—of an ‘untouchable’, however, thoroughly credentialed, obtaining a room to rent—quickly becomes apparent. A temporary solution is found in what Ambedkar calls ‘impersonation’.
Joothan
Authors: Valmiki Omprakash
Published: February 2024

Part II of Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature contains autobiographical writings by Dalit authors addressing the theme of hidden identity. This chapter is a selection from Omprakash Valmiki’s celebrated Hindi-language autobiography Joothan, translated here by Joel Lee. In the selection, Valmiki describes his experience as a twenty-something apprentice draftsman at the Ordnance Factory Training Institutes of Jabalpur and then Ambarnath on the outskirts of (then) Bombay—places very far removed from his childhood experiences in an Uttar Pradesh village. In Ambarnath, Valmiki is befriended by the Kulkarnis, a Maharashtrian brahmin family. As Valmiki and Savita—the daughter of the family—grow close, it emerges that the Kulkarnis have assumed Valmiki is brahmin, creating a delicate situation.
Interrogating My Chandal Life
Authors: Byapari Manoranjan
Published: February 2024

Part II of Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature contains autobiographical writings by Dalit authors addressing the theme of hidden identity. This chapter is a selection from Manoranjan Byapari’s Bengali-language autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life (Itibritte Chandal Jivan), published in 2014 and translated by Sipra Mukherjee. In the selection, Byapari describes his stint as a cook and caterer. The caterer who hires him first delivers a blunt lesson on how to deal with clients’ caste prejudices. Several months into his apprenticeship, Byapari and a partner find themselves stepping in for the head chef to cook for a wedding in a remote jungle area, where the dominant caste clients regard them with suspicion.
The Flood
Authors: Paik Shailaja
Published: February 2024

Part II of Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature contains autobiographical writings by Dalit authors addressing the theme of hidden identity. This chapter is an essay entitled ‘The Flood’ by the historian Shailaja Paik, composed specially for this book. In the essay, Paik first reflects on the politics of caste concealment and revelation in her school days in Pune and, later, in the milieu of North American academic life. She then relates a first-hand experience of caste ensnarement in a situation where one might least expect it: in the midst of the catastrophic flooding of Mumbai in 2017.
Coming Out as Dalit
Authors: Dutt Yashica
Published: February 2024

Part II of Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature contains autobiographical writings by Dalit authors addressing the theme of hidden identity. This chapter is a selection from the journalist Yashica Dutt’s 2019 book Coming Out as Dalit, a memoir that weaves together an analysis of caste in contemporary India with a personal account of her parents’ efforts—in part by concealing caste—to secure for her a future free of caste contempt. The excerpts here come from two parts of Dutt’s memoir: the first comes from the introduction, in which Dutt describes her reaction to the suicide of Dalit PhD scholar Rohith Vemula in 2016 and her subsequent decision to ‘come out’. In the second selection, Dutt recalls navigating—with a brahmin surname—hierarchies of caste, class, colour, and English fluency in the elite boarding school environments of her childhood.
Foundations of Loyalty in Child and Adolescent Development
Authors: Flanagan Constance , Pykett Alisa
Published: February 2024

This chapter focuses on the developmental foundations of loyalty in childhood and adolescence, arguing that developing loyalty is integral to the process of civic identity formation. Three particular kinds of foundation are explored. First, drawing from studies of adolescents, the authors argue that relational family values encourage children to respond to the needs of other people, and hence serve as a foundation for the development of loyalty. Second, trusting relationships provide another kind of foundation, as children develop an increasing awareness of the reciprocal relationship between trust in others and being a trustworthy person. Finally, the authors argue that the capacity to be loyal depends on the formation of an autonomous moral self whose trust in others and in self is grounded in relationships of care in infancy, is practiced through imaginary and role play, is clarified through friendships, and is honed via collective action with others in community groups.
Betrayal
Authors: Kleinig John
Published: February 2024

The chapter sets out to explore the strong emotional responses we tend to feel toward betrayal, and to explain a commonly felt asymmetry: people commonly judge that the badness of the vice of betrayal is worse than the goodness of the virtue of loyalty. It works with five cases—participants in organized crime who snitch on fellow criminals, police who choose to break “the blue wall of silence,” marital infidelity, treason, and whistleblowing—in order to draw out features commonly found in betrayal, namely, its subversion of relational commitments, its harmfulness, and its self-serving motivation. Avishai Margalit’s theory of betrayal as ingratitude is critiqued. Finally, the chapter addresses the question of how one might respond to betrayal from a moral point of view. Several possible answers to this question, including forgiveness, are considered.
Is Loyalty Redundant?
Authors: Jollimore Troy
Published: February 2024

One reason for doubting that loyalty is a virtue is grounded in what we can call the Redundancy Argument: if the person you are loyal to is good, then you have independent reason to support them, but if they are not good, then supporting them would presumably be unjustifiable. In the former case loyalty seems redundant, while in the latter case it seems to be wrong. This chapter responds to the Redundancy Argument, focusing on cases in which one’s friend stands accused of a serious moral offense. In such cases the Redundancy Argument tends to ignore various responses that virtuous loyalty would demand and support. Even if we accept that loyalty should not require us to become complicit in a friend’s serious wrongdoing, there are ordinarily a large number of things a loyal friend may do, and ought to do, without compromising their moral integrity.
Exemplars of Loyalty
Authors: Foust Mathew A.
Published: February 2024

This chapter draws connections between Josiah Royce’s philosophy of loyalty and recent work on moral exemplarism by Linda Zagzebski. Like Royce, Zagzebski unites strands from various ethical theories and foregrounds the significance of moral exemplars—individuals who exemplify various virtues and moral traits—and, in doing so, helps further our knowledge and understanding of the nature of morality. Although Zagzebski places less explicit emphasis than does Royce on the significance of loyalty among the virtues, loyalty in various forms is nevertheless invoked at various points in her discussion. Royce, for his part, is clear about the centrality and significance of loyalty, and famously proposes the promotion of “loyalty to loyalty” as a criterion of worthiness with respect to the causes to which people might devote themselves.
Innovation in Systems of Postpartum Care
Authors: Harper Kimberly D. , Charles Nkechi U. , Gibson Amelia N. , Tully Kristin P.
Published: February 2024

This chapter focuses on innovation in systems of postpartum care. Soon after delivery, many women struggle with multidimensional postpartum challenges, such as insurance interruptions and incomplete handoffs between obstetrician-gynecologists and other healthcare providers as well as limited monitoring and accountability for the quality of healthcare services. The chapter focuses on strategies and interventions for reclaiming and reshaping postpartum care in the United States. Selected strategies include integrating multidisciplinary teams into the perinatal care continuum, standardization of clinical processes, improvement of patient–healthcare team communication, and recognition and uplift of community leadership.
Diminishing Returns . . . Everywhere
Authors: Phelps Charles E , Lakdawalla Darius N.
Published: February 2024

Standard cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) states that people have constant returns to “health,” but the generalized risk-adjusted cost-effectiveness (GRACE) model introduces diminishing returns to health. This chapter first explores how the fundamental trade-off between consumption of market goods and services (“consumption”) and “health” arises, because all money spent on health care to improve health reduces consumption. It shows how the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and health is indeed the willingness to pay for health care and, fundamentally, how diminishing returns affects this concept. The chapter then shows why standard CEA overvalues treatments of low-severity illnesses and undervalues treatments for high-severity illnesses. It introduces the severity of illness ratio, R, which climbs exponentially with illness severity. The R measure also depends on people’s attitudes toward risk, and the chapter defines the necessary measures of risk attitudes in health. Finally, using Taylor series expansion methods, the chapter provides numerical estimates of the way R increases as illness severity increases.
Multiperiod Models
Authors: Phelps Charles E , Lakdawalla Darius N.
Published: February 2024

With regard to health, value can be assessed in a simple two-period model. In period 0 (before any health outcomes are known), consumers, in effect, decide what health technologies they are willing to pay for in period 1, when any potential illness risks become manifest. The mechanism to do this, of course, is to buy health insurance. This chapter expands this simple two-period model to include N periods (typically thought of as “years”). In the most general approach, many of the parameters of the two-period model now are time-dependent, requiring that they be measured on a period-by-period basis. Methods to employ incremental cost-effectiveness ratios in this environment are developed. Although the math looks daunting, this chapter shows that it is really simple bookkeeping to keep track of the period-by-period activity. This N-period model is then simplified to the case in which the parameters are “stationary” and hence only need to be estimated once.
Application of Motivational Interviewing in the Rehabilitation Environment
Authors: Wright Katherine S. , Bombardier Charles H.
Published: February 2024

This chapter presents an overview of motivational interviewing (MI) as applied in rehabilitation environments and discusses potential benefits, perceived myths, and barriers to using MI in rehabilitation settings. Given that rehabilitation is largely about health behavior change, using evidence-based theoretical models for health behavior change provides the “change roadmap,” and then MI strategies are a natural fit for providers to use as part of guiding their patients forward. Also discussed are strategic times to use MI in patient visits, specific co-occurring conditions regularly found in rehabilitation with which MI is effective, and guidance on MI applications outside of direct patient encounters, such as interdisciplinary consultation, navigating changes within provider teams, and supervisory relationships. MI is consistent with rehabilitation values, can help promote the behavior change goals of rehabilitation, and can be learned by any rehabilitation provider to help facilitate behavior change.
Liberal Critics of Roe
Authors: Strauss David A.
Published: February 2024

This article establishes three explanations for the views of liberal critics of Roe. First, for decades after the New Deal confrontation between President Roosevelt and the Court, many liberals believed that the courts should hesitate to resolve controversial issues of national policy unless the ordinary political processes were dysfunctional (which, regarding abortion, they were not). Second, some liberals believed that the Court’s basic error in the Lochner era was that the Court recognized unenumerated constitutional rights. Some liberals said that Roe was wrong for the same reason. Third, and most important, a commitment to women’s equality became more central to liberal constitutionalism over the last decades of the twentieth century. The more that abortion came to be seen as an issue about women’s equality, the more the existing doctrinal categories—which had been developed in the context of race discrimination but which made Roe harder to defend—came under pressure.
Dobbs’s Democratic Deficits
Authors: Murray Melissa , Shaw Katherine
Published: February 2024

Organization makes repeated reference to democratic deliberation as the proper mechanism for resolving the abortion debate. There are, however, reasons to doubt the Dobbs Court’s genuine commitment to democracy. This chapter traces the emergence of the rhetoric of democracy in the Court’s abortion cases, explaining that the anti-abortion movement turned toward democracy-grounded arguments only after a failed attempt to pass a constitutional amendment that would have outlawed abortion nationwide. After discussing this history, the chapter turns to Dobbs itself, identifying the deep democratic myopia displayed in the opinion’s historical method and in its assessment of the current electoral landscape. A proper appreciation of the Court’s extremely limited view of American history, institutions, and democratic participation reveals that Dobbs cannot genuinely be understood to rest on or further principles of democracy.
Where History Fails
Authors: Cott Nancy F.
Published: February 2024

Supreme Court opinions can make history in more than one way. First, obviously, the Court’s power to declare what the law is and how it should be applied can make dramatic changes in national policies and in everyday life. Second, and less noticed, the Court’s opinions can include assertions about history. Judge-made law is a historical practice. Relying on previous cases and precedents, it looks to the past, as history does. Historical claims made in Supreme Court cases are taken as accurate, enshrined and quoted in subsequent cases—even if the Court’s claims rest on faulty grounds—until and unless countermanded by a subsequent holding. This essay traces the uses of history in the series of twentieth-century Court opinions leading to and including Roe v. Wade, focusing on the development of the concept of privacy as a dimension of Fourteenth Amendment liberty, and contrasts the alternative history asserted in Dobbs.
The Death of Expertise
Authors: Nichols Tom
Published: February 2024

In The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols explores the rejection of experts and the ongoing assaults against knowledge and critical thinking. He notes several influences, including the ubiquity of the Internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a continual entertainment machine, among others. In this updated and expanded edition, Nichols returns to these themes and he is more alarmed than ever, especially in the aftermath of a pandemic and the outbreak of war in Europe. The rejection of expertise—in which people are hobbled by narcissism and reliant on an overestimation of their own knowledge—is now the foundation for populist political movements. The attacks on science and knowledge have become attacks on democracy itself by an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who are lost in a maze of misinformation, conspiracy theories—and even paranoia.
Judicial Elections and Judicial Behaviour
Authors: Nelson Michael J. , Burnham Michael
Published: February 2024

This chapter reviews the evidence about how electing judges, rather than appointing them, affects judicial behaviour. It argues that judicial elections direct judges to respond to public preferences just as elite re-appointment mechanisms lead judges to pay increased attention to the desires of legislators and executives. Thus, there is no ‘perfect’ way to select or retain judges. Instead, reformers must decide to whom they want courts to respond and design the judiciary accordingly. Judicial elections present important (and underused) inferential opportunities for those seeking to understand judicial behaviour. Studies of elite behaviour in other institutions, the role of interest groups in elections, partisanship and the policy-making process, and the dynamics of candidate emergence in legislative elections all have obvious implications for studies of judicial elections. But this potential can only be realized if researchers are willing to abandon disciplinary silos and use judicial elections to test general theories that these institutional arrangements have the potential to be.
Models of Constitutional Review
Authors: Ginsburg Tom , Versteeg Mila
Published: February 2024

Constitutional review is the power of a body, usually a court, to assess whether a law or government action complies with the constitution. Constitutional review has spread around the globe in recent decades, leading to a rise in scholarly work trying to understand the various institutional designs that have been deployed and utilized. The existing literature is largely focused on legal tradition, with France, Germany, and the United States providing a canonical triad of models. This chapter describes these models and their historical development. It then proposes new institutional dimensions to offer a typology of systems of constitutional review. The dimensions of focus include access, finality, and centralization. Using these institutional dimensions rather than legal tradition produces a distinct set of categorizations, destabilizing the classical paradigms of analysis. The chapter also notes how the development of supranational review has affected models of constitutional review, integrating national and supra-national levels into the institutional analysis.
Courts and Transitional Justice
Authors: Skaar Elin
Published: February 2024

Transitional justice—i.e., how societies respond to the legacies of massive and systematic human rights violations—has become an important scholarly field as well as a political and legal terrain of concern and contestation. The role of courts in the larger picture of transitional justice is particularly contentious and judicial behaviour in these contexts is under-explored. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it maps out some of the historical developments in the field of transitional justice since the Second World War, focusing specifically on courts. It shows that although the ‘toolbox’ of transitional justice has been vastly expanded over the last few decades to include a wide range of institutional and non-institutional measures, claims for criminal accountability continue to constitute one of the core pillars of transitional justice when the most atrocious human rights violations are being committed. Second, the chapter offers a tentative explanation for how and why claims for criminal justice for past wrongs rarely translate into successful trials, despite the general consensus that trials are considered vital to reestablishing the rule of law, and hence contribute to transitions to peace and democracy after violent conflict. Specifically, the chapter identifies some of the obstacles that constrain judges from keeping alleged human rights perpetrators to account.
Halakhic Responses to Modernity
Authors: Tucker Ethan M.
Published: February 2024

Classical halakhah contains a variety of rules that grant privileges and protections to Jews over non-Jews—a fact that at one point was used to justify excluding Jews from mainstream society. While some of these rules remain theoretically applicable in the contemporary world, halakhic authorities have devised workarounds for some of them. Some of these workarounds include invoking alternative considerations, such as the imperative to avoid potential danger caused by antagonistic relationships with non-Jewish neighbors, or the desire to avoid the defamation of Jewish communities and the desecration of God’s name. Alternatively, some halakhic thinkers attempted to redefine certain Biblical and Rabbinic categories of “gentiles” or “idolaters” in order to include or exclude contemporary groups of non-Jews. This chapter will catalog these laws and legal approaches as a case study for how halakhah responds to modernity.
How Does the Talmud Read the Mishnah?
Authors: Moscovitz Leib
Published: February 2024

Mishnah interpretation played a significant role in the formation of Talmudic halakhah. Various types of Mishnah interpretation are found in Talmudic literature: philological interpretation (including lexical interpretation and textual emendation), legal interpretation, and stylistic interpretation. Talmudic approaches to Mishnah interpretation were diverse; thus, individual Mishnaic passages were often interpreted in different ways by different rabbis, and diverse approaches to Mishnah interpretation were frequently adopted by different sages, in different geographical centers and chronological periods. One of the hallmarks of Talmudic Mishnah exegesis is its intertextual and often harmonistic character: the Mishnah is read and interpreted—or, more accurately, reinterpreted—in light of parallel texts and a priori considerations of various sorts. Talmudic interpretations of the Mishnah often reflect its plain, presumably original meaning, but elsewhere the Talmuds’ interpretations are forced and textually difficult to justify, even if the motivation behind such exegesis—usually, resolving real or artificial difficulties with the Mishnaic text— is apparent.
Illiberalism and Authoritarianism
Authors: Waller Julian G.
Published: February 2024

Illiberalism is often associated with the concept of “authoritarianism,” but their relation can be underspecified, confused, contradictory, or overlapping. This is in no small part due to the tricky conceptualization of authoritarianism itself, which holds to surprisingly different definitions across several social-scientific disciplines and deals with the same common problems of usage imprecision. This chapter conceptualizes the relationship between illiberalism and the several understandings of authoritarianism current in the mainstream academic literature. In doing so, it shows how the concept of authoritarianism understood as a form of political regime is the most useful for most scholars working on the subject of illiberalism, although in some ways also the most difficult to adhere. In support of this conclusion, the chapter reviews several prominent and influential alternative definitions of authoritarianism, including psychological-dispositional, psychological-behavioral, policy-ideological, and practice-process conceptualizations. It notes that these other variants of authoritarianism suffer from diverse, internal problems with conceptual coherency, parsimony, bias, rigor, and empirical replicability. Furthermore, they are particularly susceptible to obscuring or even hindering the empirical and theoretical application of illiberalism in scholarly study, although important exceptions and further avenues of exploration are noted as well. Familiarity with definitional problems associated with non-regime conceptualizations of authoritarianism will ultimately facilitate a more precise and nuanced scholarly research approach on illiberalism.
Illiberalism and Islam
Authors: Sibgatullina Gulnaz
Published: February 2024

The evolution and spread of illiberalism occurs against the backdrop of increased contact between Muslim-majority countries and Western democracies. This chapter examines two ways in which non-Muslim illiberal movements engage with Islam to define themselves and their agendas. On the one hand, the growing visibility of Muslim groups in the Global North has led to the rise of illiberal discourse that seeks to exclude Muslims by portraying them as a threat. Nevertheless, some illiberal actors instead endorse certain Islamic principles, seek cooperation with Muslim groups, or even convert to Islam. The instrumental use of Islam by illiberal actors relies on images of the religion as a homogeneous, conservative, and male-centered system of faith. The discussion shows that the convergence between illiberal and Muslim elements primarily occurs as a critique of cultural liberalism, and it tends to be driven by expediency, is temporary in nature, and does not challenge existing power relations.
Consuming the State
Authors: Kudaibergen Diana T.
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the phenomenon of spontaneous rallies and contentions organized by groups united by demands for additional and often unsanctioned welfare, namely mothers with multiple children who unite sporadically to seek material gains from the Kazakhstani state. Other groups, especially nationalist and populist groups, are similarly demanding that the state write off certain citizens’ consumer debts on the grounds of these citizens’ rights to share the country’s resources. What unites them is how they justify their demands, even though the protesters are aware that their claims bypass the legal structures already in place. The demands for additional assistance—in the form of housing or of canceling one’s debts—are essentially calls for redistribution, even at the price of discriminating against other groups. These protesters’ claims emanate from the illiberal values these citizens have developed over the years spent living under an illiberal regime with endemic mass-scale corruption.
Autocratization—Not an “Illiberal Turn”
Authors: Wilson Matthew C. , Edgell Amanda B. , Sato Yuko , Boese-Schlosser Vanessa , Lindberg Staffan I.
Published: February 2024

This chapter argues that the concept of autocratization is preferable to alternatives such as democratic backsliding, regression, or illiberal turn. By capturing gradual movements away from democracy across a spectrum of institutions and practices, autocratization is a more encompassing and neutral concept. To that end, the chapter provides an operationalization and an overview of the extent of autocratization in the world over the last century, using the new Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset, which draws on original data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. We show the extent to which democratization has slowed down and autocratization has intensified during the most recent wave of autocratization. The number of countries in an episode of democratization peaked in 1991 at seventy-nine countries, but has since plummeted to sixteen in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of autocratizing countries increased steadily from five in 1990 to thirty-two. Notably, the third wave of autocratization has involved more democracies than autocracies. In 2019, roughly 74 percent of autocratization episodes (twenty-three of thirty-one) were occurring in countries that began as democracies. According to this analysis, the number of countries experiencing autocratization is at an all-time high, despite a slight decline in recent years. While most episodes of autocratization since the early 1900s occurred in countries already scoring low on democracy, suggesting a tendency for instability in autocracies, recent episodes tend to affect more democratic countries, illustrating the fragility of many third-wave democracies.
The Role of Éric Zemmour in the “Right-Wingization” of France
Authors: Schir Périne
Published: February 2024

France is currently experiencing a “right-wingization” of its public debate, as far-right ideas become largely detached from politics and are being spread among the academia, journalism, or the literary milieu. Éric Zemmour, a famous French journalist who became a far-right candidate for president in 2022, seems to represent a new stage in this process. His hitherto marginal ideas, with xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic themes, are now prospering in the public debate without serious counterweight. While his mediocre electoral results in 2022 may suggest that he has lost a battle, his ability to impose his pet themes—like nativism and traditional gender norms—in the political debate seems to suggest that he is winning the war. In this chapter, we offer a detailed textual study of the content and discursive techniques of Zemmour’s best-selling 2014 political essay, Suicide français, in which he opposes liberal ideology as cultural hegemony. Our hypothesis is that Zemmour is the French version of a transnational trend that has been rising for several decades, in which illiberal thinkers have been able to position themselves at the forefront of the current “culture war”.
Illiberal Peace?
Authors: Lewis David
Published: February 2024

Since the early 1990s, international responses to civil wars and conflicts have been dominated by a set of liberal discourses and practices that are often labeled “liberal peacebuilding.” But in the last decade, liberal peacebuilding has faced a growing range of challenges. In a series of recent conflicts, many states have rejected liberal ideas of peaceful negotiation to resolve conflicts. These policy responses have been described as forms of “illiberal peacebuilding,” a form of conflict management designed to end violent conflict through illiberal mechanisms. The terms “illiberal peace,” “illiberal peacebuilding,” “authoritarian peace,” and “authoritarian conflict management” all describe a form of conflict management that seeks to establish political order through top-down, state-centric methods, including the use of violence, while tactics of co-optation, corruption, and patronage are used to encourage compliance. This chapter explores the emergence of this phenomenon and the challenge it poses to existing ideas and practices of international peacebuilding.
Contending Illiberalisms in the People’s Republic of China
Authors: Pils Eva
Published: February 2024

After 1976, the autocratic Chinese party-state introduced economic reforms and mechanisms of “ruling the country in accordance with law” (yi fa zhi guo) that reflected the limited official recognition of liberal legal principles and prompted limited toleration of some freedoms. However, the Chinese leadership has since attempted autocratic reclosure, characterized by intensified domestic and transnational repression. This paper argues that the sovereigntist and anti-pluralist justification narratives advanced by China’s “New Left” (xin zuo pai) in support of changes to the Chinese party-state system under Xi Jinping are a form of droitisation “in the mirror.” These narratives echo and amplify illiberal and anti-globalist discourses directed against a world order supposedly dominated by “the West.” However, some of the views of a global populist and libertarian right wing are also being absorbed by persecuted oppositional groups within China. Together, these shifts weaken liberalism in China and strengthen illiberalism at a global level.
Corona and the Left
Authors: Soiland Tove
Published: February 2024

This chapter argues that the Covid-19 regime shows tendencies of a new form of totalitarianism. The novelty of this form lies in the fact that the authoritarianism of the Corona measures essentially serves the implementation of a new accumulation regime, but in its authoritarianism does not draw on classic insignia of a right-wing fascism. The left, in unreservedly supporting this authoritarianism, has thus taken on a role historically reserved for the right. The danger of such a coalition between a state that serves capital by authoritarian means and the left that supports it is that this authoritarianism no longer appears as such. This new form of totalitarianism is called post-ideological because it seems to renounce a higher ideal by referring to a (supposedly) uniform scientific opinion. Subsequently, any critique of the Corona measures is denied the status of the political, even if it is formulated from an explicitly left perspective.
Religion and Education in Southern Ireland
Authors: Kieran Patricia
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the complex, contested, and extensive influence of religion in education in post-independence southern Ireland. It identifies the Free State’s ceding of management of national schools to Catholic and Protestant religious bodies as one in a series of defining moments embedding a religious ethos not only in the state’s educational structures but within the state itself. The overwhelmingly Catholic denominational national school system reinforced a distinctive religious ethos where religious personnel and patronal bodies, and not the state, held responsibility for the management of schools. Religious bodies had autonomy in the design, delivery, and assessment of the syllabus for Religious Education thus benefitting the churches significantly. The evolving role of religious authorities in the management of Catholic and Protestant national schools, voluntary secondary schools, and religiously run industrial schools is analysed and critiqued.
Northern Ireland
Authors: Walker Graham
Published: February 2024

The term ‘Protestant State’ is routinely applied to Northern Ireland in the 1921–68 period. This is largely on account of both a statement to this effect made by Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, James Craig, in 1934; and of the power balance between the Unionist (overwhelmingly Protestant) and Nationalist (overwhelmingly Catholic) communities and the accompanying issues of discrimination and disadvantage. However, this chapter contends that the ‘Protestant State’ characterization can also conceal the extent to which there were significant intra-Protestant divisions: between different denominations; between social classes; between Orangeism and less tribal Protestant outlooks. The chapter also considers how sensitive issues such as education and temperance could create political difficulties for the Ulster Unionist Party, and exacerbate tensions between Protestants of different denominations and outlooks.
Religion and Education in Northern Ireland
Authors: Barnes L. Philip
Published: February 2024

This chapter describes the historical relationship between religion and education in Northern Ireland, particularly the ways in which the importance of religion has been mediated through politics and influenced legislation, school management, and education policy. Religion here denotes Catholicism and Protestantism, for it is in these forms and in these oppositions in Northern Irish society that it exhibits its influence. Discussion begins with consideration of the Londonderry Act of 1923, which provided the basic framework for education and schooling until 1947: what it accomplished and what it failed to accomplish dictated the course of subsequent history. Protestant agitation against perceived secular influences in education aimed to accommodate the public system of schooling to Protestant sensitivities, as illustrated in the 1925, 1930, and 1947 education acts. Catholic agitation against the various education acts is also considered. Finally, more recent developments are reviewed.