bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The International Criminal Law Aspects of the Protection of Global Commons: The Case of Cultural Heritage
Authors: Capone Francesca
Published: September 2021

This chapter addresses the international criminal aspects of the protection of global commons, with particular regard to cultural heritage. As the general principle of respect for cultural heritage transcends the classic scheme of state responsibility for wrongful acts, international criminal law is recognized as one means of protecting cultural heritage for transmission to future generations. In order to reflect on the capacity of international criminal law to effectively enhance the protection of cultural heritage, first, this chapter aims at providing a critical overview of the existing international legal framework as enshrined in the relevant instruments criminalizing any form of intentional destruction of cultural property. Second, the analysis will focus on the role of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and its groundbreaking case law. Third, this chapter will discuss the most recent developments of international criminal practice as it applies to the destruction of cultural heritage, examining in particular the Al Mahdi case.
Community Interests in World Trade Law
Authors: Tietje Christian , Lang Andrej
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the question on whether World Trade Organization (WTO) law protects community interests, revisiting the interrelated scholarly debates about whether the WTO’s legal system resembles a ‘constitution’ or a ‘contract’ and whether WTO obligations are ‘bilateral’ or ‘collective’. The first part of the chapter addresses challenges that are brought forward against the WTO system pursuing community interests; in particular that it only sets forth bilateral obligations, disregards nontrade values, and is unfair to developing countries. The second part examines structural elements of WTO law that are indicative of community interests, namely the non-discrimination principles, the limits on derogability, and the design of enforcement mechanisms. The chapter concludes that WTO law protects the community interest of promoting an essentially rules-based and fair world market. It argues that the core concern of WTO law is to protect trade-conducive structures that enable and further global economic activity for the purpose of generating overall welfare.
Cultural Heritage as ‘Common Concern’: Role of International Organizations and States
Authors: Vrdoljak Ana Filipa
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the evolution of cultural property as the ‘common concern’ of the international community by focusing on its protection during armed conflict and belligerent occupation. By focusing on the role of international organizations over the last century, it examines the development of the rationales for this protection and related obligations concerning safeguarding and prosecution of violations. It charts the drive to realize a specialist instrument on the protection of cultural property during armed conflict and the enforcement of these obligations through the various phases of the evolving membership and priorities of the Intellectual Cooperation Organisation (ICO) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It is shown that despite the changing fortunes of these specialist international culture organizations themselves, the core commitment by the international community to the articulation of the protection of cultural property during armed conflict as a common concern of humanity and the obligation to prosecute violators of these norms has strengthened over decades.
Nationalism, Secessionism, and Autonomy
Authors: Lecours André
Published: September 2021

The strength of secessionism in liberal democracies varies in time and space. Inspired by historical institutionalism, this book argues that such variation is explained by the extent to which autonomy evolves in time. If autonomy adjusts to the changing identity, interests, and circumstances of an internal national community, nationalism is much less likely to be strongly secessionist than if autonomy is a final, unchangeable settlement. Developing a controlled comparison of, on the one hand, Catalonia and Scotland, where autonomy has been mostly static during key periods of time, and, on the other hand, Flanders and South Tyrol, where it has been dynamic, and also considering the Basque Country, Québec, and Puerto Rico as additional cases, this book puts forward an elegant theory of secessionism in liberal democracies: dynamic autonomy staves off secessionism while static autonomy stimulates it.
Scotland
Authors: Lecours André
Published: September 2021

The fourth chapter looks at the case of Scotland. The surge of secessionism within Scottish nationalism is puzzling considering that demands for Scottish territorial autonomy were met in the late 1990s with devolution. Yet, a mere 15 years later, 45 per cent of Scots supported independence in a referendum. Scottish autonomy was conceived as mostly static during key periods of political development. Devolution in the United Kingdom was a settlement, a new political and constitutional order, not originally meant to be adapted or enhanced. Yet, devolution created a series of changes to Scottish politics that immediately put pressure on the new status quo. Although the Commission on Scottish Devolution was established in late 2007, it did not include the SNP, which was then forming the Scottish government, and, with British general elections on the horizon, its impact on Scottish autonomy was uncertain. By the time the Commission’s recommendations would start being implemented in 2012, the SNP had already formed a majority government committed to holding an independence referendum. When this government was considering a multi-option referendum question comprising an option for more powers to Scotland as well as independence, the British government refused: devolution was, at that time, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. In other words, short of independence, Scottish autonomy would remain as it was; the British government was then offering static autonomy.
Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction
Authors: Dancer Thom
Published: September 2021

From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity today are impossibly complicated and planetary in scale. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction makes the surprising but compelling claim that it is precisely by culitvating a modest temperament that contemporary fiction can play an central role in conbating the despair that many of us feel in the face of such enormous and intractable problems. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction shows us how contemporary works of literature model modesty as a critical temperament. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, Dancer builds a case that the novel has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role than it has done. In doing so, the book offers an engaging response to the debate over post-critical and surface readings, bringing novels themselves into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.
Leveraging Plastics Linkages for Diversification
Authors: Bell Jason , Monaco Lorenza , Mondliwa Pamela
Published: September 2021

The chapter considers the role of linkages, lead firm strategies, industrial policies, and value chain governance in the performance of the South African plastic products industry. The extent to which the linkages of the plastic products sub-sector backwards with the polymers industry, and forwards to plastic automotive components, have influenced the performance of the industry is assessed. The forward linkages to the automotive industry are assessed through a comparative assessment of technological capability accumulation in South Africa with its relatively more successful upper-middle-income counterpart, Thailand. The analysis shows that vertical integration and horizontal collaborations through clusters, as well as the different roles played by multinational corporations and the state, have exerted a stronger influence on the accumulation of capabilities in Thailand, compared with South Africa. The assessment of backward linkages to polymers shows how the linkage development in South Africa has been undermined by market power in the upstream polymers industry. This is coupled with a failure of industrial policy to support diversified industries such as plastic products, including through addressing the challenges related to input prices and supporting the accumulation of capabilities.
Digitalization, Industrialization, and Skills Development
Authors: Andreoni Antonio , Barnes Justin , Black Anthony , Sturgeon Timothy
Published: September 2021

The world economy is undergoing a period of structural and technological transformation, driven by the increasing digitalization of economic and social life. Digitalization is being experienced differentially across the globe, reflecting the different opportunities it offers as well as the particular challenges countries face in digitalizing their economic systems. This chapter looks at the opportunities and challenges of digital industrialization through the lens of the South African case. In South Africa, digitalization is occurring in an economy that has prematurely deindustrialized, where the digital capability gap in terms of digital infrastructures and skills is wide, and where organizations need significant investments to retrofit their existing systems. Despite this, South Africa has islands of excellence in which firms are embracing the opportunities provided by digitalization to achieve greater efficiency, process innovation, and supply-chain integration. These examples point to what is possible, while at the same time revealing gaps and shortcomings. The potential and shortcomings are evident both across firms (in terms of their investment rates) within global value chains (domestic firms; engagement with multinationals), and across public institutions and industrial policies. The development of digital skills in cross-cutting fields such as data science and software engineering, as well as transversal technologies in complementary services, are identified as particularly important. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications for South Africa and beyond.
Confession at a Time of Revolution
Authors: Kizenko Nadieszda
Published: September 2021

Chapter 7 explores how changes set in motion by rapid industrialization first climaxed in the Revolution of 1905, dropping confession rates. The Great War, initially sparking enthusiasm for the sacraments, dropped them further yet. After the February Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II, all state structures compelling or supporting annual confession vanished. Bishops, parish priests, monastics, and ordinary laypeople struggled to make sense of the revolutionary climate, exploring such new forms as general confession or seeking to drop confession altogether. This experience helped prepare them for the savage attack on religion under Soviet rule and the decades that followed, creating new forms of confession. It also informed the evolution of confession in different strands of the émigré Russian Orthodox Church. The legacy of confession in the empire would become even more important after the fall of communism, when the Russian Orthodox Church rejected Soviet-era changes and tried to embrace pre-revolutionary practice with unexpected fervour.
Understanding School Fees in Relation to both Access and Quality
Authors: Kabay Sarah
Published: September 2021

Between 1990 and 2007, sixteen different countries in sub-Saharan Africa used national education policy to formally abolish school fees. Implementing its Universal Primary Education Policy in 1997, Uganda was the third country in sub-Saharan Africa to do so. School fee abolition is typically understood along a single dimension: access. Any cost associated with attending school is seen as discouraging access; conversely, efforts to reduce costs are seen as improving access. Little to no research has investigated the connection to quality. In this chapter, analyzing a school savings program presents the opportunity to investigate how an intervention that encouraged the payment of school fees relates to both access and quality. Secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial and research questions on mediation and moderation are used to explore this issue.
Understanding Administrative Law in the Common Law World
Authors: Daly Paul
Published: September 2021

This book has three goals: to enhance understanding of administrative law; to guide future development of the law; and to justify the core features of the contemporary law of judicial review of administrative action. Around the common law world, the law of judicial review of administrative action has changed dramatically in recent decades, accelerating a centuries-long process of incremental evolution. This book offers a fresh framework for understanding the core features of contemporary administrative law. Through comparative analysis of case law from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland and New Zealand, Dr Daly develops an interpretive approach by reference to four values: individual self-realisation, good administration, electoral legitimacy and decisional autonomy. The interaction of this plurality of values explains the structure of the vast field of judicial review of administrative action: institutional structures, procedural fairness, substantive review, remedies, restrictions on remedies and the scope of judicial review, everything from the rule against bias to jurisdictional error to the application of judicial review principles to non-statutory bodies. Addressing this wide array of subjects in detail, Dr Daly demonstrates how his pluralist approach, with the values being employed in a complementary and balanced fashion, can enhance academics’, students’, practitioners’ and judges’ understanding of administrative law. Furthermore, this pluralist approach is capable of guiding the future development of the law of judicial review of administrative action, a point illustrated by a careful analysis of the unsettled doctrinal area of legitimate expectation. Dr Daly closes by arguing that his values-based, pluralist framework supports the legitimacy of contemporary administrative law which although sometimes called into question in fact facilitates the flourishing of individuals, of public administration and of the liberal democratic system.
Remedies
Authors: Daly Paul
Published: September 2021

When an applicant for judicial review succeeds in demonstrating that an administrative decision was unlawful because it breached the principles of institutional structures, procedural fairness or substantive review, the court must then decide whether to grant a remedy. This Chapter first discusses the nature of the remedies available to a reviewing court, explaining how the different characteristics of the so-called ‘prerogative writs’ and their successors can be understood in terms of the values of individual self-realisation, good administration, electoral legitimacy and decisional autonomy. It highlights how judges’ choices whether to issue a remedy and how to structure a remedy can also be understood as being influenced by these values. The chapter then addresses several aspects of judicial discretion not to grant a remedy and the ability to sever problematic aspects of a decision, again demonstrating the influence of administrative law values.
The Realist and the Visionary
Authors: Desautels-Stein Justin
Published: September 2021

When we ask how the concept of sovereignty might become something other than what it has been, we must realise the structural context of the question. If we take liberal legalism as that context, we discover that the concept of sovereignty has a twin in the concept of property. To be sure, when we move beyond the deep grammars of the structure, important conceptual differences quickly emerge. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that if we are to take seriously our concerns with social change and transformation, and ask what concepts like sovereignty and property might become, we must first understand the deeper structural frames from which these concepts take their meaning. Reckoning with the possibilities of sovereign change and transformation is less like altering a small dialect, and more like transforming the syntactical range of an entire language.
Subverting Eurocentric Epistemology
Authors: al Attar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) has a fundamental problem: its scholars don’t quite know how to relate to international law. This problem is constitutive of the theory, born as it was out of disillusionment with the failures of decolonisation and, of course, of international law. As a consequence, we find in TWAIL scholarship the juxtaposition of powerful critiques of international law alongside noisy calls for more international law. TWAIL’s aspirational projects are timid, constrained as they are by TWAIL’s overriding commitment to a legal regime its scholars bemoan. In this chapter, I propose to use counterfactuals to overcome the schizophrenia. I treat counterfactuals as a device that enables methodical explorations of alternative legal imaginaries. Contrary to Venzke, I propose exploring counterfactuals that are neither probable nor sensible within the current regime. For TWAIL, counterfactuals have value if they facilitate thinking beyond the rigidity of the status quo. And that’s the point: if TWAIL’s mission is to upend Eurocentric epistemology and practice, we must begin to imagine international law outside the parameters established by Europe.
Contingent Movements?
Authors: Szabla Christopher
Published: September 2021

No single international organisation oversees and enforces global migrant rights or plans and facilitates migrant movement. Migrant rights are fragmented among, inter alia, human rights and labour law. Why does no clear, comprehensive international regime exist to integrate migrant law and provide oversight for all migrants as international refugee law and institutions do for refugees? Scholars have cited a 1951 US decision to withdraw support for a migration regime that involved communist participation. But the Cold War explanation sidesteps, among other things, the creation of an intergovernmental migration regime outside the communist world. Both the refugee and migration regimes subsequently paralleled one another’s development, but architectural differences ultimately rendered one more robust. This chapter shows how decisions that shaped the differences between these regimes were not entirely determined by the Cold War, while demonstrating how decisions related to another overarching historical force—decolonisation—resulted in the expression of these differences.
Unveiling Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions
Authors: Maganza Bianca
Published: September 2021

The chapter analyses the role that contingency played in the negotiation, adoption, and interpretation of Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions. It focuses in particular on the choice of including the Article in the Conventions, on the terminology that is used in the provision, and on the way in which the latter is currently interpreted. Through a study of the past contingencies that shaped the (hi)story of the provision, leading to the contingency of its contemporary interpretation, the chapter challenges the concept of non-international armed conflict as it is traditionally understood, proposing an exercise of self-reflexivity on the existence of different interpretive possibilities. Borrowing from both contextual and critical approaches to history, the analysis is informed by the two sibling frameworks of false necessity and false contingency, that are put in constant dialogue with each other. By adopting a two-tiered perspective, the ultimate aim of the analysis is to show that, with respect to a same issue, the necessity stemming from a given historical moment can turn into contingency when tested against the background of a different context.
Why Did Starvation Not Become the Paradigmatic War Crime in International Law?
Authors: Mulder Nicholas , van Dijk Boyd
Published: September 2021

In the late twentieth century, the starvation of civilian populations as a method of warfare came to be prohibited in international law. Yet starvation is still commonly used today. In retrospect, what is striking about its international legal history is that the ban itself happened so late and appears still so incomplete. Why did depriving non-combatants of the essential means of sustenance not come to be seen much earlier as a cruel form of wartime behaviour that should be unambiguously outlawed? This chapter critically analyses the history of the anti-starvation norm and explains not only why some political agendas for starvation were frequently tolerated, but also why others failed to reach the stage of codification, and what this tells us about its past and future. Understanding how and why people starve, what role the use of blockade and international law play, and to what degree Schreibtischmörder might be held responsible for it, gets to the heart of questions of contingency and international law.
The Law of State Responsibility and the Persistence of Investment Protection
Authors: Greenman Kathryn
Published: September 2021

At the first international conference for the codification of international law, held in 1930 by the League of Nations, the law of state responsibility could have been different—and, in a sense, was different. A group of largely Latin American and former Austro-Hungarian states rejected rules which favoured foreign commercial interests over their political and economic self-determination, and had been used to justify intervention by the colonial powers. However, the change did not stick; today international investment law embeds economic relations that continue to subordinate the Global South. This chapter explores the idea that international law’s prioritisation of investment protection is something that, despite contingency, is more likely to persist than not. To understand how international law might have been or might be otherwise, it is essential to understand how certain potentialities have persistently prevailed, even in the face of resistance. This chapter introduces two possibilities: fragmentation and structural bias.
Afterword
Authors: Faragher Megan
Published: September 2021

This short afterword looks to the work done by Theodor Adorno and others in the production of The Authoritarian Personality, a quantitative study of psychological traits that might suggest preternatural fascist tendencies in interviewees. This text symbolizes the onslaught of postwar psychographic consumer research, which was only heightened with the use of computer algorithms to more clearly map groups psychology. The book traces the postwar use of “psychography” in marketing, and contends that the book’s tracing of the psychographic turn can help us better understand the contemporary psychographic age, wherein algorithmic sociological profiling has become a dominant force in modern democracy.
Enlisting and Excluding an “Enemy Race”
Authors: Guglielmo Thomas A.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 2 examines the US military’s effort to restrict Japanese Americans’ access to the nation’s fighting forces during World War II. In the navy, Japanese Americans were barred from enlisting and serving throughout the war. But the army’s restrictive policies, by contrast, changed dramatically and repeatedly over the course of the war, resulting in Japanese Americans zigging and zagging between exclusion and inclusion. At times their army access approximated that for white people; other times it was more restricted than that for black people. In the end, like African Americans, Japanese Americans were underrepresented in the military. At the same time, their enlistment barriers had their own particularities, which bespoke the variety of racisms in wartime America and its military, as well as the variety of struggles that emerged to uproot them.
The Backbone of Segregation
Authors: Guglielmo Thomas A.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 3 examines African Americans’ struggle to integrate military units during World War II. Integration of this kind became for the first time ever a core element of black people’s civil rights demands, around which growing numbers of them and their allies rallied during the war. Their efforts fell far short of their intended goal. The forces in favor of the segregated status quo—Congress and the White House, military brass and military tradition, federal law and white public opinion—proved too formidable. Even so, African Americans’ wartime integrationist struggle laid the foundation for the postwar desegregation of the armed forces.
Bonds and Barriers
Authors: Guglielmo Thomas A.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 7 follows nonblack minorities through their training and service in the United States. America’s World War II military, from its top leaders to its enlisted personnel, simultaneously built and blurred a white-nonwhite divide alongside its black-white one. On the one hand, the blurring stemmed from a host of factors, including the day-to-day intermingling of troops, the activism of nonblack minorities, and, paradoxically, the unifying power of the black-white divide among nonblacks. On the other hand, this blurring had its limits. White-nonwhite lines cropped up in some of the same places black-white ones did and in some different ones, too, especially those related to national security and Japanese Americans. In the end, these lines remained in place throughout the war years, despite continuous blurring. They did so in part because of these racialized national security concerns and because of the power of civilian racist practices and investments.
Brothers in Arms?
Authors: Guglielmo Thomas A.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 9 looks at what happened to the US military’s white-nonwhite lines as American troops moved overseas during World War II. Nonblack minorities faced both bright and blurry white-nonwhite lines when deployed abroad. At times, the military remained determined to uphold distinctions between whites, on the one hand, and Asian Americans, Latin Americans, and Native Americans, on the other. This determination, evident in everything from military justice proceedings to promotion patterns, stemmed primarily from long-standing civilian investments in these distinctions and in response to the vicious race war in the Pacific with Japan. At the same time, overseas service also witnessed the continued blurring of white-nonwhite lines—the transformation of “Mexicans,” “Puerto Ricans,” “Indians,” “Filipinos,” “Chinese,” and even “Japanese” into whites’ buddies and brothers, comrades and fellow Americans, deepening a process that had begun on the home front. While this overseas blurring often emanated from day-to-day battlefield bonding, it was America’s military leaders and commanders who largely made it possible. In doing so, they narrowed the white-nonwhite divide, but also deepened the black-white one in the process.
Spectral Music Design
Authors: Lazzarini Victor
Published: September 2021

This volume offers a complete guide to a computational approach to spectral music-making. It provides, in a stepwise manner, a [ ] to the signal processing techniques and their application to computer music. The book begins with a series of fundamental definitions, delineating the basic concepts of spectral audio. This includes both a technical and a historical appreciation of the ideas related to the spectrum. The core of the text is formed by six chapters on the techniques of spectral musical signal processing. These are thoroughly illustrated with examples and code excerpts using the Python and Csound languages. This section of the book traces a path from the Fourier theorem to the consideration of non-deterministic signals, also in a step-by-step way discussing the various elements of spectral audio. The final part of the book is dedicated to the aesthetics of spectral music, and methods of design and composition, which apply the ideas and techniques explored earlier in the volume.
Rock and Rhapsodies
Authors: Braae Nick
Published: September 2021

Rock and Rhapsodies is the first book-length musicological study of British rock band Queen. It primarily addresses the material written, recorded, and released between 1973 and 1991. The text provides readers with a nuanced analytical account of the group’s songs and illuminates the varied stylistic and historical contexts in which Queen’s music was created. The key conceptual basis for the analysis is an idiolect, which refers to the distinct musical style of a single artist. Having documented the key features of Queen’s idiolect, the book further explores the nature of specific musical characteristic and uses them to respond to a range of wider analytical and discursive issues as pertaining to style, genre, form, time, voice, and historiography. Rock and Rhapsodies comprises twelve chapters. The introduction documents Queen’s place in scholarly literature and unfolds the principal analytical methodology. The following three chapters address the structural details of Queen’s idiolect and songs, before analysing the voices of Queen’s singers. The vocal techniques are related to discourses of authenticity and, in the case of Freddie Mercury, the queer voice. The five subsequent chapters identify the changing and myriad stylistic influences on Queen, as well as relate the band to the major rock movements of the 1970s: hard, glam, and progressive. The final chapter explores the replacement singers, Queen in wider popular media, and the influence of the band, since Mercury’s death in 1991.
Hitler's New Disorder
Authors: Pavlowitch Stevan , Djokic Dejan
Published: September 2021

The history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia was for a long time the preserve of the Communist regime led by Marshal Tito. It was written by those who had battled hard to come out on top of the many-sided war fought across the territory of that Balkan state after the Axis Powers had destroyed it in 1941, just before Hitler's invasion of the USSR. It was an ideological and ethnic war under occupation by rival enemy powers and armies, between many insurgents, armed bands and militias, for the survival of one group, for the elimination of another, for belief in this or that ideology, for a return to an imagined past within the Nazi New Order, or for the reconstruction of a new Yugoslavia on the side of the Allies. In fact, many wars were fought alongside, and under cover of, the Great War waged by the Allies against Hitler's New Order which, in Yugoslavia at least, turned out to be a “new disorder.” Most surviving participants have since told their stories; most archival sources are now available. This book uses them, as well as the works of historians in several languages, to understand what actually happened on the ground. The book poses more questions than it provides answers, as the author attempts a synoptic and chronological analysis of the confused yet interrelated struggles fought in 1941-5, during the short but tragic period of Hitler's failed “New Order,” over the territory that was no longer the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and not yet the Federal Peoples' Republic of Yugoslavia, but that is now definitely “former Yugoslavia.”
State Responsibility and Its Distributive Effect
Authors: Pasternak Avia
Published: September 2021

This chapter presents the problem of the distributive effect and its treatment in existing literature. Starting with the idea that states are corporate moral agents, it suggests that states are morally responsible for their wrongdoings in two distinct senses: they can be blameworthy when they act wrongly, and they incur remedial responsibilities to address the wrong, including paying compensation to its victims. The chapter then contrasts two core views on how the state’s remedial responsibilities should be distributed among its members. The first view supports a proportional distribution, which tracks the state’s members’ blameworthy contributions to their state’s wrongdoings. While this approach caters to individualist intuitions about fairness, it is hard to implement in real-world states. The second approach is nonproportional, and lets the burden fall on the population at large. While easier to implement, it seems to lack a solid normative justification.
Distributing State Responsibility
Authors: Pasternak Avia
Published: September 2021

Chapter 5 contrasts the intentional participation framework with other accounts, builds on the normative and empirical findings of the previous chapters, and develops a viable model for the distribution of remedial responsibility within the state. It examines five alternative principles that could justify a nonproportional distribution: “national responsibility,” democratic authorization, benefiting from state wrongdoing, having a special capacity to address it, and having special associative obligations to the victims of the wrongdoing. While each of these principles has important limitations, under some circumstances they can play a role in explaining citizens’ obligations with respect to their state’s wrongdoings. The chapter then outlines a context-sensitive process for determining how a state’s responsibility should be distributed between its citizens in specific cases. Typically, this process will conclude that in democratic states, a nonproportional distribution is overall justified, while in many authoritarian states it is not.
Conclusions
Authors: Pasternak Avia
Published: September 2021

This chapter provides a brief summary of the book’s main findings. It summarizes my argument that citizens who intentionally participate in their state can be expected to incur a nonproportional share of their state’s remedial obligations for its wrongdoings, and the context-sensitive framework I propose for the distribution of the state’s responsibilities among the population. It then considers some action-guiding implications of these arguments: first, for policymakers in the international arena who deal with delinquent states. Second, for national governments, which are responsible for collecting the resources necessary to meet their compensatory obligations. Finally, for citizens, who need to decide whether to lend their support to their government’s policies.
The Silken Thread
Authors: Wiedenmann Robert N. , Fisher J. Ray
Published: September 2021

Insects are seldom mentioned in history texts, yet they significantly shaped human history. The Silken Thread: Five Insects and Their Impacts on Human History tells the stories of just five insects, tied together by a thread originating in the Silk Roads of Asia, and how they have impacted our world. Silkworms have been farmed to produce silk for millennia, creating a history of empires and cultural exchanges; Silk Roads connected East to West, generating trade centers and transferring ideas, philosophies, and religions. The western honey bee feeds countless people, and their crop pollination is worth billions of dollars. Fleas and lice carried bacteria that caused three major plague pandemics, moved along the Silk Roads from Central Asia. Bacteria carried by insects left their ancient clues as DNA embedded in victims’ teeth. Lice caused outbreaks of typhus, especially in crowded conditions such as prisons and concentration camps. Typhus aggravated the effects of the Irish potato famine, and Irish refugees took typhus to North America. Yellow fever was transported to the Americas via the trans-Atlantic slave trade, taking and devaluing the lives of millions of Africans. Slaves were brought to the Americas to reduce labor costs in the cultivation of sugarcane, which was itself transported from south Asia along the Silk Roads. Yellow fever caused panic in the United States in the 1700s and 1800s as the virus and its mosquito vector was moved from the Caribbean. Constructing the Panama Canal required defeating mosquitoes that transmitted yellow fever. The silken thread runs through and ties together these five insects and their impacts on human history.
Introduction
Authors: Talisse Robert B.
Published: September 2021

The Introduction canvasses the major concepts discussed in the book: democracy, citizenship, civility, partisanship, and polarization. It also provides a sketch of the book’s central argument. There is a tension at the heart of the moral office of democratic citizenship. Citizens are called upon to take responsibility for their political order, and hence must act in ways that further justice. Yet they also must show a due regard for one another’s equality. They must treat their fellow citizens as their political equals. In many cases, these directives pull in opposing directions: in treating our political opponents as our equals, we seem to be conceding something to their views, which we hold as misguided and possibly unjust. It seems, then, that the directive to pursue justice supplies reasons to disregard our opponents, to treat them as less than our political equals. Perhaps democratic citizenship is self-defeating?
The Polarization Dynamic
Authors: Talisse Robert B.
Published: September 2021

The challenge of sustaining democracy is complicated by the fact that political engagement exposes citizens to a cognitive and social dynamical force known as belief polarization that leads us to over-ascribe malicious motives, irrational ideas, and extreme commitments to those who we perceive to be political opponents. As we politically interact with our fellow partisans, we come to see those who do not share our political identity as untrustworthy, incompetent, and threatening. This gives rise to the democrat’s dilemma. However, belief polarization also infects our alliances, turning groups of like-minded people into increasingly homogeneous and conformist units that ultimately are internally hierarchical and unstable. The reason we have to sustain democracy with our foes is that unless we do so, we will not be able to sustain democracy among our allies.
How Can We Sustain Democracy?
Authors: Talisse Robert B.
Published: September 2021

In order to sustain democracy, we must develop strategies for managing belief polarization within ourselves and our coalitions. This chapter spells out a two-stage approach. First, citizens must establish channels for subjecting their ideas to reasonable criticism; second, citizens need to occasionally create distance between themselves and the fray of partisan politics.
Introduction
Authors: Steward Gary L.
Published: September 2021

This opening section introduces the argument of the entire work, namely, that the American clergy who supported political resistance to the British did so in continuity with their own theological tradition. It also surveys a number of different approaches to interpreting the American Revolution. The influence of Bernard Bailyn’s Neo-Whig school of interpretation upon recent scholarship has significantly shaped how the American clergy’s arguments for resistance have been understood. Mark Noll, especially, has influenced how a number of historians have viewed the American clergy’s thought of this period, namely, as co-opted by secular philosophies and radical political views. The nature of political resistance doctrine sheds light on the role that Christianity played in the American founding.
“Never to Be Forgotten”
Authors: Steward Gary L.
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the clergy’s doctrine of political resistance expressed during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. The clergy’s justifications of political resistance as the Revolutionary-era troubles began emerged against the backdrop of clerical arguments for resistance articulated after the overthrow of Governor Edmund Andros in 1689. The memory of Andros, his tyrannical reign over New England, and the clergy’s resistance to him were evoked by the clergy during the Revolutionary era. This act of pre-Revolutionary resistance provides important context for understanding how the clergy themselves thought about the moral legitimacy of resisting one’s political authorities in the Revolutionary period. Colonial resistance to oppressive British agents was not a new or novel idea.
The Cloud of Longing
Authors: Jarow E. H. Rick
Published: September 2021

The Cloud of Longing is a full-length study and translation of the great Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa’s famed Meghadūta (literally: The Cloud Messenger) with a focus on its interfacing of nature, feeling, figurative language, and mythic memory. While the Meghadūta has been translated a number of times, the last “almost academic” translation was published in 1976 (Leonard Nathan, The Transport of Love: The Meghadūta of Kālidāsa). Barbara Stoler Miller, my graduate mentor at Columbia University, oftentimes remarked that it was time for a new translation of the text. This volume, however, is more than an Indological translation. It is a study of the text in light of both classical Indian and contemporary Western literary theory, and it is aimed at lovers of poetry and poetics and students of world literature. It seeks to widen the arena of literary and poetic studies to include classic works of Asian traditions. It also looks at the poem’s imaginative portrayals of “nature” and “environment” from perspectives that have rarely been considered.
Vastunirdeśa
Authors: Jarow E. H. Rick
Published: September 2021

The opening verses of the poem reveal very conscious strategy that is less of a beginning then a continuation of Epic and Purāṇic concerns. The entire journey of the Cloud, in fact, follows that of the great epic Rāmāyaṇa. The early verses of the poem also reveal Kālidāsa’s concern with the issue of how language generates meaning, as the Cloud may be viewed as language itself through its changing forms and figures. The conventional theme of the anguished ridden lover, pining in longing for the beloved, is seen through its relationship with specific landscapes. The chapter ends with a metaphysical look at the ways of “truth and silence”: the inability of any form of language to touch reality versus the potential of poetic figures to rise above the literal into greater spheres of signification.
The Argument
Authors: Jarow E. H. Rick
Published: September 2021

This chapter offers a close reading of the next four of the poem’s opening verses that frame the rest of the work through the address of the Yaksha to the Cloud. These verses are both descriptive and suggestive, focusing on the state of loss, the pining-sorrowful condition of the Yaksha, the surrounding environs, the appearance of the Cloud, and perhaps underneath all this, critical issues concerning the relationship between language and representation. The intertextuality of the Cloud image is discussed, as is its relationship with figurative language, and the correlation of the rainy season with the themes of loss and longing. The critical question of the poem is then considered: “How can an inanimate Cloud transmit a message from a living being?” Other works of Kālidāsa are considered in this regard (Śakuntalā, Raghuvanśa) as is the recurring trope of the reckless lover, alongside that of the silent sage. What is the relationship between the cloud and the message, the form and the content, the sign and the object world? Does figuration reveal through indirection or does it simply magnify an inadequate situation? The answer given is the remainder of the poem itself, one that simultaneously dazzles with visionary capability and demonstrates figurative impossibility.
The Cloud’s Way
Authors: Jarow E. H. Rick
Published: September 2021

This chapter follows the imagined journey of the Cloud through varied landscapes of India. The phenomenon of “diversion,” also seen in the epic Mahābhārata, is examined as an associative organizing principle of narrative in which one scenario suggests another (as opposed to linear progression). The arc of the journey is examined through close readings of particular verses that describe fabled sites in India’s mythic geography. These are unpacked and analyzed for their exquisite figurative detail. The repeated stops with mountains and dalliances with rivers are shown to be part of Kālidāsa’s eroticized landscape, and comparisons are made with well-known landscape narratives. The actual poetic figures that the poet employs, and how they work, are examined.
Alakā
Authors: Jarow E. H. Rick
Published: September 2021

As the Cloud Messenger approaches the city where the Yaksha’s beloved resides (Alakā) the concentric layers of the poetic mandala narrow. The descriptive focus descends along with the Cloud to the city rooftops, the city, and its residents. The Cloud is led to the Yaksha’s home and finally to his beloved. The visual descriptions of the city are stunning, as the text continues to echo the Rāmāyaṇa, citing Hanumān’s display of the Rāma’s ring to Sītā. The ring, as the sign, tries to keep the hope of meeting alive. It offers hints, but itself provides no resolution save that of pointing to its own impossibility. It is this very impossibility, however, that becomes exalted as longing amplifies the mood of separation, and through the deep recognition of this condition, rasa appears.
Movies on Our Minds
Authors: Cutting James E.
Published: September 2021

Why do we enjoy popular movies? This book explores perceptual, cognitive, and emotional reasons for our engagement. It considers effects of camera lenses and the layout of images. It outlines the types of transitions between shots, and it traces their historical functions and changes. It classifies different kinds of shots and the changes in them across a century. It explains the arcs of scenes and how they fit into the larger structure of sequences, and then it explores scene- and sequence-like units that have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. It then breaks movies into larger, roughly half-hour parts and provides psychological evidence for them. Finally, it explores the rhythms of whole movies, first observing the flow of physical changes—shot durations, luminance, motion, and clutter—as it has developed over time, and then how cinematic polyrhythms have come to match aspects of those in the human body. Overall, this book focuses on how the narration, the manner in which the story is told, has come to reinforce the structure of the narrative, the story proper. It uses several hundred popular movies released over a century and embeds its exploration in discussions of evolution, culture, and technological change. The changes in movies have contributed to viewers’ engagement by sustaining attention, promoting understanding of the narrative, heightening emotional commitment, and fostering their felt presence in the story. Examples of cinematic effects in particular movies are given at every turn.