bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Public Agenda
Authors: Bevan Shaun , Jennings Will
Published: March 2019

This chapter considers the question of what shapes the public agenda and how, in turn, the public agenda influences public policy. It introduces the survey question about the most important problem as a measure of the public agenda—comparing evidence on the policy issues attended to by publics in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, and also the degree to which public opinion itself is subject to “punctuations.” The analysis shows how the public agenda reflects both the problem status and level of media coverage of certain issues (specifically crime and the economy). Lastly, it presents evidence on the correspondence between the priorities of citizens and those of policymakers.
Parliamentary Questions
Authors: Borghetto Enrico , Chaqués-Bonafont Laura
Published: March 2019

Do political parties increasingly engage in non-legislative parliamentary activities? To what extent is the range of issues addressed through parliamentary questioning becoming more diverse? Is overtime change in issue attention during question time incremental or rather stable and occasionally interspersed with radical changes? These questions have generated an intense debate in legislative and agenda-setting studies during the last decades. The goal of this chapter is to explore these trends by focusing on a specific type of non-legislative activity: oral questions to the cabinet in the plenary. The analysis relies on the data available in eight countries of the Comparative Agendas Project: Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
‘That Saucy Paradox’
Authors: Kesselring K.J.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 4 looks at the duel as envisioned when it first appeared in late sixteenth-century England. Seen as an inherently private, unauthorized quest for revenge fought by elite men, the duel prompted responses from King James VI and I that some common law advocates in time came to see as problematic. The chapter surveys the history of duelling in practice and as an idea. It argues that the abstraction of the duel as a special kind of fight by men of special status helped in the creation of stronger statements of the supremacy of the king’s peace and public justice over private interests, in part by doing so in ways that many elite men found useful or at least not unduly threatening.
‘For Publick Satisfaction’
Authors: Kesselring K.J.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 5 turns to the ways in which killings became ‘public’ in the sense of being made widely known, and how that contributed to making homicide public in the sense of being seen as an offence against a community. It examines public executions, the advent of printing—including both the new genre of the murder pamphlet and legal printing more generally—and the rise of the commercial stage. It examines the ways in which these discussions and displays helped inculcate a message that vengeance ought to be left to law, a public rather than private matter.
Conclusion
Authors: Kesselring K.J.
Published: March 2019

The conclusion sums up ways in which the manslaughter verdict became a useful mechanism for criminalizing homicide, or making murder public, and thus how it might have contributed to the declining incidence of homicide in the period. It surveys the responses to a number of killings by elite men at the end of the period, and how these responses show signs of the broader changes under discussion in the book. It ends with a brief summary of the political aspects of homicide and its prosecution, and addresses how talk of murder as an offence against a collectivity beyond king and kin both drew upon broad participation and served to exclude some people from law’s protections.
The Theory and Philosophy of Life
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

The idea that there is an animating principle, a life force, that drives the living, that life itself comes to form through the manifold appearances of the world, is very ancient and can be found in Greece, China, and India. We also have more recent philosophical arguments that have understood life in terms of a vital principle or essence. Philosophies rooted in biology have tended to be sceptical of vitalist philosophies, while vitalist philosophies have rejected eliminative, materialist explanations. With reference to these concerns, the chapter examines the question of whether we are to understand life primarily in terms of human purposes, desires, fears, and hopes; or are we to explain life primarily in terms of impersonal, biological drives?
The Emergence of Religion
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

The communicative practices that comprise religions have their roots in human niche construction. But this is not a cognitivist argument that locates religion in particular regions of the brain, or a naturalist, biological reductionism that maintains the hegemony of the genes; rather, it contends that forms of communicative practice that are constitutive of religions, while being rooted in human biology, function at a cultural level that has autonomy from the cellular. Religions are niche constructions that create worlds of meaning through imagination within which people can live complete and competent lives and that function eschatologically to facilitate self-repair; their roots are in the pro-social emotions, language development, and ritual behaviour.
Earth under Heaven
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

China developed the notion of life as a sustaining power of living beings, but in contrast to India, did not pursue the idea of transcendence as its source. In contrast to any Gnostic view of flight to a higher reality that we find in India or Greece, China throughout its history has maintained a positive evaluation of life, placing human life within a cosmos. In particular, pre-modern Chinese civilization emphasized harmony in the relationship between heaven (tian), earth (di), and humanity (jen): there should be a ‘unity of heaven and humanity’. Heaven is the source of all things and generally, with some philosophical exceptions, humanity is thought to be perfectible. There is a continuity between the political and natural orders that the chapter examines.
Transforming Life
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

Although the category ‘Abrahamic religions’ is contentious, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do form a group of traditions related historically, conceptually, and practically. The theme of life itself has been central for them all, especially the sacrificial model of transforming death into life and an eschatology that awaits the end of days. The history of these three religions has been more conflictual than harmonious, almost inseparable from the history of power and the emergence of the idea of the nation and state. A conception of life begins to emerge in these religions from common roots in Jewish and Greek thinking. Three trajectories of interest in life itself can be traced: first, a sacrificial imaginary at work across the Greek, Semitic, and Christian histories; second, life understood in terms of verticality; and third, a horizontal, scientific drive to understand life.
Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.
Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell
Authors: Mottram Stewart
Published: March 2019

Ruin and Reformation explores writerly responses to the religious violence of the long reformation in England and Wales, spanning over a century of literature and history, from the establishment of the national church under Henry VIII (1534), to its disestablishment under Oliver Cromwell (1653). It focuses on representations of ruined churches, monasteries, and cathedrals in the works of a range of English protestant writers, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Denham, and Marvell, reading literature alongside episodes in English reformation history: from the dissolution of the monasteries and destruction of church icons and images, to the puritan reforms of the 1640s. The study departs from previous responses to literature’s ‘bare ruined choirs’, which tend to read writerly ambivalence towards the dissolution of the monasteries as evidence of traditionalist, catholic, or Laudian nostalgia for the pre-reformation church. Instead, Ruin and Reformation shows how English protestants of all varieties—from Laudians to presbyterians—could, and did, feel ambivalence towards, and anxiety about, the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries and the other acts of protestant reform. The study therefore demonstrates that writerly misgivings about ruin and reformation need not necessarily signal an author’s opposition towards England’s reformation project. In so doing, Ruin and Reformation makes an important contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about the character of English protestantism in its formative century, revealing that doubts about religious destruction were as much a part of the grammar of English protestantism as expressions of popular support for iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel
Authors: Behr John
Published: March 2019

This is an inter-disciplinary work, bringing together historical scholarship (regarding the earliest readers of the Gospel of John), contemporary scriptural scholarship on John, and philosophy, specifically Michel Henry, a French Phenomenologist and another reader of John, to explore how the Incarnation relates to the Passion of Christ, and how we understand and speak of revelation, that is, the relationship between scriptural exegesis and theological discourse. In particular, the work shows how ‘incarnation’ is not an event now in the past, but rather the continuing embodiment of God in those who follow Christ in the present. Those who do so, moreover, are born into life as human beings, giving their assent to the project of God initiated in the opening verses of Scripture, ‘Let us make a human being in our image’. The intimate connection between theology and anthropology, centered in Christology, as this work demonstrates, illumines the nature and task of theology itself, bringing together the various disciplines drawn upon in this study.
History, Phenomenology, and Theology
Authors: Behr John
Published: March 2019

This chapter brings together the presentation of Michel Henry’s reading of John in Chapter Six with themes explored in the previous two parts of the work. In particular the connection is made in the concern of both theology and phenomenology with ‘apocalypse’, that is, ‘unveiling’, ‘revelation’, ‘appearance’. This unveiling results in a doubling: the way Scripture had been read before the Passion (as narratives about the past) and now in the light of the Passion (as speaking about Christ); and following this unveiling: the identity of Christ, no longer known as the son of Joseph and Mary, but the eternal Word of God; the Eucharist, which appears in the world to be bread and wine, but is consumed as the life-giving flesh of Christ; and ourselves, not simply as bodily children of our parents, but, as living flesh, sons and daughters of God, with a body not made by hands, eternal in the heavens. Sharing the Passion of Christ, recalled from absorption in the world to the pathos of life, is our entry, in and with Christ, into the divine reality of God, in which, while remaining what we are by nature, created beings, we share in the properties of God, uncreated and eternal, just as iron, when placed in a fire, remains what it is by nature but is now only known by the properties of the fire. And in turn, the divine fire, while remaining unchanged, is now embodied, but in a body no longer known by spatio-temporal properties as it appears in this world. The economy of God, understood in an apocalyptic key, brings together heaven and earth, the beginning and the end, in Christ, the first human being, the theanthropos.
Conclusion
Authors: Behr John
Published: March 2019

The Conclusion brings together the different threads spun during the course of this work to reflect on the nature and task of theology. Rather than seeing theology as the articulation of various doctrines, Trinity and Incarnation chief among them, and as a separate discipline from scriptural exegesis or phenomenological reflection, the conclusion argues that the subject of Christian theology is the Crucified and Exalted Jesus Christ, as preached by the apostles in accordance with Scripture, who, in the way in which he dies as a human being, shows us what it is to be God and human, simultaneously, so calling us to become human, as he is, and share in the life that he offers. This connection between theology and anthropology, centered in Christology, is compared to similar insights developed by Karl Barth and Karl Rahner.
Introduction: Budgeting in the UN System
Authors: Patz Ronny , Goetz Klaus H.
Published: March 2019

This chapter introduces the main debates that this book contributes to and outlines how various disciplines—Public Administration and International Relations, Public Policy and Political Economy—look at budgeting, and, in particular, how these relate to the changing system of international cooperation and of international organizations. Scholars and practitioners alike question how far states still come together in today’s IOs to prioritize solutions for global challenges and whether states are able to provide sufficient and reliable resources for IOs to address these matters. Nowhere is this as visible as in budgeting dynamics of IOs. This is evidenced in the shifts that United Nations system budgeting has faced for more than seven decades, most notably the change to the increased importance of earmarked voluntary contributions in the financing of present-day UN organizations.
We Got Along Splendid
Authors: Newell Quincy D.
Published: March 2019

After Joseph Smith’s death, Jane Manning worked for his successor, Brigham Young, and she married another black convert, Isaac James. When the Mormons left Nauvoo in 1846, Jane and Isaac James traveled with them. Jane James gave birth to her second child as they crossed Iowa. After spending the winter with other church members near Council Bluffs, the Jameses were in one of the first pioneer companies to enter the Salt Lake Valley, arriving in the fall of 1847. The Jameses initially made their home on land belonging to Brigham Young. Jane James gave birth to her third child in May 1848, just before the Mormons faced the first of several cricket infestations that would challenge their ability to raise crops in the Valley. Nevertheless, Jane James later recalled, she and her family “got along splendid” in their new home.
‘Panditji Knows Best’
Authors: Thakur Vineet
Published: March 2019

Unlike most other departments that made the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial regime, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) underwent a fundamental transition of both personnel and ideas. Although there existed three different Departments—the Commonwealth Relations Department and the External Affairs Department and the Commerce Department—which handled different aspects of foreign affairs, there were only four Indians who had served as diplomats abroad. Hence, it was not only the question of recruiting new staff, but also training them in a new skill, diplomacy. The chapter argues that there were five main reasons for the ideational weakness of the MEA in the first decade of Indian independence: the tendency towards greater bureaucratization, the lack of communication, the neglect of thinking on economic issues, the blind imitation of British protocols and policy traditions, and the lack of organizational unity. These factors contributed towards the weak foundations of the MEA.
From Pigmentocracy to Representocracy
Authors: Thakur Vineet
Published: March 2019

This chapter traces the post-apartheid transformation of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) in South Africa. It argues that in the first decade of transition, the Department remained preoccupied with the process of internal restructuring, which was successfully achieved. This caused structural pains as many of the old white diplomats left the service, robbing the Department of crucial expertise. In these years, the political leadership played a stronger role in the South African foreign policymaking. While Mandela’s foreign policy formulation was ad-hocist, Mbeki relied on institutional structures. However, rather than emphasizing on strengthening the DFA, he created new institutional structures under his integrated governance scheme which, ironically, further centralised foreign policymaking. Consequently, the DFA was further marginalized.
Time and Temporalizing Tactics II
Authors: Bajpai Anandita
Published: March 2019

The Chapter shows how a selective past is conjured to feed into, supplant the present of ‘Emerging India’. In this ordering of time, the simultaneity of breaking and bridging with a heritagized selective past is kept alive. The second section traces how the reforms are embedded in a temporal order, which is presented as something pre-ordained, even destined for India, how the speakers naturalize a particular sequence of events, which legitimize the change that the reforms embody as something pre-determined, even an act of providence. The third section focuses on the temporalizing tactics of the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi starting with the suggestive slogan Achche Din aane wale hain (Good Times/days are about to arrive) which hallmarked his electoral campaign of 2014. The slogan not only aptly captures the temporalizing mood of the campaign for the cause of electoral victory but its popularity also indicates how Modi himself became a popular brand through it, the prime mover and sole guarantor of good times.
Speaking the Nation ‘Secular’
Authors: Bajpai Anandita
Published: March 2019

This chapter shows how Prime Ministers have profiled India as ‘secular’ and how the discursive production of Indian secularity converges with the staging of India’s emergence, both for the ‘outside’ world as also for those deemed as ‘Indian’. It investigates how the PMs translate the paradigm of secularism to the Indian population by showing which vocabulary is adopted to lend credibility to this claim, as well as how the Indian state, through the addresses of the elected head, positions itself vis-à-vis the wider world through the same concept. It follows from the analysis that the paradigmatic notion of secularism constitutes an interface, ‘a common shared boundary’, a zone of contact between the perceived ‘internal’ and ‘external’. In internal settings, it acquires different ambivalent understandings which draw their resources from the Indian context of religious pluralism. In the external settings, the term is used as such to concretize the image of India as being in ideological cohesion with the world as an ‘emerging’ yet ‘secular’ democracy.
State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

How do people respond to a state that is violent towards its own citizens? In State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India, this question is addressed through insights offered by ethnographic explorations of everyday policing in Delhi and the anti-insurgency measures of the Indian army in Lakhipathar village in Assam. Battling the dominant understanding of the inverse connect between state legitimacy and use of violence, Santana Khanikar argues that use of violence does not necessarily detract from the legitimacy of the modern territorial nation-state. Based on extensive research of two sites, the book develops a narrative of how two facets of state violence, one commonly understood to be for routine maintenance of law and order and the other to be of extraordinary need for maintaining unity and integrity of the nation-state, often produce comparable responses. The book delves into the debates surrounding state–citizen relationship in India, while critically engaging with dominant notions of state legitimacy and its relation with use of violence by the state.
Bearing Witness
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

This chapter discusses conflict and violence in Lakhipathar, over a period of two decades, drawing on oral histories from the people of Lakhipathar. Listening to the narratives of past sufferings here has worked not merely a tool to know what happened to the narrators in the past but it also gives a key to analyse why and how they live in the present. Apart from offering evidence towards the larger argument of the work, this part of the book has also aimed towards opening a conversation on some buried and forgotten moments in the history of the Indian state that resemble what could be called an Agambenian ‘state of exception’. The dense narratives give a picture of the collaboration and deceit, revenge and violence, suspicion and fear in war-torn Lakhipathar and how the common people negotiated their ways through these.
Political Finance in a Developing Democracy
Authors: Sridharan Eswaran , Vaishnav Milan
Published: March 2019

This chapter surveys the legal and regulatory history of political finance in India, situating it in the context of India’s political economy. It devotes special attention to recent developments, including new reforms implemented by the Modi government in 2017. It also discusses possible areas of reform, including the regulation of political parties, which can lead to increased transparency and help the country break out of a corrupt equilibrium.
What Costs So Much in Indian Elections?
Authors: Chauchard Simon
Published: March 2019

This chapter focuses on what candidates concretely spend their money during presumably expensive campaigns. Specifically, it is interested in two questions. First, to what extent is this expenditure illegal—that is, unaccounted for officially? Second, and more importantly, to what extent is this illegal and unaccounted spending directed towards illegitimate tactics or tactics that potentially threaten the fairness of elections? Estimates from two recent campaigns suggest that gifts are neither the only nor the main reason why electoral campaigns are expensive in Mumbai. Other kinds of expenses, such as the short-term wages that candidates pay to their workers and to the crowds these workers in turn recruit, or even simply ‘politics as usual’ expenses, place equally important constraints on candidates. This suggests that the perceived increase in the cost of campaigns does not have one cause but several, and that the narrative assigning the rise in the cost of campaigns to increasingly illegitimate tactics may be simplistic, or simply erroneous.
Whose Money, Whose Influence? Multilevel Politics and Campaign Finance in India
Authors: Bussell Jennifer
Published: March 2019

Those who affect the outcomes of elections—via financial or means—often have greater access to elected officials. Yet, we frequently have little information about the dynamics of elections, let alone the relationship between campaigns and subsequent sway over officials. I draw on surveys of politicians to illuminate three key aspects of campaign dynamics in India: differences in campaign costs across levels of government; variations in funding sources across levels; and the role of various actors in providing other forms of campaign assistance. I find, first, that financial support from political parties is relevant only at high levels of elected office, whereas personal resources dominate at lower levels. Second, a substantial portion of all respondents highlights the role of illicit funds in campaigns. Finally, sources of non-financial assistance—for example, for voter mobilization—differ across levels of government.
Wielding Power in the Capital
Authors: Kaladharan Megha
Published: March 2019

Delhi’s electricity sector represents a case of privatization in the face of electoral populism. Publicly-supported privatization-based reform, introduced by the Congress government, yielded some service quality gains to customers and political advantage to the government. However, these reforms also sowed the seeds of future discontent by introducing tension between the credibility of reforms and that of the regulator. Reforms became politically unpopular, as the public was mobilized to protest tariff hikes and question the gains from reform. Moreover, financial pressures rose as a result of two forces: growing regulatory assets allowed by the regulator as a way of staving off tariff increases and increases in power purchase costs due to imprudent contract lock-in. A new AAP in government sought consumer gains through transparency-focused reform along with targeted subsidies, but this fell afoul of Delhi’s federal politics. Reform allowed Delhi to change the equation between politics and electricity, but not in a manner that was sustainable.
Extractive States and Layered Conflict
Authors: Chandra Rohit
Published: March 2019

Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar, and at the time of separation received an endowment of cheap power, sources of cheap natural resources (e.g. coal), and a large industrial customer base. However, the power sector has been treated as a source of rents through contracts rather than a source of political support, with successive unstable and short term governments following an extractive rather than developmental approach. Moreover, the industrial customer base was tied to private utilities and the Damodar Valley Corporation (a Government of Indian undertaking) and therefore was not available as a source of cross-subsidy. The net effect is that Jharkhand has been trapped in a low level equilibrium of low access and low political demand for access.
Protecting Power
Authors: Swain Ashwini K.
Published: March 2019

Punjab is a high-income state with a predominantly agrarian economy, the first in India to achieve universal village electrification and household access. Promises of free power for farmers came at a time when electricity constituted a substantial input in farm costs. Now, though, even as the economic significance of the subsidy has fallen and free power yields few electoral gains, no party in the state can risk eliminating the subsidy. In addition to cross-subsidy from industrial consumers, paying consumers are also charged increasing levels of cess and duties to balance the high cost of subsidies. Populist inertia strains the ability of any one actor to break from the status quo. On the supply-side, high-cost, long-term contracts signed over the last five years with private generators have curtailed the potential benefits of demand-side management (since far from curbing demand, the utility needs to encourage it) and renewable energy (with a supply glut, no one has an appetite for new sources of energy, however virtuous they may be).
Pathways to Parliament
Authors: Rai Shirin M. , Spary Carole
Published: March 2019

This chapter focuses on the different routes women political actors take to get to the Parliament. It outlines four such routes—kinship and family networks, social and political movements, the party system, and the struggle over quotas for women. Building on the methodological discussion of narrative structures, this chapter shows how through a close reading of the changes in the political environment of the country as well as of the life stories of women members of Parliament we can piece together the complex layers of negotiations that women make to be successful.
The Parliamentary Committee for the Empowerment of Women
Authors: Rai Shirin M. , Spary Carole
Published: March 2019

The chapter examines the working of the Committee for the Empowerment of Women as a politically gendered space and one which enables the substantive representation of women. It explores the gendered micro-politics of the only female-dominated committee in Parliament: the circumstances in which it was established, its functioning, how and why members are appointed, its subjects of investigation to date, the minority presence of male members on the committee, and the extent to which partisan politics has the potential to divide women member of Parliament on empowerment issues. It analyses the extent to which the committee is an effective body for linking women member of Parliament, the national machinery for women, and the women’s movement in India.
Follow the Money
Authors: Rai Shirin M. , Spary Carole
Published: March 2019

The chapter reflects upon the money–politics nexus in the Indian Parliament and parliamentary/electoral politics. It focuses attention on issues of corruption and on the effects of money on garnering resources for influence: election expenses, asset accumulation, and spending of MP Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS). The chapter assesses how money is seen and spent, on and by women MPs. The concern here is to examine how money plays a part in the gendered life of Parliament. While corruption in an important issue for accountability, the chapter shows how it is constructed in gendered ways. While women garner fewer monetary resources than men, they are not particularly less corrupt, or more sensitive to the demands of their constituencies. At the same time, public commentary on women’s role as members of Parliament is particularly harsh and intolerant of their shortcomings—perhaps because women are burdened with expectations of care in the way that male politicians are not.
Narratives of Politics and Leadership
Authors: Rai Shirin M. , Spary Carole
Published: March 2019

This chapter analyses whether narratives of politics and leadership that women members of Parliament employ and perform suggest that women’s precarious position within Parliament, party politics, and on the borders of the public and the private generate a vocabulary of service rather than leadership, which is seen as an appropriate characterisation of women’s public work. In order to study the subjectivation of women members of Parliament, the chapter analyses their subject narratives when they describe what they do, how others describe what they do, and how their roles are received by citizen audiences. In so doing, the chapter concludes that the subjectivation of women members of Parliament reflects, negotiates, and sometimes challenges gender relations that they encounter, perform, and sometimes defy.
Social Theory of Knowledge Production
Authors: Gurukkal Rajan
Published: March 2019

A concise representation of the social theory of knowledge production is the main task that we try and summarize in this chapter. Tracing the antecedents of social theories about the origins of knowledge by briefly reviewing the ideas of Giovanbattista Vico and Auguste Comte we focus on Karl Marx’s theory. Other theories explaining the social foundation of knowledge through multiple analyses of the influences of social affairs, conditions, and processes of human existence on the cognitive outputs have also been summarized.
Does Persuasion Occur?
Authors: Bromwich David
Published: March 2019

The question whether persuasion occurs is surprisingly hard to answer. J. L. Austin provided specimens of verbal formulae that perform actions in the course of being said or by virtue of having been said, and illustrations of this kind may be found in poetry as well as in ordinary speech. But impassioned speech itself may yield effects it could never have anticipated. We can be fairly sure they will happen, but we cannot accurately predict what they will be. Examples include the complex political influence traceable to Edmund Burke’s anti-revolutionary pamphlet A Letter to a Noble Lord, and the difficulty of knowing how to judge the characters in certain novels and stories by Henry James. The ascribed intention seems to depend on the personal experience or the aesthetic refinement of the reader, and often some combination of the two.
What Are We Allowed to Say?
Authors: Bromwich David
Published: March 2019

Liberty of thought and discussion, as it came to be understood in Europe and North America, arose from the schismatic energies of the Protestant reformation and the political idealisms of the Enlightenment. The uncertain future of the principle can be estimated by the spread of demands for codified speech and the widening context of recent proposals for censorship—proposals that are often advanced in the cause of cultural identity and sensitivity. Libertarian writings by Milton and Mill are pertinent for their emphasis on the connection between free speech and “moral courage,” and for their warning against the supposition that the future course of moral progress is already known to some people. The distinction between words and actions is worth preserving, as much as the distinction between persuasion and force. Censorship presumes an innocence in the censor that can never be humanly tenable.
Feminist Dialogues
Authors: Heathcote Gina
Published: March 2019

Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the core concerns of the text, including the arguments made regarding gender law reform as a marker of feminist successes in international law, the range of feminist methodologies deployed throughout the text, and the structure of the book as a whole. The chapter reviews contemporary gender law reform, as successes and as embedding feminist tensions, to consider future feminist dialogues on international law. Chapter 1 argues for the use of intersectional feminist approaches alongside a politics of difference to embed feminist methodologies alongside feminist messages within international law. The chapter also identifies queer, crip, postcolonial, transnational, and critical scholarship that might be drawn into feminist dialogues on law.
Authority
Authors: Heathcote Gina
Published: March 2019

Chapter 6 examines what authority is given to specific feminist actors to speak and what authority is imagined lying within the domain of legal acts. A study of the convergence of the women, peace, and security agenda and the counterterrorism agenda is offered in this chapter, as is a study of alternative sites of feminist engagement with law, from the use of protest in Uganda to the manipulation of digital spaces by Chinese feminist activists. Connecting to the larger theme of the book as a feminist dialogue, the chapter evolves into a study of how different discourses converge to give the author voice and authority, questioning whose silences that authority depends upon. The chapter draws upon Black British feminists and indigenous Australian authors to question white, Western feminist’s complicity in the production of privilege and to explore the steps that are necessary to commence feminist dialogues on international law.
The Qur'an and Late Antiquity
Authors: Neuwirth Angelika
Published: March 2019

The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage, the culminating summary of the work of the most prominent German scholar of the Qurʾan, provides an original introduction to the Qurʾan against the background of the plural religious and literary cultures of Late Antiquity. In order to bridge the polarity between understandings of the Qurʾan in the Islamic world and the West, the work offers a critical introduction to the study of the Qurʾan within Western scholarship, before employing a range of philological and historical methods to present a critical image of the history of the text’s emergence, redaction, and earliest “setting in life” within the community. Setting out and upholding a chronological understanding of the stages of the “proclamation” represented by the final, canonized text, Neuwirth sets forth an original philologically and historically informed reading of the text. This entails a detailed description of the stages of “communal formation” detectable behind the canonized text, as well as an exploration of the emergence of patterns of communal liturgy and ritual-textual practices reflected in the literary forms of the suras. The process of the text’s historical emergence is set carefully against the background of the other scriptural traditions into which it inscribes itself, and the relationships between the Koran and the text corpora of the Old and New Testaments, as well as to ancient Arabic poetry, are given detailed and original treatment. No work of this kind exists now in English: both thoroughly and critically aware of the body of Western research on the Koran, and based on a thorough and historically informed literary reading of the Koranic text.
Redaction and History of the Text
Authors: Neuwirth Angelika
Published: March 2019

In this chapter a detailed history of the redaction and earliest recording of the Qur’an text is given. This history allows the prominent theses about the historical emergence of the text to be examined, and provides a basis on which to interpret the “canonical” Uthmanic text of the Qur’an. Following this, the post-redactional history of the text is reviewed, offering a historical explanation of the processes that have led to the proliferation of the current standardized version. As one of the primary functions of the Qur’anic text is liturgical, standards of recitation have played a central role in the development of the form of the text.
Fight or flight? Potential tradeoffs between drought defense and reproduction in conifers
Authors: Lauder Jeffrey D , Moran Emily V , Hart Stephen C
Published: March 2019

Plants frequently exhibit tradeoffs between reproduction and growth when resources are limited, and often change these allocation patterns in response to stress. Shorter-lived plants such as annuals tend to allocate relatively more resources toward reproduction when stressed, while longer-lived plants tend to invest more heavily in survival and stress defense. However, severe stress may affect the fitness implications of allocating relatively more resources to reproduction versus stress defense. Increased drought intensity and duration have led to widespread mortality events in coniferous forests. In this review, we ask how potential tradeoffs between reproduction and survival influence the likelihood of drought-induced mortality and species persistence. We propose that trees may exhibit what we call ‘fight or flight’ behaviors under stress. ‘Fight’ behaviors involve greater resource allocation toward survival (e.g., growth, drought-resistant xylem and pest defense). ‘Flight’ consists of higher relative allocation of resources to reproduction, potentially increasing both offspring production and mortality risk for the adult. We hypothesize that flight behaviors increase as drought stress escalates the likelihood of mortality in a given location.
Beyond the extreme: recovery of carbon and water relations in woody plants following heat and drought stress
Authors: Ruehr Nadine K , Grote Rüdiger , Mayr Stefan , Arneth Almut
Published: March 2019

Plant responses to drought and heat stress have been extensively studied, whereas post-stress recovery, which is fundamental to understanding stress resilience, has received much less attention. Here, we present a conceptual stress-recovery framework with respect to hydraulic and metabolic functioning in woody plants. We further synthesize results from controlled experimental studies following heat or drought events and highlight underlying mechanisms that drive post-stress recovery. We find that the pace of recovery differs among physiological processes. Leaf water potential and abscisic acid concentration typically recover within few days upon rewetting, while leaf gas exchange-related variables lag behind. Under increased drought severity as indicated by a loss in xylem hydraulic conductance, the time for stomatal conductance recovery increases markedly. Following heat stress release, a similar delay in leaf gas exchange recovery has been observed, but the reasons are most likely a slow reversal of photosynthetic impairment and other temperature-related leaf damages, which typically manifest at temperatures above 40 °C. Based thereon, we suggest that recovery of gas exchange is fast following mild stress, while recovery is slow and reliant on the efficiency of repair and regrowth when stress results in functional impairment and damage to critical plant processes. We further propose that increasing stress severity, particular after critical stress levels have been reached, increases the carbon cost involved in reestablishing functionality. This concept can guide future experimental research and provides a base for modeling post-stress recovery of carbon and water relations in trees.
Proliferation of Recombinant PVY Strains in Two Potato-Producing Regions of Canada, and Symptom Expression in 30 Important Potato Varieties with Different PVY Strains
Authors: MacKenzie Tyler D. B. , Nie Xianzhou , Bisht Vikram , Singh Mathuresh
Published: March 2019

Potato virus Y (PVY) exists as several strains with distinct symptomology and tuber yield effects in different potato varieties. Recently, new recombinant strains have proliferated and dominated local populations around the world. In this study, PVYO, PVYN:O, PVYN-Wi, and PVYNTN strains were tracked across Canada from 2014 to 2017, showing rapid evolution of populations away from the traditionally dominant PVYO to recombinants PVYN-Wi (western Canada) and PVYNTN (eastern Canada). Simultaneously, 30 potato varieties were inoculated with PVYO, PVYN:O, and PVYNTN in controlled greenhouse experiments. Foliar symptoms of primary (mechanical inoculation mimicking aphid infection) and secondary (tuber seedborne) infection were cataloged, and tuber yield measured. On average, and generally similar in primary and secondary infection, symptom expression and yield reduction were most severe with PVYO, followed by PVYN:O and PVYNTN. Strong mosaic symptoms were most commonly expressed with PVYO infection, and only seen with PVYN:O or PVYNTN in 15 and 3 varieties, respectively. Across variety–strain combinations, yield reduction was correlated with symptom severity, most strongly in PVYO-infected plants (e.g., AC Chaleur, Beljade, Envol, Norland, and Pacific Russet), and four varieties exhibited tuber necrotic ringspot disease with PVYNTN (AC Chaleur, Envol, Pacific Russet, and Yukon Gold).
Novel Sources of Resistance to Root-Lesion Nematode (Pratylenchus thornei) in a New Collection of Wild Cicer Species (C. reticulatum and C. echinospermum) to Improve Resistance in Cultivated Chickpea (C. arietinum)
Authors: Reen Roslyn A. , Mumford Michael H. , Thompson John P.
Published: March 2019

Pratylenchus thornei, a nematode species that feeds and reproduces in chickpea (Cicer arietinum) roots, is widespread throughout the Mediterranean basin and Indian subcontinent. In Australia, it can cause yield losses up to approximately 25% of intolerant chickpea cultivars. Potential for improvement has been hindered by the narrow genetic diversity of cultivated chickpea and a limited world collection of original wild Cicer spp. in the primary gene pool, consisting of 18 C. reticulatum and 10 C. echinospermum accessions. Recently, collections of C. reticulatum and C. echinospermum from Turkey have substantially increased the number of accessions. This study evaluated 133 C. reticulatum and 41 C. echinospermum accessions from the new collection for resistance to P. thornei under controlled conditions in repeated glasshouse pot experiments. The aim of the study was to identify accessions with resistance superior to that currently available in Australian germplasm. Both wild Cicer spp. were found, on average, to be more resistant to P. thornei (P < 0.001) than C. arietinum. Combined analyses across experiments to determine genetic rankings showed that 13 (7%) wild accessions were significantly more resistant than the most resistant C. echinospermum reference ILWC 246, while another 40 (23%) accessions were significantly more resistant than the least susceptible Australian chickpea cultivar PBA Seamer. Mean P. thornei population densities differed significantly between collection sites in Turkey and within each of the genetic population groups. The sites Kayatepe and Baristepe1, and genetic population groups Ret_A and Ret_F associated with sites Oyali and Baristepe1, produced the lowest P. thornei population densities. This is the first report assessing the resistance to P. thornei of this new collection which offers novel sources of P. thornei resistance and untapped genetic diversity valuable for international chickpea breeding programs to exploit.
Identifying Predictors of Higher Acute Care Costs for Patients With Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury and Modeling Acute Care Pathway Redesign: A Record Linkage Study
Authors: Vaikuntam Bharat Phani , Middleton James Walter , McElduff Patrick , Connelly Luke , Pearse Jim , Stanford Ralph , Walsh John , Sharwood Lisa Nicole
Published: March 2019

Study Design.

Record linkage study using healthcare utilization and costs data.

Objective.

To identify predictors of higher acute-care treatment costs and length of stay for patients with traumatic spinal cord injury (TSCI).

Summary of Background Data.

There are few current or population-based estimates of acute hospitalization costs, length of stay, and other outcomes for people with TSCI, on which to base future planning for specialist SCI health care services.

Methods.

Record linkage study using healthcare utilization and costs data; all patients aged more than or equal to 16 years with incident TSCI in the Australian state of New South Wales (June 2013–June 2016). Generalized Linear Model regression to identify predictors of higher acute care treatment costs for patients with TSCI. Scenario analysis quantified the proportionate cost impacts of patient pathway modification.

Results.

Five hundred thirty-four incident cases of TSCI (74% male). Total cost of all acute index episodes approximately AUD$40.5 (95% confidence interval [CI] ±4.5) million; median cost per patient was AUD$45,473 (Interquartile Range: $15,535–$94,612). Patient pathways varied; acute care was less costly for patients admitted directly to a specialist spinal cord injury unit (SCIU) compared with indirect transfer within 24 hours. Over half (53%) of all patients experienced at least one complication during acute admission; their care was less costly if they had been admitted directly to SCIU. Scenario analysis demonstrated that a reduction of indirect transfers to SCIU by 10% yielded overall cost savings of AUD$3.1 million; an average per patient saving of AUD$5,861.

Conclusion.

Direct transfer to SCIU for patients with acute TSCI resulted in lower treatment costs, shorter length of stay, and less costly complications. Modeling showed that optimizing patient-care pathways can result in significant acute-care cost savings. Reducing potentially preventable complications would further reduce costs and improve longer-term patient outcomes.

Level of Evidence: 3