bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Traditional Computing
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

Alice and Bob explain the difference between classical (traditional) computing and quantum computing, deploying a gentle introduction to classical binary digits (bits) beginning with a brief history of the development of quantum mechanics and computer architecture. The abstract backbone of classical computing is logic gates, which represent changes to input bits under specific rules. These rules, governed by Boolean, logic can be summarized in truth tables, giving the output values for specific input values. The most common classical gates—NOT, AND, NAND, and XOR gates—are introduced. The vocabulary of classical computing provides the basis for understanding quantum computing.
Traditional Bits in New Clothing
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

After a quick review of Chapter 2’s bits and gates, Bob and Alice introduce Cardy to several concepts and symbolic representations that will be of crucial importance in understanding quantum computing: state vectors, pictorial representations of state vectors, and simple mathematical forms that help us manipulate and reason about state vectors. State vectors may be represented by arrows in a state space diagram. States may also be represented more abstractly using Dirac notation symbols |⟩. Logic gates, critically important for carrying out computational work, can be represented by mathematical objects called matrices. States are represented by column vectors. Everything you need to know about matrices is presented over just a few pages.
Qubits and Quantum States
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

The quantum equivalent of bits—qubits—can be implemented with common quantum objects such as photons (light), electrons, atoms, as well as with manufactured quantum systems such as superconducting electrical circuits. Emphasizing that the term qubit will be reserved for the physical quantum objects, Alice and Bob use polarized light as a paradigmatic qubit system. They show how everyday observations using polarizing sunglasses can illustrate basic features of polarized light, which has been widely used to demonstrate many fundamental aspects of QIS. Alice and Bob introduce the key concept of quantum state vectors and describe three ways to represent quantum states: (1) arrows in state space, (2) Dirac notation symbols that are important for the formal mathematical manipulation of quantum states, and (3) collections of 1s and 0s grouped in columns or rows. Cardy learns about both the mathematical and the physical meanings of orthogonal (perpendicular) state vectors and superposition states.
Quantum Gates and Quantum Circuits
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

Quantum gates, equivalent to logic gates, operate on and modify the state vectors. Alice and Bob explain what quantum gates do and illustrate their action on states describing a single qubit. These gates include the NOT gate, the Pauli gates, and the Hadamard gate. The operations of the gates are represented both as abstract symbols and by matrices multiplying state vectors (expressed as column vectors). Alice and Bob also provide a simple introduction to some of the mathematical aspects of quantum gates and what happens when several gates act successively on the state describing a qubit, a feature which appears again and again in quantum computing. Cardy wants to know how quantum measurements are related to quantum gates. Alice and Bob point out important differences between measurement devices and quantum gates. Those differences foreshadow the deep conceptual divide between quantum and classical physics.
Multi-Qubit Systems, Entanglement, and Quantum Weirdness
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

Quantum state entanglement is a crucial ingredient in many quantum algorithms. This chapter introduces the description of multi-qubit quantum systems and then explains what it means to say the state of that system is entangled. If the quantum state of the system is an entangled state, none of the constituents of the system are described by their own individual states. For a two-qubit entangled state, measurements of one of the qubits apparently affect the measurement results of the other even though the two qubits may be far apart. The change in basis states, introduced in Chapter 8, is applied to a two-qubit system, which will be used to illustrate Bell’s theorem. That theorem tells us that the quantum description of the world profoundly violates almost every concept we have about material properties and the measurement of those properties.
Quantum Circuits and Multi-Qubit Applications
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

The devices that carry out manipulations on qubit states are called quantum circuits, built from collections of quantum gates. Alice and Bob describe several two-qubit quantum gates and illustrate their actions on quantum states. They show that it is impossible to clone an unknown quantum state—the so-called No-Cloning Theorem. That theorem severely limits an eavesdropper’s ability to listen in on quantum communications without being detected. Alice and Bob then introduce and explain in detail two quantum communications algorithms: Superdense Coding (transmitting two bits of classical information with only one qubit) and Quantum State Teleportation (the ability to send enough information over a long distance to reconstruct a quantum state). Each of these applications highlights the book’s leitmotif of state preparation, state manipulation, and state measurement.
More Quantum Algorithms
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

This chapter explores in detail the Grover search algorithm, which finds a basis state that has been “tagged” by making its amplitude negative, while the amplitudes of all the other basis states are positive. The analysis provides answers to important questions: How many steps are needed to find the tagged state? What is the probability of identifying the tagged state after a specified number of steps? The answers to those questions show the advantages of the quantum algorithm over the corresponding classical one. Alice and Bob introduce quantum error correction, which is needed for practical QCs because qubits interact with their environments in uncontrollable ways. It is important to detect when those “errors” occur and to correct them. The chapter concludes with an introduction to computational chemistry, algorithms used to find the energy and structures of molecular configurations. This application is likely to revolutionize materials science and the discovery of new drugs, to mention just two examples.
Complexifying Quantum States
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

This chapter explains why complex numbers are important for more general quantum mechanical situations. The complex exponential function, aka Euler’s formula, plays a critical role in expressing phase differences between components of a quantum state vector. These phase differences affect the outcome of quantum operations. The Bloch sphere and Bloch vector provide a visual representation of these more complex quantum states with the real and imaginary parts on different axes. The complex exponential is important in the quantum Fourier transform, which is then used to prove an important result for finding the repetition period in the Shor algorithm.
Present and Future QIS and QC
Authors: Flarend Alice , Hilborn Bob
Published: June 2022

Alice and Bob describe currently available physical systems to be used as quantum qubits. While the quantitative physics is beyond the scope of this book, they give a brief qualitative explanation of the physics of those qubits. The difference between QC and QIS is briefly delineated, including the possibility of a quantum internet. They also explain a variety of other QC and QIS issues including programming quantum computers, future qubits, new QC architectures, machine learning, and AI. They also raise several ethical issues facing QC and QIS and point to information about careers in QC and QIS.
Life, Death, and the Western Way of War
Authors: Zambernardi Lorenzo
Published: June 2022

The book traces when and how western soldiers—once regarded as simple fighting tools—became the far less expendable beings that we know today. In Kant’s terms, the study traces the process through which soldiers have been turned from mere military means into ends in themselves. The book argues that such a major transformation is largely the result of a shift in the social meaning ascribed to soldier deaths. It will be suggested that looking at death can somehow provide a privileged angle to understanding the value that societies attach to life. The narrative emerging from the empirical evidence will show that the story of attitudes towards soldier deaths is the story of a gradual, increasing process of individualization in the social meaning attached to human loss in war. Such a development, which took centuries to emerge in full, was neither simple nor linear. It was a process that the state was temporarily able to frame in the collective narrative of the nation, but which ultimately has seen the increasing importance of the life of the individual soldier. In tracing the process through which soldiers have been turned from an amorphous collective into distinct individuals, this book shows how the emphasis on the primacy of the individual has further eroded the effectiveness of western warfare as an instrument of foreign policy. In particular, the modern, liberal conception of the soldier has had the unintended consequence of jeopardizing the Clausewitzian relationship between military means and political ends.
Introduction
Authors: Zambernardi Lorenzo
Published: June 2022

The Introduction sets the stage for the theoretical and historical analysis. In particular, it presents the research question (that is, when and how western soldiers became the far less expendable beings that we know today) and outlines the main arguments of the book: warfare is permeated by attitudes towards life and death, and the history and current reality of war are themselves the result of these changing attitudes. After identifying the gaps in the relevant scholarship, I briefly discuss the main driver concerning attititudes towards military deaths (that is, the emergence of the modern individual) and some of its most important consequences for western warfare. Then, the chapter describes the longue durée mode of enquiry employed in the book, which emphasizes the value of a cross-disciplinary, long-range vision of the past for understanding complex contemporary phenomena. Finally, the chapter provides a description of the method and organization of the volume.
Sacrificial Death
Authors: Zambernardi Lorenzo
Published: June 2022

Chapter 3 discusses the changes that took place between the mid-nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that a radical modification took place in the meaning attached to soldier deaths. Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a different pattern emerged. Western states started to celebrate the ordinary war dead as national heroes whose sacrifice was publicly recognized and commemorated. It was in that period that the deaths of soldiers ceased to be politically and socially meaningless and started to have public importance with monuments and other forms of commemoration. Moreover, in that period the dead body of a soldier was invested with a value that cannot be deduced from its corporeality. Not only—unlike the early modern period—did states begin to have cemeteries built for their war dead, but when feasible they also provided the fallen with individual tombs.
Conclusions
Authors: Copenhaver Brian P.
Published: June 2022

Since the middle of the last century, textbooks written for college students have promoted only one Pico, purportedly a hero of progressive humanism. But his stance in the Conclusions and Apology, which were products of late medieval culture, was in no way progressive. The familiar, forward-looking Pico did not write the Apology. The grim scene of his book, his report on a battle for life and honor, was the proximate medieval past where human history was despised as the annals of sin. To understand Pico’s universe of dismal expectations, our best guide is his Apology. But the author did not choose his book’s topics, and its theories were not his own. He learned them from medieval teachers like Robert Holcot.
Editors’ Introduction
Authors: Allen Jason Grant , Hunn Peter
Published: June 2022

This chapter outlines the genesis of, and background to, the volume as the first interdisciplinary exposition of the ‘smart legal contract’. In doing so, it provides an assessment of many of the critical issues that arise from the interface between law and technology as they pertain to computational contracts. Topics include notable developments in law and practice, the issues of ‘smart contract’ terminology and ostensible extra-legality, and the emerging techno-legal concept of the ‘smart legal contract’. Allen and Hunn proceed to frame the ‘smart legal contract’ as a ‘contract stack’ combining human-readable and machine-readable artefacts capable of being arranged to incorporate both the traditional recordation functions of written contracts with software-based operationalization of contractual obligations. The future development of terminology is suggested. The chapter concludes by introducing the author chapters and their contribution to the volume as a landmark in the literature on computational contracting.
Why the Ricardian Contract Came About
Authors: Grigg Ian
Published: June 2022

This chapter sets out some critical reflections on the creation of the ‘Ricardian Contract’, the most direct antecedent for the ‘smart legal contract’, and more recent developments in blockchain-based ‘smart contracts’. In the halcyon days of 1995, Ian Grigg looked for a way to capture the nature of financial agreements in order to create an instrument that could be traded on the Internet. By way of the zero coupon bond, he discovered that the legal prose contract is close to the semantic essence of all financial instruments; the way to issue any instrument reduces to the way to capture any contract, digitally and cryptographically. The Ricardian Contract emerged as the design pattern for that capture: a human-readable, contractually significant document, digitally signed and including sufficient but simple markup tokens such that a computer program could extract out the handful of important values including face, rates, issuer, etc. The document could then be hashed cryptographically, providing a secure, unique, and cost-free identifier. With Bitcoin’s drive to decentralize all of finance, the design pattern is now emerging as the way to efficiently tie a legal intent into a financial agreement.
A Model for the Integration of Machine Capabilities into Contracts
Authors: Blycha Natasha , Garside Ariane
Published: June 2022

This chapter sets out a model for the integration of computer code and natural language into a technically functional and legally enforceable contract. It proposes a formal definition of ‘smart legal contract’ for the purposes of scoping this model, and within the model identifies key attributes that require a different approach to that of traditional contracting. This framework is then applied to consider some legal principles and practical methodologies for ensuring that neither the legal nor code elements undermine the other’s fitness for purpose and effectiveness in their respective domains of operation. In this regard, there is a need for mechanisms of governance in the natural language over the status and effect of coded elements. These mechanisms focus on the linking and integration of natural language to related code, and so also have the effect of enhancing the drafter’s ability to ensure the parties’ agreement is enhanced rather than hampered by the inclusion of code. This model will result in a viable legal contract with enhanced functional (‘smart’) capabilities that digitally automate the performance of certain (but not all) rights and obligations via the inclusion of coded instructions.
Six Levels of Contract Automation
Authors: Wilkinson Susannah , Giuffre Jacques
Published: June 2022

This chapter proposes a framework to assist development of legally enforceable automation of contractual performance by considering the digital evolution of contracts and, primarily, the question of what digital functionality is required of a contract for it to become a ‘smart legal contract’. It explores this distinction and orients it within the broader paradigm of a legal-led approach to digitalization and automation of contracts at different stages of the contract life cycle. Analysis is assisted by reference to the Blycha & Garside Model requirements for smart legal contracts. It studies the different characteristics of contracts along a proposed spectrum of contract automation by describing a conceptual model of levels of digitalization and resulting potential for automation of contracts, drawing analogies with the SAE International J3016 ‘Levels of Automation’ model for autonomous vehicles. It analysis example features of contracts for each level of contract automation and how these interact with specialized digital platforms. It considers proposed requirements of digital infrastructure or enterprise platforms intended to support smart legal contracts. Law is not immune from the forces of digital transformation (nor is the legal industry). In order to leverage the benefits of automation, digital connectivity, and the generation and processing of structured data in everyday business transactions, lawyers need to understand the implications of contractual obligations being expressed in machine-executable form and interacting with specialized digital platforms and infrastructure.
Smart Contracts as Execution Instead of Expression
Authors: Tjin Tai Eric Tjong
Published: June 2022

This chapter elucidates the position of smart contracts from the perspective of contracts as a means of connecting execution to human intentions, and draws several conclusions with regards to the consequences and limitations of the use of smart contracts. Contracts presume a human execution chain: humans interpret the contractual rules to realize the contract through actions. Interpretation functions as a means of making execution conform to party expectations, with the help of contractual terms in human-readable form, corrected by contract law. Smart contracts offer an alternative, an automated execution chain. This does not remove the need for translating party expectations into a specification of actions (the contract). It does imply that the specification is liberated from the need to be readable by humans. Consequentially, this chapter argues that the smart contract has no expressive force as to its actions: the impression given by the code to a human reader has no intrinsic connection to what the smart contract will do. As a result, smart contracts can execute contracts without exactly following contract law doctrines, although parties probably expect smart contracts to broadly conform to contract law as protecting background expectations. Smart contracts are limited in only following background expectations that have explicitly been programmed: they are unable to follow the precise, case-based and ex-post decided way in which equity and fairness operate as correctives. Parties to a smart contract should realize that they lose ex-post control such as unfair terms protection.
Techno-Legal Supertoys
Authors: Herian Robert
Published: June 2022

This chapter explores the interparty electronic agreements known as ‘smart contracts’ against the established boundaries of contract law and theory. Underpinning the question of characterization are three overlapping legal and extra-legal factors. The first concerns legitimacy, in law and fact, of smart contract agreements. Second are uncertainties regarding applicable remedies at law and in equity. And third, fetishization of the perfectibility and legal certainty of smart contracts by technologists and other stakeholders that risks undermining and impoverishing contracts as socio-legal institutions and processes. Set against the backdrop of a fetishistic techno-legal imaginary in which smart contracts echo science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss’ conception of ‘supertoys’, this chapter argues that legal legitimacy and certainty of smart contracts rests on fundamental principles of contract law and theory, not on quasi-legal conditions determined by the limits of coding and design. Rooted in centuries of contract law and theory are expectations of right and wrong, including a need to incorporate remedies demanded for the intellectual, social, and procedural life of contracts and contracting to function reasonably. Far from intelligent ‘solutions’ to longstanding ‘problems’ and complexities of contracting, smart contract design today is too simplistic and risks lowering standards by deliberately ignoring critical pieces of the jigsaw of contract law and theory. This begs whether smart contracts have the potential to supplement or, in time, supersede traditional contract law.
Beyond Human
Authors: Koepsell David
Published: June 2022

Documentality is a theory of social reality proposed by philosopher Maurizio Ferraris. Barry Smith and David Koepsell have previously written about some of the theory’s shortcomings in accounting for edge cases, specifically where social objects arise and may continue to exist without any ‘inscriptions’, and how computers have complicated the notion of inscriptions in general. In this chapter, the technology of smart contracts is described as providing additional challenges to documentality, but the theory of documentality is proposed as suggesting some sound design principles for smart contracts and the digital objects that may yet be possible where documents become computable and even potentially, true artificial agents. Legal rules and classifications will require adjustment to account for the manners of existence of the social objects and agents that are considered, and references to elements of documentality are potentially important for such a framework.
Dispute Resolution for the Digital Economy
Authors: Morgan Charlie , Livingston Dorothy , Moir Andrew
Published: June 2022

The novel characteristics of distributed ledger technology (‘DLT’) and ‘smart legal contracts’ (‘SLCs’) make it essential for parties to think carefully about how disputes arising in this context will be resolved. Put simply, codification and self-execution of parties’ agreements will not do away with disputes, and conflict of law questions can be very complicated in the absence of express dispute resolution mechanics within the SLC itself or the governance framework of the relevant DLT ecosystem. Many users of DLT are keen to resolve disputes ‘on chain’, avoiding recourse to traditional courts or tribunals. This trend is diving a new wave of Online Dispute Resolution (‘ODR’) tools. However, notwithstanding the potential benefits of efficiently enforcing ODR decisions ‘on-chain’ as a matter of practice, it is crucial to consider how those decisions can be anchored (and enforced or protected) within a valid domestic or international legal framework. It is no good to have a self-executing ODR process ‘on-chain’ which can be wholly unwound if a dissatisfied party takes the matter to a domestic court. This chapter summarizes the basic concepts related to ODR, DLT, smart contracts, and SLCs, reviews the possibility of resolving DLT disputes through new and established ODR processes, and explores the promise and challenges of DLT-based ODR solutions currently available. It comments on the need for greater multi-disciplinary collaboration at the interface of law and technology to build legally robust ODR processes that are fit for the digital economy and will enable and promote more mainstream adoption of DLT.
Interceding for the Lost
Authors: Wessling Jordan
Published: June 2022

Interspersed throughout Christian Scripture, liturgy, and tradition are instances of the admonition to pray for the salvation of others. A natural interpretation of such prayers is that one is petitioning God to save certain individuals, or at least to make efforts toward their salvation. So understood, one is asking God to perform some salvific action in response to the request—where, roughly speaking, God is thought to answer a request if the request plays an essential and significant role in explaining why God performed the requested action. However, the idea that God answers prayers for the salvation of others in this way generates certain problems concerning God’s goodness as well as the role human free will plays within the salvation process. This chapter offers an account of the value of God’s decreeing a system wherein He answers prayers for the salvation of others that eludes such problems.
Praying in the Name of Christ
Authors: Gordon James R.
Published: June 2022

This chapter argues that Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “mystical” account of prayer offers a viable theological and philosophical alternative to traditional accounts of so-called “petitionary” prayer. To substantiate this claim, the chapter (i) situates the practice of prayer in its analytic context, (ii) responds to objections to the claim that analytic theology has nothing to offer to an account of prayer, (iii) examines two frequently applied philosophical and theological methodologies (the “from below” and “from above” approaches) used in discussions of prayer, and (iv) provides a third way forward found in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s constructive account of prayer, which walks the fine line between a “magical” view, on the one hand, and an “empirical” view, on the other. It then highlights the key features of Schleiermacher’s account of prayer (as found in his The Christian Faith and sermon “The Power of Prayer in Relation to Outward Circumstances”), noting the connection of Schleiermacher’s view to other theological loci and responding to potential objections to and tensions in the described “mystical” view.
Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge
Authors: Green Adam
Published: June 2022

There is a long history in philosophy and, indeed, in everyday life of thinking that we have privileged access to our own mind. Who has a right to tell me what you feel if not you? And who can better relate what I believe but me? Surely, there is something odd about my asking you what I believe, or you asking me what you feel. Teresa of Avila, in contrast, claims that prayer is the road to self-knowledge. This chapter tries to make plausible that prayer provides us with a unique and privileged path to self-knowledge, one whose strengths complement and contrast nicely with introspection. To this end, the first section explores some of Teresa’s thoughts on prayer and self-knowledge in Interior Castle and The Book of Her Life. The second section then uses the analytic philosopher Richard Moran’s insightful discussion of self-knowledge and the first-person perspective to lay out some of the limitations of unaided introspection as a guide to self-knowledge and so show how thinking of prayer as a (if not the) path to self-knowledge transforms the conclusions of Moran’s discussion.
Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging
Authors: Roy Anupama
Published: June 2022

Law must be seen not simply as bare provisions but examined for the ideological practices that validate it and lay claims to its enforceability. Successive amendments in the citizenship law in India have spawned distinct regimes of citizenship. These regimes manifest a movement from jus soli to jus sanguinis through a complex process of entrenchment of exclusionary nationhood under the veneer of liberal citizenship. This work argues that the contemporary landscape of citizenship in India is dominated by the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The CAA 2019 and the NRC emerged as distinct tendencies from the amendment in the Citizenship Act in 2003. These tendencies subsequently become conjoined in an ideological alignment to make citizenship and belonging dependent on lineage and blood ties. The extraordinary legal regime of citizenship spawned by the NRC was justified by invoking the spectre of ‘crisis’ in citizenship precipitated by indiscriminate immigration, and the risks presented by ‘illegal migrants’. The CAA provides for exceptions in this regime by making religion the criterion of distinguishability. The CAA and NRC together constitute a regime of ‘bounded citizenship’ which assumes that citizenship is a natural and constitutive identity. The ideological apparatus of Hindutva has buttressed this regime, eroding the foundational principles of secular-constitutionalism that characterized Indian citizenship in 1949.
Recalling Citizenship
Authors: Roy Anupama
Published: June 2022

This chapter looks at the spate of protests against the CAA/NRC from December 2019 to March 2020 when the pandemic put in place a different order of public life. The title ‘recalling citizenship’ refers to what was being recalled in these movements, that is, the constitutional ethics of citizenship that informed the constituent moment, and the invocation of constitutional morality which B. R. Ambedkar considered indispensable for the durability of constitutional democracy. Describing this period as one of enhanced consciousness about citizenship, the chapter focuses on specific sites of protests that became iconic elaborations of dissident citizenship. The chapter raises the question why the Constitution of India became emblematic of an idiom of politics which was insurgent and democratic at the same time. In contexts of politics of domination, in which citizenship is itself under siege—dissident citizenship demands, in particular, the restoration of equality as the non-negotiable foundational premise of democracy. Yet, this process of restoration is a fraught one, and has to contend with competing ideas and claims to what it means to be a citizen.
Knowledge
Authors: Aradau Claudia , Blanke Tobias
Published: June 2022

From the ‘needle in a haystack’ to microtargeting, big data and its algorithmic operations have produced new modes of knowledge for the government of individuals and populations. Big data has sparked much anxiety about the ways in which traditional modes of knowledge have been unsettled or even undone. Starting from the scene of the Cambridge Analytica scandal about the use of digital data in elections around the world, the first chapter explores controversies over what can be made algorithmically knowable and how. We show that a different political rationality of governing individuals and populations is at stake, which promises to surmount the great methodological and epistemological divides of individual/population, part/whole, large/small. We argue that it is the decomposition and recomposition of the small and the large that constitutes the political rationality of algorithmic governing. This rationality of recomposing the small and the large also recasts the distinction between speech and action so that a new mode of ‘truth-doing’ rather than ‘truth-telling’ becomes constitutive of algorithmic reason.
Conclusion
Authors: Aradau Claudia , Blanke Tobias
Published: June 2022

In the Conclusion, we discuss the compound political implications of an ascendant algorithmic reason. What vocabularies have become available to us to render the rationalities and materializations of algorithmic reason? How can algorithmic reason be politicized? Even as the conditions of political action become more limiting through algorithmic reason, we argue that frictions, refusals, and resistances can reconfigure political interventions in the sense of facing up to governing by algorithms. We situate the analyses of friction, refusal, and resistance within a broader mapping of contestation, controversy, and democratic politics. As controversies over algorithms, data, and artificial intelligence unfold, scenes of controversy can also become worksites of democracy in the sense of what Étienne Balibar has called the ‘democratization of democracy’.
Caste and Partition in Bengal
Authors: Bandyopadhyay Sekhar , Basu Ray Chaudhury Anasua
Published: June 2022

This book situates caste as a discursive category in the discussion of Partition in Bengal. In conventional narratives of Partition, the role of the Dalit or the Scheduled Castes is either completely ignored or mentioned in passing. This book addresses this discursive absence and argues that in Bengal, the Dalits were neither passive onlookers nor accidental victims of Partition politics and violence, which ruptured their unity and weakened their political autonomy. Indeed, they were the worst victims of Partition. When the Dalit peasants of Eastern Bengal began to migrate to India after 1950, they were seen as a ‘burden’ for the frail economy of West Bengal, and the Indian state did not provide them with a proper rehabilitation package. They were first segregated into fenced refugee camps where life was unbearable, and then dispersed to other parts of India—first to the Andaman Islands and the neighbouring states, and then to the inhospitable terrains of Dandakaranya, where they could be used as cheap labour for various development projects. This book looks critically at their participation in Partition politics, the reasons for their migration three years after Partition, their insufferable life and struggles in the refugee camps, their negotiations with caste and gender identities in these new environments, their organised protests against camp maladministration, and finally their satyagraha campaigns against the Indian state’s refugee dispersal policy. This book looks at how refugee politics impacted Dalit identity and protest movements in post-Partition West Bengal.
Conclusion
Authors: Bandyopadhyay Sekhar , Chaudhury Anasua Basu Ray
Published: June 2022

This book argues that the Dalits in Bengal were neither unmindful spectators nor accidental victims of Partition politics and associated violence in the fateful years of 1946–47. The Dalit peasants of East Bengal, mostly Namasudras, did not migrate immediately after the Partition, but only after the riots of 1950. Their experiences of migration, life in the refugee camps, subsequent dispersal across India for rehabilitation, and betrayal by all the mainstream political parties made the Bengali Dalit peasant refugees the worst victims of Partition. And this victimhood was not accidental or random but targeted. They were treated differently by the Indian state, as a convergence of inferior caste and class positions constituted their marginality and expendability. As they became refugees, their main struggle was for rehabilitation and citizenship, and their main protests were against the dispersal policy of the state. The issues of caste identity and discrimination disappeared from the discourse of that refugee movement. Dispersal further reduced their spatial ability to mobilise. As a result of this chequered historical trajectory of the Namasudra community—one of the main powerhouses behind the organised Scheduled Caste movement in the colonial period—that movement temporarily disappeared from public space in post-Partition West Bengal. This did not mean that the caste question was resolved. The book does not claim that Partition was the only reason for the enigmatic disappearance of caste movements in post-colonial West Bengal, but it was certainly one of the major factors. The resurgence of these movements in recent years shows that these were never completely defeated either.
Gender and the Dharmas of Singleness, Marriage, and Desire
Authors: Vanita Ruth
Published: June 2022

This chapter explores the questions of whether a woman can be single, whether women and men are inherently different, whether female and male desire is different, and whether old women experience sexual desire. All these questions arise in a debate between a young male sage Ashtavakra and the elderly, never-married female sage Disha. Ashtavakra, who mistakenly thinks he has overcome desire, learns about desire, and about himself. Bhishma recounts the debate to Yudhishthira in answer to Yudhishthira’s doubts about how spouses can share dharma when each being has its own separate birth, actions, and death.
Power Politics and the Imperial Mediterranean
Authors: Murray-Miller Gavin
Published: June 2022

Chapter 1 establishes the broad context of the “new imperialism” of the nineteenth century and its impact on the Mediterranean. Conventional histories have argued that over the course of the century practices of “informal” empire were gradually replaced with models favoring territorial possession. Following the Berlin Conference of 1884, which endorsed the concept of “effective occupation” in making claims to African land, European states increasingly placed a premium on territorial and administrative control as they rushed to carve out imperial domains across the continent. Focusing on the Anglo-French rivalry which ensued following France’s invasion of Tunisia (1881) and Britain’s occupation of Egypt (1882), this chapter examines how imperial endeavors remapped the geopolitical landscape of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean in the 1880s. It questions the extent of “rivalry” between the two foremost imperial powers, arguing that while imperial rhetoric often emphasized competition and adversity, this “war of words” concealed the numerous entanglements that existed as the two powers entrenched themselves in the region. French and British imperial ideologues sparred off against one another as each attempted to reinvent themselves as “Muslim powers” capable of commanding the loyalties of North African subjects. Yet in re-imagining the cultural identities of their respective empires, imperial officials were responding to imperial competitors as each side sought to consolidate their presence in the Mediterranean.
Breath
Authors: Simpson Hannah
Published: June 2022

This concluding chapter summarises the particular epistemological, ontological, and ethical tensions that Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Ionesco, and Marguerite Duras ascribe to the experience of witnessing another’s pain in their wartime and postwar stage plays. It also draws a final line of contrast between Beckett’s relentless refusal of any consoling perspective on the encounter with pain and the threads of surviving redemptive impulse we can trace in the work of Camus, Picasso, Ionesco, and Duras. The chapter analyses the particularly unsettling distanced intimacy of Beckett’s dramaticule Breath (1969) as a model of the intense decorporealising that typifies Beckett’s continued interrogation of the encounter with another’s not-quite-witnessed pain in his later theatre plays. Finally, it examines the concept of empathic unsettlement (rather than empathetic identification) proposed by trauma theorists Dominick LaCapra and Jill Bennett, in order to illuminate the ethical value of Beckett’s refusal of the redemptive or absolving witnessing of pain in his postwar theatre.
Britain in the 1880s
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: June 2022

This chapter explores a key theme in the history of Victorian social investigation and social contestation: the centrality of arguments over living standards and the extent of poverty. It concerns the Industrial Remuneration Conference, held in London in January 1885. This brought together leading representatives from politics, intellectual life, business, trade unions and other working-class organizations, to discuss the maldistribution of wealth and the proceeds of industry in Britain. It also considered the reforms required to give working people higher incomes and better life-chances. The statistics of daily life and working-class consumption dominated discussion. The recent Presidential Address to the Statistical Society of London by the civil servant Robert Giffen on ‘The Progress of the Working Class’, delivered in 1883, was roundly condemned for its roseate and optimistic views of material progress over the past half-century in Britain. Many delegates contested Giffen’s statistics on wage rates and prices. The Conference reached no consensus and conclusions. It is a further example, however, of the so-called ‘re-discovery of poverty’ in the 1880s and an important context for the origins of Charles Booth’s great inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London, one of the most significant of all British social investigations, which began in the following year.
Ethnic Mobilization and the Election Process
Authors: Pachuau Joy L.K.
Published: June 2022

This chapter is an examination of the political processes in the state of Mizoram. Using the assembly elections of 2018 as an entry point, the chapter explores the contours of the political discourse in contemporary Mizoram. The chapter then examines the historical background to the development of the political issues to suggest that ethnic politics in Mizoram are often not the concern of the political parties that stand for elections. Ethnic politics are instead driven by NGOs that are constituted on the basis of ethnicity, age, and gender. In the history of political developments in the state since the post-independence period, the above-mentioned phenomena is relatively new. The chapter delves into the possible reasons for a shift in the contemporary political discourse.
Konyak Cosmopolitics
Authors: Heneise Michael T.
Published: June 2022

This chapter explores the processes by which the upland Konyak Nagas in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands divine, construct, and legitimize political authority. Drawing on a series of recent events, including a controversial coronation ceremony attended by the state governor organized by a millenarian religious leader named N. Yahoi, considered a prophetess by her many thousands of devotees, the chapter argues that a form of cosmopolitics is at play, namely a politics involving the regeneration of sacred kingship. This, the emergence of a ‘Naga script’, and the extreme asceticism of the Yahoi movement, evoke memories of a historically significant Naga religious movement that openly resisted the British Raj, namely the Heraka led by Rani Gaidinliu. Here, remote, economically depressed Indo-Myanmar borderland communities regenerate older forms of governmentality to confront ineffectual state development and religious institutions seen largely to capitulate to corrupt political elites. This chapter shows how strict ascetic regimes such as extreme fasting, on the one hand, and great coronation feasts, on the other, as well as forms of deliberate self-alienation, are techniques used in the shaping of a new society, with new symbolic registers and new political vision.
Designing Indigeneity
Authors: Gergan Mabel
Published: June 2022

For the last decade, Dzongu, a reserve of the Indigenous Lepchas in Sikkim, has been the site of a youth-led anti-dam movement that pushed the state to cancel four of seven proposed projects within the reserve. Even as Dzongu youth were celebrated by activists and scholars, the cancellation of these projects divided opinions and loyalties within the reserve. This chapter attends to the sharpest of fault lines—the divide between the older generation of panchayat and state officials, and the younger generation of activists, through a focus on two specific instances of this generational divide. The first focuses on the use of concrete in eco-tourism infrastructure, and the second on how state discourse framed anti-dam activists as ‘entitled’ youth. Building on theories of the everyday state, infrastructure, and youth geographies, I argue that the discursive and material practices of Indigenous youth provide important insights into the shifting terrain of Indigenous articulation and democratic politics in Northeast India.
Higher education—an image-boosting business?
Authors: Alvesson Mats
Published: June 2022

A key question of this chapter is the role and function of higher education, especially the universities, in contemporary society. Is it primarily a vehicle for the improvement of knowledge and intellectual qualifications? Or is it about other issues? A second key question is what the signifier ‘university’ means (in the context of education), questioning extent to which the entire sector in itself can be viewed as an illusion. A third key question concerns the benefits of higher education for individuals. This chapter starts by critically examining to what extent higher education leads to qualifications and whether an academic degree offers a clear message about a graduate’s ability. These questions trigger further consideration of inflation tendencies in the entire educational sector, but especially in universities. One problematic outcome is over-education whereby the number of graduates exceeds the number of jobs for which their formal education indicates they are qualified.
Modern working life and organizations— change, dynamism, and post-bureaucracy?
Authors: Alvesson Mats
Published: June 2022

Today’s working life can be understood in terms of grandiose ideas, illusion, and zero-sum games. These three concepts provide a rather different perspective than conventional understandings of working life phenomena suggested by signifiers such as leadership, visions, strategy, change, entrepreneurship, innovations, and human resource management. Chapters 6–9 deal with four key themes in current organizations and working conditions. This chapter addresses the first theme: ideas about major, drastic changes. People refer to the demise of bureaucracy and mass production, a transition to new forms of production and work organizations characterized by flexibility, dynamism, networks, knowledge intensive work, flat organizations, and so on. This is worth investigating, which is what this chapter aims to do.
Strong Roots, Myriad Branches
Authors: Iwanek Krzysztof
Published: June 2022

This chapter presents a very brief history of Vidya Bharati. It mainly mentions when and where the first schools of the RSS had been established and ponders on historical circumstances that could have facilitated the organization’s meteoric rise. From there, the chapter moves on to describe Vidya Bharati in its current form: the organization’s structure, its types of schools, their names and numbers. The chapter also briefly covers other institutions within the Vidya Bharati network and lists some of the other RSS suborganizations that run educational institutions.
From Sages to Sieges
Authors: Iwanek Krzysztof
Published: June 2022

This chapter focuses on the teaching in Vidya Bharati schools in terms of the contents of the organization’s textbooks in Hindi. The textbooks used for the social science courses and the moral education course in elementary schools, as well as question sheets for Vidya Bharati’s own extracurricular examination were found to be more infused with Hindu nationalist propaganda. Hence, more space has been devoted to analysing them. The chapter ends with conclusions on how the teaching of history in Vidya Bharati schools fits within the overall Hindu nationalist narrative.
Minstrels and Kings
Authors: Iwanek Krzysztof
Published: June 2022

This chapter describes how the RSS (the Hindu nationalist organization), the BJP (the party), and Vidya Bharati (the school network) cooperate with and support each other. These conclusions may be summarized thus: the BJP supports Vidya Bharati with patronage, ranging from donations of the party politicians for particular schools to at least letting the schools function. Vidya Bharati, in turn, is important for the RSS and the BJP because it spreads their ideology, making it reach wider audiences, and thus helping it become a part of mainstream politics.