bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Political biases in international organization evaluation reports
Authors: Jankauskas Vytautas , Eckhard Steffen
Published: June 2023

Chapter 6 investigates the content of international organizations’ (IOs) evaluation reports, searching for potential political biases. It asks whether there are patterns in evaluation findings and recommendations that would systematically reflect powerful stakeholders’ interests and thus could be perceived as political biases. While no such patterns are found in terms of the positivity or negativity of evaluation findings, evaluation recommendations systematically favor stakeholder interests, depending on who controls evaluation system resources. In IOs where member states have the control, recommendations are more specific in their content and contain fewer implications on resource expansion and oversight reduction. By contrast, in IOs where IO administrations control evaluation units’ budget, staff, and agenda, produced recommendations tend to be broader (more ambiguous) in their content and contain more implications on the need to enlarge bureaucratic resources and reduce political oversight. These findings are based on the analysis of 212 evaluation reports across 6 different IOs by manually coding their executive summary and recommendations sections.
Conclusion
Authors: Jankauskas Vytautas , Eckhard Steffen
Published: June 2023

Chapter 8 concludes how the book’s findings alter existing understandings of international organizations (IOs) and the role of evaluation in their policy processes. Also, the chapter offers a more practical discussion on the conduct of evaluation in IOs while not neglecting, but acknowledging, the politics surrounding the processes. For one, the findings imply that more guidance on the status and formulation of evaluation recommendations is needed. Also, the book clearly shows that it matters who controls evaluation system resources. Different institutional constellations as to how IOs can design their evaluation systems are discussed, outlining relevant trade-offs and dilemmas. Finally, the idea of a centralized, UN-wide evaluation unit is examined, highlighting potential drawbacks of such a reform in light of already existing evaluation politics.
Skills and the will to grow
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

Do not expect to approach your project fully prepared. Rather bring a set of foundational skills and the will to grow yourself through the challenge.
Relevance follows audience
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

Relevance is the life-blood of your project. It entails that you not only can explain that your topic is important, but also to whom and why.
Renewable research energy
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

Maintaining motivation to work on your project is crucial. Fuel your progress with curiosity first, and switch to discipline when you run out.
Countless shades of supervision
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

Supervisors are free to interpret their role as they see fit. Work with one who interprets their role in a way that you would like to be subject to and learn from.
Conduct a project
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

Think of your thesis or dissertation as a project to be conducted. The resulting document merely reports your project and is a component of it.
Writing as modern architecture
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

Great academic writing not only facilitates but encourages comprehension of complex material. It is intentional, clear, structured, and statically sound.
Core motivator, key critic
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

Optimism and criticism are strangely interlinked when working on challenging research projects. One of the many paradoxes to reconcile.
Mitigating mental overload
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

Your project is most likely too large to keep in your mind at any one time. Focus your mind on the individual problems and challenges to be solved.
Your degree is a trusted symbol
Authors: Aschari Omid , Berghaus Benjamin
Published: June 2023

A degree earned from a university is a symbol of trust in you. Be aware of that, and allow this idea to help steer your choices for your next steps.
Introduction
Authors: Rudolphy Marcela Prieto
Published: June 2023

This introductory chapter explains the aim of the book, which is to justify what is known as the equality of combatants or the symmetry thesis. Combatants are legally equal during armed conflict: they are lawful targets, and they can kill each other during battle. Traditionally, philosophers thought this legal symmetry was also true of morality. The opposite is true now: most philosophers think that unjust combatants who kill just combatants are engaged in the murder of the innocent. This position—known as ‘revisionism’—presents an obvious, albeit mostly ignored, challenge to international law: how can we justify the laws of armed conflict if they allow people to murder the innocent? The chapter then provides a roadmap of the book. Thereafter, it clarifies the meaning of terms that will be used throughout the book, such as just combatants, just war, evidence-relative, and fact-relative. Finally, it briefly surveys the laws of armed conflict regarding the killing of combatants by answering who is a privileged combatant, who can be targeted, the limits on the means of targeting, and when targeting combatants is permissible.
Regulating Murder
Authors: Rudolphy Marcela Prieto
Published: June 2023

This chapter argues that the humanitarian view, whereby the laws of war are justified on the basis of their ability to reduce suffering, cannot justify the legal equality of combatants if revisionists are right, and unjust combatants are simply like those who murder the innocent. However, the failure of the humanitarian view does not provide a conclusive argument against instrumentalist justifications of the symmetry thesis. The chapter proceeds to argue for a different, contingent, instrumentalist account, by relying on John Rawls’s distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory and on what the book refers to as ‘the perpetual peace ideal’. Nevertheless, as this chapter concludes, the instrumentalist account provided can only justify, contingently, the adoption of the symmetry thesis, not its content. It thus remains incredibly fragile when premised on the revisionist morality of war. And although, in many ways, moral fragility is inescapable for both just war theory and the legal regulation of war, we would do well in trying to attenuate it.
Beyond Self-Defence
Authors: Rudolphy Marcela Prieto
Published: June 2023

This chapter proposes an alternative account of the morality of killing in war by introducing the idea of moral permissibility. It argues that some instances of harm against the non-liable—agent-relative prerogatives to defend oneself and killing non-liable unjust combatants in pursuit of a just war—might be justified on the basis of a sui generis account of moral permissibility, which has three main features: killing the non-liable wrongs them grievously; killing the non-liable leaves a significant moral residue; and the reasons in favour of killing the non-liable are barely weightier than the reasons against doing so. This last feature relies on Bernard Williams’s idea of there being conflicts where reasons are unanswerably and clearly overridden, and others where they are not. If successful, this account of moral permissibility allows us to move beyond absolute pacifism and to provide a justification for the just combatant’s legal privilege to kill unjust combatants in war. The chapter discusses the objections and advantages of the view, as well as the implications regarding the treatment of the targeting of combatants in International Humanitarian Law.
The Prohibition on the Use of Force
Authors: Reinold Theresa
Published: June 2023

Chapter 8 by Theresa Reinold assesses from an IR perspective whether state practice and interpretation have transformed the core value of the non-use of force and the related right to self-defence. Reinold conceptualizes legal change as an alteration of the law’s content, either because a new norm has emerged in vacuo or as a modification of an existing norm. To understand why demands for change arose in the first place and under which conditions these demands translated into norm change, she draws on the psychological principle of dissonance reduction. Analysing the empirical example of the international military campaign against the Islamic State, she finds that a perceived incoherence between the law as it stood prior to 9/11 and the political imperative of effectively combating transnational terrorism drove substantial value change and social validity loss.
Why Drawing Still Matters
Authors: Meyer Caspar
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores drawings of Greek vases from three turning points in the history of ceramic studies and in archaeological thinking more broadly: they reveal how these objects were made sense of through the emergent taxonomies of early modern antiquarianism, how Neoclassical critics reinterpreted the materiality of the painted decoration as form and reconceptualized the act of drawing itself, and finally how drawing allowed painted pottery to be accommodated in the all-embracing classifications of scientific archaeology that crystalized in the twentieth century. The final section considers how drawing aided the formation of processes of knowing, inviting the consideration of touch, embodied viewing, and craft in general into object-based research. Throughout, the aim is to shift the conversation from evaluating drawings of vases as more or less accurate visual records to the transformations which the practice of visualization itself accomplishes—how it shapes the viewer’s perceptions and has given rise to new frameworks of interpretation.
Winckelmann’s Elegant Simplicity
Authors: Smith Amy C.
Published: June 2023

This chapter considers how changing representational strategies in drawing the Greek vase from the middle of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries influenced the public perception of these objects and the commercialization of Neoclassical reproductions and adaptations. At this time, Greek vases came to be admired, not least by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, for their simplicity of design in both form and decoration. The discussion analyses how the vase came to be perceived as a mere two-dimensional canvas, the influence of the linear ‘international style’, and the translation of the ancient painters’ lines from figural details to indications of pictorial depth and incident light. Analysis of the work of two British manufacturers enables a deeper understanding of the influence of drawings of Greek vases. These include Josiah Wedgwood’s use of the art of John Flaxman and of William Hamilton’s first collection to produce three-dimensional wares inspired by antiquity, and Josiah Spode II’s use of Thomas Kirk’s renderings of Hamilton’s second collection in designing his ‘Greek’ series of blue-and-white transferware.
The Graphic Medium and Artistic Style
Authors: Petsalis-Diomidis Alexia
Published: June 2023

The chapter analyses Thomas Hope’s graphic engagements with ancient Greek vases. It treats them according to style, dealing first with paintings in the picturesque style, and second with engravings in published books in the neoclassical outline style. The analysis aims to show the different effects of presenting Greek vases in these two artistic styles; and to explore the way that the publications, though finished products in their own right, were also intended to serve as models for further use by painters in new compositions, and by furniture and fashion designers. The chapter therefore investigates how these graphic encounters with Greek vases actively mediated between original artefacts and further two- or three-dimensional artwork. In so doing a case is made for the crucial role played by graphic images in creative receptions of Greek vases at a time when the boundaries between scholarship, archaeology, and contemporary design were fluid.
Volume and Scale
Authors: Lorenz Katharina
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores how the different approaches to illustrating Greek vases in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries impacted the study of ancient visual narrative. It examines the scholarly treatment and visual presentation of two vessels by the Meidias Painter and his circle in Adolf Furtwängler and Karl Reichhold’s seminal 1904 Hervorragende Vasenbilder. The discussion establishes how, in contrast to earlier documentations of these vessels, Furtwängler and Reichhold firmly emphasized in their texts and illustrations the materiality of the vessels as a support for the figure scenes. The analysis establishes how their approach fostered a concern with questions of form and style in subsequent studies. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how Furtwängler and Reichhold’s focus on classification and style prevented their contribution from fostering scholarship on Greek visual storytelling akin to the seminal works of Carl Robert and Franz Wickhoff. Despite the opportunities to use Reichhold’s illustrations to investigate narrative methods, the key parameters for analysing such narratives—namely, the relationship of space and time as they unfold across the painted clay surfaces—remained underappreciated for much of the twentieth century.
Drawing the Greek Vase
Authors: Morton Kate
Published: June 2023

Since the foundation of the British Museum, one of the main concerns of the Trustees was to publish the growing collection of objects. As part of that process illustrators have been employed to produce high-quality drawings. This chapter introduces the five illustrators employed in the Department of Greece and Rome to produce work relating to the museum’s Greek vase collection from 1893 to the current day. By consulting the departmental archive of both published and unpublished drawings, along with the publications that feature the graphic work, it is possible to describe how drawings were made and how past working methods compare with those of today. The value of drawing as a way of engaging closely with an object is emphasized, along with the benefits of integrating photographic techniques into the drawing process. While illustrators historically were quick to harness the technological advances of their era, the need for carefully executed drawings—packed with morphological and decorative information—has always informed the process. An understanding of the skills of past illustrators is vital for the appreciation of their images and their contribution to the study of Greek vases.
The Use of Photographs in the Trade of Greek Vases
Authors: Nørskov Vinnie
Published: June 2023

This chapter investigates the use of photography in the trade in Greek vases as an aspect of the broader historical connections between archaeology and visualization. While photographs of archaeological objects featured in auction catalogues by the late nineteenth century, they did not replace drawings. Instead, photography provided a new technology to picture multiple objects in the same image, which dealers exploited. The chapter discusses photographs as constructed performances in auction catalogues and in the archive of the dealer John Marshall (1862–1928). In these catalogues, photographs typically show vases against a neutral background, isolating them in time and space, not unlike photographs used in scholarly publications. In addition, there is a tradition of showing a few ‘standout’ objects in the context of elite collectors’ homes. In the dealer’s archive, photographs tend to be more diverse in terms of quality and setup, as is evident from the use of Polaroids by Giacomo Medici (who was convicted of trafficking antiquities in 2004). Overall, the chapter argues that photographs offer new insights into the workings of the antiquities trade.
Afterword
Authors: Meyer Caspar
Published: June 2023

This afterword highlights connections between the discussions of drawings in the foregoing chapters and the emergence of ontological approaches to material culture in the past twenty years. It considers the implications of describing drawings of Greek vases as ‘illustrations’ or ‘representations’ of objects with anterior properties and argues for the importance of understanding image-making as a generative process in its own right. The relationship between drawing and knowing is brought out by exploring the expressive capacity of the drawn mark to present the object as a ‘timeless’ type or as a ‘palimpsest’ of traces of the artefact’s previous history of use. Finally, the continued importance of drawing in the twenty-first century is emphasized by reference to its value in training responsible users and producers of digital surrogates of archaeological heritage.
Introduction
Authors: Schmiegel Armin U.
Published: June 2023

The idea for this book derived from my lectures ‘Energy Storage Systems’ and ‘Electrical Storage Systems’. These lectures are part of the master programme ‘Decentralized Energy Generation and Energy Management’ at the University of Applied Science, Reutlingen. Both lectures and this book are influenced by my many years of professional experience, first as project manager and development engineer for solar home storage and then as development manager at REFU Elektronik, later known as REFUdrive. Here we develop battery systems, solar, battery, and drive inverters. Applications range from stationary battery power plants for the balancing energy market, to the electrification of mobile working machines.
Power conversion
Authors: Schmiegel Armin U.
Published: June 2023

When implementing energy storage systems, different forms of energy usually have to be converted into each other. For example, the battery voltage is often not high enough to be used for the conversion of direct current into alternating current. Therefore, inverters and converters are necessary. This chapter explains these power electronic components. Their function and design are described, and their use is illustrated using the buck converter as an example.Since, in addition to the conversion of direct current into alternating current, the conversion of electrical energy into kinetic energy is also an important task, an introduction to the structure and function of direct current motors and alternating current motors is given. The chapter concludes with a description of the components as system components.
Electrochemical storage systems
Authors: Schmiegel Armin U.
Published: June 2023

This chapter describes electrochemical storage devices. The chapter starts with an introduction of the general characteristics and requirements of electrochemical storage: the open circuit voltage, which depends on the state of charge; the two ageing effects, calendaric ageing and cycle life; and the use of balancing systems to compensate for these effects. Then the four most common electrochemical technologies are described: the lead acid battery, the lithium ion battery, the sodium sulphur battery and the redox flow battery. The primary and secondary reactions are described for each cell chemistry, alongside the ageing effects that occur and the measures that can be taken to reduce them. The discharging behaviour, which is very important for a cell’s operation, is also given for each cell chemistry. The system components and requirements of each electrochemistry are detailed, and each electrochemistry is then used in an application example.
Demand side management
Authors: Schmiegel Armin U.
Published: June 2023

This chapter describes demand side management, which is a method to better utilise the residual load by shifting consumption over time. The two basic methods, shifting loads and reducing loads, are described. Several examples show how schedules can be created to better use the residual load. The system components and requirements needed for the technology are described. A building complex that optimises the use of a solar power system via demand side management serves as an application example.
The New Rules of the Red Queen Retail Race
Authors: Rusanen Olli
Published: June 2023

During the twentieth century, major retail chains competed through investments on volume-driving resources that leveraged supply innovation, wide product assortment, and large physical spaces that in turn delivered competitive advantage through economies of scale. Lately, the value of volume-driving resources has declined, creating a problem for retail resource management. Retailers aspire to find new sources of growth and identify emerging value drivers. In this chapter, a model is presented that examines the gap between large retailers’ established resource base and emerging value drivers. The model was developed through comparative longitudinal case analysis of six major retailers in Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The model summarizes four characteristics of resource base with four emerging value drivers. The resource base of established major retailers is built around supply technologies, product orientation, physical environment, and standardization-driven economies of scale. Emerging drivers of resource values are increasingly intangible: demand-driven innovations through data, service orientation, digital solutions, and personalized relationships. This chapter contributes to the discussion about increasingly intangible resource value drivers due to the megatrends of digitalization and servitization.
Physical Retail Spaces in a Digital World
Authors: Pulkka Lauri , Cuthbertson Richard
Published: June 2023

Given the increasing importance of digital resources within the Red Queen Retail Race, this chapter considers the new meaning of physical space. It looks at different perspectives of the impact of the developing digital revolution on retail real estate. It examines how different organizations perceive different futures for retailing in general and for shopping centres in particular. In addition to teasing out the various perceptions, the chapter attempts to discern what they may mean for the firm, consumers, and the business ecosystem that exists today and which may exist in the future. The structure of this chapter is twofold. First, it describes prior applications of the scenarios methodology as an approach to better understand and prepare for an uncertain retail future. Second, it employs four broad scenarios in three focus groups to explore the implementation and operational implications for the future of physical retail space, the shopping centres in particular.
The Timing of Innovation
Authors: Pulkka Lauri , Cuthbertson Richard
Published: June 2023

Not all innovations are successful. While innovation is vital to keeping ahead (or at least level) in the Red Queen Retail Race, it must be the right innovation at the right time. Thus, the capability to innovate has tremendous importance. The continued success and survival of firms depend on it. Innovation gives an edge on competition, and failure to change has been the undoing of many companies. Innovation is also linked to economic growth, and governments around the world enact policies in support of innovation. Moreover, external pressures, whether long-term changes, such as the ongoing digital revolution, or short-term shocks, such as the recent coronavirus pandemic, highlight the importance of innovation capability even further. Depending on the organization, such external pressures can present a cornucopia of opportunities or a kiss of death. This chapter begins with a short overview of the innovation literature, with a focus on why the timing of innovation is relevant. This is followed by a review of innovation capability. It then proposes a construct of innovation capability consisting of capacity, ability, and value. Capability is important but alone insufficient in explaining the timing of innovation. Therefore, the chapter also examines the external forces that act as an impetus to innovation. It then proceeds to show how the implementation of innovation depends on both capability and impetus. Finally, it develops a new model of the timing of innovation that is a function of capabilities, impetus, and implementation.
Undoing Coloniality?
Authors: Fakhoury Tamirace , Icaza Rosalba
Published: June 2023

This chapter is situated in the emerging field of critical enquiry and praxis of decolonial thinking that gravitates around the notion of modernity as coloniality. In a nutshell, this perspective highlights what modernity actively produces as inexistent, a process that can be conceptualized as ‘epistemicide’. In particular, we critically engage with colonial and monocultural gestures around the volume’s propositions that polycentricity and governing are ‘different’ or ‘new’ forms of ordering. Consistent with a feminist and refugee-centric perspective on coloniality and governing, our response speaks back to power, and in that sense highlights the following questions: what is to be governed, by whom, and for what purposes? In addition, this response is understood as pedagogical praxis and as such engages with the (un)learning opportunities that the concepts in the volume open (and close). This point is developed in relation to two principal concerns: temporalities and understandings of the modern/colonial self. The remainder of the chapter engages with empirical illustrations from refugee spaces in Lebanon. We aim to explore whether a decolonial reading of polycentric governance in dialogue with the field of refugee studies, and more specifically, the politics of refugee voices and representations, can contribute, on the one hand, to undoing coloniality in polycentric governing research, and to desilencing what polycentric governance mutes, on the other.
Law’s Governing Centres
Authors: Rajah Jothie
Published: June 2023

This chapter applies a global socio-legal approach to show how ‘law’ and ‘governing’ are imbricated processes and categories that shape multi-scalar issues. Specifically, the chapter analyses dynamics of governing at work in a land grab in Uganda in September 2011, which illustrates processes of governing through a trio of techniques: law, representation, and violence. Law at global, national, and local scales is evident in that the (global) Kyoto Protocol led to the licence that a private company obtained from the (national) Ugandan government. At the local level, the people living on the land understood themselves to be lawful in their situated-ness on the land. Law’s relationship to violence also plays out in multiple forms: the epistemic violence of carbon trading; the global/intra-national violence of state elites allying with global capital in order to dispossess rural peoples; and the brute violence through which the people living on the land were forcefully evicted. The third technique of governing, representation, also threads through these events at multiple levels: news media coverage that drew the world’s attention; Oxfam’s report; the private company’s website; and documents on the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman’s website. This chapter details the expressions and operations of these three techniques, highlighting the manner in which they articulate and re-inscribe entrenched global and intra-national relations of power, shaping outcomes in material reality and generating authoritative texts that (overtly and covertly) legitimize accumulation by dispossession.
Governing Assemblages
Authors: Bueger Christian , Liebetrau Tobias
Published: June 2023

Assemblage theory provides an innovative approach to analysing governance and a unique position from which to understand processes and situations of polycentrism. Its strength lies in understanding constellations that involve large numbers and multiple forms of actors and in exploring governing relations that are informal and often subject to rapid change. It is also well suited to understanding situations where there is an overlap between jurisdictions and where new governance techniques such as best practices or public–private partnerships are employed. Assemblage theorizing originates in political anthropology and geography where scholars drew on insights from social theory, relationalism, and practice theory. Today, assemblage theorizing is adopted across disciplines to study governance at different scales, from the city to regions and global processes.. This chapter provides a concise overview of assemblage theory as an analytical tool for studying governance. We start by exploring the core conceptual apparatus of assemblage theory and discuss concepts such as territorialization and socio-material relations. Laying out the basic understandings of techniques, legitimacy, and power that emerge, we turn to empirical examples to further explore these issues. We draw on the examples of the governance of two particular spaces, the oceans and cyberspace, in order to illustrate the analytical power of the approach. Both spaces involve complex territories and actor constellations. In the empirical discussion, we show how governing evolved using best practices and public–private partnerships. Both examples show how assemblage often implies de-politicization, with power relations becoming hidden.
A Governmentality Perspective on Polycentric Governing
Authors: Beckman Frida
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores the tension between how we are governed and how we think we are governed. The diffusion and multiplication of centers, practices, and techniques of power in a polycentric world challenges philosophical and political traditions which assume that we are liberal subjects, and that political power can be located in the state. Adopting a Foucauldian perspective, the chapter maps such increasingly dispersed and diverse techniques of power as they develop to create a neoliberal society of control. Whereas older forms of disciplinary control relied on more centralized and therefore more readily identifiable forms of power, neoliberal control thrives on continuous modulations and variations of power, which thereby becomes more elusive. The dispersion and invisibility of neoliberal power encourages a spread of uncertainty and paranoia in the contemporary West. Uncertainty extends to everything including knowledge (e.g. what news is ‘true’ and what is ‘fake’) and identity (e.g. what can replace the liberal subject). The (increasingly desperate) will for certainty brings an intensification of extremist and nationalist identitarian forces. Through it all runs a legitimacy crisis that emerges from the clash between deep-rooted conceptions of the liberal subject and neoliberal modes that no longer operate on the basis of such conceptions.
Coda
Authors: Greaves Margaret
Published: June 2023

The Coda reflects on poems discussed throughout the chapters of Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present, including works by Archibald MacLeish, James Dickey, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, Agha Shahid Ali, Seamus Heaney, and Tracy K. Smith. These poems all feature planet Earth photography taken in the 1960s–1970s, centering Earth at the center of extraterrestrial exploration. The coda goes on to describe poems that have been launched into extraterrestrial space—including works by Maya Angelou, Amanda Gorman, and Joy Harjo—arguing that the cultural practice of sending poems into the cosmos amounts to a kind of self-elegizing of the human species and our imperiled planet.
Ancient Texts and Sibylline Truths
Authors: Langenfeld Kathryn A.
Published: June 2023

This chapter reexamines the forged and falsely antiquated documents found within the Historia Augusta’s Life of Aurelian. This chapter contends that the spurious linen sources referenced in the Life are part of an extended analogy between the work’s forged documents and the prophetic Sibylline books. As this chapter illustrates, this analogy is central to the author’s defense of his forged documents as valuable purveyors of historical memory. After the original Sibylline books were destroyed in a fire in 83 bce, the senate recreated an inexact replica of the texts from apocryphal materials. Despite these interpolations, the pseudonymous Sibylline texts continued to be preserved by Roman audiences as valuable antiquarian sources, making them an apt model for the author’s reconstruction of lost Aurelianic sources. The author uses this analogy to argue that his pseudonymous documents, much like the inauthentic Sibylline books, were still worthy of preservation and entry into the Aurelianic biographical canon.
Thinking with Antiquity’s Ancient Beginnings
Authors: Clark Frederic
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines how the afterlife of a forged ancient history can illuminate post hoc constructions of antiquity and its ostensible beginnings. It takes as its case study the medieval and early modern reception of the De excidio Troiae historia or History of the Destruction of Troy of pseudo-Dares Phrygius. Although in reality a late antique forger, this “Dares” claimed to have been an eyewitness observer of the Trojan War and Troy’s fall; so many in the medieval and early modern periods considered him no less illustrious a figure than the first pagan to write history. This desire to locate such an authentic “first” in the ancient historical record helped guarantee Dares’ enormous popularity: his History appeared in numerous manuscripts and printed editions. From Isidore of Seville in the seventh century to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, this contribution summarizes the long history of Dares’ rise and fall, and the varieties of antiquity desired by his defenders and critics alike.
Archaeology and the Invention of Holy Bodies in Post-Tridentine Rome
Authors: Manno Talia Di
Published: June 2023

Nostalgia for Christian antiquity drove patrons in the post-Tridentine period to search for the bodies of ancient Christian martyrs under Rome’s churches. This chapter examines the strategies used to authenticate the relics discovered at five churches between 1599 and 1634. Through this period, antiquarians increasingly sought to show that their relics were authentic by appealing to current empirical shifts in intellectual culture; the grounds for identification, they said, came not from inherited histories but rather from carefully examining the antiquity of the burial site, fragility of bones, and subterranean objects. Archival records, however, reveal that the certainty of these identifications was forged, and discoveries were often motivated by the desire to dispel rival claims to the same relics in order to bolster devotion at the given church. The forging of relic-hood outlined in the case studies of this chapter provides a lens into how the Catholic church negotiated confessional polemics by appealing to shifting conceptions of truth and authority in early modern Europe.
Deceptively Authentic Additions
Authors: Kansteiner Sascha
Published: June 2023

The point of departure for this chapter is the large group of antique ideal sculptures that have been altered by Roman restorers active during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The most important additions were heads, and they had one main purpose: to transform an antique torso into a statue appearing more or less complete which, consequently, could be sold at a high price. The discussion concentrates on those sculptures whose restorations were executed with such skill that not only did the buyer, but also past and present-day scholars, believe them to be ancient works,. These scholars have published work based, apparently, on a mistaken judgment of the state of preservation of certain statues. The ambivalent role of post-antique restorations is best illustrated by a colossal marble statue of Hercules which was provided with a new head in the sixteenth century, and also with an inscription attributing the torso/statue to one of the most famous sculptors ever, Lysippos.
The Fresnel Connection
Authors: Nolte David D.
Published: June 2023

“The Fresnel Connection: Particles versus Waves” describes the campaign of Francois Arago and Augustin Fresnel to prove the wave nature of light based on Fresnel’s theory of interfering waves in diffraction. Although the discovery of the polarization of light by Etienne Malus posed a stark challenge to the wave theory of light, the application of wave interference and the superposition principle of Daniel Bernoulli provided the theoretical framework for the ultimate success of the wave theory. Arago encouraged Fresnel to submit an entry to a prize competition announced by the Académie des Sciences in 1817 to explain the phenomenon of diffraction. The final proof of the wave nature of light came through the dramatic demonstration of the Spot of Arago.
Connection, Recognition, and Return
Authors: Houghton-Walker Sarah
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores the related ideas of revisiting places, and of ‘recognizing’ and remembering both places and people, and the way in which these returns are related to a sense of community (or its absence) in Wordsworth’s writing. The chapter begins by discussing experiences shared with Dorothy Wordsworth: a re-visit to Scotland, when a repeated sound profoundly affects the poet and his sister, and the return which is central to ‘Tintern Abbey’. It moves on to examine the London of The Prelude, where Wordsworth’s alienation, his lonely disjunction from the city streets, is explored through figurative interest in a lack of connection, alongside literal experimentation with grammatical conjunctions which aim to represent the nature of experience as accurately as possible. As part of this analysis, it describes the problematic spectatorship which attaches to Wordsworth’s experience of the theatre in London, and discusses the epitaph as a form which offers escape from the difficulties of sincere communication found in such situations.
Resounding Voices, Habitual Haunts
Authors: Houghton-Walker Sarah
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores Wordsworth’s fascination with the repeated experience of places and moments, both physical and imaginative. In particular, it is interested in repeated sounds, configured as ‘earworms’; in the posture of listening which allows the appropriate attention to such repetitions, and in the ‘spots of time’. It traces the various ways in which the suggestion or representation of particular recapitulations within texts enable the coterminous presentation of specific and general experience. This balance of specificity and generality, it is argued, constitutes the nature of real, lived experience according to Wordsworth. Because sincerity involves representing accurately, the chapter proposes, this expression of the nature of experience insofar as it incorporates specific and general is vitally necessary to sincere poetry, and it can also gesture towards the sublime.
Small Farmers of Cane and Paddy: Post-Harvest Delays and Non-Payment
Authors: Vanashree
Published: June 2023

The consciousness narrative in the two stories lets us see that the struggle of the cultivators of cane and paddy does not come to end with sowing, fertilizing, and harvesting—braving drought or inundation. Those who work as the functionaries in the transaction of cane or paddy, with the covert complicity of their bosses, follow the colonial system: favour bribe givers, unjustly allow them to slide ahead, assuming that it was their obligation to harass and discipline the poor peasants; even the lower-level functionary with the collusion of some stand by dabangs, manhandles the cane peasants, who catch up long distances, exhausted, starved, sometimes die, waiting for the deal done. One who seeks justice at the higher level would invariably be ineffective due to the intimidating gap between the peasant and the Sahib. Even when the complaint is heard, the smarter weighing assistant, nonetheless, has the last laugh.
Rural Migration: Dismantling Rural Resources
Authors: Vanashree
Published: June 2023

Several fictional narratives since the time of Premchand reveal the moving tales of lives away from ones’ nearest family members, year-round. It could involve living hazardously, beyond the margins of subsistence and exposure to the threats of disease and death. Weddings of daughters, debts, vagaries of weather, fast disappearance of indigenously running workshops that were traditionally aligned with farming, drive the rural existence to the brink of a full-blown crisis. The three narratives here explore the varied contexts when migrating became the only resort for subsistence. Lakhs of workers from rural India have been toiling in the cities or departing to the Gulf countries to earn their living. The larger urban population hardly registered their presence or cared about the migrant populace, even though they were very much around, until the break out of COVID-19.
The Electoral Effects of Social Democratic Austerity
Authors: Bremer Björn
Published: June 2023

Chapter 8 examines the electoral consequences of social democratic austerity. A lot of research suggests that mainstream parties benefit from programmatic moderation because it allows them to capture ‘potential’ centrist voters. Yet, austerity is often incompatible with the brand of social democratic parties, threatening to undermine the partisan attachment of their ‘core’ voters. This chapter tests which effect dominates by analysing the electoral effects of social democratic austerity during the Great Recession. It uses time-series-cross-section analysis to examine the relationship between austerity events and the popularity of centre-left parties in twelve European countries from 2008 to 2017. The results show that social democrats lost support when they implemented austerity and that this effect persisted over time. The chapter then uses individual-level panel analysis based on the British Election Study (BES) to examine how voters responded when the Labour Party adopted orthodox policies in election campaigns. Potential voters who are fiscally conservative were unlikely to support the party. Rather, orthodox fiscal policies undermined the party’s ability to mobilize its core voters that were opposed to austerity. This contributed to the crisis of social democracy in Europe.
The Stock Market
Authors: Brown Rajeswary Ampalavanar
Published: June 2023

One of the reasons for the sustainability of the Bahrain stock exchange had been that oil wealth provided it with funding. Personal ownership in listed companies is limited, as the state is the major investor on the stock exchange. The power dynamics of oil and the Sunni-dominated Gulf allowed Bahrain to undertake the refining of oil from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, after it exhausted its own oil reserves by the early 1970s. Bahrain then established its financial leadership through flows of oil capital and was in the vanguard of GCC financial vitality and economic resurgence. Therefore Bahrain’s economic, political, and social history has thus been relatively stable, compared to that of her neighbours.
Bahrain’s Arab Spring
Authors: Brown Rajeswary Ampalavanar
Published: June 2023

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was fertile ground for social and political disorder, as the disadvantaged rural and urban regions of Bahrain sought new opportunities. Particularly relevant was loss of land by Shi’ites in the aggressive economic diversification after 1990. The violent clashes in Bahrain in the early 1950s, along communal, religious, ethnic, and racial lines, expressed deep resentment against the Sunni state. Later disorders were continuations of grievance politics, set against the changing networks of patronage. Many of the protests leading to the 2011 Arab Spring involved poor Shi’ites, claimed by the authorities to be stooges of Iran. But Bahrain’s Shi’ites are culturally and psychologically different from the Shi’ites of Iran. Not least, they do not seek the creation of an Islamic state. Disgruntled, unemployed Bahraini youth, mainly Sunnis, and some of leftist persuasion, offered a vivid example of resistance and the political drive behind resentment and grievances towards the state. They cooperated with Shi’ite protestors and communist parties.
The Mind in the Ice
Authors: Fernández-Armesto Felipe
Published: June 2023

The task for the chapter is—without stretching inference implausibly beyond the evidence—to read some of those thoughts and experiences in objects of art and material culture from the Ice Age and to understand why a cold climate seems to have been mentally bracing. The Ice Age is revealed as a surprisingly conducive time for ‘Stone Age affluence’: abundant game and wild food crops, plentiful energy sources, long days of leisure unequalled in most farming societies, and plenty of time for observing nature, thinking about the observations, and recording the results in art. Using techniques of cognitive archaeology and anthropological analogy, the author explores how the makers of the earliest surviving art thought about the world they inhabited and tried to control it or communicate with it.
Material Life
Authors: Brooke John
Published: June 2023

The chapter covers the environmental history of the world, seen as a whole, over more than two millennia. Cycles of solar intensity and, occasional, more erratic clusters of volcanic eruptions operated upon the great systems of atmospheric circulation: the equatorial monsoon domain and the mid-latitude westerlies operating just beyond the polar vortex. The result was an oscillating wave in the human condition, two long optimums of population expansion and growing stability, even prosperity, rising and falling between three eras of crisis and decline. In sequence, these were the Bronze Age Crisis, the Iron Age recovery and Classical optimum, the Dark Ages, the Medieval optimum, and then the Little Ice Age, with its great epidemics. This oscillating pattern took its global shape and coherence from the great repeating pattern in global climate history: the 2,200–year Hallstatt solar cycle manifested in the Bronze Age–Iron Age crisis and the Little Ice Age, with warmer Ancient and Medieval regimes separated by the half-cycle Dark Ages.
Humanism and the Classical Tradition
Authors: Mack Peter
Published: June 2023

Renaissance humanism was a scholarly movement which profoundly changed European society and intellectual life. Its impact is particularly apparent in educational reforms, which shaped the thinking of elites in Europe and settler societies in the Americas. The chapter begins with an account of the origins of humanism (with particular attention to Petrarch) and then turns to Italian humanism in the fifteenth century. The recovery of the Latin and Greek texts of classical antiquity is discussed, as is the role of wealthy patrons who founded libraries and schools and financed scholarly activities. Particular attention is given to Lorenzo Valla, Angelo Poliziano, and Pico della Mirandola. The focus then shifts to humanism in northern Europe and Spain, and to figures such as Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, and Jean Luis Vives. The chapter concludes with an account of the broader impact of humanism.
War and the State, c.1400–c.1650
Authors: Parrott David
Published: June 2023

The Renaissance was a period of endemic warfare, and the destruction wrought by warfare that shaped the political and social structures of Europe. Humanists such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More condemned warfare as the ungodly sport of a wicked ruling class. Others sought to understand war through the prism of classical authors such as Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch who described armed conflict in Republican and Imperial Rome. Figures such as Machiavelli studied ancient texts with a view to understanding the ‘art of war’ and its relationship to politics and morality. War is discussed in terms of dynastic rivalries and divisions arising from the Protestant Reformation. Technological changes include the advent of gunpowder, the proliferation of artillery, and innovations in fortification. The changing composition of armies and navies and their equipment is discussed, as are changes in strategy and tactics. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Renaissance responses to warfare.