bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
He’s the Arbiter, Really
Authors: Rosenblum Joshua
Published: June 2024

This chapter looks closely at how the Maltby/Shire songwriting partnership actually works, in their own words. The “head versus heart” dynamic, which is implicit in numerous Maltby/Shire songs, is often at the root of the songwriting process itself. The question of which comes first, the music or the lyrics, is explored. (Answer: the idea.) The discussion illuminates how their collaboration and friendship have managed to endure for more than six decades. A look at an early draft of a passage from “Autumn” shows how back-and-forth between the writers can improve a song. Insights into and illustrations of the team’s writing process are woven throughout the book, but this chapter focuses on that subject exclusively.
Postpartum
Authors: Rosenblum Joshua
Published: June 2024

A 2019 off-Broadway revival of Baby, brought back for a post-pandemic extension in November 2021, offered an updated version of the show that provided diversity in terms of both race and sexuality, with one same-sex and two mixed-race couples. This addressed previous critiques of the show for being both too white and too straight. Additionally, the production, by Out of the Box Theatrics, starred one legally blind and one hearing-impaired performer. The result seemed like a fully contemporary musical rather than a revival of a show from the ’80s. A cast recording of the new production was released on Yellow Sound Label.
From Bottom Up to Top Down in Ecuador
Authors: Schneider Ben Ross
Published: June 2024

Education reform in Ecuador was the most dramatic and profound in the region, and it certainly deserves more attention Reforms to teacher careers started bottom up with a national referendum on education reform that was overwhelmingly approved in the same presidential election won by Rafael Correa. The design and implementation of reforms especially after 2009 was then more top down and technocratic, with little participation by civil society or policy networks. The teacher union, a powerful political machine, initially opposed the career policies, and the Correa government reduced its prerogatives and benefits and ultimately closed it down in 2016.
Top-Down Reform
Authors: Schneider Ben Ross
Published: June 2024

Colombia and Peru have longer tenure of technocratic ministers of education, compared to other countries in Latin America. Technocrats had some support in public opinion and managed to nudge career reforms along because the major potential opponents—clientelist politicians and machine-type teacher unions—were less involved. Weakly institutionalized parties especially reduced political pressures on the education system and gave technocrats more space. Teacher unions either negotiated aspects of the teacher reform (Colombia) or semi-imploded during the implementation phase (Peru). Business, parents, and civil society were weak and not involved. Colombia’s experience shows another way to handle, or circumvent, union opposition. Career reforms began in 2002, but rather than confront the teacher union Fecode (Federación Colombiana de Educadores) head on, the government applied the reform statute only to new hires. The cost of this bypass was lengthy delays.
“Gone into the Ancient Forest”
Authors: Grieve-Carlson Timothy
Published: June 2024

This chapter explores how Hermetic Protestant ideas were distributed in seventeenth-century Pennsylvania, in the years leading up to and following the arrival of Johannes Kelpius in 1693. I explore some of the archival evidence for the sustained popularity of the works of Johann Arndt and Jacob Böhme before tracing the history of the colony in the religious radicalism of William Penn and the early Quakers. This chapter also touches on the colonial relationships with the Lenape and cultural exchange between the Lenape and colonists on matters of religion and environmental knowledge. Focusing on Francis Daniel Pastorius and Daniel Leeds while exploring the general political and cultural forces at work, this chapter shows how Hermetic Protestant environmental thought flourished in early Pennsylvania.
The Threefold Wilderness State
Authors: Grieve-Carlson Timothy
Published: June 2024

This chapter is a deep dive into the late theology of Johannes Kelpius through a close reading of a 1706 letter in which he outlines a tripartite system of spiritual development he calls the “Threefold Wilderness State.” This text, which was copied, reprinted and distributed among the more radical scenes of Philadelphia Quakerdom during the eighteenth century, reveals Kelpius’s mature religious thought, the culmination of more than a decade of ascetic labor on the cliff of the Wissahickon, a deeply alchemical and ascetic reading of the Bible, his body, and his environment, with an eye toward spiritual and bodily transformation and eventually self-negation. As the great nineteenth-century scholar of German literature Oswald Seidensticker noted, Kelpius’s late religious thought was at times “more reminiscent of Plotinus than Christianity.”
“Delay Not Longer the Blessed Day”
Authors: Grieve-Carlson Timothy
Published: June 2024

This third and final vita describes, as best as the primary sources allow, the circumstances surrounding Kelpius’s death from an unknown illness in 1707. Sources include the dates on his letterbook and his own poems, in which he describes his declining condition and seems to openly yearn for physical death. Kelpius’s fragile health was a matter he referred to repeatedly in his letters. On the front page of his letter book there is a hint of when his decline began. He wrote 1694–1703, before tacking on more years as he added more copies of letters: 1694–1703–4–5–6–7, indicating four years of borrowed time, four sequential years that he did not anticipate living through as his condition worsened and he looked ahead into future that he did not expect to see.
Attunement
Authors: Carnes Natalie
Published: June 2024

Feminist theologians have received the patriarchal inheritance that constitutes the field of Christian theology largely through modes of critique and avoidance, two modes of engagement that have established the field of feminist theology by exposing texts’ and artifacts’ strategies of domination and amplifying more generative voices. This chapter notes the merits of these modes while also describing their limitations in transforming theological discourse. It introduces attunement as an alternative, additional mode of interpretation, illustrating the different possibilities the mode opens and affords by performing feminist readings of Augustine’s Confessions, first in the mode of critique and then in the mode of attunement.
Seeking Stability Amidst Disorder
Authors: Borck Tobias
Published: June 2024

The 2010s were a decade of transformation and conflict in the Middle East, bookended by the Arab Uprisings and the pandemic. Throughout this time, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar—the three Arab states with the most ambitious regional—declared stability to be their main objective. Yet, rather than being a common denominator, this seemingly shared objective of stability obscured the differences between their often-competing agendas. These three Gulf monarchies all agreed that the Middle East descended into unprecedented and dangerous instability following the Arab Uprisings. But their assessments diverged on what characterized and drove the unrest. This led each country to formulate different—and at times contradictory—views of how politics should be organized in and between states in the region, and what role external powers should play to build a stable new order. With no universally accepted definition of stability, this book develops an original analytical framework linking this concept to that of order, and provides a useful lens through which to understand foreign policy in the Gulf. While governments often frame their relations with other states by evoking a joint commitment to stability, the book shows that this does not, in itself, imply strategic alignment.
Saudi Arabia’s Perception
Authors: Borck Tobias
Published: June 2024

This chapter establishes how Saudi Arabia made sense of the instability in the MENA during the 2010s; it identifies the Kingdom’s diagnosis, as it were, of the problems in the region that it considered necessary to address to build an order that was more conducive to stability. The chapter argues that Saudi Arabia experienced the 2010s as a decade in which the regional order came undone at various levels. It saw the Arab world, with the Kingdom at its centre, as beset by enemies, and destabilized, betrayed, and abandoned by supposed friends. In this environment, Saudi Arabia felt it necessary to assert itself to protect its national security and regional interests, to prevent the worst outgrowths of instability from taking root, and, eventually, to lead the region into what it considered a more secure future.
The UAE’s Perception
Authors: Borck Tobias
Published: June 2024

This chapter analyzes how the UAE made sense of the developments in the MENA during the 2010s. It argues that the UAE experienced the decade as a period of regional turmoil in which many serious threats to its national security and regional interests arose, but also as an affirmation of its own political and socio-economic governance model and an opportunity to expand its regional reach. The UAE viewed the Arab Uprisings as cataclysmic events that revealed the fragility of many Arab states and failures of their governments, as well as the changes underway in the international system that meant that the USA would no longer guarantee security in the MENA. As the decade progressed, the UAE saw the region’s status quo state system and its own development model threatened by an array of destabilising extremist forces, comprising of both Islamist non-state actors and their state-backers, namely Iran, Turkey, and Qatar.
The UAE’s Conception of Stability
Authors: Borck Tobias
Published: June 2024

This chapter analyzes the UAE’s conception of stability in the MENA during the 2010s. The UAE conceived of stability in the MENA as based on strong Arab states led by governments focused both on facilitating socio-economic development and controlling the public sphere in their countries. In a regional order centred around the twin pillars Saudi Arabia and Egypt, both orienting themselves by the UAE’s example and strategic direction, it wanted Arab states to take responsibility for resolving regional crises. Further, Arab states needed to hold at bay political ideologies advocating revolutionary change, whether championed by non-state actors or states with revisionist regional agendas. Finally, it wanted external powers—most of all the USA, but also Russia and China—to enable and support stability in the MENA by reliably upholding the region’s state system and focusing on pursuing their security and economic interests, with the UAE as their primary regional interlocutor.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar in Comparison
Authors: Borck Tobias
Published: June 2024

This chapter compares the findings of the book’s three case studies. It shows that for Saudi Arabia, regional leadership was not optional, whereas taking on a prominent role in regional affairs involved more choice for Emirati and Qatari leaders. The latter perceived significant threats to their security, but their regional foreign policies were more obviously driven by ambitions to elevate their small states’ status within the region and beyond. The chapter further summarizes how the three countries’ assessments about what drove instability in the MENA during the 2010s differed considerably, even as they all saw the region collapse into a general state of disorder; and it outlines how their ideas of what kind of order could yield stability—i.e. an environment in which they felt secure enough domestically and able to protect and pursue their regional interests as freely as possible—consequently described three different versions of the MENA.
Conclusion
Authors: Brafman Yonatan Y.
Published: June 2024

This chapter synthesizes Critique of Halakhic Reason’s textual, legal, and philosophical arguments to clarify its larger claim: whether religious norms or obligations—even divine commandments—are justified and how they are implemented depends on the reasons that can be offered for and against them by human agents. Reasons and practices of reason-giving are thus central to religious thought and life. In the process, the chapter draws out the implications for Jewish philosophy and law, theology, and the study and philosophy of religion, as well as legal, political, and moral philosophy. Critical reflection on religion must recognize it not as an autonomous domain based on uniquely religious reasons—which is merely an updated version of the unhelpful category “faith”—but as a nexus of reasons with connections to theology, philosophy, law, politics, and ethics. Tracing and evaluating reasons in religious traditions thus requires agile movement across multiple discourses.
The Delhi Bomb
Authors: McQuade Joseph
Published: June 2024

The chapter traces Rash Behari Bose’s initial appearance within the historical record by reconstructing the events that preceded and then followed the Delhi bomb attack of 1912. Drawing on reports by colonial officials and intelligence officers, the chapter argues that Bose’s first major revolutionary operation exposed the limits of colonial knowledge and helped accelerate the growth of the modern surveillance state in India. The assassination attempt against the British viceroy triggered a subcontinent-wide manhunt for the perpetrators. Drawing on new methods of surveillance, intelligence-sharing, and the emerging field of forensic science, the Delhi bomb investigation marks a key episode in the birth of the modern security state in India and beyond.
A National Army
Authors: McQuade Joseph
Published: June 2024

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Rash Behari Bose worked alongside Indian revolutionaries and Japanese imperialists to create the Indian National Army (INA), which fought alongside the Japanese against British imperial forces. Bose also mounted a sustained communications strategy intended to add fuel to the fire that was already raging back home, thanks to Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, whose Quit India movement threatened to render British rule on the subcontinent impossible. The chapter assesses the successes and failures of these movements and demonstrates Bose’s continued significance in India’s freedom movement up until his death in 1945.
Muhammad’s Confrontations with Meccan Pagans
Authors: Ibrahim Ayman S.
Published: June 2024

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Muhammad’s major confrontations with the Meccan pagans of his Quraysh tribe. Chapter 3 examines the Muslim victory at Badr (2/624) and their defeat at Uḥud (3/625). The narratives are treated as literary stories, fashioned and created by traditionists to communicate meaningful religious dispositions. The chapter shows how ᶜAbbāsid-era historians seem to have elevated the status of figures crucial to ᶜAbbāsid legitimacy (e.g., al-ᶜAbbās ibn ᶜAbd al-Muṭṭalib) and how they also designed narratives to present Umayyad notables (e.g., Abū Sufyān and Muᶜāwiya) as weak Muslims who desired worldly gains and remained unbelievers until they were forced to submit to Muhammad at the conquest of Mecca. Muslim historians were unable to relinquish their religious sympathies or political inclinations in forming their narratives. They not only report stories—they author them.
The King of Arabia
Authors: Ibrahim Ayman S.
Published: June 2024

Chapter 6 is devoted to Muhammad’s final maghāzī against the Bedouins, which reportedly resulted in their total surrender to his leadership. The tradition describes that, after subduing the Jews of Medina and the pagans of Mecca, Muhammad subdued various strong tribes in Western Arabia. The chapter analyzes the incursion against the Banū Jadhīma, the Battle of Ḥunayn, and the siege of al-Ṭā’if. The first two resulted in Muslim victories, while the siege did not. These narratives depict Muhammad as having become the major leader in Arabia, and allege that many Arab delegations came to declare allegiance, loyalty, and submission to Muhammad—a notion conveyed in the tradition as religious conversion. In the examination of these narratives, the chapter highlights apparent attempts by the narrators to adjust the portrayals of individuals and the course of events. Muslim traditionists appear to have designed military victories and defeats to communicate theological meanings.
Concluding Remarks
Authors: Ibrahim Ayman S.
Published: June 2024

In this concluding chapter, the main points of the book’s chapters and their major observations and arguments are given and explained. The book is a journey into medieval Muslim thought on Muhammad and his role as a military champion. The classical narrators designed his memory as a raid initiator, caravan interceptor, and plunder seeker—a memory that Muslims past and present have cherished. While very little is known about the Muhammad of history from contemporary and near-contemporary sources, details about the Muhammad of the tradition are ample in number, stunning in detail, and complex in composition. These stories are documented centuries after his death by religious zealots who served as authors of history. They tweaked, adjusted, and rewrote their narratives in response to their sociopolitical and sectarian contexts. When asked what is fiction and what actually occurred, one can only yield, Allāhu aᶜlam (Allah knows best).
Greater Tigray and the Mysterious Magnetism of Ethiopia
Authors: Erlich Haggai
Published: June 2024

This is an analytical history of the role Tigrinya-speakers have played and are still playing in the history of Ethiopia and Eritrea, from Tigray’s very ancient incipience to the origins of today’s tragically fratricidal war. Drawing from his huge corpus of publications on the Horn of Africa, Haggai Erlich sheds new light on major turning-points, as well as patterns of continuity. His history revolves around one key question: what was “the mysterious magnetism” that held (and still holds) Ethiopia together? Erlich argues that there is an “Amhara thesis” competing with a “Tigrayan thesis” on what Ethiopia’s political and administrative system should be, and that the region’s history has often rotated around the axis of struggle between these two visions. The Tigrayans, though a minority, have had their periods of domination, the last ending in 2018. In between these eras, Tigrayans have been marginalised and weakened, including as the victims of their own internal rivalries, which culminated in the deep and bitter split between “core” Tigrayans and Tigrayan Eritreans. In the context of today’s war, Erlich’s insightful book offers an extremely timely introduction to Tigrayan history, and an indispensable key to understanding the roots of Ethiopia’s present crisis.
The Era of the Judges
Authors: Erlich Haggai
Published: June 2024

In the three centuries following the destruction by Ahmad Gragn, Ethiopia did not recuperate. More factors contributed to a gradual weakening of the imperial system of the kingdom. The Oromo ethnic group penetrated the centre. Portuguese missionaries challenged the Ethiopian Church. The weakened emperors isolated themselves in their new capital of Gondar. By the end of the 18th century, Ethiopia was in fact a loose framework for regional entities: Gondar, Shoa, Gojjam, Tigray. While Shoa stabilized under its local dynasty, Tigray grew stronger due to two processes that would prepare her for future hegemony. One was the solidification of the social and economic power of the leading families. The other was the quicker and better adoption of firearms. However, local power in Tigray was rotating between rival families amid perpetual internal conflicts.
Collapse
Authors: Erlich Haggai
Published: June 2024

When Yohannes fell, Tigray was already exhausted. The imperial system that had been built around her collapsed. Shoa under Menelik II, 1889–1913, was now the stronger and dominant power in Ethiopia. The heir of Yohannes, Ras Mangasha, proved unable to unite Tigray. The devastated region, caught between Shoa and the Italians--now the occupiers of Colonia Eritrea (declared in 1890)--sank into endless internal conflicts. Ras Alula, the mentor of Mangasha prevented him from submitting to Menelik. Finally, in June 1894, the Tigrayan leaders marched to Addis Ababa and swore allegiance to the emperor. They helped him to win the decisive battle of Adwa over the invading Italians in March 1896, but Menelik saw to it that Tigray would remain poor, disunited, and marginal.
Under Haile Selassie
Authors: Erlich Haggai
Published: June 2024

In the years after the 1941 liberation and until the 1945 end of the global war, there continued the triple game: Haile Selassie, the British, and Tigray’s traditional leading families. The latter were entrenched in their power positions as of the 16th century (or earlier), but in 1943 a fourth factor entered the scene, a popular Tigrayan protest movement, the Woyane. Though it was soon quelled, and though the old tripartite game was quickly resumed, Woyane proved significant in later years. The Woyane revolt was both a demand of the local minor chiefs, for more attention from the central government, as well as a gesture of discontent on the part of Tigray against imperial control. (The Tigrayan People Liberation Front (TPLF) would lead Ethiopia as of 1991, proud in their nickname as “Woyane”).
The Grand Dam
Authors: Erlich Haggai
Published: June 2024

Meles Zenawi emerged stronger at home from the 1998–2000 war with Eritrea, and even stronger from the Ethiopian 2006–2008 pre-emptive invasion of the Islamic militant Somalia. Many admired him for pushing the country momentously forward, others criticized him for being arrogant, and for his general policy of ethnic federalism. His supporters argued that his achievements in all fields--economic, education, freedoms, openness to the world--were far greater than his failures. The chapter focuses on one important aspect: laying the foundation for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). An enterprise, which he envisioned and carried out in the spirit of Tigray’s tradition of courage and defiance, at home as well as in external affairs.
A Prospect of Secularization?
Authors: Morier-Genoud Eric
Published: June 2024

The chapter looks at the consequences of the religious liberalization and political rise of Muslims in the 1990s. It explores whether this resulted in an integration of Muslims in the country’s hegemonic bloc. The text looks at the presence of Muslims in parliament, nationally and locally, and uncovers that since 1998 the government has in fact restricted the influence of Muslims within the party in power. This has limited the weight Muslims have had on politics, and it poses the question of whether secularization could ensue. Muslims have noted the change and reorganized accordingly, refocusing their energy away from politics, on religious, social, and educational issues. The text analyzes the new thinking and strategy of Muslim national leaders in the early 2000s.
From Palace to Revolution
Authors: Pargeter Alison
Published: June 2024

This chapter focuses on the role of tribes and their relationship to the state during the coming to power and early years of the Qadhafi regime. It explores how despite Qadhafi’s Arab nationalist discourse, which castigated tribes as backwards and reactionary, and despite his aspiration to forge a modern state that would transcend tribal and regional divisions, Qadhafi came to realize early on that he could not go against the social fabric of society. Having grown up steeped in tribal traditions, he fully understood the weight and influence of kinship relations and structures. He worked therefore to bind tribes to his regime, reaching out to and engaging tribal elites in order to widen his support base and shore up his fledgling regime. This chapter also looks at how after an attempted coup by members of his inner circle from Misrata in 1975, Qadhafi’s engagement with Libya’s tribes deepened and he moved further to wrap himself in the protective layers of kinship.
Tribes and the Post-2014 Order
Authors: Pargeter Alison
Published: June 2024

This chapter focuses on the tribes and their role in Libya in light of the conflict that erupted in 2014, creating yet more faultlines in an already fractured environment. It traces the tribes’ relationship to Khalifa Haftar, showing how many tribes, especially those in Cyrenaica, looked to him to provide stability and security, viewing him as an antidote to the predominantly Islamist and Misratan forces that had emerged triumphant in 2011. Yet while many tribes, or parts of tribes, provided Haftar with a bedrock of support, enabling him to expand his area of control, this relationship was not unproblematic; tribal support was not uniform or guaranteed. As this chapter shows, while tribes may be flexible and pragmatic, there are limits as to how far they will bargain or bend to accommodate, and their ability to mobilize, mediate and push back against key stakeholders has had far-reaching consequences on Libya’s post-Qadhafi trajectory.
Tribes and the Iraqi Republic
Authors: Pargeter Alison
Published: June 2024

This chapter explores the relationship between tribes and the Iraqi state from the 1958 coup until the Ba’athists’ coming to power a decade later. It looks at how successive revolutionary regimes adopted a discourse that equated tribalism with feudalism, castigating tribal sheikhs and their “outdated practices,” and seeking to undermine tribal power. While these developments eroded old patterns of social organization, transforming relations between the sheikh and his tribesmen, the birth of the Iraqi Republic did not herald the end of tribalism. As this chapter examines, not only did tribal structures remain intact, the new military elites proved unable to bypass the kinship alliances that were woven deep into the fabric of their own society. Despite their public rhetoric, successive regimes continued to rely on kinship relations, using tribes as protective layers to buttress their power. This chapter shows that while 1958 marked a radical rupture with the past, it did not result in the wholesale decline of the tribe or the tribal sheikh. Social organization patterns and kinship bonds were affected by the policies of successive regimes, but were not broken.
Tribes and the Ba’athist State
Authors: Pargeter Alison
Published: June 2024

This chapter focuses on the role of tribes and their relationship with the Ba’athist regime that took over in 1968. More radical in outlook than successive regimes of the preceding ten years, the new revolutionary Arab nationalist leaders adopted more robust efforts to undermine and dismantle tribalism, which they equated with the reactionary forces of the past. However, as this chapter shows, while tribal power was undoubtedly weakened during this period, the new regime found itself forced to engage with the very tribal elite it was bent on destroying. From the outset, it employed a two-pronged approach, repressing the tribal sheikhs while simultaneously courting and accommodating them. Although this engagement remained largely hidden, the relationship served both ruler and ruled, enabling the regime to tap into the tribal networks whilst enabling the tribes to carve out space for themselves under Ba’athist rule, both during the time of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and during that of Saddam Hussein.
Tribes, Occupation and Shi’ite Iraq
Authors: Pargeter Alison
Published: June 2024

This chapter looks at the shifting role of tribes following the 2003 occupation of Iraq, assessing how tribes responded to regime change and to the presence of occupying powers. It also examines how tribes were suddenly propelled to the fore, showing how tribal elites began to exercise tribal agency in new ways. It examines how tribes began running and securing their local areas, how they dealt with militant forces including al-Qaeda, but also how they sought to recover a political role in their own right. It shows too how, as the transition progressed, the tribes found themselves outmaneuvered by competing forces including the Americans, political Islamist parties, militias, and extremist groups. The chapter focuses too on the rule of prime minister Nouri Maliki and his relationship to the Shi’ite tribes, arguing that he and the Shi’ite ruling elite forced the tribes back into a clientelistic relationship, simultaneously courting and subduing them, and establishing a new bargain between ruler and ruled.
Introduction
Authors: Awan Akil N. , Lewis James R.
Published: June 2024

This chapter explores the origins and contemporary usage of the term Radicalization which has become an important and ubiquitous part of the twenty-first-century security and political landscape, employed by academics, policymakers, civil society actors, practitioners, and media alike, in ever-expanding ways, while derivative terms like counter-radicalization and de-radicalization, have spawned an entire industry of radicalization experts, counter-radicalization consultancies and think tanks, and de-radicalization programs, centers, and policies. As this chapter argues, the term is a product of the post 9/11 milieu and the appropriation of the term in policymaker, popular, and media discourse was quickly matched in academia, albeit, not entirely uncritically. Highlighting the enduring political origins of the term, the vast majority of academic studies address Islamist or Jihadist radicalization. This is of particular concern when viewed in light of the increasing prevalence of right-wing terrorism during this period, which nevertheless remains both understudied in academia and underreported in the media, allowing it to grow on the margins relatively unnoticed, while conversely reinforcing the linkage between Muslim communities and terrorism, contributing to both societal polarization and the creation of suspect communities.
Aum Shinrikyo and the “Aum Incident”
Authors: Repp Martin
Published: June 2024

This chapter examines the emergence of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, and the factors behind its eventual radicalization which culminated in a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. The chapter explores how a religious group was able to transform itself so drastically during a relatively short period of time. In addition, the chapter examines the numerous, often contradictory, narratives of Aum Shinrikyo and the 1995 Aum incident, asking why some have come to dominate the discourse while others are neglected. The chapter argues that many academic studies take the poison gas attacks of 1995 as presupposition for understanding the group, and therefore portrayed its earlier developments anachronistically from later events. According to these narratives, internal reasons such as the religious teachings, practices, and the leader led necessarily to the evil outcome. However, in doing so, external contributing factors were neglected, as were the unproblematic spiritual aspects of the group, as practiced by many ordinary members not involved with Aum’s crimes, and who continued with their beliefs and practices. This holistic appraisal is necessary if we are to fully comprehend the radicalization of Aum Shinrikyo.
ALM
Authors: Pearson Elizabeth
Published: June 2024

The aim of this chapter is to situate the masculinities evident in narratives participants told about pivotal moments in their lives before their association with the al-Muhajiroun network. Masculinities emerge as constructed in three ways: in geographic space, in particular a hypermasculine street culture echoing that of radical right radicalization; through a process of gendered meta-reflexivity that constitutes the “identity crisis” of radicalization literature; and in the discursive space constructed post-9/11 through the gendered securitization of Muslims and Islam. The chapter therefore expands radicalization theories’ understanding of identity crisis: here it is less “crisis,” more cumulative process. Reflexivity is constant, and while there appears to be a pivotal moment for each participant, this cannot be predicted. The chapter explores how gender is fundamental in that process, given that participants internalize conflicting masculinity systems and conflicting normative gender frameworks. As with the radical right, this means that gender and sexual norms are important in distinguishing in- from out-group. The chapter also introduces the Islamist participants, and their backgrounds.
ALM
Authors: Pearson Elizabeth
Published: June 2024

This chapter explores how the masculinities that participants discussed as important in their lives prior to becoming Islamists are later mobilized in the ideology and activism of the extreme network. It sets out what the Islamist participants believe, with a focus on their understanding of doctrine, and how this positions them in relation to women, to gender and to jihad. While radical-right participants deemphasized adherence to any explicit “ideology,” ideology has an important status within the Islamist network. There is far more coherence around a particular gendered ideological position among al-Muhajiroun members and their network than there is for the radical-right participants: ideological knowledge endows status. This is accumulated via reading, but also learning by association with more experienced activists. This learning process is an induction into a particular gendered outlook, entailing the acceptance and propagation of explicitly gendered norms, and constituting a particular masculinity project.
Introduction
Authors: Vuković Vuk
Published: June 2024

There is a deep, structural connection between elite power and the consequences it projects on the distribution of incomes and wealth in a society. In order to theoretically justify the origin of such a connection the book must answer three basic questions: (1) why is there an incentive to join an elite network, (2) why should elite networks have any effect on inequality, and (3) if there is a relationship, how does it explain the cyclical nature of inequality? The introductory chapter summarizes the answers to all three of these questions, which will later be tackled, theoretically and empirically, throughout the book.
Why Study Elite Networks?
Authors: Vuković Vuk
Published: June 2024

Chapter 1 defines the concept of elite networks. It provides a formal definition, discusses the logic behind the creation of networks, and provides several visualizations of the most obvious examples of elite networks, with an emphasis on network superhubs in finance and politics. It then draws a map of political interactions and uses Olson’s logic of interest group behavior based on their relative power and salience to place elite networks on that spectrum. Finally, it describes how to quantify and establish elite network outcomes.
Political Networks and Wages of Top Corporate Income Earners
Authors: Vuković Vuk
Published: June 2024

Chapter 4 summarizes the empirical evidence that confirms the theoretical intuition laid out in the previous two chapters. It presents evidence using a large database of corporate executives of publicly listed companies in order to measure directly how they might be connected to politicians. A political connection implies any channel through which a top-ranked corporate executive could form an informal interaction with an office-holding politician. Once such an informal relationship is established, favors can be exchanged; the executive gets beneficial regulation or government contracts, and the politician gets campaign donations or direct bribes. When the executive successfully extracts rents for his firm, he demands a higher compensation as a reward for his efforts. The empirical evidence supports this hypothesis and finds that politically connected executives, by assumption elite network members, tend to have higher salaries and total earnings than nonconnected executives.
Motivation for Politicians
Authors: Vuković Vuk
Published: June 2024

Chapter 6 presents theoretical and empirical justifications and explanations of why politicians would enter an elite network type of relationship. They benefit in two ways: preserving their position of power through building small winning coalitions, and by directly or indirectly extracting rents. This is where elite network theory meets the selectorate theory and paints a complete picture of the motivation of political survival. Rents can come in the form of bribes and kickbacks to direct usurpation of office for private gain. The chapter concludes by presenting empirical findings linking corruption, in the form of rent-extraction, directly to re-election possibilities of politicians. The data is drawn from the case of Croatia, where corruption has been directly approximated using fraudulent procurement contracts.
The Practices of Indian and Brazilian Infrastructure Builders in Africa
Authors: Dye Barnaby Joseph , Alencastro Mathias , Oliveira Ricardo Soares de
Published: June 2024

Actors from the Global South have transformed Africa’s twenty-first-century international relations, but the literature has primarily focused on China, overlooking the true diversity of other “new” actors on the continent. This chapter addresses two alternative, prominent countries that have become major financiers and builders of infrastructure: India and Brazil. We focus on the practices involved in India and Brazil’s infrastructure engagements in Africa, providing an overview of the main state financing mechanisms, the key companies involved, and the patterns of governmental decision making. Using detailed empirics, we assert the importance of taking the private sector as a serious agent in forging international relations by making specific infrastructure deals, forging relations with African governments and determining construction practices. We also trace the refraction of domestic politics into the international sphere connected to infrastructure building in Africa.
South-South Cooperation Monitoring Movements
Authors: Waisbich Laura Trajber
Published: June 2024

This chapter investigates accountability-related mobilization practices of civil society organizations from Brazil, China, and India, alongside peer organizations in Africa. The chapter examines how these organizations engage in the politics of contestation around infrastructure projects in Africa throughout the 2010s. It provides a comparative analysis of the framings and repertoires used by civil society actors and the issues that citizen-led collective action produces in the context of expanding South-South cooperation (SSC) in Africa by rising powers. By focusing on dynamics of social mobilization in the context of Southern-led development cooperation, the chapter helps to better understanding how citizens demand and forge alternative citizen-led forms of participation and political control over this burgeoning transnational arena. In doing so, the chapter connects SSC-related mobilization dynamics to evolving state-society relations in the context of foreign policymaking in Brazil, China, and India, and how these influence African infrastructure globalities.
The Bosniaks
Authors: Mujanovic Jasmin
Published: June 2024

For the first time in nearly two centuries, one ethnic group now constitutes an absolute majority of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s population: the Bosniaks. It is an unlikely development given that, scarcely thirty years ago, they were targeted for extermination and expulsion by Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević. Even as the Bosniak community fought to survive these atrocities, it simultaneously came under attack from militants led by Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, who attempted to partition Bosnia and Herzegovina between Zagreb and Belgrade. Improbably, the Bosniaks and the Bosnian state survived these campaigns. But the country’s fractious sectarian post-war order has produced the world’s most convoluted constitutional regime, always teetering on the brink of collapse. Jasmin Mujanović illuminates the sources of contemporary Bosniak political identity, tracing the evolution of a religious community into a secular nation, and shedding light on the future of a nation at a crossroads. He explores the idea of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a “national homeland,” considers how narratives of genocide influence self-identity, and probes how demographic changes are putting pressure on the country’s political framework. The fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s peace and democracy rests on the Bosniaks’ shoulders--and with it, the stability of all Southeastern Europe.
The Politics of the Bosnian Genocide
Authors: Mujanovic Jasmin
Published: June 2024

This chapter examines the political origins of the Bosnian Genocide, arguing that there is an overwhelming degree of evidence that the ideological and practical preparations for the extermination of the Bosniak people between 1992 and 1995 by Serbian proxy forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina originated as early as the mid-1980s in the senior levels of the Belgrade political and military establishments. It also examines the shared attempt to partition Bosnia and Herzegovina between then political leadership in Croatia and Serbia, and their respective proxy forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Life at the Limits of Language
Authors: Edwards Terra
Published: June 2024

Chapter 1 provides the theoretical and practical background needed to understand the main arguments of the book, as well as their contribution to theories of language in social context. In particular, it provides an elaborated discussion about how linguists have distinguished statements about the world, or “propositions” from the world itself. Drawing on innovations in anthropological theory, I introduce a distinction between “non-propositional” and “propositional” meaning, or “semiosis”, in order to account for the existential foundations of language. Integrating this conceptual framework with situated observations about everyday life among DeafBlind people in the U.S., before and after the inception of the protactile movement, frames the question at the heart of the book: What use is language, as a means of representing the world, when the world itself is threatening to break apart, turn into a distant memory, or, in the end, just go silent.
Introduction
Authors: Roscini Marco
Published: June 2024

The principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other states is a venerable principle of international law but determination of its exact content remains an enigma. This book addresses what constitutes an ‘intervention’ in international law and when such intervention is unlawful. The approach is from three different perspectives, which are reflected in the book’s structure—historical, theoretical, and systemic—using predominantly desk- and library-based research involving rigorous analysis of primary materials and qualitative data evidencing the practice of states and relevant international organizations. By adopting this approach, the book provides a systematic and coherent analysis of the principle of non-intervention. The sources used are mainly those listed in Article 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ): treaties (including resolutions of treaty-based international organizations), customary international law, general principles of law, and in a subsidiary role, the ‘judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations’.
The Principle of Non-Intervention in the Information Age: Cyber Operations as a New Means of Coercion in the Domestic Affairs of States
Authors: Roscini Marco
Published: June 2024

It is now uncontested that the application of the principle of non-intervention extends to cyber operations. What remains controversial is what type of cyber operations are coercive. Those resulting or designed to result in material damage or in loss of functionality of infrastructure involve an exercise of power by a state on the territory of another and constitute forcible coercion. If they compel the target state into doing or not doing something, they amount to dictatorial coercion. Cyber operations are a violation of the principle of non-intervention also when they involve the unauthorized extraterritorial access to non-publicly available data. Disinformation operations, on the other hand, are a new type of coercion of state at least when they disseminate fake or inaccurate information to prevent the electorate from casting their vote. Finally, cyber operations in support of foreign subversive, terrorist or armed opposition groups are prohibited by the principle of non-intervention.
The Limits of Democratic Dissent, 1830–48
Authors: Brophy James M.
Published: June 2024

How the doctrine of radicalism increasingly distinguished itself from liberalism after 1830 looms as a central question for social, political, and intellectual historians. This chapter examines the print circuits of radicalism to clarify its commercial and political circumstances. It presents the numerous printers who defied governments to circulate the agitational literature for the Hambach Festival in 1832, and it explores the German, Swiss, and French publishers who delivered radical tracts to German and Austrian readers through the 1840s. But publishers never fully realized the aspiration to move radical literature beyond clandestine audiences into mainstream commercial networks. The successes and failures of radicalism set in bold relief the limits of political dissent to move beyond monarchical liberalism. In doing so, it offers important insights to understand the fractured revolutionary front in 1848–49.
The Rule of the Association and Related Texts
Authors: Collins John J. , Nati James
Published: June 2024

This book provides text, translation, and commentary on 1QS (Serekh ha-Yahad), 1QSa (Rule of the Congregation), 1QSb (Scroll of Blessings), and related fragmentary texts: 1Q29a, 4QSa–j, 5Q11, and 11Q29. It also provides introductions to 1QS, 1QSa, 1QSb, and to the related fragments from Caves 1, 4, 5, and 11. Each of the fragmentary manuscripts is presented in full and analyzed in its own right, and not treated simply as variants of 1QS. The entity for which the Rule was written (the yahad) is called an “association” rather than a “community,” because it assumes that members have multiple settlements, not just one at Qumran. The commentary recognizes, however, that a special group is set aside within the association, to go into the desert to pursue a higher degree of holiness. The introduction to 1QS attempts to locate this association in the context of ancient Judaism, and also pays attention to the broader cultural context, by noting the phenomenon of voluntary associations in the Hellenistic world and the influence of Zoroastrian dualism on the doctrine of two spirits of light and darkness in 1QS 3–4. The commentary engages the full range of scholarship on the Rule and provides a comprehensive bibliography.
1QS 5:1–7:25. The Rules of the Association and Penal Code
Authors: Collins John J. , Nati James
Published: June 2024

This section is generally regarded as the oldest core of the Rule. 4QSd provides clear evidence that one form of the Rule did not include parallels to 1QS 1–4. Also 4QSb,d did not include mention of the “sons of Zadok” corresponding to those in 1QS 5. This commentary argues that “sons of Zadok” was an honorary title for the members of the association, derived from Ezekiel 44. The expression is used similarly in the Damascus Document CD 3:21–4:4. The chapter goes on to discuss the provision for multiple settlements with a minimum of ten members and admission to the association, which has a striking parallel in Josephus’s account of the Essenes. The last part of this chapter (1QS 6:24–7:25) discusses the penal code of the association, which has significant parallels in the Damascus Document.