This concluding chapter looks at the ramifications of the Gulf’s position in the global food system. It explores the implications of regional inequality and potential trajectories in the domestic and international politics of food.

This chapter explores various approaches to syllable division, the factors influencing syllabification, and the interaction of these principles with phonotactic constraints within a TSM language. Three prominent approaches to syllable constituency are discussed: Initial-Final, Onset-Rime, and Body-Coda. The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) and Moraic Theory are identified as key factors governing syllabification in TSM. Notably, segment-mora mappings effectively account for checked syllables in TSM. Compensatory lengthening and closed syllable shortening phenomena provide additional evidence that voiceless stop codas in checked syllables are not extrasyllabic.

Significantly, these diverse approaches to syllable division are not mutually exclusive. A speaker’s linguistic intuition likely encompasses all these divisions, allowing them to leverage relevant phonotactic constraints at various levels, including Rime, Nucleus, Coda, Onset, Body, and even the entire syllable. When the domain is extended to encompass the entire syllable, the [nasal] feature is prohibited from spreading across the boundaries of Body and Coda. Consequently, nasality in this language manifests as a crisp edge phenomenon.

The conclusion summaries the key arguments and ideas presented in this book. It also offers some brief thoughts on the overlap between Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ ideas about history-writing as well as on the nature of institutions in the early Islamic world.

In 1967 Pablo Neruda wrote his only play, Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta, which recreated the popular legend of the Chilean emigrant in “gold rush” California, who ended up becoming a bandit, pursued, and killed by the rangers. With the data collected during his trip to the United States, Neruda wrote his piece with the collaboration of the director Pedro Orthous, a member of the Chilean National Theater and one of the best representatives of political theater in Latin America. Both in the staging and in the text, the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose work began to be known throughout the world, is discernible, but also that of the political theater written in Spain before and during the Civil War, especially of Fermín Galán, the drama of another communist poet friend of Neruda, Rafael Alberti.

The Gulf is changing the geography of production and consumption. Its import demand is leading to control over production in agricultural countries in Asia and Africa. Its weight in export markets gives it influence over trade terms and standards of production. This is concomitant with the development of transport infrastructure and the growth of the Gulf’s logistical sector. A facet of this change is a fundamental reorganisation of regional food trade that has allowed countries such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia to achieve some of the largest values of food exports in the Arab region. Another trend is the increasing control that Gulf conglomerates have over food production in regional countries such as Egypt and Iran.

This essay focuses on Pablo Neruda’s politics as seen in his social and historical poetry, much of it having been published after the end of World War II. It concentrates on two collections: Canto general (1950) and España en el corazón (1937), in which one sees the development of a more pronounced political and historicist agenda. The latter text focuses on Spain and specifically on his witnessing of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that forced him to take sides with the republicanos and the Marxist cause. Later, after the horrors of World War II, he published Canto general, where the Marxist and communist cause becomes fundamental to his poetry, whether it treats the “liberators” of Latin America throughout the centuries, the segregationist United States, or the Soviet Union. In sum, Neruda progressed in the mid-twentieth century into a profoundly committed political poet.

Food acts as a proxy for different political agendas in the Gulf states. For governments, it is a means to reproduce nationalism and identity; it is a vehicle for citizen upgrading. Questions of environmental sustainability and consumption pervade food and agriculture, and in the Gulf, this is managed through a techno-political discourse. The development of indoor farms that utilise technology presents farming as a means to produce food that is free of its social and ecological dimensions. Lastly, the chapter illustrates the way in which boycotts provide Gulf societies with a means of expression and agency.

Chapter 7 focuses on more local dynamics over cross-border voting in certain borderland localities where all scales merge, and where palimpsestic political communities emerge even more clearly. It emphasizes the question of authority in the recognition or contestation of belonging. By campaigning in the Togolese borderlands in the 2000s, the Ghanaian political parties aimed to instrumentalize cross-border ties and recognized the authority of the local level in confirming belonging to the nation. This chapter demonstrates that the local level is the authority on and the gatekeeper of national belonging. As a consequence it shows that the local level is the most powerful layer of belonging in the palimpsestic political communities of the region, since it is capable of influencing all the other layers of belonging.

The opening chapter recasts a central puzzle in European political development during the so-called first wave of democratization. The puzzle is not that democracy was so successful over this period, but that the transition to some form of mass politics in the birthplace of both the Enlightenment and industrial revolutions produced so few democratic successes. If there was indeed a democratic first wave, it was an extraordinarily small one. And if this is true, then it is not the democratic achievements of the first wave, but rather the successful blocking strategies of the old regime that deserve our attention today.

Chapter 1 is a detailed guide to the multifaceted historical backdrop of the Safavids, charting their first transformation, from a Sufi order to a potent Shiʿi empire in Iran. In this exploration, Anatolia holds particular importance, illuminating the region’s significant impact on the Safavid journey and unveiling the movement’s origins within Ottoman territories. This chapter also contends that a rigid understanding of sects and sectarianism does not adequately capture the nuanced emergence of the early Safavid movement and its spread into neighboring regions. Instead, it posits that the Safavid order (and later the state) was the product of a syncretic and turbulent religious, cultural, and political landscape in Southwest Asia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This perspective is particularly pertinent when connecting Safavid history to recent scholarship that highlights the coexistence and long-term transformations of religious identities in regions such as Anatolia and the Iberian Peninsula, rather than reducing the narrative to one of perpetual tension and abrupt ruptures.

Intertwined with romanticism and his communist political stance, Neruda expresses in multiple lines an ecocritical stance. Animals, landscapes, and the critique of the ideology of progress are found throughout his poetry. This chapter seeks to highlight his contribution within a broad conception of “environmental history.”

This chapter examines segmental mutations and processes in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), including assimilation, dissimilation, gemination, syllabic reduction, contraction, and vernacular-literary phonological differences.

Assimilation occurs in place (e.g., homorganic nasal assimilation, optional palatalization) and manner (e.g., nasal harmony). Dissimilation prevents adjacent identical [back] features in diphthongs and avoids co-occurrence of [labial] and [dorsal] features in onset glides and coda consonants.

Gemination lengthens glides, nasals, and stops. Stop codas of checked syllables are voiced and undergo gemination when followed by a vowel-initial function word; otherwise, they undergo final devoicing. Gemination is constrained to the prosodic word domain, and the chapter suggests a gradient interpretation of geminate inalterability in some systems.

Syllable reduction leads to contraction, with nuclear segments potentially undergoing transformations like devocalization, merger, or nasalization. Contraction follows an edge-in paradigm, with sonority-based priority.

Vernacular-literary differences include onset consonants in the literary register undergoing pharyngealization and velarization, and vowels alternating through rounding and derounding, reflecting a trend toward unmarked phonological structures.

For the first time in its modern history, the post-2003 state faced a severe legitimation crisis, which was compounded by its inability to establish the authority to dominate. Chapter 4 argues that the fragmentation of the state’s authority resulted from the undoing of its domination capacity by the US-led invasion during the first three months of the occupation. The extent of the fragmentation was plain to see in 2003 when militia-backed political groups moved into the space where the state used to be – by the end of the 2006 civil war, those groups had firmly consolidated their demarcated domains of authority over Iraq’s economy and politics. The chapter investigates the Coalition Provisional Authority’s biggest civil project: repairing the national electrical grid. Technical and material elements of that project became sites of physical and political contestation over the state’s consolidation at a moment when its domination had disappeared. The chapter also traces the trajectory of “state-building” as an influential and ultimately dangerous framework, from its roots in 1980s US academia and 1990s UN peace-keeping practices to its arrival in Iraq with the US-led invasion.

The phonological phrasing of adverbs reveals a complex interplay of syntactic positioning, semantic modification scope, and semantic interpretive mode. Several nuanced patterns emerge from this linguistic phenomenon. In syntactic medial position, when an adverb operates at the sentence scope, a phonological phrase boundary materializes subsequently; however, this boundary is precluded following a predicate-scope adverb. In syntactic initial position, a phonological phrase boundary manifests after a speaker-oriented adverb with a subjective interpretative mode, yet remains absent in instances of adverbs with an objective interpretative stance. Moreover, such a boundary occurs after a focused polymorphic-scope adverb, while being systematically absent following a focused predicate-scope adverb. In essence, the focal adverbial tonal domain is fundamentally circumscribed by its scope of semantic modification, demonstrating the complex relationship between syntactic positioning and semantic interpretation.

Function words typically exhibit extraprosodicity at the phonological phrase level and are consequently exempt from tone sandhi processes. These elements, however, are reintegrated at the intonational phrase level, where they become subject to neutral tone operations. When function words receive focus, they no longer exhibit extraprosodicity and are thus subject to tone sandhi processes.