This chapter explores the central theme of meaning-making within the Syrian revolution. It focuses on how exiled intellectuals grappled with the loss of hope and disenfranchisement as the revolution became increasingly militarised. Intellectuals in exile worked to construct new frameworks of meaning, using revolution as a source of existential and cultural significance. The chapter examines how revolutionary language and narratives were liberated from state-controlled discourse and reinterpreted by intellectuals to align with their visions for Syria’s future. However, the chapter also addresses the growing sense of disenfranchisement as these intellectual narratives lost impact amid the rise of competing ideologies and factions within the revolutionary movement.

Through syllable contraction, sandhi, base, and neutral tonal melodies merge, resulting in single tones or tone clusters. Simplification follows via edge-in association, which preserves the edge tones. In cases where clusters are longer, mora addition is employed.

Trisyllabic reduplication involves an emphatic -á suffix attached to the leftmost syllable. When this emphatic -á is absent in triplication, its high tone persists as a floating tone. The initial syllable of triplication, functioning as the prosodic head and favoring a high tone, bears focal stress. If this syllable surfaces with a low-register sandhi tone, it recruits the floating high tone to form a tone cluster. However, if it already carries a high-register tone and satisfies prosodic prominence, the floating high tone remains redundant.

Tetrasyllabic reduplication exhibits distinct phonological and semantic patterns in its various manifestations. The ABAB configuration functions to attenuate semantic meaning, whereas AABB, ABAC, and ACBC patterns serve to intensify semantic content. From a prosodic perspective, ABAB configurations consistently operate as unified tone sandhi domains. In contrast, AABB, ABAC, and ACBC patterns demonstrate prosodic flexibility, potentially functioning either as single unified domains or bifurcating into two discrete domains. It is critical to note that the ABCC pattern, despite its superficial similarity, does not represent genuine tetrasyllabic reduplication; instead, it comprises two distinct phrasal elements that invariably constitute separate tonal domains.

This chapter presents a corpus-based study of the segmental and tonal accents in the iGeneration’s Taiwanese Southern Min (iTSM). Segmentally, iTSM speakers exhibit several distinctive phonological processes. Stop codas in checked syllables are elided, followed by resyllabification rather than gemination. Labial nasal codas are coronalized, while coronal nasal codas are velarized. Velarized nasal codas undergo gemination, while coronalized codas resist it. Labial nasal codas resyllabify to the following onsets. Voiced velar stop onsets, the most marked in the voiced stop series, are often elided or nasalized before nasal vowels, while less marked voiced labial stops and laterals are preserved. Nasalization in iTSM, both intra- and inter-syllabic, shows non-crisp edge phenomena, contrasting with TSM’s crisp edge phenomenon.

Tonally, stop coda elision results in the loss of checked tones, shifting to smooth tones with compensatory vowel lengthening. The study also shows that iTSM speakers prefer parsing longer expressions into tetrasyllabic or shorter fragments, which function as phonological phrases and constrain the application of tone sandhi. This phrasing process is sensitive to syntactic adjuncthood and syllable count.

This essay discusses Pablo Neruda’s youth love poetry collection Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) in relation to situated subjectivities, from decolonial, intersectional feminist perspectives. One hundred years after the collection was published, we briefly account for Neruda’s inter- and intra-subjective exploration of love and otherness. Particular attention is given here to the poetic process as an unending dialogue between production and reception, including some current poetic and nonpoetic canceling, as well as rediscoveries of his rich eco- and geopoetic vocation.

The introduction addresses the double erasures of the story of the Nicaragua Canal and the history of the Mosquito Coast as a result of the triumphalist narrative of the Panama Canal. Arguing that the Nicaragua Canal route has historically been an imperial staging arena, the chapter suggests that exploring the entwined history of the Mosquito Coast and the Nicaragua Canal can help us visualize the shadowy limits of imperialism and sovereignty in the nineteenth century.

The Ewe-speaking region straddling the border between Ghana and Togo has not been envisioned by much of the scholarship as a viable political community capable of forming a nation-state. Yet this interpretation does not account for the continued identity claims arising from this transnational region. By looking more closely at grassroots perceptions of what constitutes a political community, the diagnostic may be different. This chapter considers how the scalar and genealogical principle underpinning the local indigenous political space, the dukɔ , has come to underpin the transnational Ewe-speaking region to form a larger political community. This is notable in the Ewe Newsletters, which aimed to convene and construct a transnational Ewe nation based on mutual recognition and oral tradition but also today across the border in both oral tradition and the performance of festivals.

The role of international war in the first wave of democratization is the theme of Chapter 8. Scholars have long noted an increase in franchise extensions during wars, and political economists have recently formalized this insight. Still, there is a prevailing view in the literature that international war – particularly WWI – merely hastened the ultimate success of prewar democratization efforts. I argue that international war was not the final straw for the old regime but rather was one of only a small category of exogenous events capable of dislodging a resilient system of competitive oligarchy.

This chapter examines how exiled Syrian intellectuals navigated their positionality between their home society and host countries, developing a dual gaze – balancing engagement with Western audiences while remaining invested in the Syrian cause. Their intellectual production shifted towards universalism, broadening international resonance but risking disconnection from local realities. Two currents shaped this shift: one emphasising cultural difference, reinforcing Orientalising discourse, and another promoting cosmopolitanism, aligning with non-governmental organisation funding priorities. Many also exhibited exceptionalism, framing the Syrian revolution as uniquely tragic and situating it within global discourses of oppression and resistance. The chapter explores ambivalence towards integration, particularly in Germany, where state-led policies were seen as patronising. It concludes by identifying a paradigm shift: from a politics of being perceived (concern with Western views of Syrians) to a politics of perceiving, where exiled intellectuals assert critical agency in judging global political failures rather than merely responding to Western narratives.

Chapter 3 focuses on a period in the 1990s when Iraqi oil flow was restricted and closely regulated by a special UN Security Council committee, thus severely reducing the state’s ability to collect or spend oil revenues. By homing in on the state’s enterprising response to the sanctions regime, we can see clearly how the state navigated its consolidation in the margins of the economy, of institutions, of borders, and of legality. What emerges from tracing the state in those margins is thus consistent with a number of sociological understandings of the state as a non-bounded actor. In other words, once examined on the ground, the state’s boundedness disappears, giving way to a multitude of actions that together contribute to the production of the state as a unitary actor.

Chapter 2 explores the significance of domination in state consolidation. It argues that while violence is the crudest and most basic form of establishing domination, it remains constitutive of state consolidation: within its boundaries, the state’s relationship to violence is constitutive. The chapter explicates an extreme case when the state lost all control over portions of its territory and population. These events were centered around the interstate war with Iran in the 1980s and a state-organized counterinsurgency campaign to capture the northern Kurdish territories in 1987 and 1988. The case allows us to zoom in on one of the longest legitimation and domination problems in Iraq: the reach of the state vis-à-vis Kurdish national aspirations. It also illustrates how this episode of state violence in Kurdistan triggered a series of developments that led to de facto and de jure Kurdish autonomy in Iraq. I show how the processes that contributed to the weakening of the Iraqi state consolidation are the same ones that also made a Kurdish autonomy possible.