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.

This essay looks at the artistic patronage of the Strozzis and Widmanns, who were connected not only through commerce and culture, but also through the relationship between Giovanni Paolo Widmann and Barbara Strozzi. Both Giulio and Barbara, as well as various members of the Widmann family, were painted by the leading artists active in Venice at that time, such as Tiberio Tinelli, Bernardo Strozzi (well known as Il Prete Genovese) and Nicolas Régnier. Through the surviving documents and works of art, the dense intertwining of painting, music and poetry emerges, fostered by the Accademia degli Incogniti, the most famous literary circle flourishing in Venice in the seventeenth century, and to which Barbara and Giulio Strozzi and the abovementioned artists were connected. Furthermore,the essay sheds new light on the genre of the and the role it plays in celebrating the individual’s features and perpetuating personal memory.

This chapter interrogates the widespread modern framing of Strozzi’s life and music through the unanswerable asking of whether or not she was a courtesan, and proposes alternative viewpoints from which and with which to understand and represent her. Working from a reception study of popular and academic cultural framings, new engagement with primary materials, and intersectional feminist perspectives on the analysis and representation of contested gendered experiences, this chapter asks what it is that this repeated question does – its functions and its fall-outs – and suggests another way of engaging with the scanty material evidence that has survived of Strozzi’s life. This chapter concludes with a proposal to retire the courtesan question in favor of a more grounded and culturally sensitive understanding of Strozzi’s family life through common seicento Venetian relationship practices, restoring Strozzi’s own representation of herself to the forefront of our representations of her music and person.

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.

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.