When considering presidential power, presidential “ethics” concerns also are relevant. Here we address two aspects of this problem – financial and political conflicts of interest of the President.

Chapter 5 explores xiangchou as a materially and culturally embedded concept in the 2010s, which represented an ‘era of crises’ in China. The chapter frames crises as both the acute global COVID-19 pandemic, as well as through longer-term and more embedded ‘crises,’ categorized broadly as: the ’big city disease’, the existential crisis of meaninglessness, and the three-rural issue. Discursive analysis of various government text illustrates how different state organs can invoke the language of xiangchou to describe both a symptom of such crises as well as a response and potential remedy to these crises. Various case studies also demonstrate how feelings of homesickness and the inevitable separations from those ‘left behind’ can compel various forms of ‘rural return,’ but to varying effects and opportunities.

Corruption is an ancient problem. Edmund Burke, as a member of the English Parliament, denounced the corrupt influence on government by corporations, particularly the East India Company. After the 1773 Tea Act granted that company a monopoly on sale of tea in America, colonists dumped their tea into the Boston harbor, an event that became known as the Boston Tea Party. Americans in the past and now are deeply concerned with being governed by money.

Chapter 2 introduces the Iraqi diasporas in the UK and Sweden, their migration waves, and the sociopolitical reasons for leaving Iraq and migrating to each hostland. It highlights the importance of the socioeconomic profile of each diaspora, which affected their transnational connections to Iraq, and how they could involve themselves rebuilding Iraq. In the United Kingdom, political and religious elites, and upper- and middle-class professionals contributed to London being an oppositional hub for Shi’a Islamist Parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi National Congress, and the Iraqi National Accord, as well as other liberal and leftist figures. The socioeconomic profiles of the UK diaspora also provided the diaspora with the material power and networks to influence hostland and international policymakers. Meanwhile in Sweden, the socioeconomic profile of the Swedish diaspora, made up of largely refugees and less-skilled individuals, affected its ability to contribute directly towards Iraq, redirecting mobilisation towards the diaspora in the formation years, and later, once settled, towards the hostland audience in the late 1990s. Mobilisation was channelled through Swedish civil society and in collaboration with civic groups and parties, reflecting Sweden’s tradition of politics through social movements.

This essay explores the Inquisition’s persistent interest in converts, and descendants of converts, from Judaism to Catholicism. Spanish inquisitors believed those converts, called conversos, were prone to the heresy of Judaizing, which was continuing to follow Mosaic Law despite Christian baptism. The essay addresses the ambiguity of defining who exactly was a converso, and examines the kinds of accusations made against Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants in the first four decades of the Spanish Inquisition’s activity, from approximately 1484 to 1525. It considers the gendered nature of those accusations as well as the potential motivations of accusers. After weighing the veracity of inquisition records about Judaizing, the essay moves to a comparison of trials from earlier and later periods of inquisition history, from the mid sixteenth century onward. These trials demonstrate the complicated, ongoing interactions among Jews, New Christians, and so-called “Old Christians” throughout the Spanish empire and around the world.

This chapter considers Christian converts from Islam who were converted forcibly in the early sixteenth century and known as moriscos. Once Catholic, the moriscos came under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition. For more than a century, Spanish authorities worried about Moriscos adhering to their former religion and being Christian in name only; Spanish inquisitors investigated and prosecuted them for practicing Islam. The number of trials reached a high point in the second half of the sixteenth century, and only dropped when the monarchy expelled the Moriscos from the Spanish kingdoms between 1609 and 1614. This essay examines how the Spanish Inquisition constructed a model of Islamic heresy that encompassed Morisco cultural traditions. It surveys the rise in inquisitorial prosecution of this population across multiple Spanish regions. It also considers Morisco responses to the Inquisition, including strategies of petitioning and financial negotiation. This chapter assesses what Inquisition records can reveal about Morisco histories, as well as methods for reading beyond inquisitorial perspectives.

Using the case of the New Right movement in South Korea beginning in the early 2000s, Chapter 4 analyzes how far-right intellectuals – academics, journalists, writers, and political analysts – constructed reactionary historical narratives and discourses in the post-authoritarian period. Analyzing disputes over historiography in the last decade relating to Japanese colonialism (1910–45), the founding of the Republic of Korea (1948), and the Park Chung Hee regime (1961–79), New Right intellectuals contributed to generating historical knowledge and narratives to construct positive images of the past. I argue that, to solidify their influence, New Right intellectuals have proactively adopted the leftist strategy of targeting the cultural sphere, disseminating ideas, and building cultural hegemony. In doing so, they have sought to restore the right’s political legitimacy and symbolic power in a post-authoritarian context.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) began as the network administrative organization (NAO) overseeing the voluntary sharing of organs among transplant centers. It subsequently became the administrator of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), which Congress created to allocate deceased-donor organs when it nationalized them in 1984. The OPTN continuously makes incremental changes to organ allocation rules, raising concerns that the path dependence of allocation rules would hinder more radical change. Under pressure from the federal government, the OPTN gradually reduced the role of geographic boundaries in its allocation rules. However, it also introduced other categories so that allocation rules became increasingly complex. It initially considered continuous distribution (CD), a radical change, as an alternative for eliminating historical geographic boundaries. The OPTN subsequently committed to implementing CD for all solid organs because it offered improvements in efficiency, equity, and transparency, and because its relative simplicity would allow more expeditious incremental changes to allocation rules.