Chapter 3 provides the first historical case study of the encounter between American lawyers and German-Jewish Marxists and focusses on collaborative writing practices. It traces the invention of the intelligence report during World War II and describes this genre’s characteristics as paradigmatic for the bureaucratic style of the memorandum culture. Franz Neumann (the intellectual head of the OSS’s Research and Analysis branch) and his grand analysis of Nazi Germany in Behemoth is thus considered in close relationship to his work as intelligence analyst collaborating with his European and American colleagues. In this chapter, I describe the medial infrastructures (index cards, transatlantic microphotography) that were used to analyze the distant enemy, and I ask in a reading of the intelligence report “German Morale after Tunisia” what it meant to “understand” the Nazi enemy in 1943.

In this chapter, I provide a more textured picture of corruption in China’s courts. First, I find that the scale of judicial corruption in China is larger than was reported by the SPC. Second, I unpack judicial corruption with a four-filter scheme, separating prevalent conducts from the less prevalent and then provide a statistical description of the more prevalent types of misconduct, using a self-compiled dataset. I find that the predominant type of judicial corruption is the abuse of judicial discretion for self-enrichment. This type of corruption is ubiquitous in China’s courts, regardless of the type of the court where a judge serves, the type of the case concerned, and the stage of a litigation process where corruption takes place. My findings render some popular explanations of judicial corruption in China incomplete, which prompts further investigation of judicial decision-making in these courts in the next chapter.

The critique of realism dominant in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood in the context of the longer history of anti-realism that accompanied the rise of literary modernism. Misconceptions about realism deriving from three sources within the larger frame of discourse of French theory: the modernist rejection of realism as an outmoded form; general claims about language, representation, and knowledge, making it harder to see the validity of the realist project; explicit attacks on realism, which need to be read as an argument with Lukács and the version of Marxism he represented. It is my hypothesis that the conception of realism as an epistemological problem is rooted these three tendencies, and once those positions are no longer assumed, then it can be shown that realism entails no special epistemological pleading and does not offer or require any particular philosophy of knowledge. Questions regarding realism’s truth should (and, if fact usually do) turn on what is represented, rather than on the claim that it has been represented truthfully. Realism should be understood as a set of conventions that emerge in nineteenth- century fiction and which have been recognized by critics since at least the second half of the twentieth century.

Throughout the post-Soviet era the Kremlin grappled with two interrelated questions. Firstly, whether a Ukrainian or (Russia’s preference) a pan-Russian identity would dominate Ukraine. Secondly, whether Ukraine would be part of Europe or (the Kremlin’s preference) the Russian World and Eurasia. Between 1991 and 2013, Ukraine found itself in the ‘grey zone’ where two identities and foreign policy orientations competed, with conflict especially acute in the decade between the 2003-2004 Orange and 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolutions. Russian imperial nationalists never accepted Ukraine could be a fully independent state. They demanded, lobbied, cajoled and aggressively pursued a Ukraine that would have a semi-sovereign relationship akin to that which exists between Russia and Belarus. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka is the kind of leader Russia sought to install in Kyiv if its ‘special military operation’ had gone as planned. The roots of Russia’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion lie in the dominance of Ukrainian and marginalisation of pan-Russian identity from 2014. Ukrainian identity became dominant after the marginalisation of pro-Russian forces who had supported a pan-Russian identity, and through the adoption of new legislation in memory politics, language, education, and media, and the goals of NATO and EU membership and closure of Russian television and radio media broadcasting into and inside Ukraine, banning of twelve pro-Russian political parties, and the removal of Russian Orthodox canonical control over Ukraine through autocephaly for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

In this chapter, I survey major historical cases to examine different paradigms under which a disciplinary action against a Politburo member could be launched and how these paradigms were observed, abandoned, or changed over time. I find two prominent paradigms. One is a highly ideologized model developed during the Yan’an Rectification Campaign in 1941-1942. This model enables the winning party to conduct a purge of its adversaries with broad scope and impact, while reinforcing Party unity. It also has several disadvantages, including heightened social disruption, excessive purging, and the exposure of divisions in the Party leadership. The other is the de-ideologized corruption model. The paradigm shift was spurred by the political crisis of 1989, attributed at least in part to the exposure of an ideological split at the Party Center. Another reason for the shift was the introduction of the age-limit norm, which provided an alternative mechanism to facilitate peaceful exits of Politburo members in a regular and predictable manner. Under Xi Jinping's rule, the utility of the corruption model has been maximized. At the same time, the resulting power shakeup led to widespread political resentment, which, in turn, triggered the politicization of the corruption model.

This chapter opens the book with a puzzle. It starts by delineating two tales about the Chinese internet – one emphasizing state control and the other digital innovation and the rapid growth of China’s tech industry. To make sense of these two seemingly contradictory stories of greater openness to support digitalization while also increasing political control – also referred to as digital dilemma – the chapter introduces the core elements of popular corporatism and looks at how it differs from the more familiar command and control that builds on strong hierarchically organized state-centered logics. It considers existing work on digital dilemma and posits that its digital governance approach to the Chinese model is based on the dynamic relationship between the state, platform firms, and citizens. Because voluntary participation of citizens is important for the state to obtain feedback about their policies as well as for the companies to develop their organizational and informational resources in the state–company partnership, it focuses on two examples of digital participatory spaces in this book – social media platforms and the social credit system (SCS) – to illustrate the Chinese model during Hu and Xi’s leaderships.

This chapter delves into the implications of citizen participation in commercial SCS for their support of the state’s digital policies. Unlike the focus on general political trust in Chapter 5, the attention here now turns to assessing support for a specific digital policy. This chapter finds that citizens are highly supportive of state, compared to company, involvement in managing the SCS. It explores potential explanations such as media exposure, social interaction, and potential network effects. However, high levels of state support can only be fully understood once how people experience policy implementation on the ground is taken into account. When these experiences are mostly financial in nature, individuals are more likely to believe that the chances of their data being used for political purposes is low. Therefore, they become more supportive of the state’s involvement in the SCS overall. For most citizens, a primarily financially oriented SCS is acceptable, but its use as a political tool is not.

This chapter explores the methods and theories used in anthropology and music to understand Mexico's African presence and its relevance after the 1910 Revolution. Despite disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical differences at midcentury, Mexican scholars, chiefly anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and musicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, focused on the colonial period and the postrevolutionary present. Their histories glossed over the nineteenth century. Their debates about how to study Afro-Mexico in the 1940s—and the research methodologies that buttressed them—elucidate why the history of nineteenth-century Afro-Mexico continues to be ignored in the historiography about Mexico’s place in the African diaspora. The intellectual and cultural histories explored in this chapter also explore why concerns about Mexico’s African presence have continued to loom over the field of Afro-Mexican studies.

Erik H. Erikson’s book Childhood and Society, started, as I show in Chapter 7, with his “remote” psychoanalysis of Adolf Hitler. I present the transatlantic history of the concepts “identity” and “reeducation,” which may serve as a prime example for the impact of the study of Nazi Germany’s alterity on postwar intellectual discourse. The final chapter traces the use of the two concepts in a microhistorical account in order to arrive at macrohistorical revisions. I show how the conception of reeducation migrated from Native American reservations to the wartime pathologization of the Nazi German enemy. Only then – in collaboration with Margaret Mead – it became the name of the policy according to which the United States planned and initially attempted to subject, as occupation power, the postwar German society in order to reintegrate the outcast nation back into the family of man.