Chapter 4 examines the group of carpets termed tapis polonais (French for ‘Polish carpets’), which were mistakenly given this name in the nineteenth century despite their Iranian provenience. Today, these artefacts are often described as the ‘so-called Polish carpets’, emphasizing the historical confusion that led to the epithet. Relying on evidence from both early modern and modern archival and literary sources, this chapter argues that to uncover the significance of tapis polonais, however, we must embrace their transcultural contexts. Woven on Iranian looms, the carpets were often commissioned by Poles, Ruthenians, and Lithuanians; until the late nineteenth century, these objects were held in Central and Eastern European collections. Carpets based on similar designs were even produced in Poland-Lithuania, further complicating the discussion of these objects’ cultural status. Tapis polonais effectively challenge outdated assumptions that the origin of an art form must be linked to a single nation or geography. These woven things engender a more horizontal narrative that treats with equal interest the many entangled places where tapis polonais were made, traded, consumed, and reinterpreted. Stressing the recontextualizations and reappropriations of these artistic objects, this chapter accordingly foregrounds the ongoing creation (and re-creation) of cultural forms that cannot be simply assigned to a single cultural region and its historical traditions.

Chapter 4 engages the average people behind these trends. In particular, it tells the stories of Hungarians compelled to leave after the reelection of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to a fourth consecutive term with a parliamentary supermajority, Serbs crestfallen after the reelection of President Aleksandar Vučić to a second term, and Russians fleeing the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent domestic crackdown on dissent. Some mundane, some extraordinary, their first-person narratives display the household considerations behind a mass population phenomenon. The chapter then leverages a unique study of European public opinion to reveal the way that Eastern Europeans who move West under the European Union’s free mobility rules likely hold more liberal democratic proclivities than those in their countries of origin who wish to migrate, and how those prospective migrants hold more liberal democratic proclivities than those of their countrymen who don’t wish to move at all – a sliding scale of liberal democratic views among people with the same origins.

Chapter 3 takes a closer look at the mechanics of Democratic Drain. More specifically, it asks when demigrants are likely to depart. Focusing on 127 countries worldwide, it finds that people’s interest in emigrating spikes in the immediate aftermath of national elections when an authoritarian-leaning party or ruler is elected to public office. Importantly, this effect is limited only to people who hold expectations of democratic norms and institutional integrity. Those who question the honesty of the election, suspect corruption among public officials, or feel that freedom of speech is constrained are significantly more likely to say they would like to leave when faced with the future deconsolidation of their country’s democratic institutions. This shows the way that elections are precipitating events for individuals disappointed by the results and concerned about the future of their civil life. Previously unnoticed over the ebb and flow of electoral cycles, Democratic Drain removes the people who are most likely to voice their dissatisfaction and most likely to demand institutional integrity in less democratic spaces.

Women involved in animal protection were often victims of ancient misogynistic prejudices – notably a belief that women were themselves animalistic, or prone to irrational and excessive ‘sensibility’. Tenderness towards animals might be an attractive feminine trait, suited to acculturation of the young, but it was viewed as a foil rather than as a corrective to normative masculine behaviour. Important thinkers and writers of the late Georgian period such as Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Joanna Baillie attempted to counter these prejudices, reflecting deeply on human–animal relationships, while Margaret Cullen embodied such reflections in the form of a novel, Mornton (1814). At a more didactic level, women were acknowledged as the prime authors of books for children about the need for kindness to animals, many of which became nursery classics reprinted throughout the Victorian period. However, one woman in particular, the anti-slavery campaigner Elizabeth Heyrick, resorted to bold practical action to prevent cruelty to animals. The obstruction and indifference she encountered typified the problems that women experienced when entering the public sphere.

In order to connect the book’s discussion of transculturation to the present day and reinforce the importance of exploring deep histories of how such interrelations have worked since the early modern period, the epilogue moves us to today’s Kruszyniany, a village in northeastern Poland that is a home to one of the oldest mosques in this part of Europe. Rather than offering comfort, the Kruszyniany mosque causes cognitive dissonance, presenting us with a historic building in conflict with the all too often prevailing image of a modern, ethnically homogenous Polish state. Reading the Kruszyniany mosque as a Tatar building, Polish only in a qualified sense, removes the temptation of tracing every architectural and artistic form found in the present-day Republic of Poland to distinctively Polish national traits. Foregrounding unexpected connections, relationships, and dependencies between seemingly disparate cultures becomes increasingly important in the twenty-first century, a period which has seen a renewed interest in invidious nationalism both in North America and in Europe, including the Commonwealth’s four indirect successor states, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. Today’s world is at a crossroads, in between cosmopolitanism and nativism, and it is through the stories like that of the Kruszyniany mosque’s transcultural manifestations that the clichés of national uniqueness and authenticity might finally be dispelled. While offering a summary of the book’s arguments, the epilogue is an appeal to thinking about the nation through the prism of its transcultural ramifications.

White Mindfulness is a new concept that captures the various social forces shaping ‘secular’ mindfulness in the West. Using an analogy of a cruise ship to depict a substantial industry with a large engine, crew, and passenger list, the introduction shines a light on dominant social norms and narratives that compose the murky waters the ship sails. It considers how systemic whiteness comes about and what its implications are for those who are racialised as well as those who aren’t. The positionality of the author as a Black feminist is set out to explain their orientation as an outsider-within White Mindfulness spaces. But given that race is a construct, the introduction also considers how to discuss race as central to this work without recentring whiteness. It identifies race as but one characteristic that intersects with others to perpetuate discrimination, vulnerabilities, and marginalisation. To navigate this terrain, the term People of the Global Majority is preferred as a descriptor that does not collapse ethnic difference, moves away from White as a starting place, and allows people to self-identify. The three parts of this book weave together the setting that shapes White Mindfulness, the engine that keeps it running, and the initiatives that disrupt it. A description of the 10 chapters explains how frameworks are established in the first part of the book to pave the way for discussions of change in the second. Audre Lorde’s ‘master’s tools’ is introduced to guide thinking about the possibilities and practicalities of change.

The third chapter focuses on the symbolic value of the activities for the young men to construct status. It shows how, in a context of apparent convenience and freedom, risks of enduring precarity result from processes of closure among workers. In both Berlin and Abidjan, young male workers were marginalized among co-workers if they valued the activity as their main occupation rather than simply as a bridge or parallel activity. Situating the temporal work in the long term, the chapter concludes that official certificates and institutionalized cultural skills were differently meaningful in both cases. In Berlin, they were functional elements in objectified mechanisms of social reproduction: for the urban youth in Berlin, presenting themselves to others as detached from work and celebrating flexibility concealed the importance of official qualifications for making a living. In Abidjan, official cultural resources and the pursuit of an economic activity served the investment in relationality – being and spending time with others – to gain ‘wealth in people’ (Guyer 1995; Vuarin 1994).

Chapter 5 considers the possibility that, while people with liberal and democratic proclivities may leave their countries of origin, they may influence the democratization of their homelands from abroad – a possible “democratic gain.” Could emigrants’ advocacy from abroad offset the effects of their departure on prospects for democracy? After the oppressive Assad dictatorship was challenged by opposition groups in 2011, many activists in Syria’s massive diaspora mobilized to support and influence people living in rebel-held territory. However, in a social network analysis of Syrians in regions governed by the Free Syrian Army in 2015, there is almost no evidence of their impact. Despite their presumed prominence in the West, a majority of Syrians could not even name a single pro-democratic leader from abroad – let alone identify their influence. And perhaps most damningly, the departure of former Syrian citizens for other countries was viewed by most respondents as an abandonment of their cause – an offense worse than being previously complicit with the oppressive Assad regime. Taken together with other research showing the limits of democratic diaspora activism, the chapter concludes that the potential for “democratic gain” is severely constrained.

In late Ottoman Jerusalem, violence was common, but milder than in other areas of the Ottoman Empire. More importantly, it was not yet the expression of organised forces. The Ottoman order based on the Millet system produced a society defined by religious identity, however space was not segregated, rather it was shared. In 1917, the arrival of the British started and facilitated a number of transformation processes, including sectarianisation and segregation of the urban environment, changes of space, time and forms of urban violence. While the British Mandate was taking form, they altered the local situation in many ways, especially through their support of Zionism and immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Despite a limited number of options, Palestinians reacted in different ways to what they perceived as an illegitimate decision from an external power. During the Muslim Nabi Musa celebrations, Arab nationalists and Zionists confronted each other in the first example of organised national struggle in 1920. The outbreak of violence in Jerusalem in 1929 shows that space became a defining element and time functioned as a glue, linking various locations. Starting with the object of the dispute – the Western Wall – it marked a clear shift from early examples of urban violence, as space itself became a disputed object and a target. Neighbourhoods were mobilised and incidents followed the movement of people from one locality to another. The perception of time, its regulation through public clocks and the systematic spread of news became an essential part for the development of violence.

Whiteness is not only about race; it encapsulates a multifaceted politics that maintains White supremacy, favouring some lives more than others. The overarching power whiteness bears on White Mindfulness is evidenced in its demographic staffing profiles, drawn from data gathered from three organisations between 2015 and 2018. A case is made that a predominance of White male decision-makers, distant from the imperatives of change, blunts efforts to diversify programmes or engage with marginalised communities. Attempts to widen participation beyond White middle-class audiences suffer from a lack of understanding and direction at decision-making level. This chapter explores the endorsement of White Mindfulness through gateways of science, the psy-disciplines, and a one-size-fits-all model. Gaining traction through the master’s gateways detracts from White Mindfulness’ racialised, gendered organisations and from the racialised nature of these mechanisms themselves. But this chapter also asks questions about agency and freedom to move beyond a rigid neo-colonial/oppressed binary. bell hooks and Stuart Hall offer understandings of ‘becoming’ that complicate simplistic notions of appropriation. Referring to people and entities as ‘constantly becoming’, they emphasise the importance of referencing context, the origins of ideas, respect for knowledges, and engagement with and restoration of power to bearers of traditions as ways of engaging cultures that we are not born into. Agency exercised outside the confines of whiteness demonstrates different ways of working that upend power-over and emphasise appreciation of contributions across difference. This marks a different way of ‘becoming’ in worlds dominated by whiteness.

This chapter provides background information to help with understanding what the two cases of airtime sellers in Abidjan and food delivery riders in Berlin are about. To this end, the chapter first presents the research methodology. At the focus of the comparative case study are economic practices. In-depth interviews and participant observations with airtime sellers and food delivery riders were methods used to carve out practices of organizing livelihood. The coding process started with the material in Abidjan, which was used to further develop concepts relevant in this context to see how these mattered in Berlin too. The knowledge produced in this way is embedded in the researcher's own positionalities and relations to the interlocutors and the research context, as discussed in the second section of the chapter. After contextualizing the cases in methodological perspective, the chapter then embeds airtime selling and food delivery in the broader urban settings of Abidjan and Berlin respectively, while at the same time being sensitive to the cities’ (colonial) history.

Social change does not only come about through planned resistance. In fact, protracted resistance that centres the status quo can, at times, thwart efforts. Change also happens through the emergence of new ways of being and creating the world. Decolonisation, now squarely on the agenda of those seeking justice and more equitable societies in the US and UK, is replacing words like diversity and inclusion. Yet efforts at disruption can all too often remain confined to the systems they wish to transform. A brief reflection on decolonisation foregrounds ‘writing back’, already underway within the sphere of White Mindfulness, as a way of upending dominant narratives. An emergent movement engaged in decolonial praxis shows the power of disruption, especially when it is forged as a new liberatory framework. This chapter breaks free of dualistic thinking that recentres the status quo as the starting point of social change. Within this frame, to better understand White Mindfulness, it maps the evolution of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s ‘second Renaissance’ thought, showing how his conceptualisation becomes increasingly politicised over time. But drawing on earlier definitions of engulfing narratives, it shows how popular discourses of hyper-individualism and sameness colonise the concept itself. Interrogation of the conceptualisation of mindfulness lays groundwork for chapters 8 and 9 that respectively complicate notions of temporality and emotionality.

In a world in turmoil in which social forces of racial capitalism engulf efforts towards change, bold measures are required for meaningful transformation. Purposeful change necessitates radical social transformation, rather than cosmetic reforms, to forge futures of belonging in the world of Western mindfulness. Moving beyond one-size-fits-all models, this chapter draws together many of the strands previously discussed and focuses more closely on what is to be done to change White Mindfulness. This discussion is not about blueprints but instead captures the essence of initiatives that model change, highlighting the rudimentary values and principles that distinguish them from dominant norms. Shining a light on decolonising actions outside the White Mindfulness space, it considers mindfulness in relation to a pro-justice society. Emphasis on inner, outer, and interstitial change addresses the social tissues that embed Othering as much in human interactions as in social structures that fortify discrimination. This chapter poses liberatory questions that are important for any inquiry into dynamic, meaningful change. The inquiry, itself part of a process of decolonisation, asks about decision-making and power, what is envisioned and by whom, and how change can be made. Embodied liberation and leadership are pivotal to the decolonise agenda, which encourages collaboration with key parties at the design phase of innovations to redress skewed patterns of power. By the same token, innovative projects that draw on the vast social capital of People of the Global Majority demonstrate the power of collaborative transformation.