In Ireland, the origins of the notion of ‘minorities’ as categories of political analysis is associated with the democratisation of the representative system and the proposal of Home Rule, from 1885–6. Together these measures presented the prospect of a shift from parliamentary to popular sovereignty and the emergence of Ireland as a distinct self-governing – and overwhelmingly Catholic – country. This chapter examines how both Jews and Protestants responded to these developments and discusses the relations between the two groups. It also discusses how early Zionism in Ireland was related to these constitutional developments and discusses in detail the role of class and geographical distribution in defining the attitudes of the minorities and their sense of identity. The two religious minorities, and especially the Protestants, supported each other when it was in their interest to do so. However, besides political opportunism, there was a genuine elective affinity between them, which are explored herein. The final part of the chapter discusses the historiography.

Chapter 5 begins with a brief overview of the Constitutional Revolution before turning to the role of non-Muslims in the struggle. It begins by exploring the motivations behind religious minorities supporting the revolution. Then it looks at the various ways they contributed – such as providing financial and military assistance, engaging in social initiatives, and establishing cultural institutions like anjomans (associations), schools, and political parties. The chapter highlights the significance of anjomans and explores how transnational networks reinforced the revolutionary cause, with Armenians from the Caucasus and Parsis from India playing especially prominent roles. Finally, it addresses the violence directed at non-Muslims during periods of unrest, underscoring the precariousness of their position even as they participated in the revolutionary movement.

The so-called Tomb of the Diver is a fifth-century stone cist tomb from Paestum/Poseidonia famous for its painted depictions of a young man diving and a symposium. While both the style and iconography of the images have strong Greek connotations, the tomb as a whole is no less deeply rooted in the local social and cultural environment of Iron Age Campania. This burial testifies to the richly diverse and multicultural nature of the late Iron Age societies that lived in South Italy and that included Etruscans, Lucanians, Oinotrians, and Greeks, to name but the principal communities.

This chapter offers a close reading of Chapter 5 of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Its primary focus is the two new characters Heinrich meets: an old miner and a hermit. The miner embodies a poetic way of seeing nature as an interconnected whole that gives expression to the presence of the divine. The hermit embodies a poetic way of seeing history in a parallel way, in which past and future are joined together in a spiritual present. Heinrich witnesses how their conversation converges on poetry as the higher power that unites nature and history, giving him a first glimpse of his own vocation.

This chapter explores clinical trials, the gold standard in evaluating healthcare interventions. It begins by outlining the fundamental principles of randomisation, blinding, and control groups, which reduce bias and strengthen causal inference. Different trial designs, including parallel, crossover, cluster, and adaptive trials, are described, each with their advantages and limitations. Outcome measures, intention-to-treat analysis, and ethical considerations are discussed, highlighting the need for rigorous methodology and participant protection. The chapter considers both explanatory trials, which evaluate efficacy under ideal conditions, and pragmatic trials, which assess effectiveness in real-world practice. Challenges such as recruitment, adherence, attrition, and generalisability are addressed. Practical examples illustrate the transformative impact of clinical trials in areas such as cardiovascular medicine, oncology, and mental health. The role of data monitoring committees, trial registration, and reporting standards (CONSORT) is emphasised as essential for transparency and credibility. The chapter concludes by noting the continuing evolution of trial methodology, including adaptive designs and real-world evidence generation. This chapter maps to syllabus sections 3.2.11–3.2.12, which cover randomised controlled trials, intention-to-treat analysis, and trial design methodology.

Southeast Asian countries face both direct and indirect vulnerabilities from climate change. Multiple threats to five sectors – agriculture and fisheries, conservation, energy, migration management, and health – prompt responses of governments and other stakeholders, often threatening the wellbeing of marginal populations. The chapter previews the general challenges and the issues specific to each sector.

As in other parts of Southeast Asia, the power of ancestral spirits and the spirituality of the place are both distinct, constitutive elements of the domestic and communal ritual activity in Vietnam. In the realm of death remembrance, the homebound ancestral relics are typically contrasted to the displaced souls of the dead and their supposedly homeless existence. However, the notion of home that structures this existential divide is complicated by the experience of a long civil war and the war-caused mass human dislocation, both physical and political. This chapter explores the question of displacement in death, focusing on the shrine for the earth god where people routinely make small offerings on behalf of the wandering souls of the dead today. It will ask if an alternative idea of home is found in this ritualized act and, if so, what the act of remembrance can tell us about the ethics of hospitality.

We trace the evolution of statistics from its origins in the seventeenth century, contrasting twentieth-century data sets and approaches with those seen frequently today. This discussion motivates the approach taken in the book, which focuses on the bias--variance tradeoff as opposed to unbiased estimation, and on finite-sample guarantees as opposed to asymptotics, which can often be misleading in problems whose difficulty is controlled by several parameters. We introduce the decision-theoretic framework that underpins our assessment of the performance of statistical procedures, and discuss the concepts of minimaxity and adaptation. One of our perspectives is to seek to understand the behaviour of methods with respect to as wide a class of data generating mechanisms as possible, and in particular under model misspecification --- where an idealised model that motivates a procedure fails to hold. We discuss the use of the book for teaching and prerequisites for students, concluding with notation used throughout the book.

In late 2021, as schools and colleges in the Indian state of Karnataka resumed in-person classes after nearly two years of institutional closures provoked by the pandemic, a new script for continuing the work of exclusion had to be prepared. Prolonged educational disruption and a forced digital outsourcing of curricular processes had already borne out a nationwide ‘crisis’ in terms of increasing school dropouts, especially among the socially deprived (and those further economically precaritized by the Covid outbreak). Because the pandemic made apparent how the same viral ‘cause’ can exacerbate historical differences in ‘impact’ on the basis of populations’ rights of access to infrastructures – for example, the physical site of the hospital or the school or the college – the state's script for a return to ‘normalcy’ was first dressed up in a shared existential predicament of man, and then in the myth of a common national destiny, a uniform(ed) national-secular humanity.

Both government-funded and private pre-university colleges in Karnataka – enrolling students for higher secondary schooling – started denying Muslim women students entry into classrooms if they insisted on wearing the hijab over prescribed uniforms. College administrators and government officials insinuated, over different moments in the course of the controversy, that formal dress codes had been in existence for a long time and therefore the recent demand for a hijab exception must have been provoked by ‘outside support’ from radical Islamist organizations. While, in principle, the restriction of a freedom for any amount of time cannot become the justifying ground for maintaining status quo, the irony of this inversion of juridical logic is glimpsed in the verdict of the Karnataka High Court on this matter.

Chapter 5 analyzes Russia’s changing gas interdependencies in the post-Soviet space and reveals how economic forces brought about by asymmetrical dependence on Russia have shaped strategic thinking according to the availability of other transnational opportunities for gas trade, and the interpretation of the effects of natural gas interdependence with Russia on their economies and national security. The chapter focused on international economic incentives along with a focus on domestic shifts in identity politics to account for the emergence of new dominant narratives. The case study focused on the differential impact in Belarus and Ukraine of asymmetrical gas dependence on Russia. It showed how policies differed depending on the ideas of those in power. Chapter 5 demonstrates the book’s framework’s applicability to variation across otherwise similar cases and elaborated an alternative explanation to the field’s ongoing realist versus liberal debate on the effects of asymmetrical energy interdependence. Finally, it considers the war in Ukraine and the rewiring of the disparate gas trade dependencies in post-Soviet Eurasia.