The final chapter of Persistent Citizens summarizes the book’s key contributions. It reaffirms the importance of state-centric persistence as a concept and the value of an attitudinal explanation for variation in citizens’ willingness to persist when seeking access to social programs. The authors discuss the scope conditions of their argument, noting that it is most relevant in "intermediate states" where access to promised benefits is possible but not guaranteed. The chapter concludes by exploring the distributive and normative implications of the findings. It suggests that the need for persistence may have a mixed impact on inequality. The chapter also considers how technological advances and policy changes might affect citizen–state interactions and outlines several areas for future research, including applying the "2ei" framework to domains beyond social welfare.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central research question and rationale. It highlights the growing prevalence of Islamist civil wars. The chapter underscores the urgent need to understand how these conflicts can be effectively ended and resolved, pointing to the lack of systematic scholarly attention to this issue. The book examines whether – and why – Islamist civil wars are more difficult to end than other conflicts, and to what extent they can be resolved. Developing a bargaining explanation, we suggest that Islamist civil wars are especially intractable because they are embedded in a particular strategic environment, which increases uncertainties about the parties’ resolve and capabilities. Understanding what makes Islamist civil wars so challenging is necessary to identify what can be done to resolve and end them. The chapter outlines the book’s main arguments and findings, including the empirical focus and cases to be explored, setting the stage for the chapters that follow.

This chapter discusses the gradual consolidation of the dual-sided framework in the contemporary digital era. Despite the decades-long transatlantic battle between ‘free flow’ and privacy protection, serious disagreement over how to conceptualize data, and the inter-regime tension between human rights and world trade, this chapter argues that the consolidation of the dual-sided framework is precisely a result of such internal tensions and contradictions. The more this dichotomy seems hard to resolve, the more the two framings of free trade and human rights get reinforced, and the more they monopolize the policy terrain for the governance of information and data. This chapter also shows that, despite the entrenched dichotomy, free trade and human rights regimes have been mutually influencing in the ways they respectively approach transborder data flows and the responsibility of big tech, hence further reinforcing the transnationalization of capital and unequal distribution of power in information capitalism.

Consumed by thoughts of a blue flower, Heinrich leaves his cold homeland and travels south until he meets Mathilde, who opens his eyes to the world’s mysteries. Then a tragic event reveals the secret power of poetry …

Heinrich von Ofterdingen, left unfinished at the time of the author’s death, is a masterpiece of philosophical fiction and a classic of German literature. This highly detailed and original interpretation is the most comprehensive and systematic study of the novel ever written. Developing fresh insights into the philosophical ideas of the novel while also attending to its symbolic, literary, and creative qualities, Owen Ware explores how Novalis probes the core problem of modern life – fragmentation, and our sense of alienation from the world. Ultimately, he shows us, this novel is a timeless expression of the Romantics’ idea that only the imagination, guided by love, can bring us back to our spiritual home.

There has long been a complex relationship between ritual and change in anthropological theory. On the one hand, scholars have tended to view rituals as unchanging because they serve as effective vehicles for illustrating the deep ideational or social structures of a group. On the other hand, other scholars have long pointed out the existence – and even the commonality – of change. How should we interpret ritual change beyond simply declaring rituals (even invented ones) to be a mixture of change and continuity? At the core of these debates lies the question of what constitutes a change in ritual. Is any modification of a ritual considered a change, or do only certain changes that are structurally different from before count as change? By analyzing how different types of deathcare workers have transformed Chinese death practices, I demonstrate how their limited practical arrangements as they carefully navigate the state’s ambiguous position on death rituals have actually created long-term types of structural change at the collective and cumulative level.

This chapter explores four brain-based models of general hunger (i.e., hunger for any palatable food). The first is the energy control model (or homeostatic account), where a departure from the usual level (historically a set point) of some index of bodily fuel status (carbohydrate, fat, or protein) causes a compensatory response, namely an increase or decrease in hunger. The second is the biological agent account, where release of an agent centrally or peripherally (e.g., ghrelin) causes hunger. The third is the excitation-inhibition account, where hunger arises from tipping the balance towards excitation, with these processes instantiated in the neuroanatomy and neurochemistry of the brain. The fourth model, which could be included in the third, is the circadian account, namely that one cause of hunger arises from the brain’s time-keeping mechanisms. The strengths, and often the fundamental weaknesses of each accounts, are presented. This discussion provides the basis for why a psychological model involving learning and memory is necessary for a causal explanation of hunger, and how this can be successfully integrated with brain-based models.

This chapter explores thematic repertoire as a hallmark of aesthetic variety in African American novels of the 1940s. Focusing on portrayals of dating and marriage, it charts how Chester Himes, Ann Petry, and William Demby use romantic relationships to express unique creative priorities as they engage Black life in a Jim Crow society. The chapter’s argument builds on recent research about heterosexual intimacy. At the same time, it endorses a patient exploration of mid-century African American novelic production, contending that precisely because the 1940s were moments of unprecedented growth in the publication of Black fiction, that era’s texts provide singular insights into artistic maturation. Today, scholars celebrate the variety of Black expressive styles. While such hoorays often wear theoretical guises, this chapter suggests that fully grasping such plurality requires scrupulous attention to the archive of African American literary and cultural production. It espouses a granular analysis tied to exhaustive inventorying.

This chapter discusses qualitative studies, which explore meanings, experiences, and processes underlying health and illness. It contrasts qualitative and quantitative paradigms, emphasising the depth and richness of qualitative insights. Common methods such as interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and document analysis are explained, alongside analytic approaches including thematic analysis, grounded theory, and phenomenology. Strengths of qualitative research include its ability to capture lived experience, uncover context-specific factors, and generate hypotheses for further study. Limitations include smaller sample sizes, issues of generalisability, and the need for reflexivity in interpretation. The chapter highlights criteria for rigour in qualitative research, including credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability. Examples illustrate applications in exploring patient experiences of chronic illness, barriers to healthcare access, and the implementation of interventions. Ethical considerations, including informed consent, confidentiality, and sensitivity to participant vulnerability, are also discussed. The chapter concludes by emphasising the complementary role of qualitative studies within health research. This chapter maps to syllabus section 3.4, which covers qualitative methodologies, strengths, limitations, and appraisal criteria.

This chapter examines the placing of COVID-19 grief through ethnographic vignettes from three distinct contexts: the prolonged search by one woman in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to find and bury her mother’s body; the ritualized micro-eulogies and use of public health data that characterized Kentucky’s state response to the pandemic; and the community efforts to create a national commemorative space in Washington, DC, for lives lost to COVID in the absence of state recognition. Drawing on philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the ethical imperative to care for the deceased, we show how individual acts of mourning – what we call “micro-eulogies” – confront the silences and erasures surrounding COVID-19 death. These quotidian practices of naming, honoring, and remembering the dead emerge alongside and against narratives of revisionism and calls to “move on.” In attending to the specificity of these three places – geographic, sociopolitical, symbolic – and the movement of individual and collective grief between the private and the public, the chapter explores what it means for the experience of COVID-19 loss to be located. It argues that localizing pandemic grief is an act of refusal, one that demands a collective reckoning and response.

Routines are part of everyday life. Essentially a routine is a sequence of actions that is followed regularly, although not always with the same frequency. For example, some routines are part of every day, while others may occur weekly or even less frequently. Some people are comfortable with a framework of their day and prefer a flexible approach to routines. Others prefer a more rigid schedule, and routines are part of that fixed plan. However, there are some people who find routines challenging, and require additional support for these to be a successful part of the day. This chapter will explore some of the daily routines that are part of a child’s life, both within and outside the ECEC service. It will include what routines are, why they are important, challenges some children (and adults) might experience, and strategies that may provide additional support for routines to become less difficult, and more seamlessly embedded in the day.

In this chapter, we examine key empirical implications of our theoretical argument by analyzing global patterns in the termination and recurrence of Islamist civil wars compared with other civil wars. Drawing on novel data that captures the religious dimensions of armed conflict, we assess whether civil wars involving Islamist claims are less likely to end and more likely to restart. The analysis reveals strong evidence that Islamist conflicts are indeed less likely to terminate compared with other civil wars, and when they do end, they are significantly more likely to recur – either through the resurgence of the same group or the emergence of new ones. Importantly, our findings further suggest that the degree of internationalization matters – specifically, the presence of foreign fighters on the rebel side and secondary support on the government side can make these conflicts more intractable. In our analysis, we rule out some competing explanations for the religious dimension more broadly, and we also nuance the claim that Islamists are merely the new revolutionaries.