The chapter focuses on the Romantic philosophy of nature. This will permit us to point out how the relational idea of the Romantic Self is consistent with the image of the human being as located within nature. The human is not opposed to nature and is neither her master, but she is immersed in (and even constituted by) the entanglement of natural forces. Following a line of reflections that unites Spinoza, Leibniz, Herder, and Goethe to the Romantics, I will show the centrality of ‘life’. This is the inexhaustible source of forms created through repetitions and metamorphoses. As we will see at the end of the chapter, the Romantic interpretation of life is at the basis not only of their anthropology but also of their idea of normativity. Norms are, for the Romantics, instructions provided with a compelling force and are not only the formulation of interdictions. The dynamic conception of nature allowed the Romantics to reintegrate human beings into it and overcome the opposition between nature and freedom, nature and politics; however, a distinction between human and animal, or human and plants, is maintained. It is, though, not maintained in the sense of domination.

The popularization of psychoanalysis following World War II provided African American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry with a new paradigm for exploring the effects of racial prejudice and discrimination on Black identity and consciousness. The new field of social psychiatry helped these writers expand their frame to encompass the broader environment of American racism and examine how segregation was not just about the control of Black bodies but about the psychological control of Black minds. Their nonfiction writings and experimentation with the documentary mode of the photo-essay illuminate how visual culture could be adapted to reveal Black lives under the pressure of racial discrimination and increasing cold war surveillance. All four fought to find and improvise safe spaces, both physical and psychological, for African Americans during a decade in which the national security state overshadowed and conflicted with civil rights goals.

Chapter 2 develops the theoretical foundation for why Islamist civil wars are especially intractable. We question both essentialist and instrumentalist perspectives on Islamist armed conflicts. Instead, we develop an argument based on a bargaining perspective when explaining the intractability of Islamist conflicts, which we refer to as the strategic embeddedness of Islamist civil wars. The thrust of our argument is that Islamist civil wars are embedded in a particular strategic environment – engulfed in a transnational network of groups and actors supporting the rebels and, in parallel, entangled in a web of various intergovernmental commitments and support structures backing the government side. Such international support tends to create a high degree of uncertainty in terms of the extent and nature of support, making it harder for the parties to assess one another’s resolve and capabilities, which in turn makes these conflicts less likely to end. We explain how the transnational dimension of Islamist civil wars affects the level of uncertainty in conflicts and how it can decrease the likelihood of termination, increase the risk of recurrence, and reduce the chances of conflict resolution.

Chapter 4 argues that to think clearly and well about the rule of law idea and ideal we should begin by asking what we want it for and what we want from it, not by attempting first to define its specific components and then wondering what we might do with them. Only if we come to some view of what we are after can we be in a position to explore possible and available ways of getting there. At this point, the role(s) that law might play, the forms it needs to assume, the institutions that would best serve, what else besides law and institutions would be needed, are all in principle open questions, as is the relative salience of whatever particular measures and institutions we light upon – not completely open, because this is not the rule of law’s first rodeo, but open enough. Since the world does not always present even the same sorts of problems in the same sorts of ways, different ways require different responses and there are new problems.

The conclusion to The New Believers identifies how the varieties of spiritual realism newly imagined by each writer reshape our critical understanding of ontology, subjectivity, collectivity, and teleology. Because they commit to spiritual beliefs, in their public comments and in their fiction, the New Believers change the basic understanding of reality (ontology) from a materialist absence of intrinsic meaning to a world filled with spiritual meaning. Our sense of self (subjectivity) changes from completely self-created to one that is still free but responsive to forces of care and compassion, which in turn make better communities (collectivity) possible. The spiritual realism of these writers ultimately reshapes our understanding of death and the purpose of the universe (teleology) by pointing to spiritual persistence and the hope for something beyond our own material demise and the deaths of those we love, which empowers the contemporary novel in more hopeful and affirmative directions.

An ongoing debate in the fields of forensic investigation and transitional justice after atrocity has often involved a conceptual binary between, on the one side, a legal or “human rights” approach, and on the other a victim-centric or “humanitarian” approach. This binary understanding of forensic forms of repair has contributed to harmful generalizations that fail to appreciate locally specific practices and politics. Forensic human identification practices in the US–Mexico borderlands have often been categorized as humanitarian, apolitical responses to state violence along the border. In this chapter, through a close examination of forensic identification efforts in Arizona, I show how individual identification can be a political process. In a context where the individual personhood of migrants is erased before, during, and after unauthorized migration across the international border, individual identity takes on political meaning and social significance. I show how individual identifications often involve dialogue within a complex network of state and nonstate actors. To be sure, in the US–Mexico border context and elsewhere, identification can serve to sanitize violence, stifle political claims, and reassert state power. However, it can also involve political practices of care that open new forums for justice and repair.

One of the fundamental tools in diophantine geometry is the notion of a height function. This function measures the geometric and arithmetic complexity of rational points on a projective variety defined over a number field and is a key to a number of the fundamental finiteness results in arithmetic geometry, e.g., Mordell–Weil Theorem, Siegel’s theorem, Mordell–Faltings’ theorem and so on.

Chapter 5 shows that development banks provide policy-makers with the ability to address policy contestation. I document the varying policy contestation from labor unions, civil society organizations, and legislators to each type of internationalization support: acquisitions and greenfield investments, project finance, and mergers among domestic firms. I then show that this variation obeyed differences in the salience of associated domestic effects and in BNDES’ funding strategy for each intervention. The chapter shows that BNDES relied increasingly on providing equity financed through market sources to finance politically sensitive overseas investments. These dynamics reveal the “fragile autonomy” of states under democracy: their capacity to support national firms in global markets depends on their ability to strategically mobilize or obfuscate their interventions and pushes them toward more market-conforming instruments of industrial policy.

This chapter uses creative, narrative nonfiction writing to portray a deathbed conversation or confession of sorts between a dying person and their healthcare providers. While literary in style, it is based on seven years of the author’s immersive field research in post-Apartheid South Africa in long-term and frail care homes. After providing background on long-term care and the history of racial segregation in that country, the chapter depicts a scene where white and Black nursing staff provide palliative care for and converse with a dying white woman whose character is composed from life history interviews with multiple residents of the home. As a contribution to the anthropology of death, the chapter shows how humanistic and literary approaches can be used to represent voices of dying people, as well as the ways histories of racial violence and inequality can be highlighted in research on long-term and palliative care.

In the face of socioeconomic shifts – a high aging population, decline in marital and birth rates, irregularization of labor and precaritization of life – the family model of mortuary care in Japan is coming undone. As sociality trends toward single households, the prospect of dying alone increases in this era of “family-less dead.” The rise of lonely deaths – those who die unaccompanied whose remains, if unclaimed, wind up as “disconnected souls” in public cemeteries – spurs national anxiety, but also a new “ending industry” offering alternatives to family-based deathcare. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter examines one of its most popular businesses: services that clean up the stuff left behind by the deceased. A job once done by kin, workers can now be hired to sort through personal belongings – even those of the lonely dead. In exploring what kind of work this is, the chapter teases out the physical and affective strands workers bring to this task that may well be the final “touch” of those who go otherwise unmourned. The chapter asks, does this constitute a modicum of recognition for the otherwise “unrecognized dead”? And what does this say about the sociality of dying with/out others in Japan, or anywhere, today?

Populist leaders often rise to power by promising a utopian future and radical change. However, their reliance on demagoguery, protectionism, and state control frequently undermines long-term prosperity. This chapter explores how populist governance weakens institutions, disrupts markets, and exacerbates inequality. Drawing examples from Latin America and beyond, it warns that populism reshapes democracy by amplifying grievances and concentrating power. Strong institutions – not demagoguery – are essential for development.

In this chapter attention turns to the Early Modern English lexicons of texts written by radical Protestants (and some of their opponents) from the late sixteenth century up to and including the civil wars: pamphleteers such as ‘Martin Marprelate’ and Richard Overton, whose usages demonstrate remarkable linguistic creativity, and revolutionary thinkers such as the ‘Digger’ Gerrard Winstanley. The chapter concludes with an examination of the language of the Putney Debates of 1647, in which the soldiers of the New Model Army, victorious in the civil wars between king and parliament, discussed how the country should be governed. The Debates were a remarkable event in the history of democracy, in which religious expression was linked intimately to the holding and handling of political power.