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Laura Nenzi draws readers into a fascinating world of samurai, shipwrecks, nocturnal monsters and partying crowds, in this richly detailed, illustrated and evocative history of the night. The world over, the installation of public lights transformed the night, reshaping expressions of authority; altering centuries-old forms of production and consumption; and enabling the expansion of legitimate daytime activities into the night hours. The cities of Tokugawa Japan, however, lacked any kind of public illumination until the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Nenzi shows, many of the attributes associated with the modern night were firmly in place in cities and villages well before the age of streetlights. This exploration of the transformation of early modern Japan after dark challenges accepted definitions of modernity, encouraging readers to rethink the way we write history.
In this groundbreaking study, Asaad Alsaleh reveals how ISIS weaponized Islamic texts to transform Islamic theology into a tool of ideological violence. Drawing on close readings of Arabic primary sources, he explores the historic notion of takfir – excommunication -- from the 'apostasy wars' that followed Prophet Muhammad's death through modern jihadist movements. Alsaleh demonstrates how political authorities systematically exploited excommunication to eliminate perceived threats throughout Muslim history. He also examines the theological mechanisms through which the group legitimizes violence. Combining theological, historical, and ideological analysis, Alsaleh argues that ISIS pursues a utopian project based on man-made ideology rather than divine revelation, thus distinguishing authentic Islam (rooted in the Qur'an and authenticated Prophetic hadith) from human interpretations that have been tragically conflated with the religion itself. Alsaleh concludes with suggestions as to how to solve the problems that ideology poses, emphasizing that clear efforts must be made to disentangle ideology from religion.
Does democracy matter for urban protest? Africa is the fastest urbanizing region in the world, with more citizens every day requiring access to goods like housing, energy, food, and transportation. At the same time, citizens across the continent have also indicated declining satisfaction with democracy. Thus, many citizens have turned to strategies like protest to meet their basic needs. Yet for urban communities fighting for access to these goods, does democracy still make a difference? Drawing on a decades-long comparison of urban protest in Cairo, Lagos, and Johannesburg, We Have the Rights challenges the conventional wisdom of the social movement literature, by showing that even when democratization has not altered the prevailing forms of protest, it can significantly improve protest outcomes. These findings suggest that democracy can empower urban communities, not by enclosing citizen participation, but by expanding the avenues and boundaries of institutional engagement.
Intellectual property (IP) rights have long faced strong legitimacy criticisms. As the vaccine debates during the COVID-19 pandemic showed, IP is often seen as a problematic asset of powerful private companies and developed economies. This book addresses these criticisms by focusing on a renewed interpretation of the TRIPS – the key international treaty for IP. By combining international law analysis and political theory, this work presents the TRIPS as the structuring agreement of the international IP regime rather than treating it as a technical trade instrument. Drawing on the ideal of freedom defined as protection against domination, the book develops a legal philosophy of the TRIPS, revisiting its foundations and proposing a renewed interpretation of its key norms. This reframing highlights how the treaty can potentially provide consistency and foreseeability in a conflict-ridden global multilateral trade system where weaker trade partners are often at a disadvantage. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Throughout Islamic history, Muslim jurists have prohibited sex between men. Yet, this prohibition was not based solely on scriptural commands. Tracing a genealogy of Muslim discourses across the first five centuries of Islam, this study situates liwāṭ within wider debates about the body, gender, morality, medicine, and religion. Sara Omar examines changing interpretations of the Lot narrative, the evolution of ḥadīth traditions, and the gradual formation of Islamic legal frameworks. Through close readings of legal, exegetical, medical, and ethical texts, the book uncovers deep disagreements over evidence, authority, culpability, and punishment, revealing a tradition marked by contestation rather than consensus. Omar engages Jewish, Christian, and Hellenic intellectual legacies to shows how early Muslims negotiated the boundaries of nature, desire, and the permissible. Accessible yet analytically rigorous, the book offers new perspectives on Islamic law, sexual ethics, and the historical roots of contemporary debates.
When, why, and how did we, humans, develop our distinctive and paradoxical inclinations for both war and peace? This groundbreaking book investigates that central question by drawing on cutting-edge research and an unprecedented range of evidence from thirteen disciplines: biology, primatology, comparative ethology, behavioural ecology, anthropology, archaeology, criminology, social psychology, linguistics, demography, genetics, neuroscience, and climatology. The book shows how the capacities for both war and peace co-evolved gradually over millions of years through a mosaic-like pattern, with distinct but interacting components emerging at different moments and becoming integrated over evolutionary time. This deep-rooted trajectory has been shaped by feedback loops among biological, cultural, and environmental forces. With its expansive temporal horizon, cross-species comparisons, and empirical richness, this book offers a sweeping new account – and an indispensable resource – for anyone interested in the origins of the Janus-faced inclination for both war and peace in the human species.
This Cambridge Companion offers a rich range of contexts for studying the literary histories of New Orleans. Some of the essays offer a deep focus on the significance of iconic figures such as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Kate Chopin. Other essays detail long traditions of writing not widely known beyond the city but that complicate our understanding of American literary history in new ways, as in the chapters on queer writers or Mardi Gras or the Asian presence in the city's literary imagination or how deadly nineteenth-century epidemics continue to shape the ways the world has come to read the city as a capital of Gothic horror fiction. These fresh perspectives on one of the most storied cities in the world are an essential resource for those who seek to piece together their own understanding of New Orleans as an historic and living flashpoint in the global literary imagination.
When a government participates in an International Monetary Fund (IMF) program, media coverage often highlights strong public reactions in the borrowing country, marked by mass mobilization and protests. In Creditors and Crowds, Sujeong Shim asks if public opinion matters for resolving economic crises. She shows how public opinion is pivotal to shaping global financial outcomes and reveals how public support for a government shapes the interactions among borrowing governments, IMF officials, and private portfolio investors. Combining cross-country data, case studies, and interviews, the author shows that public support for governments affects IMF programs' design and consequences. Using practical examples and comparative insights from Greece, Latvia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and more, Shim highlights the often-overlooked role of public opinion in international finance and offers lessons for governments navigating crises.
With university student populations becoming ever more diverse across the globe, it has become increasingly difficult for educators to presume that all students possess the necessary knowledge and skills in academic literacy to succeed in their academic studies. This timely book presents the argument for embedding academic literacies in higher education degree curricula. It supports an inclusive approach to student academic language development, where all students stand to benefit from instruction in the literacy practices specific to their disciplines. The book is split into two parts, with the first providing a number of thought-provoking perspectives on different aspects and interpretations of embedding. The second part provides a set of case studies that serve both to highlight how various theoretical frameworks inform different approaches to embedding, and to illustrate the real-word affordances and constraints at play that act as determinants of the shape, extent and success of embedding initiatives.
This book presents an interdisciplinary survey at the intersection of music, creativity, and medicine. Featuring contributions from medical doctors, psychologists, and musicians, it surveys thought-provoking findings in the music-medical borderlands. Experts in neuroscience explore the cerebral underpinnings of music, from auditory-motor interactions, to rhythm, to the role of music in therapy, epilepsy, and cognitive disorders. Case studies describe medical biographies of musical masters, including Beethoven's deafness, Schumann's deterioration, Ravel's dementia, and Gershwin's brain tumor. There are accompanying studio recordings from the volume editors. Students, researchers, or anyone interested in the new frontiers of music in medicine will find original cross-disciplinary connections in this volume.
Why are most contemporary autocracies concentrated between Siberia and Central Africa while other regions remain largely democratic? This book uncovers the deep historical forces behind that divide, tracing how geography-particularly the vast steppe grasslands-and political-economic conflicts between nomadic and sedentary societies shaped enduring patterns of power. These structured conflicts reinforced authoritarian persistence across half the globe, creating a binary world with starkly different opportunities and threats. The result is a long-standing geopolitical fault line that continues to shape global politics today, exemplified by the autocratic axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Combining insights from geography, history, and political economy, this book offers a compelling explanation of why authoritarianism thrives -and why democracy prevails elsewhere.
Hope is a vital force in politics, nourishing our visions of the future when things seem irredeemably bleak. Contemporary philosophy is trapped within a view of hope as an everyday desire empty of ethical and political content. Much political theory defers to philosophy and appears unable to appreciate the value of hope as a political attitude. Through an interpretive conversation with Richard Rorty, Robert Lamb shows how Rorty uses Hegel to develop a compelling, alternative understanding of hope as the yearning for a better future amidst a contingent social world and fragile political inheritance. Commitment to political hope – an enemy of despair, optimism, and certainty – invites a reorientation of philosophical reflection and involves a demanding civic ethos to sustain communities fragmented by pathological individualism. Rorty's interpretations of John Rawls, feminism, and the redemptive potential of history show the relevance of hope for the urgent challenges facing twenty-first century liberal democracy.
The study of periodic partial differential equations has experienced significant growth in recent decades, driven by emerging applications in fields such as photonic crystals, metamaterials, fluid dynamics, carbon nanostructures, and topological insulators. This book provides a uniquely comprehensive overview for mathematicians, physicists, and material scientists engaged in the analysis and construction of periodic media. It describes all the mathematical objects, tools, problems, and techniques involved. Topics covered are central for areas such as spectral theory of PDEs, homogenization, condensed matter physics and optics. Although it is not a textbook, some basic proofs, background material, and references to an extensive bibliography providing pointers to the wider literature are included to allow graduate students to access the content.
Ethnographers of socio-cultural phenomena routinely face moments in the field that evoke no answers for our interlocutors, or in which answers come in entirely different forms from those anthropologists and other scholars expect. The over-emphasis on structure and meaning in social science, and anthropology in particular, has inhibited the study of a-conceptual or 'darker' spaces of cultural phenomena. In this book, Diana Espírito Santo and Sergio González Varela explore areas of social life often neglected by traditional ethnographers, analytically described as spaces of negation, of not-knowing, where bodies, environments, and realities resist explanation or description, and where there are ultimately no answers – either for interlocutors or researchers. Examining fields as diverse as divination, parapsychology, monsterology, Brazilian capoeira, tattoo artistry, art and aesthetics, Afrofuturism, fantasy fiction, ufology, and Cuban Spiritism, they argue that radical uncertainty should propel novel forms of theory.
Designed to build confident analytical abilities, this book introduces a scaffolded five-step strategy for solving problems in classical mechanics. With progressive problem sets spanning kinematics, forces, momentum, rotational motion, and more, it focuses on deepening conceptual understanding beyond the basic application of formulae. This highly pedagogical approach highlights the importance of determining which principles apply under given conditions, and each problem is accompanied by the full mathematical solution and a visualisation of the underlying physical concepts at play. Guided exercises allow students to reinforce their understanding and turn passive solution-checking into active learning. Written for undergraduate physics and engineering students keen to develop more efficient and fluent problem-solving skills and improved exam results, it also provides instructors with a novel and effective teaching framework for tutorials and assessments.
This is the first comprehensive analysis of Southeast Asian globalization and development since 1870. Interpreting over 150 years of Southeast Asian economic history, Gregg Huff traces the impact of a first period of globalisation from the 1870s to 1929, the effects of Japanese occupation during World War II and its aftermath, and a second wave of globalisation since the late 1960s. He uses vent-for-surplus, dual economy and plural society concepts and argues that the response of those in Southeast Asia to periods of transport revolutions, innovation and opportunity in the world economy translated into rapid export-led growth. Recent swift growth enabled Southeast Asia to start to 'catch up' with the world's leading countries for the first time in its history. Achievements include industrialization, genuine social progress and numerous large urban regions. Nevertheless, the book contends that Southeast Asian development in its 'miracle economies' remains incomplete.
Domestication is not just something that humans impose on animals, but an ancient structure binding both creatures within shared systems of subjugation. Advancing trenchant new ideas, David Carr unpacks Genesis 1–11 to reveal ways in which embedded human–animal, gender, and group hierarchies constitute our world. Drawing on animal studies and Indigenous perspectives alike, he treats the Bible's origin stories as an invitation to rethink inter-species flourishing and re-imagine community based on intrinsic worth rather than mere utility. Tracing human rule over creation in Eden to slavery and concentrated human power at Babel, the author exposes an escalating trajectory of domination. Yet these foundational stories also suggest that global subjugation is not inevitable, but instead the consequence of a fall from an earlier relational, reciprocal mode of living. Here is a hopeful framework that recognizes this crisis while offering alternatives rooted in respectful relations and multispecies kinship.
Corporate Ordering explains how modern corporations navigate social conflict when law is incomplete, politics are polarized, and shareholders disagree about corporate purpose. Drawing on original case studies from ridesharing, climate sustainability, and artificial intelligence companies, the book reveals the internal governance systems corporations use to set standards, justify decisions, and monitor their impact. Moving beyond the familiar debates between shareholder primacy and stakeholder capitalism, the book offers a clear framework for understanding how corporate power actually operates in practice. Written for scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and informed general readers, it provides a timely guide to corporate governance in a world where business decisions increasingly function as social policy.
This book explores how language shapes our engagement with fiction, from understanding characters to discussing stories. It delves into the unique ways we communicate about fictional worlds, showing how fiction-related talk is used in a variety of situations. Andreas Stokke explores the semantics and pragmatics of fiction-related language, focusing on how we use language to create and discuss fictional stories and characters. He argues that the linguistic tools used for fiction are the same as those for reality, yet fictional communication is distinct as it is unconstrained by real-world reference and allows for saying things without incurring factual commitments. He also shows how fictional names retain their meaning across many ways of using them. He then analyses the various ways in which we talk about fiction, including metafictional, interfictional, and counterfictional discourse.