Jean-Paul Lederach is a leading proponent of transformation type conflict resolution who contends that conflict tends to occur where there are ethnic, regional and religious differences and arises over ‘long-standing animosities rooted in a perceived threat to identity and survival’ and thus armed conflict has security as its goal. Cohesion is seen as a desired goal of conflict by Lederach, and the irony, according to Lederach, is that the existence of division contributes to this desire. But cohesion, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, is a mirage. Diane Francis notes that conflict arises because injustice and oppression ‘characterise a substantial proportion of human relationships’. She places her emphasis on conflict resolution with active non-violence and highlights power and justice in this framework. For John W. Burton, conflict is not caused by power rivalries or ideologies and interests but by needs and values. He highlights the centrality of identity, security, and recognition to conflict. This chapter discusses traditional approaches to conflict resolution and their application to the conflict in Northern Ireland. It also explores Jacques Lacan's approach to change in the socio-ideological fantasy.

This chapter expands on the concept that the Travellers’ storytelling traditions function as negotiations of their marginalisation. First, it takes a close look at stories about place, then by returning to the story of Geordie McPhee introduced in Chapter 3. It provides further detailed examples of how super-empirical story spaces function as quintessential ideological locations. Throughout this chapter, we retain the term ‘supernatural’ in keeping with the literature with which we engage and to describe certain characters. The term super-empirical is reserved for the definition of the story spaces as a genre. Citing Degh, Braid notes that legends function to challenge listeners’ understanding of the world and invite them to modify their beliefs and worldviews (2002: 74). This chapter expands upon such conceptualisations of legends – this expansion is necessary because although the examples provided conform to ideas around ‘legends’, they also display characteristics that set them apart. For instance, the stories have alignments with ATU magic tales, take place in liminal story spaces, or have direct relationships with place-names. From this perspective, the narratives under examination in this chapter inhabit a particular ‘story space’ that does not necessarily require a label for the stories to be investigable. It is not that these stories defy classification, only that the present study's questions can be sufficiently addressed without engaging in it. At the same time, as we have seen in previous chapters, this study continues to draw comparisons between the Travellers’ stories and other cultural expressions to better understand the former.

This chapter analyses how German soldiers, despite increased risk to life and limb, remarkably quickly came to accept the new international tasks and how they were willing to work as part of a multinational military coalition as required in out-of-area operations. It also looks at the approach of German soldiers to the new tasks and points to the distinctly civilised cast of the Bundeswehr's international efforts.

One of the recurring themes in medieval agricultural manuals, which are mainly based on ancient agronomic knowledge, centres around the correlation between the geography of a region and the effects of this geography on the growth of various plant types and their specific requirements. In Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya (Nabatean Agriculture), compiled in 291/903 in Lower Mesopotamia, Ibn Waḥshiyya (d. 318/930) proposed two reasons to explain this relationship. First, he argued that everything in the world possesses a nature (ṭabʿ ) composed of the four elements of fire, air, water and earth. The differences between the nature of each region and each plant explain, for instance, why the dust that covers a vine's leaves is harmful to the plant in ‘the whole clime of Bābil (Babylonia)’, while it might be beneficial in another region. His second explanation contends that the unique properties (khuṣūṣiyyāt) of each region are connected to its position ‘in respect to the rotation of the sun and the other stars which rotate in the sphere (al-falak)’. While the present book does not aim to provide an in-depth analysis of the various cosmological and philosophical aspects of agricultural manuals, such examples attest to the perception of agriculture as a human engagement with nature which is strongly dependent on the geography. A primary explanation for this concern, as mentioned by Ibn Waḥshiyya, is the recognition that the most crucial factors influencing plant growth include water, air, the ‘warmth of the sun’ and notably, soil. However, as several scholars have emphasised, the scholarly literature on gardens of Islamicate regions has often overlooked the relationship between gardens and their surrounding landscapes.This oversight is particularly evident in the conceptualisation of ‘the Islamic garden’, which as Petruccioli pointed out, ‘has been considered a specific, self-contained entity removed from its context – its surroundings, the city, and the environment’.

This chapter draws some conclusions about the central dilemmas of representative democracy. Governments in all developed countries were forced to adjust their welfare states and some also their patronage strategies to the deflationary bias created by the new foreign-exchange markets. Representative democracy eventually proved astonishingly robust in the international economy shaped by the United States after the end of Bretton Woods. The capacity for representative democracy to disappoint remains endless, and the exercise of power to contain that will always open up the possibility of conflict, because human beings do not like submitting to the will of others. In the post-Bretton Woods international economy, representative democracy is clearly not the only form of government compatible with economic success. The power of the United States, and the market dynamics and power relations of the international economy, do much to make that task exceptionally difficult, just as they punish failures of state-building.

Life Design matters now more than ever. In a world shaped by longer lives, evolving work patterns, and more frequent transitions, the traditional life script no longer fits. This chapter shows how Life Design offers a timely, science-based response – building “transition competence” to help individuals navigate uncertainty with agency, clarity, and confidence. Drawing on design thinking, positive psychology, behavioral economics, and knowledge visualization, it equips people with mindsets and tools to move forward through reflection and action. Life Design empowers us to see transitions as identity laboratories, reframe outdated stories, run small experiments, and build resilience. It replaces either-or thinking with portfolio approaches and helps turn confusion into momentum. Beyond the personal, Life Design also offers societal and organizational solutions for the future of work, aging, and well-being. It’s not just a method. It’s a movement – for a multistage life that’s meaningful by design.

This book has raised the question of whether it is possible to fight persistent values of distrust and non-cooperation in Palermo. Is it possible to support the development of trust between citizens through public action from above, through civic education? A general criticism of Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work is that he neglected state agency and the Mafia in his analytical model, when explaining the lack of trust in southern Italy. This book has focused on institutional explanations and has analysed more recent political efforts to break the heritage of the past, that is, to turn the vicious circle of non-cooperation into a virtuous circle based on trust and cooperation. The primary aim of the project is to contribute to theories on social capital, and particularly to analyse whether institutions matter for the development of generalised trust. In the book, the impact of educational institutions on students' generalised trust has been explored. Letters from the Letter Project offered insights on why different variables were important, if not all of them, for students' development of generalised trust.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the concept of ‘strategic culture’ and outlines the central tenets of culture theory. It explains how this theory provides a tool for analysing the domestic factors that influence security policy and introduces examples of culturalist analyses of post-unification German security policy. It argues that these accounts display a static bias due to their structural concept of culture, and explains how this book instead conceptualises culture as a dynamic and plural entity. Culture, it argues, limits the choices of German politicians, but simultaneously represents a resource for agents of change. The chapter also operationalises the concept of security culture and discusses how and where to study it, and argues that the sequence of Bundestag debates over the out-of-area question between 1990 and 2001 offers a window into the competing logics of German security culture.

Problem: The idea of continuity in garden traditions

Studies on ‘Islamic’ garden history have followed two paradigms whose generalising and essentialist character has drawn criticism from various scholars over the years. The first argues that the concept and types of gardens in the Islamic period – drawing on extant examples only from the fifteenth century onwards – were of ancient Persian origin, thus presupposing the idea of a continuous tradition. The second paradigm brings together gardens from different regions with Islamic rulers as ‘Islamic’ gardens, foregrounding a religious attribute for gardens in an extremely large and disparate geographical area including Arab Spain, North Africa, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the adjacent Persian-speaking regions up to India, despite the diversity of their regional and cultural traditions.

The idea of an ancient ‘Persian’ origin of ‘Islamic’ gardens and its continuity into the early modern period has been voiced since the beginning of the twentieth century. It mainly relates to the interpretation of the term chahārbāgh, found in the Persian textual sources from the fifth/eleventh century onwards, as a formal type of garden, indicating a garden divided into four quarters by two cross-axial water courses or paths. It is argued that this type can be traced back to pre- Islamic Iran, continued throughout the medieval Islamic periods and was transferred to other Islamic-ruled regions as well. Some scholars have also related the fourfold layout and chahārbāgh to the mythical Garden of Eden, from which, according to some traditions, such as the book of Genesis, four cosmic rivers, two of which were the Euphrates and Tigris, flowed towards the four corners of the earth.

As an intricate interplay of architecture and nature, a garden comes to life through its plants, living creatures, and the sensory experiences of scents and sounds. In comparison to a garden's solid structures, however, even fewer physical traces of the organisms that once populated it have survived over the centuries. Archaeozoological and archaeobotanical findings, in some cases, can help to identify certain varieties of living creatures and discern the plantings within a garden or the locations of certain plants. Environmental studies, including soil analysis, also provide valuable insights into whether an area was exposed to sunlight or shaded, featured high-growing or low-growing vegetation, and embraced a dense or sparse plantation. However, so far, no such investigations have been carried out in the Abbasid palace gardens of Lower Mesopotamia. Nor has archaeological evidence regarding horticulture, such as soil contours that could reveal the potential remains of flowerbeds, been recorded thus far. Furthermore, unlike ancient Mesopotamia, no representations of the royal gardens, depicting their plants or living creatures, are known to exist from the Abbasid period. Consequently, literary evidence remains the only source of knowledge regarding the flora and fauna of the Abbasid palace gardens in Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, the textual sources also come with their own set of limitations. They do not provide a comprehensive list of all plants or living creatures that existed in the royal gardens, nor do they offer details of planting arrangements or density. These sources, however, offer vivid glimpses into various species in the royal gardens and shed light on the types of plants and animals that were particularly appreciated. They also contribute to our understanding of how two main factors – prestige and climatic conditions – influenced the choice and organisation of plants within these gardens.

This chapter differentiates between the competing Trotskyite parties in order to trace the variety of attempts to curtail and depose the growth of gay politics. It follows the liberationists who moved back into the Trotskyite or Stalinist Left and discusses how the Left was changing and dealing with the new forces of identity politics and of the Right. The Communist Party and some of the Trotskyite groups began to engage further with youth culture and took up the counter-culture and liberation movements' use of performance as protest. Meanwhile, punk was taking lifestyle politics and running with it. Punk offered particular possibilities for young gay men who felt that neither the reformist nor liberational models spoke to them. As Punk's initial moment was disseminated, the Left belatedly attempted to harness the rise of lifestyle and cultural politics. This is examined through the examples of the Communist Party of Great Britain's People's Jubilee, Workers Revolutionary Party's Right to Work Campaign, and the Socialist Workers Party's Anti-Nazism and Rock against Racism. The chapter also considers anti-racism and gay activism.