Chapter 6 summarizes the evidence and then asks whether this longue-durée reexamination of the ups and downs in natural gas interdependence provides insights into the recent collapse of decades of EU-Russia gas cooperation amid war in Ukraine. It considers how dominant narratives may help explain why Putin decided to invade Ukraine at considerable commercial and political cost. The chapter suggests solutions to three puzzles: (1) Does reconstructing Eurasian gas ties across time and space and uncovering sources of change contribute something new to an understanding of Russia’s gas interdependence with a host of neighboring countries? (2) Does this reexamination provide insight into the subsequent collapse of decades of EU-Russia gas cooperation amid war in Ukraine? (3) Does this reconstruction and reexamination of gas interdependencies across Eurasia offer anything new to explain puzzling political outcomes in dyads where economic interdependence is high? Finally, the chapter places the book’s central arguments in an International Political Economic perspective, considering pathways to energy cooperation across Eurasia under various circumstances, especially energy transition.

In Chapter 6, we build on the analysis from the previous chapter by focusing specifically on negotiations and dialogue. We examine a few Islamist groups in Mali and Syria, highlighting how their transnational or local orientation influences conflict resolution. In Mali, we analyze variations between groups: Ansar Dine, Katiba Macina, and Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). While they all share a radical Islamist ideology, Ansar Dine and Katiba Macina – both with strong local roots and a focus on Mali – have occasionally shown interest in negotiating with the Malian government. The government, in turn, has also been open to negotiations with them at times. In contrast, no such attempts have been made with AQIM, which has an explicitly transnational agenda. In Syria, we trace the development of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and focus on variations over time. Initially one of the most extreme Islamist actors in the Syrian civil war, HTS has gradually demonstrated respect for ceasefires and a willingness to explore dialogue. We demonstrate how these openings for conflict resolution are preceded and driven by localization.

Chapter 6 turns to the Parliament as a newly created space for political negotiation. It considers the election and appointment of non-Muslim representatives and the debates surrounding their communities. This chapter revisits the issues discussed earlier in the book to assess how far they were addressed and reshaped in the parliamentary setting. It also explores the interplay between Islamic legal principles and constitutional law, reflecting broader struggles over inclusion and equality. The positions of both pro- and anti-constitutional ʿulamaʾ are analyzed, along with the legislative compromises that emerged from these debates. The chapter concludes with the dissolution of the Second Parliament in 1911, which brought disillusionment and a partial withdrawal of support for the movement among some non-Muslim communities. It compares the experiences of Bahaʾis, Armenians, and Parsis who lost hope in the Parliament. It provides an analytical review of the Constitutional Revolution and Parliament using Lefebvre’s ideas.

This chapter examines two commonly used observational designs—cross-sectional and ecological studies—focusing on their definitions, applications, and limitations. Cross-sectional studies are described as providing a snapshot of a population at a single point in time, useful for estimating prevalence and identifying associations between exposures and outcomes. Their ability to generate hypotheses is emphasised, as well as their efficiency in collecting large amounts of data relatively quickly and at low cost. Ecological studies, in contrast, analyse data at the group or population level, often using aggregated statistics from countries, regions, or communities. While useful for exploring broad associations and generating public health insights, they are subject to the ecological fallacy, where group-level associations may not reflect individual-level relationships. The chapter highlights examples of both designs in epidemiological research and discusses their role in informing policy decisions, health service planning, and hypothesis generation. Strengths such as simplicity and speed are weighed against limitations, particularly the inability to establish causality or temporal sequence. By clarifying these designs, the chapter equips readers with the ability to critically evaluate studies that provide valuable but preliminary insights into health patterns. This chapter maps to syllabus sections 3.2.1–3.2.2, which cover observational studies, including cross-sectional and ecological designs.

This chapter first situates the book’s argument in the context of two global phenomena: the proliferation of hybrid regimes and the diffusion of court-centric constitutionalism. It then shows why a normative look at constitutional courts in hybrid regimes is an important, but overlooked topic in the literature. Next, the operating assumptions of the book are specified, and basic terms are defined, including constitutional courts and democracy. The chapter concludes by offering a roadmap of the book.

This chapter focusses on imposed hunger in animals and humans. The animal literature is divided between laboratory studies, examining the effects of pre- and postnatal starvation, and environmental studies, where seasonal changes in food availability result in striking physiological adaptations – hibernation, torpor, and estivation. The human literature is also divided into two different segments. The first focusses on the relatively limited, but highly interesting studies of semi-starvation, covering those of Benedict, Milejkowski (Warsaw ghetto study), and Keys. The last mentioned of these is the most famous – the Minnesota Starvation Study, where the psychological effects of starvation were fully documented for the first time. The second segment looks at the use of hunger as a weapon, and especially in the Second World War where this reached its apogee with Operation Hunger, the Nazi plan for the use of mass starvation in the Soviet Union. Other examples covered include concentration camps, the Siege of Leningrad, and the Dutch Hunger Winter. Finally, the delayed and transgenerational effects of hunger on people are examined, both psychologically and epigenetically.

“What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?” asks Achille Mbembe in his seminal essay, “Necropolitics” (2003, 12). While the chapters of the preceding part on “Life from Death” explored what we might call the living end of a necropolitical spectrum – Mbembe’s “subjugation of life to the power of death” (ibid., 39); bare, cruddy, abandoned, and precarious life – this part focuses more squarely on the dead (the necro) themselves as vessels of power, value, and signification. That is, on the production of power through the material destruction, or in some cases, fastidious management of human remains, from disinterred coffins to petri dishes of pulverized bone fragments, as well as of their memory. This is not to suggest these discussions are separate – on the contrary, as that’s the very argument Mbembe makes. It’s also a point Ruth Toulson explores in her ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (2024). Informed by that work, our choice to place these two parts back to back reinforces their theoretical and thematic connections and acknowledges the forks in the road of scholarship whereby applications of necropolitics have at times followed different, unconnected routes.

In the first half of the nineteenth century a great deal of polemical writing on religious issues was published, notably from two radical groups within English Christianity. Both groups aimed ‘to make religion a living power in a cold and gloomy age’, but adopted very different approaches, expressed not only in formal theological treatises but also in more ‘popular’ formats such as the periodical press. John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey – leaders of the Oxford Movement that emerged in the 1830s – tried to bring their own imagined version of the Middle Ages into the Church of England: a ‘vision glorious’ that to many smacked of Roman Catholicism. At the same time, others, who might be described as ‘evangelical’ (such as Edward Bickersteth, ‘the Keble of Victorian Evangelicalism’, or the charismatic Edward Irving), insisted on their own understanding of the sixteenth-century Reformation. In this chapter it will be demonstrated that the Late Modern English lexicons of both groups were profoundly impacted by Romanticism, as expressed most comprehensively in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Chapter 4 focused on leaders’ attributes and dispositions to demonstrate the incompleteness of rationalist explanations for Sino-Russian gas interdependence variations. The chapter presented evidence of significant trends. In 2014, Russia and China concluded a thirty-year, $400 billion deal to ship Russian gas to China. The chapter emphasizes the importance of historically contextualizing such turning moments and deals of large geopolitical value. Second, the culmination of Sino-Russian gas cooperation in 2014 was undergirded by important personal relationships between Presidents Putin and Xi and between Russian and Chinese corporate partners. The chapter highlights the role of political entrepreneurs to shape worldviews. The international and domestic contexts in which states are embedded shape their societies’ identities in powerful ways. It suggests how China’s rapid adoption of net-zero targets fits a broader normative turn in global climate governance and Russian gas is bound to play a bridge role in Beijing’s low-carbon future. Finally, it considered the war in Ukraine and the further deepening of Sino-Russian gas trade.

This chapter explores the dual effect of technical change on economic growth, emphasizing its dual aspects: production expansion and the evolution of demand. The chapter begins by introducing a hypothetical economy characterized by uniform technical progress and demand expansion. It examines the analytical properties of these scenarios, shedding light on their implications for growth dynamics.

A detailed discussion follows on the production and demand aspects of technical change, highlighting how innovations reshape productive capacities and consumption patterns. The chapter identifies the essential modifications needed in the current theory of demand to better capture these changes and concludes with an analysis of the temporal evolution of demand, emphasizing its critical role in driving sustained economic expansion.

The introductory chapter of Persistent Citizens lays out the core conceptual, theoretical, and empirical claims of the book. It begins by highlighting that expanded social policy commitments in countries like Brazil and Argentina do not always translate into consistent access to social programs for all eligible citizens. The authors introduce "state-centric persistence" as a key behavior that explains who ultimately receives benefits. The chapter then previews a psychological theory that explains persistence based on three attitudes: entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy, collectively termed "2ei." The chapter reviews the scope conditions of the argument and outlines the empirical approach of the book, which involves original qualitative and quantitative research in Brazil and Argentina, focusing on health care and early childhood education. The chapter concludes by discussing the book’s contributions to literature on social policy access, claim making, and administrative burden.

This chapter provides a historical overview of social welfare provision in Brazil and Argentina. It details how both countries, in the early twentieth century, established welfare systems that were largely regressive and favored formal workers and privileged groups. The chapter then describes the social policy expansions that have occurred in recent decades, particularly since the countries’ transitions to democracy in the 1980s. While these reforms have expanded access to previously excluded populations, the chapter notes that uneven access persists despite these new commitments. It also summarizes the current state of public provision of health care, especially medication for chronic illness, and early childhood education in each country.

This chapter focuses on economic analysis in healthcare, which evaluates costs and benefits of interventions to inform efficient resource allocation. It introduces the main types of economic evaluation: cost-minimisation, cost-effectiveness, cost-utility, and cost-benefit analyses, explaining their definitions, applications, and differences. Measures such as quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) are described as key outcomes in cost-utility studies. The chapter highlights the importance of perspective (e.g., societal, healthcare system, or patient) in determining which costs and benefits are included. Strengths of economic analysis include its relevance to policy-making, priority-setting, and justifying interventions within constrained budgets. Limitations include methodological challenges, uncertainty in measuring long-term outcomes, and the need for high-quality data. Practical examples from screening programmes, drug evaluations, and public health interventions illustrate how economic analysis shapes funding and access decisions. The chapter also addresses ethical considerations in balancing efficiency and equity. By integrating economic thinking with health outcomes research, the chapter emphasises the essential role of economic analysis in guiding sustainable healthcare systems. This chapter maps to syllabus section 3.3, which requires knowledge of health economics, cost-effectiveness, QALYs, and sensitivity analysis.

We have already seen how nonparametric inference (e.g. about a density or regression function) is possible when our target of interest is smooth. The aim of this chapter is to explore nonparametric methods in a different context, namely where our target can be reasonably modelled using shape constraints, for example monotonicity, convexity or log-concavity. Such constraints are quite natural in many applications; moreover, in contrast to the smoothing methods we have encountered previously, it is often possible to propose methods that do not require the choice of any tuning parameters. Indeed, we show how simple approaches based on maximum likelihood or least squares can frequently be employed even in these infinite-dimensional settings.