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.

Using the work of biologists from the turn of the century, this paper shows how time became part of human biology as an independent and measurable, rather than experiential or social, variable established by merging animal biology in labs with demography and statistics. Life forms were said to have an inherent vitality, or a fixed amount of living, to use Raymond Pearl’s words. At the same time, death was being understood not as an ontological necessity but as an evolutionary contingency, meaning that immortality as a concept and research object was established in terms of the non-necessity of death. Thus, biological infinitude and finitude moved coiled together in research in which death and life had gained new significance and produced new anxieties. Using the echo of these works in anthropology, I argue that secularization processes and anxieties of finitude provided a cultural backdrop that inflected many of these conceptions and experiments.

In this chapter, we begin by discussing how macro-level theories, such as social disorganization and collective efficacy, have been tested to understand the risk of victimization, followed by the application of routine activity theory to understand the locations of crime and risk of victimization at the individual or household level. We then turn to the characteristics of individuals that have long been seen as key to understanding victimization. Examining property crime victimization in our sample, our findings strongly support our interest in the impact of social context on crime.

The Introduction sets out the question and the scope of this book, and its theoretical and methodological framework. Drawing on historical materialism, it explains the anti-fetishist understanding of information taken by this book, which treats information as embedded in and constitutive of social relations and implicated in the distribution of power and order-making. Based on this historical materialist understanding of information, the Introduction sets out the book’s critique on the liberal treatment of information and its main argument that human rights and free trade have jointly and dialectically formed a hegemonic conceptual framework for the governance of information under international law which obscures the crucial material dimension of information and its connection to power.

Two instances of artistic beefing frame African American literature in the 1940s. On the front side, titans Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright traded barbs from the 1937 publication of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God through Wright’s 1940 breakthrough with Native Son. The middle of their dispute featured Wright claiming that Hurston employed a “minstrel technique” in her novel while she clapped back that his short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) contained “tone-deaf” dialect, a Communist Party-dictated “picture of the South,” and a hackneyed “kind of incident.” If this spicy exchange preambles 1940s African American literature, then an equally fiery indictment provides its benediction. Richard Wright and James Baldwin did not begin the 1940s as rivals. On the contrary, Wright actively mentored Baldwin, helping him secure fellowships, reading drafts of his work, and recommending him to publishers. This collegiality notwithstanding, when Baldwin composed “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), he leveled some of his ire regarding American literature’s duplicitous evasiveness at Wright. He concludes that though the “American protest novel,” including Native Son, aims “to bring greater freedom to the oppressed,” it fails because it denies humanity’s “beauty, dread, power” and insists that “categorization alone … is real.” Examining these moments of artistic friction that surround Black writing in the 1940s, a literary critic must decide whether the episodes are anomalies or epitomes.

The 2019 general elections in India, by granting a second term and a stronger mandate to the Narendra Modi government, became an imaginative test for the limits of parliamentary sanction that right-wing Hindu supremacism could enjoy. With a larger majority having balloted a definitive nod to the Bharatiya Janata Party's agendas of social polarization, the party realized that its sponsorship of mob violence and rioting action no longer needed shielding from the law as expressions of a fundamentalist ‘fringe’. Instead, such ‘expressions’ could now be the basis for law, and hate could officially become ideological fodder for law-making in the parliament. It did not matter if ethno-religious grounds for lawmaking were still deemed discriminatory by the Indian constitution; it was time that such laws be scrapped or amended. Three months into the second innings of Modi, the heavily militarized border state of Kashmir was stripped of its special constitutional protections in law, and an overnight gag operation sought to symbolically annex Kashmiri Muslims as the unreportable ‘subjects’ of a Hindu nation-state (The Wire 2019a; Noorani 2019; Varadarajan 2019; Mir 2021). Another three months went by in preventing news of the worst and longest-ever internet blockade (and accompanying military repression) in the Kashmir Valley1 from pouring out in the mainstream media, before the Indian parliament passed a law that invalidated Muslim migrants from making claims to national citizenship.

This time, protests erupted onto the streets. The Delhi Police, working under orders from the Home Ministry, swung into action by trying to make examples of student protestors (from Jamia Millia Islamia University) as ‘masterminding’ the upsurge.

Socioeconomic factors and power dynamics shape climate change responses. Some succeed, but maladaptations occur due to limited intelligence functions, poor problem definitions, and regulation over-reliance. Adaptive capacity varies according to income levels. Economic growth has expanded middle-income cohorts and increased environmental activism. Even wealthier countries still have rural poverty. Expanding private sectors and "Big Business" – often coordinated by overseas Chinese – dominate in infrastructure and agriculture, frequently through public–private partnerships. This reinforces high wealth concentration, allowing the rich to adapt at the poor’s expense and gain greater policy influence, although societal disruptions sometimesimprove the standing of previously excluded groups. Center–periphery economic differences allow lowland elites to penetrate remote areas, displacing marginalized communities to expand ventures like oil palm plantations. The international context is favorable, with trade, investment, and assistance coming from all quarters. Wealthy Western countries could provide more climate finance to ease the transition away from fossil fuels.

Conditional dependence often provides an interpretable way of formalising the relatedness between variables. Moreover, it may indicate a type of causal link, so it is of great interest to detect conditional dependencies from data. Conditional independencies can be conveniently represented through undirected graphs, while their directed analogues can additionally be used to indicate causal relationships. We present the PC algorithm for causal structure learning, as well as several approaches for testing conditional independence, both under a Gaussianity assumption and in a more general nonparametric context.

This chapter approaches the anthropology of death through the example of the lasting sociopolitical and material effects of what the Vietnamese know as the “American War” and the US as the “Vietnam War.” Specifically, we examine the conjoined legacies of missing war dead and the chronic ecological-physiological systems of damage so firmly fixed in the two countries’ often clashing but unavoidably tethered narratives of reparation and normalization. Death in this case tells two stories: one about formerly warring states and how they use the dead – namely, their respective and mutually exclusive sets of missing combatant dead – to advance postwar geopolitical interests on the global stage, and a second, about the necropolitical “drift” of toxins, mutations, and irreparably harmed bodies and psyches that unfolds in the shadow of state-centered narratives. Juxtaposing ethnographic insights from our respective fieldwork, we illustrate how destruction endures, vivifying the past – not just figuratively through postwar geopolitical narratives and memories of the absent but also within the physical bodies of the survivors and the tainted ecologies that surface in war’s wake.

This chapter examines the self-controlled case series (SCCS) method, a design increasingly used in pharmacoepidemiology and vaccine safety research. The SCCS approach analyses only individuals who have experienced an event of interest, comparing incidence rates during exposed and unexposed periods within the same person. This inherently controls for fixed confounders such as genetics, sex, and long-term lifestyle factors, making the design particularly efficient and robust for certain questions. The methodology, assumptions, and analytical framework of SCCS are explained, including the importance of defining observation periods and handling recurrent events. Strengths include efficiency, the ability to use routine data, and strong control of between-person confounding. Limitations include reliance on accurate timing of exposures and outcomes, difficulty addressing time-varying confounders, and inapplicability to outcomes that permanently alter risk. Practical applications are illustrated with examples from vaccine safety studies, where SCCS has helped identify rare adverse events while avoiding many biases of traditional observational designs. The chapter emphasises the growing importance of SCCS in regulatory science and public health monitoring. This chapter maps to syllabus section 3.2.4 and 3.2.9, as an extension of cohort designs and pharmacoepidemiological methods for adverse event monitoring.

Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele began his political career as a self-proclaimed “radical progressive leftist,” evolved into an ideologically ambiguous populist, and, finally, embraced far-right ideas during his first term as president. Chapter 4 draws on Bukele’s speeches, campaign materials, public interviews, and social media posts – including a sample of 16,030 tweets – to trace and explain this evolution. It argues that Bukele is, above all, a skilled populist who has strategically adapted his ideological appeals in response to evolving incentives, challenges, and opportunities. While his early leftist appeals helped Bukele rise quickly within the ranks of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), his “populist turn” enabled him to win the presidency by appealing to growing anti-establishment sentiments. Once in office, Bukele’s “right turn” helped him consolidate power and maximize his public support at home and abroad.

Why has the rule of law had global rhetorical appeal in the last few decades, and will it last? I argue that during the Cold War there was no space for this to happen, but with the collapse of European communism it appeared to many that a western, liberal democratic package with the rule of law at its core was and would continue to be triumphant. As a result, rule of law promotion swept the world. It has not vanished today, but its prospects have dimmed. I attribute that to twentieth-century geopolitical changes, on the one hand, with rivals to liberal democracies springing up, as well as to the transformation within liberal democracies, on the other. Both new democracies and older, apparently well-established ones have spawned increasingly powerful tendencies hostile to the rule of law. These tendencies are unlikely to disappear any time soon. The fate of the rule of law will depend in large part on whether they succeed.

This chapter examines what judges can do to protect the judiciary and make their judgments more effective using off-bench tools and by relying on their social networks. It discusses four sets of tools. The first is relation-building. This chapter examines how alliances can be forged through two kinds of off-bench engagement - public relations and judicial diplomacy – and with eight potential allies of a committed court: (1) lawyers, (2) legal academics, (3) the media, (4) civil servants, (5) international organizations, (6) businesses, (7) the general public, and (8) fellow judges. The chapter then proceeds to explore a second set of tools: that on establishing diplomatic connections with hostile groups. Drawing on the concept of backchanneling, the chapter theorizes the potential dangers and benefits of clandestine engagement with hostile parties. The third and fourth tools to be discussed are protest and mobilization. The chapter ends with reflections on the option of resignation and argues that resigning should only be considered as a last resort.