This chapter begins by outlining the past trends and the present trajectory of employment-related dispute resolution at international organizations. Second, the historic evolution of the statutory basis of administrative tribunals at the United Nations is analysed, suggesting that Member State governance organs are prepared to revise procedures, but are reluctant to address the transparency of employment law at international organizations. Third, and in conclusion – extending this book’s emphasis on concisely and clearly introducing the law – the incorporation of general legal principles of international administrative law into the Statutes of international administrative tribunals is proposed.

This chapter begins by introducing misconduct – as the enforcement of standards of conduct at international organizations – comprising a series of actions intended to dependably investigate, attribute responsibility and consequently sanction integrity breaches by international officials. Second, the legal principles of misconduct are identified, namely: (1) The facts of misconduct must be established; (2) The established facts must legally constitute misconduct; and (3) Disciplinary sanction must possess a legal basis. Third, three attendant legal duties of misconduct are considered, as follows: (1) Proof of misconduct must be compelling; (2) Alleged misconduct must afford an opportunity to respond; and (3) Misconduct may only be sanctioned proportionately. Fourth, the chapter considers obligations towards staff who allege that they have been subjected to interpersonal misconduct – notably sexual harassment and bullying – and their capability to challenge and obtain information concerning related administrative decisions. Fifth, and in conclusion, this employment law of misconduct at international organizations is restated. The standards of conduct implementing the treaty-attributed integrity and independence of the international civil service are the subject of Chapter 9, ‘Standards of Conduct’.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong preoccupation with time as a philosophical and compositional problem, tracing its evolution from early influences such as Oswald Spengler to the yagé-induced revelations of “space-time travel” and the radical temporality of the cut-up method. Tomasz Stompor argues that Burroughs’ literary experiments – from epistolary montage to newspaper-formatted layouts – challenge the linear, regulated time of modernity and propose alternative, nonlinear temporal regimes. Drawing on the Composite City vision from The Yage Letters, Spenglerian cyclical history, and Burroughs’ self-constructed calendar inspired by Mayan systems, the chapter demonstrates how Burroughs’ formal innovations enact temporal disruption. Through analysis of his cut-up trilogy, contributions to little magazines like My Own Mag, and the spatial logic of montage, Stompor positions Burroughs as a literary time-traveler whose work seeks to liberate the reader from linguistic and chronological control.

In this chapter, we review the Berger–Coburn–Lebow (BCL) and the Bercovici–Douglas–Foias (BDF) approaches and obtain new results on how one can map a BCL-model commuting isometric pair to a unitarily equivalent BDF-model commuting isometric pair and vice versa. We also present a more complete systematic account of the BDF-model, which fleshes out various scattered results due to the trio. This in-depth study leads to the introduction of what we call a refined BDF-model for a commuting isometric pair, the analysis of which gives a new proof of a Wold-type decomposition result of Gaşper and Gaşper. Here we also make contact with some ideas from discrete-time input/state/output linear systems (e.g., realization of a contractive analytic function as the transfer function of a unitary system node), which are important for understanding how to go from a contractive analytic function (a key invariant for the BDF theory) to a 2 x 2-block unitary operator matrix (a key invariant for the BCL theory). However, it is the BCL-model theory that will be our main tool for obtaining functional models for Ando isometric lifts of a commuting contractive pair.

Duality is one of the most basic tools in the study of interacting particle systems. There exist two forms: pathwise and distributional duality, of which the first is the stronger. It is shown how pathwise dualities naturally follow from the basic Poisson construction of Chapter 4 by looking backward in time. The classical additive and cancellative dualities, which are pathwise dualities, are discussed in detail. As an example of dualities that are not pathwise, Lloyd–Sudbury duality is discussed. It is demonstrated how duality can be used to prove various results, such as clustering in the voter model, uniqueness of a homogeneous nontrivial invariant law for the contact process, and equality of the critical points for finite survival and for the existence of a nontrivial invariant law in a contact-voter model.

This chapter examines William Burroughs’ engagement with tape recording as an integral aspect of his cut-up project, situating his sonic explorations within the broader context of twentieth-century sound experimentation and its technological evolution. Tracing Burroughs’ early interest in voice and control, the chapter highlights the pivotal influence of Brion Gysin and the advent of portable tape recorders on the development of the cut-up method beyond textual manipulation. It analyzes Burroughs’ experimental recordings, distinguishing them from his commercial releases, and considers their potential psychological and political objectives, particularly in relation to sonic manipulation. The chapter also draws parallels between Burroughs’ tape techniques and contemporary DJ practices like sampling and remixing, while exploring his engagement with noise, prosody, and the disruptive potential of sound. Ultimately, it argues that Burroughs’ innovative use of tape extended the possibilities of the cut-up as a multisensory and potentially weaponized medium, prefiguring later developments in sound art and media manipulation.

Erin C. Cassese and Yueshan Long document gender differences in public opinion and vote choice. They provide evidence of the emergence and trajectory of the gender gap in vote choice over time and in the most recent elections but demonstrate how the influence of gender is variable and contingent on other voter characteristics such as race, class, geography, and party. Cassese and Long outline common theoretical explanations for the gender gap and situate the American gap in global perspective. Shifting their attention from cause to effect, Cassese and Long explore how beliefs about women and men voters – including social constructions of key voting groups – shape campaign strategy and political communications. They evaluate the specific appeals to women and men voters in the 2024 presidential election, with particular attention to the influence of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in voter mobilization.

This chapter introduces directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) as a way to represent multivariate probability distributions. DAGs help clarify the structure of probabilistic models and the dependencies among their variables and serve as a central tool in later chapters. Every DAG corresponds to a specific factorisation of a joint mass or density function into a product of conditional distributions. While a DAG encodes how the distribution breaks down into conditionals, it does not fully determine the distribution itself. Instead, it implies certain dependency constraints among variables. These constraints can be examined using the concept of d-separation, which allows us to infer conditional independence relationships directly from the graph.

Chapter 3 reviews understandings of ideology and concludes with a discussion of Verschueren’s characterization of ideology and its manifestations in discourse. These theses, with the attributes of ideology identified by Eagleton, provide the bases for the arguments that Amnesty’s appeals and related documents are indeed elements of ideological discourse. According to Eagleton, ideologies are not necessarily instruments of false consciousness; they are constructed to promote the interests of a group, motivate its members to act in the group’s interest, legitimate those interests and actions by presenting them as natural, universal, normative and rational. The analysis shows that while the appeals are designed to persuade their addressees, they are also intended to motivate AI members. The chapter addresses Verschueren’s characterizations of ideology: rarely questioned and potentially hegemonic language use; a normative aspect of social reality manifested across multiple discourse genres; immune to experience and observation often represented implicitly and resistant to explicit expression. It frames, validates, explains and legitimates attitudes, states of affairs, and actions.

Chapter 2 reconstitutes Cuban and US history with sexuality at the center beginning in 1970s, including the sexual revolution in the US, HIV/AIDS, and the development of progressive sex ed in Cuba. It chronicles the downfall of the Soviet Union and its impact on the Cuban economy, which in turn affected the sexual economy. The meaning of homosexuality evolved in both the US and Cuba, at least in part in relation to geopolitics.

This first substantive chapter introduces readers to Truth Commissions as an institution and their relationship with international law; the core problem examined in the book, and the overall argument; the main debates in scholarship and practice, which frame the book’s intervention; and the book’s methodological approach and contribution. The chapter begins with an overview of Truth Commissions, their contemporary role, and historical transformation. The discussion focuses on how the jurisprudential tradition of ‘jurisdictional thought’ offers a way of examining how Truth Commissions have ‘authorized’ their accounts of violent events as the truth by drawing on different dimensions of international law. The chapter explains how the book approaches the analysis of Truth Commissions through the study of their representations of truth and authority. This involves setting out the book’s theoretical orientation, which includes the jurisprudence of jurisdictional thought, law and humanities scholarship, and the theory and history of international law; and explaining the importance of the author’s in-country visits and archival research.

It is almost impossible today to imagine the study of written academic English without the contribution of corpus linguistics. Corpora provide textual information which represent a speaker’s experience of language in a particular domain and so offer evidence of typical patterning in academic texts. It is a method which focuses on community practices and the ways members of particular disciplines see and discuss the world. This chapter describes some key studies which contribute to a corpus-informed understanding of academic writing in English. These show that a range of features have been found to occur and behave in dissimilar ways in different disciplinary and genre environments, indicating that academic discourse is a myriad of texts differing across contexts than a single entity. This will cover a state-of-the-art overview and highlight four central papers in this area, identifying their research questions, describing their methods, summarizing the major findings, and discussing their importance. The chapter then describes a representative work in greater detail, focusing on one of the author’s own studies which explores whether the considerable pressures on academics to publish and gain visibility for their work has led authors to rhetorically ‘hype’ their studies.

Chapter 3 discusses the arrival of same-sex marriage in Cuba along with aspects of Cuban law and discourse that may have contributed to its arrival. It engages with the details of Cuban law, including the constitution, the Family Code, and economic law, including property, self-employment, and foreign capital investment.

This chapter uses a static (one-period) economy to illustrate how general equilibrium works in macroeconomic models; if it helps, it explains the “GE” part while later chapters take care of the “DS” components. This goal is attained by introducing the notion of a competitive equilibrium -- a description of the optimal choices of all agents in the economy that lays out a blueprint for characterizing and solving it. The emphasis is on pedagogy and not realism, but understanding the contents of this chapter is key for the material ahead.

How did Calvin’s contemporaries and earliest readers likely understand the relationships among the senses, the imagination, and conscious thought? This chapter constellates a sixteenth-century understanding of visual perception with developments in optics, art, popular magic, religion, witchcraft, and demonology to deliver a usable summary of the sensory and epistemological premises that animated European visual culture during the Renaissance. Ultimately, it concludes that “perception” is a more historically illuminating shorthand than “knowledge” for the Institutes’ central concern.