This is the book’s ‘exit’ chapter. It examines how, following the success of the Truth Commissions in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador, Truth Commissions were given an ‘origins story’. The argument is that this occurred in the 1990s through the retrospective redescription of Uganda’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry as the ‘inaugural’ Truth Commission. The 1974 Commission of Inquiry was established as part of Idi Amin’s response to international pressure from human rights groups (particularly the International Commission of Jurists). The chapter discusses how the redescription of the Commission of Inquiry began at the end of the Cold War, with the publication of an article by Richard Carver in 1990, and in 1994 with an article by Priscilla Hayner. The redescription of the Commission of Inquiry as a ‘Truth Commission’ turns on the extent to which it is considered an institution that advanced human rights, which shows how the authority of Truth Commissions has depended on their connection to international law from the ‘beginning’.

War has a complex relationship to creativity and the arts. War is a mythic and hallowed subject of art, where it is often depicted in sacred terms as the testing ground of foundational leaders and the cauldron from which societies emerge. Yet based as it is in killing and destruction, war damages both society and creative faculties. War ends lives, destroys cultural treasures, disrupts artistic careers, and wreaks havoc on social networks through which artists develop and share work. War’s violence inflicts physical and psychological disabilities that limit creative expression. Those negative impacts can, paradoxically, spur creativity: war experience pushes artists to invent new forms of expression and has led to whole artistic movements (such as Surrealism). War also leads to creative interventions in fields like medicine, technology, and communication. War also changes how societies conceptualize creativity itself. “Creativity” emerged as a social scientific concept during World War II and became an important area of Cold War investigation, one cultivated to impart competitive edge. Creativity research will continue to deepen our understanding of how humans make and survive war.

In this introduction, I explore theories of injury and ethnographic methods for studying them. I treat injuries and their causes holistically, as reflecting the wounding and coactive effects of an array of harmful exposures, historical circumstances, technologies, environments, and political systems. In conceiving of injury across different scales of time, I offer insights into what health scholars term the ‘secondary’ impacts of injury on claimants and their families. Increasingly, scholars recognize that compensation systems, medico-legal assessments, and claim-making practices themselves contribute to or cause significant negative harm and secondary impacts to both the injured and their families. In contrast to the medical language of primary and secondary illness, I argue for a participant-centred and experience-near approach, one that can trace the connections test veterans themselves draw across time and within their personal and community illness narratives, as they built understandings of radiation injury and harm. Original injury or exposure ‘events’ were narratively enfolded within the cascade of transforming and accumulating harms that participants experienced.

This chapter looks on the evidence relating to fear as the basis of a motivational system, avoidance, and security motivation. The chapter describes the evolutionary significance of certain fears (e.g. of snakes), and the associated fast automatic processing of sensory information derived from them. The notion of a fear module is introduced. Neutral stimuli paired with a fear-evoking stimulus acquire a conditional capacity to trigger fear, as revealed in such phenomena as the conditioned emotional response. The neural model of LeDoux is described. Fear and anxiety are distinguished. A central motivational state of fear is proposed. The chapter discusses the logic behind Bolles’ suggestion of ‘species-specific defence reactions’ and the defence motivation system of Masterson and Crawford. Someone ironically, the notion of a security motivation system has been only recently developed. However, such a need was placed at the base level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The chapter discusses the idea of a security motivation system as proposed by Szechtman and Woody. The chapter concludes with a discussion of when fear and security systems fail, such as in pathological anxiety.

In this path-breaking history, Tobias Rupprecht offers a revisionist account of Russia’s post-Soviet marketisation from the perspective of the advisors and ministers who oversaw this transformation. Based on extensive interviews with economists and research in state and private archives, he uncovers a significant minority of economic liberals from late Soviet academic and dissident circles who sought to chart a new path, believing free prices and private property were the foundations of a ‘civilised country’. This provides a vital challenge to the dominant narrative that neoliberal advisors and organisations imposed harmful reforms on Russia after the collapse of Communism. Liberal reformers faced a profound dilemma – one for which Western advisors had no solution either: should they commit to democratic political activism and risk irrelevance, or align themselves with those in power and be co-opted by an authoritarian state determined to reassert its imperial strength?

In this chapter, we examine how to quantify uncertainty about model parameters, highlighting two main approaches: frequentist and Bayesian. We start by modelling a data-generating mechanism with a parametric family, where different parameter values correspond to different models. Assuming our model family can describe the mechanism, we use data to infer plausible parameters and quantify uncertainty. In frequentist inference, we build parameter estimators and study their sampling distributions across repeated data collection. Here, parameters are fixed unknown constants, and only estimators are treated probabilistically. In Bayesian inference, parameters are latent random variables. We express uncertainty through probability, combining prior beliefs about parameter values with observed data using Bayes’ rule to obtain a posterior distribution. The posterior and the frequentist sampling distribution often play similar roles and can resemble each other in practice. Computational tools like bootstrapping and Markov chain Monte Carlo help estimate sampling and posterior distributions, respectively.

This chapter examines applications of corpus linguistics in language teaching and learning. It opens with the main stakeholders – for developers upstream and for teachers in and out of class. The main focus is on learners who can interact more or less directly with corpus tools and techniques in what has come to be known as data-driven learning (DDL). Following a chronology of DDL research, it then discusses various syntheses to see what they can tell us about the approach, and meta-analyses for a quantitative understanding of what it can bring. Though the overall picture is generally positive, the overview allows a critical step back on a number of issues to date concerning both primary and secondary research. It suggests leads for future studies, in terms of under-researched areas as well as improvements needed in methodologies. It concludes with a word on generative AI and its possible impact as a disruptive technology in this area.

This chapter explores the invention of coinage and asks what this can tell us about the world before coinage. Money has various functions and can be documented before the invention of coinage. For example, from Sumerian times metals, especially silver, became the dominant form of money, replacing grain, and measured by weighing. Standard weights were used in Egypt, and are mentioned in the Bible. Monetary transactions can also be observed in Homer’s poems and some rare early inscriptions from Greece. Spits (obeloi) were used, sometimes in a handful (drachm), and these words were used later to denote coins. By the early sixth century, silver had become a standard form of money also in Greece. The first coins in the Mediterranean world derived from such practices and were struck in the kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor around the middle of the seventh century and were made of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver. Several Greek cities established on the Aegean coast, and controlled by the Lydians, shared in this development, as they did also in a distinct second stage, when in the majority of cities coinage in electrum gradually gave way to coinages of silver and (rarely) gold.

In this chapter, Davis Schneiderman revisits William Burroughs’ “Playback Trilogy” – The Job, The Electronic Revolution, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual – as a critical lens for understanding the contemporary challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence, misinformation, and deepfake media. Arguing that Burroughs’ theories of language, media manipulation, and technological control anticipate core dynamics of AI’s influence on culture and perception, Schneiderman explores how Burroughs’ experiments with tape recorders and playback foreshadow algorithmic systems that operate with unintended, emergent consequences. Situating Burroughs’ techniques alongside cybernetic theory and the escalating crisis of automated media, the chapter assesses Burroughs not only as a prophetic figure but also as a practical theorist of language systems gone rogue. From deepfakes to AI chatbots inciting violence, Schneiderman demonstrates that Burroughs’ methods – cut-up, disruption, playback – remain urgently instructive for resisting the logic of control in the digital age.

Burroughs and the monstrous have always gone together, and this chapter examines how not only his work but Burroughs himself was from the start defined in terms of monstrosity. It traces the origins of the association back to his early critical reception and even earlier fictionalization as a profoundly sinister persona in the novels of Jack Kerouac. The specific grounds for identifying Burroughs or his work as monstrous have changed over time, often focusing on ambiguously misogynistic, racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic content, and on his identity as a homosexual and drug addict. His accidental shooting of his second wife, Joan Volmer, has cast the darkest shadow, but, this chapter argues, it has obscured the actual significance of monstrosity in Burroughs’ work. This, as critics such as Wermer-Colan and Stevenson have argued, lies in how he embraced complicity rather than hypocritically denied it, resulting in strategies that weaponize monstrosity as a mirror for the dark forces at work in the world.