Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central puzzle: why some electoral management bodies earn public trust and develop real autonomy while others remain vulnerable to manipulation. It argues that formal institutional design alone cannot explain cross-national variation. Instead, de facto autonomy emerges through political negotiation, transparency, accountability practices, and structured partisan engagement. Drawing on fieldwork, elite interviews, and archival research across Latin America and Africa, the chapter outlines a new theoretical framework centered on partisan inclusion within administrative processes that can foster legitimacy, reduce uncertainty, and strengthen electoral integrity. The chapter also introduces the book’s cross-regional comparative strategy, explains case selection, and previews how the empirical chapters illustrate the mechanisms through which party consultation, institutional sequencing, and administrative practices jointly shape election quality. The chapter positions the book within broader debates on democratic resilience, institutional trust, and the conditions under which electoral authorities acquire real independence.

INTRODUCTION

This case arose in the parish of Bo’ness (Borrowstounness, formerly Kinneil). Much of it concerned healing rituals and prognosis. Janet Drysdale was a magical practitioner, described as a ‘wife’ who ‘could cure’ Janet Barclay's sick child. She used some conventional (if perhaps magical) rituals for this, notably involving south-running water, of which various details were given. She added a further dimension of magical beliefs with the ‘good nightbours’ – the fairies. These fairies were dangerous. Barclay's servant Katherine Currie ritually buried the sick child's shirt as Drysdale instructed, but heard ‘much speaking’ above her head, and afterwards became feverish with fear. Drysdale told another woman that Currie could have been ‘torn to pieces’, and added advice about the ‘blasting’ that had caused the child's illness. However, she said, the ‘speaking’ indicated that the child would recover – which he did.

But someone told the kirk session about the healing of Barclay's child with a ‘charme’ – a term that the church authorities often regarded as designating a superstitious practice or worse. The minister, John Brand, questioned Barclay, who in turn told him about Drysdale. This led to an elaborate enquiry. The minister and elders visited, summoned and questioned various servants and neighbours, and of course Drysdale herself, in order to piece together all the details of the story as thoroughly as they could. Then they referred the case up to the presbytery.

Neither the kirk session nor the presbytery used the word ‘witchcraft’. The one thing that makes Drysdale's case into a ‘witchcraft’ case is the presbytery’s reported recommendation at this point to ‘give her up to the magistrate’, evidently for criminal prosecution that must have been intended to be for witchcraft.

For Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the crises of post-independence Africa cannot be understood without an understanding of neo-colonialism as a political dynamic that sabotaged the freedom dreams of Africa and the Global South at large. This chapter reflects on neo-colonialism as a framework for understanding his insights on postcolonial African realities. I locate Ngugi’s views on neo-colonialism within the context of his dynamic intellectual biography, tracking the range of factors, agents, institutions and events that were instrumental in shaping his views of neo-colonialism and the postcolonial crises that haunt us – a core concern across his oeuvre. The first section of this chapter tracks the influences and trajectories of thought that shaped Ngugi’s views on the postcolonial context as a neo-colonial one. Section two turns to the imprint of postcolonial crises and neo-colonialism in Ngugi’s writing, noting the centrality of gender and the family in codifying his critique of postcolonial states as systems in the grip of neo-colonial control. The closing section underscores the continued relevance of Ngugi’s perspectives on neo-colonialism in making sense of contemporary postcolonial realities, through a brief exploration of the extractive impulse behind the romance of digital labour, as the latest iteration in neoliberal capital’s lengthy extractivist approach to African lifeworlds.

During this same half hour the countess was sitting at a desk at her balcony window, writing a letter to Fessler. She had taken her pen in hand a while ago, but the entrancing view before her caused her to set it back down again. High above the hillsides clad in vineyards and forests, silvery clouds were drifting, while in the valley below, the heat of the day had already settled in, growing more oppressive with every moment. A small pennant that marked the shooting range drooped from its flagpole and only stirred when there was a passing breeze. But suddenly came the sound of a single drum stroke, as if at random, and the countess, thus interrupted in her musings, took up her pen again and wrote:

Dear Friend,

There have been some changes to my existence here since last week, and since yesterday we have been living the high life. Egon Asperg arrived early in the morning and with him young Pejevics, who had been in England for several weeks for the racing, as you may know. I was heartily glad and resolved to spend a pleasant day with them, but would have failed in this, had I not been able to recruit as auxiliaries the two young ladies whom I mentioned to you recently. Two young actresses are naturally more interesting than an aunt of nearly seventy. And now more than ever. For those things which for us constitute life itself seem to have died out in the hearts of the current generation, more comprehensively than in the previous one. My brother treats them with mockery, at least; Count Egon, only with silence and indifference. But I am not accusing, only reporting.

In August 1914, when the First World War broke out in Europe, the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA) immediately started to organise relief provisions for the British Indian Army troops. With the sizable expansion of its pre-war ambulance and first aid agenda during the war, this non-state organisation ventured into various fields of humanitarian war work in the following four years; these fields were usually linked to, or seen as, ‘Red Cross work’. In colonial India, where until 1920 no ‘national’ Red Cross society formally existed, the ISJAA strikingly decided to fill the void. In 1914, it identified itself as the Red Cross representative in India.

This chapter shifts the focus to the humanitarian work undertaken by the ISJAA, calling for a more nuanced examination of the historical contexts surrounding the so-called Red Cross humanitarianism. Existing research has emphasised the global reach and significant impact of the Red Cross movement during the First World War, while often failing to acknowledge the contributions of other humanitarian actors who played a crucial role in providing relief.1 Historian Rebecca Gill has powerfully reminded us to ‘acknowledge the relevance of a multi-levelled history of the local, national, imperial, and international’ when it comes to understanding humanitarianism. However, she erroneously refers to the war participation of a Red Cross society in India when she actually means the ISJAA.2 By focusing on the latter's relief work, the chapter illustrates the existence of alternative humanitarian actors of significance in the provision of relief to soldiers during wartime in the British Empire.

The biblical encounter examined in this chapter takes place in littera, initiated by New Testament allusions, quotations, and exegesis, a rhetorical move that entails a certain conception of historical time unrolled through narrative. From Christian credos to anti-Jewish vitriol, that textual encounter resonates through characters, speech, and plot, and ultimately encompasses the unfinished work as a whole. By his unexpected insertion of religious matter into the territory occupied by the matter of Britain, Chrétien de Troyes effectively reimagines Arthurian romance as he invented it. I will argue that the particular character of Grail romances within the larger field of this most protean genre follows from that incongruous meeting of courtly and Christian discourses, combined for the first time in Le Conte du Graal (c. 1181–91), the last of Chrétien's five romances. The romancer's unsettling inclusion of religious issues within Arthurian narrative occurs during a period when biblical exegesis in both Christian and Jewish traditions takes a new turn, more focused on the Bible's literal and historical sense.

Chapter 7 investigates how mental models shape Americans’ attitudes toward globalization, focusing on trade and immigration against a backdrop of growing economic nationalism under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Using survey data and conjoint experiments, the chapter reveals that individuals who think like economists (i.e., high economic knowledge) view trade and immigration more favorably. To address the concentrated harms of globalization they prefer strategies such as unemployment benefits and retraining programs rather than protectionist measures. By contrast, those with Alternative Mental Models tend to support protectionist measures that promise immediate relief but undermine long-term welfare. Crucially, people aligned with the Economist Mental Model are more responsive to new economic information; when presented with evidence of net gains, they adjust their stance in favor of globalization, and vice versa. This responsiveness underscores that their support for free trade and immigration is not blind but rooted in systematic cost–benefit analysis.