Chapter 2 lays the foundation for the book’s theoretical framework by introducing the collective action problem and examining how protest mobilization unfolds in practice. Drawing on global literature and empirical examples, it demonstrates that elite-driven protest is a widespread and influential form of collective action. It shows, however, that successful elite mobilization requires deep local knowledge, strong community networks, and trust – resources that many elites lack. To overcome this gap, the chapter introduces the concept of the protest broker: an intermediary who facilitates connections between elites and potential protesters. It explores who protest brokers are, what they do, and why their role is central to protest mobilization. It argues further, that existing theories of elite mobilization implicitly assume the presence of such intermediaries, yet rarely acknowledge them explicitly. By making protest brokers visible, this chapter reframes key assumptions in the protest literature and connects them to broader research on political and vote brokers. It also situates protest brokers among other grassroots actors – such as shop floor stewards and activists – clarifying their unique but overlapping functions in enabling protest and shaping its location and form.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of modern methodological approaches to relationship science that is both practical and accessible. We start with a “status report” on the field, outlining three popular methodological trends. First, we discuss the application of machine learning techniques, specifically random forests, to the field of relationships science. Second, we elaborate on the importance of multimodal data, describing studies incorporating physiological, neurological, and linguistic measures. Third, we briefly discuss nonstandard dyadic designs, such as the round-robin design and network analysis, which enable the examination of multiple dyads within larger groups. Throughout these sections, we provide recommendations for scholars who wish to implement these methods in future work. Next, we provide a description of two analytical approaches used frequently in dyadic data analysis – structural equation modeling (SEM) and multilevel modeling (MLM) – and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. We also present a brief discussion of differences between statistical software programs and suggestions for when to use each.

The Introduction surveys the existing literature on musical salons and related institutions from cross-cultural perspectives, laying out the need for the present volume and placing it within the landscape of existing scholarship in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, women’s and gender studies, cultural studies, and other disciplines. It also provides a flexible, working definition of musical salons and related practices from c. 1600 to the present day. It provides a summary of each chapter in the volume.

This case study presents a scenario where a small community hospital faces a surge of patients during the early stages of the SARS-COVID pandemic. The hospital, located near a cruise ship port, has limited resources, including a 10-bed emergency department (ED) and a two-bed ICU. Several patients from a cruise ship, who are all part of the same family, present with worsening respiratory symptoms, including cough, fever, and shortness of breath. As more patients arrive, the ED staff must manage the influx while facing limited ventilators and critical care equipment. The scenario challenges participants to perform emergency triage, prioritize treatment for respiratory distress, manage limited resources, and follow pandemic protocols to prevent the spread of infection. Through these events, healthcare providers must transition from conventional operations to crisis standards of care while managing an overwhelmed system, making difficult decisions regarding resource allocation and patient survival.

Chapter 1 examines connections between abolition debates and legislation in Britain and the decisions of colonial administrations to amend, retain or abolish the death penalty in the 1950s and 1960s. The British government made only limited efforts to promote abolition across the Empire and readily accepted arguments made by governors, political and judicial appointees and elected lawmakers for retaining executions. The course of imperial abolition was consequently uneven in ways that reflected the diversity of colonial legal and penal cultures, crime control concerns, constitutional arrangements and political dynamics, and which saw racialized systems of colonial penal violence persist into the abolition era. Yet even in colonies where the death penalty was retained into the 1970s and beyond, death sentences were upheld in an increasingly narrow range of murder cases. In some jurisdictions, this shift predated British abolition and indicates a more pervasive and dispersed turn against capital punishment across the Empire than is captured in statute laws alone.

In the current chapter, we review the research on close relationships done via the methodologies of neuroscience – in short relationship neuroscience (RN). Much of the research we review focuses on attachment (child–parent or romantic) and sexuality. Nevertheless, we aim to cover RN broadly defined. We start by framing our topic and providing a few working definitions. We then cover the various relational (attachment, interdependence) and neuroscience (social baseline theory, and the Functional Neuroanatomical Model of Human Attachment) theories, methodologies (MRI, ERPs, and genetics), and types of relationships (familial relations, romantic, friendships, sexual relations, etc.) used or covered in this subfield. We explore both positive and negative aspects of close relationships. Finally, we reflect on the bidirectional link and contributions between relationship science and neuroscience and suggest potential implications for mental and physical health and policymaking. We also outline some remaining issues and future directions for RN.

Chapter 5 covers research on visual perception and related psychological theories needed to fully understand the visualisation process. Cues and heuristics are discussed since they are effortless and quick ways for the brain to support human decision-making. Cues are stimuli in the environment triggering a habitual thought, i.e., a heuristic. On average, cues and heuristics will help shoppers come to sufficiently good decisions, but it is highly possible that in most situations a bit of more effortful reflection would lead to even better solutions. The chapter also goes through how heuristics can be misleading. For instance, if retailers reduce the number of stock-keeping units (SKUs), the ones remaining will more easily enter the awareness of the shoppers since there is less clutter. The fact that more products enter the shoppers' awareness will be misinterpreted by the shoppers who think that the number of SKUs has increased. Furthermore, research shows that colour is the visual quality that the brain accesses most easily and that brightness contrast is the dimension of colour that the brain uses most effortlessly. Finally, eye-tracking and the physics of the eye are discussed.

The Hungarian political system after the regime change has become extremely polarised and deep political fault lines have developed between the domestic political communities. It has been investigated in this chapter how hatred and the resulting violence (verbal and non-verbal) and its post-2010 constitutional representation have become one of the main structuring factors of the domestic political and social space in such a way that asymmetric counter concepts have become dominant in the identification war between opposing political sides: this means that almost all possibilities for dialogue between opposing positions have been lost, because the definition and domination of the identity of the other has become the main aspect. This paper argues that similar processes of attribution and identification have been taking place in the refugee crisis since 2015, and this time the hatred has been directed towards the ‘political other’, only to return to the domestic political scene and further deepen the dichotomies that have become familiar since the regime change. The post-2010 constitution-making process elevated this hostility to the level of the Fundamental Law and created a system of Constitutionalised Image of Enemy (CIE), the analysis of CIE is the main undertaking of this chapter.

It is a rare thing for an historian to have access to sources which chart the entire history of a state, from planned creation to pre-meditated extinction. Nor is every state’s constitutional and political history as varied as that of Czechoslovakia, which was founded on 28 October 1918 and ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1992. Czechoslovakia’s experience can be seen as a compressed history of twentieth-century Europe and the many ways the modern state has been imagined. During its relatively brief existence, Czechoslovakia was federalized, centralized, dissolved, reconstituted, re-centralized and re-federalized; it also went from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy; from authoritarian democracy to Nazi colony; from people’s democracy to Soviet satellite; and from Communist dictatorship and command economy to democracy and the free market. In 2009, Yale University Press brought out a comprehensively revisionist history, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, the first full account of the state to be written by an outsider. This chapter tells the story of how the book first came to be researched and written by the present author, why its publication in 2009 caused such a furore and why former dissidents insisted, ten years later, in bringing out a Czech-language edition.

Several authors have connected Hegel’s view on action with Elizabeth’s Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge. This chapter first develops the notion of practical knowledge in Kant and Fichte, noting their similarity to Anscombe’s view. Practical knowledge is a knowing of what one is doing in acting. Yet Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit goes beyond this. Practical knowledge yields products or “works” (Werke), which are also products of concepts. Conceptual knowledge of such works, which often stem from institutional histories, is what Hegel calls “absolute knowledge.” It is argued that Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge is qualitative rather than quantitative: it concerns a transparent form of knowing rather than a certain massive extent or even finality of knowing. The constellation between the topics of concepts, artifacts, and social-historical realities present in the Phenomenology becomes a precedent for the more abstract argument for concrete conceptual truth in the Logic.

This chapter begins in medias res; it traces and exemplifies Romantic historicism and its enduring potency in the political imagination of the two World Wars. Two specific legacies of Romanticism are identified: the idea that the nation is a transcendent principle deserving our devotion and loyalty; and the paradox that the nation, while inspiring our fervent political allegiance, it is itself not political or contentious but, rather, ‘unpolitical’. This twofold legacy explains the title of this book, Charismatic Nations. That concept is also discussed with reference to the emergence, in the century between Edmund Burke and Max Weber, of the notion of ‘charismatic leadership’; it is suggested that such leaders, as typified by Weber, often derive their charisma from the fact that they are seen to intuit and address the historical needs of the nation as a unified whole.