Chapter 5 explores how migration management aid impacts a democratic state like Kenya, in the context of its colonial legacy and contentious regional politics. While there have been two significant revisions of the Refugee Act (2006/2021), Kenyan refugee policy relies on a compromise: the government agreed to host thousands of refugees in camps in exchange for billions in aid and a shirking of responsibility for managing the camps. Within this context, the EUTF is the latest package of funding in which Europeans condition aid on reforms by the Kenyan government. The chapter traces the long history of migration and international meddling in Kenya from formal colonialism to independence, examining the role of migration aid in the de facto encampment policy and in the 2006 and 2021 reforms. Through various interventions supported by the EUTF, Kenyan elites gained important political and financial capital, while pushing unpopular migration policies. Despite some democratic progress, we document specific projects related to counterterrorism and peacebuilding that securitized migration in Kenya, justifying more repression and restrictive policies (pathways I, II, III).

This chapter examines Sunday’s meditation, which encompasses fourteen scenes depicting encounters between the resurrected Christ and his followers, including episodes not recorded in the Gospels. The unmediated encounter with the risen Christ can be understood, following Bernard of Clairvaux, as the reward granted to the fervent soul who has diligently engaged the Meditations on the Life of Christ throughout the week. The images of Christ’s Ascension guide the reader-viewer in her transition from earthly to spiritual vision.

This chapter discusses the development of technologies that made possible the detection and imaging of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), relic radiation from the aftermath of the big bang. It analyzes how these technologies originated in military-funded projects, from radar research during World War II to Cold War-era US Air Force funding of experiments with satellites, radio telescopes, and U2-planes. In some instances, the instruments were originally designed for defense use and were subsequently adapted and applied to astronomical and cosmological observation, while in other instances the Air Force directly funded the basic science experiments themselves. In addition to analyzing the practices surrounding the production of CMB images, the chapter dialogues with recent work on scientific realism and how military funding of science reveals important insights into teleological truth-seeking and pragmatic aspects of scientific inquiry.

Chapter 1 revives the traditional view that Sir William Temple had a profound influence on Swift against the recent tendency to underrate Temple. It does so by providing long overdue attention to the most neglected yet most substantial dimension of Temple’s career, literary work, and bequest to Swift: the international dimension. Temple’s teachings as diplomat and foreign policy essayist are primarily responsible for Swift’s heightened awareness of the intersection of domestic and international politics throughout his career. Hence also Swift’s recognition of the interdependence of domestic liberty and international security – the need to preserve liberty through not only constitutional balance but also international balance. This inextricable relationship is often overlooked by scholars focused on the domestic ideological binary of liberty versus authority. It reveals Temple’s and Swift’s shared opposition to domestic political polarization, even at the risk of being falsely accused of favoring absolutist, paternalistic, or arbitrary government.

Chapter 6 shifts the scene to Ireland, where Swift returned after his four years writing propaganda for the Tory government in London. It reasserts the allegorical reading of Part I of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a defense of the Peace of Utrecht, and more importantly the underlying principles. In light of Swift’s international politics and thought, the war between the fictional lands of Lilliput and Blefuscu can be seen as a tripolar model of international relations – not bipolar, as widely believed, since Gulliver acts as arbiter. This model centers on Swift’s neoclassical balance-of-power theory, which also underscores a defensive blue-water foreign policy that contrasts starkly with offensive policy, “reason of state,” imperialism, and colonialism.

In this chapter, I examine attempts to respond to the scenario of unmitigated capitalism, where the rich continue to get richer. This second possibility focuses on how greater economic equality might be created. I discuss four approaches. First, I explore how taxation can be used to redistribute wealth. Next, I introduce the emerging idea of “degrowth” – the purposeful shrinking of some parts of the economy to protect the environment. Third, I examine communism as a means of pursuing economic equality. Finally, I outline socialism as a fourth path toward building more equal societies. I identify and articulate the strengths and limitations of each approach. These reflections lay the foundation for the third and final possibility.

This chapter describes the external environment of a financial institution.

This chapter makes the case for a robust conception of agency within emotional experience, challenging the traditional view of emotions as passive. Emotions are not simply endured but enacted; they are best understood as forms of spontaneous, reason-responsive engagement that express an agent’s evaluative stance towards their situation. Drawing on Jean Moritz Müller’s account of emotional spontaneity and expanding it through Richard Moran’s concept of the practical stance, the chapter develops a view of emotions as modes of situated responsiveness that manifest a person’s commitments and concerns. It is argued that the emotion-constitutive agency involves capacities to construe and formulate an evolving response to the agent’s existential situation. Moreover, emotions are shown to be not just reflective of the agent’s vulnerabilities but also mediums through which vulnerability is inhabited, negotiated, and at times resisted.

This chapter offers a novel account of trust as a form of opening one’s mind to the autonomy of other persons. Despite a long tradition of philosophical thinking about trust, it remains unclear how (non-instrumental) trust works in close human relationships. While important strands of theorising in sociology and moral psychology recognise that trust involves accepted vulnerability, the autonomy of the trusted person is typically viewed as something to be coped with rather than embraced. By drawing on a central distinction in Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter proposes shifting the perspective and placing the other’s autonomy at the centre of the trusting attitude in close relationships. A personalistic perspective on trust emphasises shared goals and values with the trusted individual, shaping the affective attitude towards them. To understand the affective dynamics involved in sharing and adjusting one’s goals or values in interpersonal trust, the authors suggest conceptualising attitudinal aspects of trust as a metacognitive feeling that entails a self-explorative dimension. The chapter demonstrates how this self-explorative dimension helps explain the dynamics of disclosing intimate details and adopting another’s perspective in psychotherapeutic relationships, or what is referred to as transformative trust.

Historically, democratic progress has been widely understood as correlated to the representative quality of institutions. Representativeness has been seen as essential for the social appropriation of institutions in societies analyzed as having a class structure. In the national political order, parties were intended to represent the different social interests, and in the particular context of labour, the recognition of trade unions played this role. It is in this spirit that the International Labour Organization (ILO) included trade unions in its various bodies when it was created a century ago, and, since then, the ILO has served as a reference point for representation at the international level.While this conception of representativeness remains relevant, the scope of its application has become more limited. A growing number of essential issues, such as the conservation of the environment or the protection of privacy, are, in fact, directly political: they structure our common world. In this context, authority and legitimacy carry weight in the public debate. Representativeness, by which we can ‘measure’ the social weight of a speaker, is only secondary. ‘Public voices’ have come to have greater relevance, due to their ability to resonate with, and thereby focus and shape, public opinion. These ‘public voices’ are expressed by expert groups with specific subject-area knowledge, or by individuals who have benefited from the haphazard nature of media coverage. As a result, their integration into international life can no longer be institutionalized in the ‘old fashioned’ way.

Before the development of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, astronomers and cosmologists thought of space and time as Euclidean. As described in Chapter 1, space and time were taken to be separable and fundamentally different aspects of the universe’s structure. In addition, the distances in space and the passage of time were believed to be the same for everyone. And while there was intense, and sometimes acrimonious, debate between the substantivalists, who believed space to be a background substance within which events unfold, and relationists, who took space to be nothing more than the relations between events, for all their disagreement, both the substantivalist and relationist believed that there could be no scientific disagreement about distances or durations between events. While the Euclidean framework provided an intuitively plausible picture of the universe – after all, it does quite well as an approximate model of our immediate environment – it fails spectacularly when used to model the universe at larger scales.

One example of this is the geocentric universe, posited by Aristotle in ancient Greece, that was part and parcel of the predominant philosophy in Europe during the centuries that preceded the Scientific Revolution. The fundamental problem that Aristotle wanted to solve for good (like his teacher, Plato, but in a markedly different manner) was that of change. He distinguished between four major categories of change – change of being, or generation and decay; change in properties, or qualitative change; change in degree, or quantitative change; and change of place, or motion.

‘Democratic representation’ seems to have no explanatory power for the current structure and operation of universal IOs and a weak justificatory value for upcoming political reforms of these IOs. However, under the benefit of a renewed approach to universal IOs functions and deliberation, which is one of their meta-functions, the creation of new subsidiary bodies designed to accommodate delegates from Non-State Actors (NSAs) and enable, or even compel, intergovernmental bodies to take into account other interests and perspectives appears to be both necessary and feasible, without any reference to contentious criteria of representativeness based on a fragile principle of democratic legitimacy in IL. The alternative to ‘democratic representation’ consists in amplifying diffuse attempts to redesign the institutional architecture of universal IOs and harnessing the potential of international institutional law, implied powers and privileges and immunities regimes for the sake of a genuinely international, transnational and transgenerational deliberation. Concretely, people speaking for sub-state communities (e.g. from the Global South), future generations or natural entities for instance should be given an institutional role within consultative subsidiary bodies, in combination with state representatives or scientific experts, or not – depending on what is necessary for the fulfilment of the IOs functions. The current context of exacerbated competition between more democratic and less democratic states, some of them obviously being authoritarian, also pleads for a modest approach to IOs political reform leaving the concept of democracy unaltered.

Chapter 3 deals with what we could name as the politics of not-knowing in academia and in relation to the arts of the African diaspora. Here, we move the discussion from the conceptual implications of not-knowing to the expressive narratives of the historically silenced voices coming from the Black Atlantic and their negated spaces. Our focus is on the artistic development of Afrofuturism as a creative process to think about the impossible in fiction and the projection of an alternative future for humanity. The discussion centers on the utopia developed in Afrofuturism in the United States and its genre derivations within the African diaspora. Here, not-knowing has to do with an engagement with alternative futures coming from the Black Atlantic in a way that challenges colonialism and hegemonic academic and artistic discourses, creatively reconfiguring the shared trauma of slavery, discrimination, and racism.

Camille Flammarion (Figure 5.1) is an important if enigmatic figure in the history of modern astronomy. He was undoubtedly one of the most influential popularizers of astronomy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a key voice in the plurality-of-worlds debates of that period (Crowe, 1999; Dick, 1996). His example paved the way for the scientist popularizers who followed, such as Carl Sagan. However, his philosophical approach and involvement in the spiritist movement make him appear to be a figure from an earlier century. Indeed, Flammarion’s populist and philosophical approach to astronomy ultimately fell outside of the boundaries of the new astronomy constructed in the late nineteenth century as its centers of authority moved to mountain tops, its methods became increasingly instrumental, and its ethos became defined by “professionalism, expertise, and scientific method” (Nall, 2019, p. 75).