Chapter 1 explores young women’s experiences growing up in their fathers’ households to situate this group in a broader understanding of social reproduction in urban Nigeria. At the heart of the chapter lies young women’s recognition that they must live up to their parents’ expectations of becoming eligible ‘wife material’ but that this process is complicated by their desires to conform to particular cosmopolitan identities as well as by interferences coming from ‘the village’. The chapter details young women’s childhood memories and the domestic challenges faced by the ‘girl child’ in urban Nigeria, before moving on to describe the various strategies young women have for managing their reputations as they seek to have fun in the city and look towards a future shaped by marital responsibility. Illuminating how social reproduction in Calabar is governed by the tensions of visibility and invisibility, the chapter highlights how it is not only the boundaries of feminine respectability that start at home but also the ways in which feminine identities can be shaped by uncertainty.

This excerpt is from a testimony recalled by an eyewitness, who claimed to have seen four Naxalites being killed in an ‘encounter’ by the police in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It appears in the interim report of the Civil Rights Committee (an unofficial, voluntary committee set up to investigate several ‘encounter’ killings of Naxalite prisoners) released in 1977. The committee was comprised of prominent civil society figures, lawyers, activists and journalists. The report claimed that the police ‘encounters’ they investigated were, in fact, extra-judicial killings. This claim anticipated what is today widely recognised in the public sphere, namely, that ‘encounters’ by the police or armed forces are often staged. The report was submitted to the prime minister of India and released to the press. The opposition raised questions in parliament regarding the claims of the report and a judicial commission of inquiry under Justice V. Bhargava was set up by the Andhra Pradesh government to conduct public hearings on the alleged encounters of Naxalites during and after the Emergency.

The report was a result of a fact-finding investigation. Fact-finding investigations are the predominant mode of activism for civil liberties groups in India. In a typical fact-finding investigation, an inquiry team is established on a one-off basis. The team visits the scene or site of the case, ascertains facts, identifies those who are culpable and makes demands or recommendations.

Describes the principles and application of a wide range of soft-ionization techniques which can be used to characterize larger molecular species, up to proteins and metabolites. This is the area which has grown most rapidly since the publication of the first edition.

The pervasive computer metaphor of mind and brain shapes our understanding of key cognitive concepts. These include the concept of “metaphor,” usually treated as a mapping between structures within knowledge representations. But metaphors understood performatively directly guide our embodied practice. This essay analyzes how the computer the metaphor of mind and brain shaped our activities as researchers in the cognitive sciences. I highlight the positive contributions of the metaphor and its detrimental effect of disengaging us as scientists from research on the most vital aspects of cognition: behavior, experience, and the ability to create and use symbolic forms. I will then explore whether a pragmatic understanding of metaphors could help identify an alternative – a metaphor that establishes practices in the sciences of mind and brain, which can address the fundamental contemporary challenges.

We aim to move beyond or at least to the side of the computer metaphor for mind and brain. We are not looking to demolish or banish it for those who find it useful, but instead, we want to articulate alternative metaphorical paths for advancing cognitive science. Despite decades of critique, it is striking how entrenched this metaphor remains (Newman, 2024). Does it continue like a Superman, impervious to critique, or does it stagger forward like a ragged puppet controlled by insistent operators? Given its survival in the face of much criticism, perhaps we are foolish to seek alternatives. Yet, we were born into a wealth of evidence and argument pointing to the computer metaphor’s deep inadequacy in explaining the complexities of mind and brain. Earlier generations may have seen the computer metaphor as the only path forward in cognitive science. But many of our mentors, having been trained in computational psychology, later turned against it. We suspect its persistence in some corners is less about its merits and more about the lack of widely known alternatives.

This chapter explores the ‘forgetting’ of the region as a unique form of public amnesia and the implications of this for conflict transformation. While conflict is often understood on multiple levels, including its regional dimension, peacebuilding and memory work are rarely put in conversation at this level. The chapter explores regional dimensions of memory and argues that these open up a novel and analytically productive lens on the nature and legacy of cross-border conflict and can bolster peacebuilding approaches. Taking the key case study of the Great Lakes Region of Africa, and specifically the regionalising dimensions of the Rwandan genocide, the chapter investigates the impact of two very different regional dimensions of memory on social cohesion. First, it considers the more intuitive ways in which grievances that extend across borders and fractured regional memories continue to fuel conflict. Second, and pushing beyond this, it considers the ways in which the returning diaspora deploys memory born in the wider region in attempts at nation-building. The chapter thus deploys a dynamic approach to memory, exploring mobile memories and the ways in which regional experiences are carried and deployed back in a national context. Overall, it urges us to extend the regional lens beyond the study of the roots of conflict and operational action to the study of post-conflict peacebuilding and commemoration.

This chapter considers the circumstances in which a person will be liable for the torts of another person. It primarily looks at the doctrines of vicarious liability (the liability of am employer for the tortious actions of an employee or a principal for the tortious actions of their agent) and non-delegable duties (the circumstances in which a duty arises which cannot be delegated to another person, such as a contractor). Note that there is often advocacy to change the legal position – to extend the legal circumstances in which liability can be extended to a third party – but also note that redefinition of relationships (such as the employment relationship) often requires adjustments in the law.

Chapter 1 SKILLS proposes a regimentation of skill. It differentiates skills from habits, instincts, talents, virtues, and other sorts of capacities; it argues for the legitimacy of this regimentation by locating skills in the broader explanatory contexts, from action theory and history of philosophy, to biology, evolutionary psychology, as well as anthropology; and it argues that this way of demarcating skills captures the core subject of Ryle’s Chapter 2 “Knowing How and Knowing That” of The Concept of Mind. That of skills, it is suggested, is a natural kind of interest for the study of intelligence and action, and with a long pedigree, starting from Aristotle’s conception of technē.

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, Resilient Humanitarianism, and important contextual information for readers about the history of the League of Red Cross Societies, now the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the world’s largest humanitarian and volunteer network made up of Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies from around the world. The League was established in 1919 to complement the work of the ICRC during peacetime. The League’s focus was on the improvement of public health, the prevention of disease and the mitigation of suffering. The chapter includes a discussion of characteristics of the League that helps to explain its longevity and its resilient humanitarianism. These include governance structures, how networks were assembled, ruptures and crises, innovation, capacity for development, and principles and values.

Background

The first legal code of modern Nepal, the Muluki Ain, promulgated in 1854 by Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana, systematized every aspect of Nepalese society, from criminal and religious law to the caste system and property rights, reinforcing existing social structures that benefitted the dominant caste-Hindu elites. Largely influenced by ancient Sanskrit treatises and Brahminical social ideas and practices, the Muluki Ain labeled Nepal's Tamang community, along with several other lower-caste and Indigenous groups, as masinya matwali (enslavable alcohol-drinker) and murmi-bhotiya (people from the border [P. Tamang 2018: 45–46]). This categorization further deteriorated their social status, legally sanctioning their oppression, domination, and strategic exclusion in Nepal. They were converted into mere slaves or bonded laborers and subjected to compulsory labor (rakam) and porterage (Holmberg and March 1999: 6). The Tamang community had to bear the terrible sense of loss of their caste status and remained identity-less almost a century because of the exploitative and exclusionary attitude of the Nepali state toward them. The Tamangs had to wait till 1932, nearly 80 years after the promulgation of the Muluki Ain, to get back their caste status and ethnic recognition. In this regard, A. Hofer (2004) reminds us, “A decree signed by King Tribhuvan and the then Rana Prime Minister Bhim Samser lays down that, instead of the hitherto employed designations Lama and Bhote, henceforth the designation Tamang may be used officially” (Hofer 2004: 125). Although this allowed the Tamangs the permission to write their surname – “Tamang” – and be recognized as an ethnic group with their distinct culture and history, it was only the beginning of a long struggle for equal rights (P. Tamang 2018: 55).

This paper shows that Elizabeth Anderson’s account of relational egalitarianism offers inadequate resources to combat interactional injustice, that is, the injustices in modes of social interaction that reinforce positions of unequal status and social vulnerability. The paper reviews Anderson’s argument that social integration is key to remedying specific kinds of unjust inequalities before exploring examples of interactional injustice for which integration – as Anderson specifies it – is an inadequate solution because the victims are already highly integrated, such as fat people. The paper argues that a policy-focused account such as Anderson’s misses the fact that interactional injustices are often the cumulative result of many individual people making individually legitimate choices to control their own interactional lives, choices which collectively subordinate, marginalise, or ostracise other people. In order to remedy interactional injustices, we must attend not only to government policies as Anderson does, but also to our personal responsibility for our choices and their collective impact.

This chapter articulates two new forms of vulnerability – distributive and relational – which occur respectively in situations of distributive and relational inequality. It argues that a dispositional analysis of the concept of vulnerability is needed to explain these forms of vulnerability. Vulnerability is not harm that is actualised but rather the susceptibility, risk, or potential to suffer harm under certain conditions. Distributive vulnerabilities are ‘intrinsic’ dispositions grounded in bodily properties that manifest under social conditions, whereas relational vulnerabilities are ‘extrinsic’ dispositions that obtain only because people occupy subordinated positions in unjust social hierarchies. The chapter then argues that vulnerability is a thick ethical concept that has both descriptive and evaluative elements. The descriptive elements of distributive and relational vulnerability are that people have the respective dispositions. Distributive and relational vulnerability both entail moral obligations due to their connection to inequality. However, in general, vulnerability does not entail moral obligations but weaker normative inferences.