Since 1931, the two powers China and Japan had fought intermittently in localised engagements. In 1937, however, these conflicts turned into a full-scale war between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China governed by Chiang Kai-shek's (1887–1975) Guomindang, which entered into an alliance with the Chinese communists. The Second Sino-Japanese War which had begun with a local conflict near Beijing (the Marco Polo Bridge incident) ushered in four years of Chinese resistance against an expanding enemy before it became part of the global Second World War, following Japan's simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and European colonies in Southeast Asia in 1941. The conflict in East Asia evoked various responses from humanitarian organisations and actors abroad. However, some relief initiatives decided not to take up this new cause and to continue to concentrate on the ongoing Spanish Civil War. In other cases, offers to help were declined by Japan. The international humanitarian system that emerged during the first four years of the war in support of China was majorly sustained by non-state initiatives, both established and newly founded ones. The latter especially were hardly impartial in their aid giving and often also had political motives in addition to altruistic ones. They came from strong left-leaning backgrounds and/or were rooted in diasporic Chinese, missionary or philanthropic communities.

In India, political and social actors and organisations and the press had, for a long time, followed the developments in East Asia. The outbreak of the war brought forward the question of humanitarian relief for the belligerent parties.

As reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 went out for government consultation, the interaction between trans rights and women’s rights became a topic of considerible contention. Many women who voiced concern about gender recognition reform suffered discriminaiton and harassment in the workplace. This chapter traces the development of the law on philosophical belief discriminaiton to protect gender critical belief focused on the reality, immutability and importance of biological sex. It argues that the belief in the importance of biolopgical sex is core to the protection and necessary to distinguish gender critical belief from mere opinions based on science or accepted evidence. The chapter concludes by examiing the limits of protection, including where a belief is unworthy of respect in a democratic society because it includes within it group-based intolerance of prejudice.

The Sanskrit-derived word dalit, meaning “broken,” or “ground down,” is the term most commonly used in contemporary South Asian scholarly, political, and literary discourse to denote people belonging to castes that have been discriminated against, oppressed, and exploited by those who rank higher than them in the Hindu caste system. “Dalit” is often referred to as a Marathi word, because it was in that language that it first achieved its political currency, but it is now current in every major South Asian language, including Nepali, and is used to mark the Dalits’ unashamed assertion of their identity and their claims to active political agency.

In Nepal, where they are defined by caste, Dalits number approximately 3.8 million, constituting just over 13 percent of the total population, according to the government's 2021 census. Huge social, political, and legislative changes over the past 60 years have led to improvements in the Dalit life experience.

However, while many individual Dalits have managed to acquire an education and prosper, Dalits overall remain at the very bottom of Nepali society in terms of all key development indicators. They continue to face discrimination, exclusion, and violence, both direct and structural, and efforts to improve their condition are routinely compromised by pervasive social stigma.

The High Commissioner for India, Sir S. E. Runganadhan (1877–1966), extolled the work of the Indian Comforts Fund (ICF) in the foreword to the fund's War Record as ‘a remarkable piece of humanitarian work carried out during the war largely by British women for the benefit of India's fighting men and merchant seamen’. After providing a short overview of the fund's work between 1939 and 1945, the High Commissioner expressed his and his country's gratitude by writing, ‘India will ever remain deeply indebted to them [the members of the fund's executive committee and the host of unseen helpers throughout Great Britain] for this practical expression of their sympathy and goodwill towards her.’ Although the imperial tone of this message, coming from the High Commissioner appointed by the colonial government in Delhi, might not come as a surprise, the used framing of India's indebtedness for British humanitarian assistance to Indian soldiers and merchant seamen (lascars) who had done their share to contribute to Britain's and the empire's war effort must have been puzzling for many contemporaries on the subcontinent. Next to doubting the underlying idea of the voluntariness of India's war contribution, they might also have raised questions about who should be indebted to whom.

Early in the war, the fund's public appeals for support in the form of knitted comforts and donations had struck a different note. Back in the spring of 1940, the fund had justified its appeal by emphasising that Indian soldiers had ‘come so far across the sea to help in our [the British] war effort’.

Chapter 8 THREE KINDS OF CONTROL AND THE MINDEDNESS OF SKILLED ACTION distinguishes between three kinds of behavioral control: strategic control, automatic control, and procedural control. The former corresponds to expert behavior; the second to habitual control; and the third is necessary for strategic control and agentive automatic control but can dissociate from them. I develop two positive arguments in favor of the intellectualist conception of strategic control.

We first introduce a cooperative game where players cannot form any coalition other than the grand coalition. The only possible outcome is that all players cooperate or that no players cooperate.

This book aims to present some of the recent developments in the studies of coalition formation in game theory through bridging non-cooperative and cooperative approaches.

The computer metaphor derives from two parallel histories of thought, the first questioning the operation and activity of minds and brains, and the second aiming at finding a minimal model of the mind and brain. These histories informed two hypotheses of mind: mind as computation and brain as machine, respectively. We focus on the latter, termed the mechanistic hypothesis. First, we briefly review how the brain has historically been discussed with machine metaphors and identify five tenets that define a machine. We review findings in neuroscience that motivate that the brain demonstrates exceptions to these tenets and, thus, should not be considered a machine. We offer that an alternative classification may be found in far-from-equilibrium self-organizing systems known as dissipative structures. We review the properties of these systems and suggest that the brain is more like a dissipative structure than a machine. Ifbrains do not fit the mechanistic hypothesis underwriting the computer metaphor, then the cognitive sciences may need to seek alternative metaphors based on the assumption that minds and brains are some other kind of natural systems, namely dissipative structures.

The computer metaphor of mind and brain is unviable as an explanatory vehicle for the complex adaptive behavior ofliving systems. I present anomalies in the empirical record of the neurosciences that expose profound problems with the assumption that the brain performs machine-like computations. As an alternative, I suggest that evolved agents’ adaptive coordination of behavior is based on a massive redundancy of reality, instead of a massive modularity of mind. A research program of Radical Embodied Computation based on contemporary theories of physical information and natural computation takes the reproduction of similarity by analogy as a fundamental process in the generation of complex order. Finally, I provide empirical evidence for the ability of all evolved agents, including those without a nervous system, to exploit the massive redundancy of reality to coordinate their behavior.

A defendant wishing to defeat or reduce liability pursuant to a claim in negligence can prove a relevant defence. The key defences are contributory negligence, voluntary assumption of risk, the plaintiff’s own intoxication, engagement in dangerous recreational or unlawful activities, or other statutory defences such as failure to bring proceedings within the time limits prescribed by statute.Contributory negligence is the plaintiff’s own failure to meet the standard of care required for their own protection, where that failure is causally relevant to the injury. The defendant must establish that the plaintiff failed to take reasonable care for their own safety or the protection of their own interests and that this failure was a cause of their harm created by the plaintiff’s conduct. A successful defence of contributory negligence results in an apportionment of the damages between the plaintiff and the defendant.