The reawakening of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 ignited a wave of racial and social consciousness that prompted many arts-based organizations to consider the larger implications of their programmatic visions. As a composer known to, but under-programmed in, the mainstream classical music establishment, the music of Florence Price was thrust into an even greater spotlight. This chapter considers what it means to meaningfully celebrate the rediscovery of Price’s manuscripts and her revival in the mainstream. It models discourse that ensures that more African American composers are recognized and that the communities that kept names and works alive are remembered in the historical record.

This chapter explores Bowen’s relation to Ireland in literary and cultural criticism over the past half century. It charts how developments and trends in literary criticism – the rise of postcolonial studies and Irish studies, the development of ‘Irish modernism’ as a critical category – have shaped how we understand Bowen as an Irish writer, and her fiction as Irish literature, in the twenty-first century. In particular, it examines whether Bowen’s work readily corresponds to the nationalist and statist concerns that the category of Irish literature often implies. Through a reading of how Bowen figures Ireland and Irishness in A World of Love (1955), I suggest that Bowen’s Irish modernism operates beyond the limits of national and nationalist history, a circumstance that enables a reconsideration of some of the limits and ideologies of the category of Irish literature.

Chapter 5 reanimates social theoretical accounts of the state, particularly those of Carl Schmitt, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu. Bringing together common elements of their work and context and linking these with al-Wardi’s work and context reveals profound resonances in the Iraqi experience of state consolidation. It argues that the state is an order that is consolidated through two main factors: a state’s ability to dominate population and territory, and the sociological legitimacy of the state as the arbitrator of collective life. Domination is a prerequisite for legitimacy, and establishing legitimacy is a historically contingent process. When these two elements come together sufficiently, a state may appear as a reified actor that is coherent, bounded, and autonomous in its actions. But this appearance is an effect of the state’s disciplinary power rather than a reflection of a sociological reality. At the same time, this effect is necessary for the maintenance of state consolidation.

The Epilogue tells the story of how a 2024 proposal to amend the Iraqi family law (Personal Status Law (PSL)) came to pass in early 2025 and outlines the objections to it in the context of this book’s main thesis about how and why state consolidation matters. The Epilogue highlights the main objections to the amendment, coming from Iraqi critics, which are focused on the social justice implications of introducing a legal structure wherein an authority is granted decision-making power over an aspect of public life that is parallel to, and outside of, the state’s authority. Critics see this as a canonization of state fragmentation and the underlying ethno-sectarian power-sharing arrangement on which it rests. The epilogue illustrates through this political and legal contestation the connections that run through sites of state fragmentation, attempts to consolidate a political order, historical legacies of state consolidation, and social justice. What the PSL story suggests is that who decides on public life is consequential to the political possibilities of justice.

The chapter examines the representation of Cold War nuclear threat and international politics in The Little Girls. The triangular relationship of the three girls over time, from the burying of the box before the First World War until the Cold War setting in 1962, plays out a Macbeth-inflected version of the international relations governing the nuclear world. Bowen had registered the shape and dangers of those relations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1946, which she attended with her lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie. The rule of three governing the girls’ friendship and experience of war trauma matches the three geopolitical points of the triangle of Cold War politics – the West, the communist bloc, the non-aligned nations – as well as mimicking forms of international diplomacy, two conflicting parties, and a third-party mediator.

The rapid digitalization of the economy has led to the proliferation of companies with primarily digital presences and global operations. This transformation has prompted governments worldwide to impose digital taxes on technology companies, sparking debates about the compatibility of such measures with international investment law. The introduction of digital taxes represents a significant departure from traditional territorial based tax principles, creating legal uncertainty and potentially discriminatory effects. And while the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework aims to establish a multilateral solution to digital taxation, its implementation poses challenges, including potential investor claims. Against this backdrop, this chapter explores the implications of digital taxation on foreign investors’ rights under international investment agreements, by examining four key questions: whether digital assets can qualify as protected “investments” under investment treaties; whether digital taxes violate national treatment obligations by disproportionately burdening foreign investors; whether such measures breach the right to fair and equitable treatment, including legal stability; and whether they amount to unlawful indirect expropriation by neutralizing digital assets as investments. By addressing these issues, this chapter highlights the evolving interplay between digital taxation and international investment law, emphasizing the need for balanced solutions that mitigate conflicts while fostering legal certainty in the digital economy.

Thomism is a tradition of thought that has attracted adherents through the centuries. It goes without saying that Thomists recognize the decisive genius of St. Thomas Aquinas. But a commitment to Thomism is not just a commitment to the man, despite whatever admiration we may have for his personal character. Thomism is adopted because it is recognized that the way of thinking involved therein conveys something important, indeed true, about a significant aspect of reality. It is precisely because Aquinas’s way of thought conveys something of the truth that people have been prepared to adopt and defend it through the centuries; hence we have a tradition of thought that is Thomism.

Neoclassical theists reject the traditional divine attributes of impassibility and immutability, holding that God can be affected by the things he has created and is thus changeable. Some claim, for example, that God undergoes changes in emotional state, has desires that can be either satisfied or frustrated, grows in knowledge, and can suffer. I argue that this position rests on a simplistic distortion of perfect being theology grounded in highly contestable intuitions and conceptually sloppy usage of key terms (such as “emotion” and “knowledge”). By contrast, the first-cause theology of Thomism is grounded in a rigorously worked-out metaphysics that neoclassical writers typically engage with only superficially if at all. Nor is “neoclassical” theism really new, but in fact marks a regression to a crudely anthropomorphic conception of God that Western thought moved beyond at the time of Xenophanes.

Although Elizabeth Bowen is primarily known for her work as a novelist throughout her long career, her prose frequently resembles poetry. She often borrows elements from verse to enhance her fiction. Notably, the three-part greater romantic lyric has an influence on The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart in its plying together of past and present, as well as different locations. In her lectures, radio broadcasts, and literary criticism, Bowen was fond of illustrating the craft of fiction with examples from verse. Not only was she an avid reader and reviewer of contemporary poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and May Sarton, but she was also a close friend of many of them. Whenever her work was compared to poetry, she took it as the highest compliment. This essay explores her intertwined connections, both in her language and in her life, to the poets and poetry that surrounded her.