Introducing the book’s third essential part on ‘property’, this chapter sets out Alter-Native Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation informed by vernacular law and oriented towards the everyday, ordinary South African as the ‘reasonable’ person in law. It draws on ethnography and sociolinguistics, problematising the continuities in how democratic South African law treats ‘customary law’ consistently with colonial-apartheid. A SiSwati conversation with Make Ng’Gogo frames the chapter’s exploration of vernacular law’s indigenous ethical orientation, embodied in Ubu-Ntu, as it applies to guiding not only societal organisation but also land rights – emphasising human-centred values over individualistic property rights. By first examining indigenous normative relationships with land then translating their application into critique of Constitutional Court interpretive practices, the chapter advances an Alter-Native framework that represents a paradigm shift in constitutional interpretation, privileging Ubu-Ntu’s holistic world-sense. This framework advocates reinterpretation of dignity and rights under the Constitution, moving beyond Western legal principles toward a jurisprudence grounded in indigenous natural law and relational ethics. The chapter argues for South Africa’s Constitutional Court to adopt this indigenously transformative constitutional approach to interpretation, treating vernacular law as equally legitimate to European ‘common law’ and thereby making truly transformative socioeconomic outcomes more possible.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This chapter provides an analysis of the structure of love in Kierkegaard’s thought, which takes its most developed shape in Works of Love. This analysis will help us understand the four key elements of Kierkegaardian love that constitute it in its proper sense. The four elements of love are: repetition, time, commitment, and the good of the other. The overall argument in this chapter is that for Kierkegaard love necessitates a repeated, hence time-oriented, commitment to the good of the other. The object of this commitment is the other and that which is truly their good, which is their “abiding in love.”

This chapter discusses the long Arthurian section of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Latin history of Britain, the De gestis Britonum (or Historia regum Britanniae). It sets Arthur in the context of Geoffrey’s focus on the strengths and weaknesses of a long line of British kings, starting with Brutus, the Trojan refugee who follows the goddess Diana’s prophecy to settle the island of Britain. The Britons are shown to be imperial and formidable, but also subject to internecine strife. British kings sometimes make disastrous decisions because of their own desires. Arthur is a paragon, a perfect king, and the narrative’s lingering over his reign and his victory over the Romans can make readers forget the larger pattern that governs Geoffrey’s history. But at the height of success, he is betrayed by his nephew, and while he wins his final battle, he is fatally wounded: all kings must, in the end, die.

This chapter presents a historical survey of environmental fictions in Africa, considering the robust scholarly interests in ecocriticism. Of particular significance are the emergence of the environmental fiction genre, marked by the relocation of ecocritical concepts from North America to Africa, the transition of existing literary works to the domain of environmental fiction, an efflorescence of self-representing environmental narratives, the co-existence of fictive and non-fictive narratives, and the attendant ecocritical discourse in the present time. Considering these, African environmental fictions can be grouped into two. The first group are fictions that explicitly thematize environmental justice and declaim the eco-destructive culture of extractive industries and corporate capitalism. Writings under this category are mostly transgressive, with a sense of activism. The second group are fictions that come under revisionist ecocritical studies focused on the idea that certain narratives predating the emergence of ecocriticism lend themselves to an ecocritical reading, in that such fictions have represented human–nonhuman relations, interdependence, and multi-species presence. A further strand of this chapter pays attention to the local particularities of nations such as Nigeria and South Africa, with prominent voices in African environmental fiction, and the peculiar ecological realities represented by authors from these countries.

This introduction examines Cold War liberalism as a significant ideological and political force in U.S. history. It argues that Cold War liberalism was characterized by two core features: a deep skepticism of mass democracy and a commitment to American global hegemony. These traits emerged as the result of Cold War liberals’ encounter with perceived existential threats, particularly Soviet communism, which led them to embrace a politics of emergency that sacrificed liberalism for a broadly defined security. While Cold War liberals achieved some progressive domestic reforms, their actions both at home and abroad often undermined liberal democratic principles. In particular, Cold War liberalism’s emphasis on the necessity of U.S. empire had long-lasting consequences, establishing patterns of domestic governance and foreign military intervention that continue to shape the world today.

This chapter examines debates around state planning in Morocco and Tunisia, centering on the idea that the post-colonial state could engineer a great leap in the 1960s. Socialist leaders Mehdi Ben Barka and Ahmed Ben Salah pursued ambitious development plans—agrarian reform and industrialization— intended to “catch up” their so-called delay. These policies, however, were deeply entangled with French colonial knowledge and development experts, most notably on how they conceived of tradition as an obstacle for progress. This chapter explores these plans’ entanglements in the imaginations of international experts during development conferences in Paris and Algiers. In both cases, these socialist leaders placed their attentions on the social resistance of peasants and downplayed reactions from educated youth in the cities. By the mid to late 1960s, students protests raged in Casablanca and Tunis, revealing a generational rupture and a challenge to the socialists’ visions of national development. This chapter also illustrates the benefits of excavating printed traces. International conference proceedings reveal post-colonial entanglements with government policy documents such as the Tunisian and Moroccan development brochures of the 1960s. This connection highlights the shortcomings of post-colonial state power after independence.

In 1968, the humanitarian and development charity Oxfam asked a simple question: does aid work? What this meant in practice was that it appointed Bernard Llewellyn as its first Aid Appraiser. His conclusions were that roughly 50 percent of most aid work was wasted and ill-spent, too often on what he disparaged as ‘monuments to human folly’. That the organisation continued to support such initiatives he blamed on the ‘Oxfam bias’. There was always somebody to claim that aid worked. Llewellyn’s criticisms, and those who followed him, were acknowledged but the sector has been able to absorb them and move on. Indeed, a development studies literature has pointed to the self-perpetuating nature of aid work more generally: the ‘anti-politics machine’. One consequence has been that, if it is not known what works, then it is not known either what contribution charity has to the mixed economy of overseas welfare. That this has never been determined is not only a reflection of the ongoing disputes about the meaning of charity itself but also the reason for its subsequent growth.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Takes up another aspect of free will, the challenge of scientific determinism. I argue that Jewish tradition contains surprisingly many thinkers who either deny free will or (more commonly) greatly limit its scope, question its value, or embrace compatibilism (the thesis that free will and determinism are compatible). Some of what these thinkers say can be transferred to the challenge of determinism as it exists today.

In this chapter, comparable designs and methods are applied to a language which is grammatically distinct in branching direction and word order from either English or French: Tulu, a Dravidian language spoken in Southern India, which allows several variants of relativization. The chapter introduces critical aspects of Tulu grammar, focusing on the pronominal feature system and its interaction with Determiners in the language. Despite variation in the expression of headed and headlessness, Tulu data confirm a primacy of headlessness in the development of relativization. Once again, the data reveal that the child is engaging in Grammatical Mapping between a universal template and linguistic properties of a language-specific grammar.

According to Dazai Shundai, the most effective way for feudal domains to amass wealth and resolve their fiscal difficulties is to promote the production of crops and other products for which the domain’s soil and geography provide a particular advantage. Domain governments should then manage trade in these products with other regions in order to maximize profits for the domain, rather than allowing private merchants to dominate this trade. From the perspective of traditional Confucian teachings it is not ideal for rulers to pursue profit through commerce, but this is an acceptable emergency measure to deal with a time of crisis.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.