This chapter encompasses Neruda’s poetic production during his latest years, which has been divided into two sections: late and posthumous poems published in books. Neruda’s literary fame was cemented in his previous work, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1924), Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1933, 1935, 1947), Canto general (1950), and Odas elementales (Elemental Odes, 1954–57). In general, critics and general readers have overlooked Neruda’s late body of work, which reflected a post-millennial futurity. He announced this visionary approach in both Aún (Still Another Day, 1969) and Fin de mundo (World’s End, 1969), but the best summary of his take on futurity can be found in his posthumous 2000 (1974).

In one of the celebrations of his fiftieth birthday, Neruda stated that the poet has two duties: “to leave and to return.” He later named one of his books Navigations and Returns. His life was that of a traveler who always returned, in real life and imaginatively, to his starting point: the southern territory of his childhood. This chapter examines the reasons for the journey and return in the life and work of Neruda, as well as other themes associated with his travels, such as the antipodes. He also alludes to the use of travel as a metaphor in some of his texts.

This Chapter conceptualizes security exceptions under international trade and investment agreements. In particular, it seeks to construct the chain that links trade and security-related issues arising from the application of security measures by clarifying the concept of national security to be used for the book, revisiting the current role of international organizations in balancing free trade and national security, ie the UN and the WTO, and finally contemplating the decision to incorporate security exceptions into international economic agreements or the decision to adopt security measures through the lenses of economic contract theory, the theories of international relations, such as realism, institutionalism, and constructivism, and the concept of securitization.

China’s notion of cyber sovereignty reflects an assertive extension of state authority into the digital realm. Rooted in principles of territorial jurisdiction, national security, and technological independence, this framework is embodied in key legislation. These laws impose rigorous compliance obligations on foreign and domestic businesses, particularly those operating critical information infrastructure. While these measures reinforce China’s digital autonomy, they pose significant challenges for foreign investors navigating this intricate regulatory landscape. This chapter critically examines how China’s cyber sovereignty aligns with its international investment obligations, focusing on three core principles: protection against expropriation, national treatment, and fair and equitable treatment (FET). It explores whether the stringent requirements and lack of effective remedies breach these standards, highlighting potential areas of discord with China’s investment treaties. Furthermore, it evaluates the limitations of security and general exception clauses in justifying these regulatory measures under international law. The findings suggest that China’s cyber sovereignty framework, while advancing its domestic security and technological goals, may conflict with its international investment commitments. As more nations adopt similar regulatory stances, this trend could signal a shift toward a fragmented global ICT market, reshaping the dynamics of international economic governance.

Drawing from both the medieval Scholastic philosophical-theological tradition and Aristotelian virtue ethics, Thomas Aquinas offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the virtuous life – one that suggests fruitful relationships not only with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions but also with recent empirical work. In this short chapter, I sketch the big picture using an Aristotelian, four-causes approach. Section 1 mainly addresses the final cause or telos of virtue: ultimately, perfect happiness in eternal life – although a good earthly life affords “a certain participation” in happiness. Section 2 considers virtue’s quasi-material causes: reason and the appetites, including the intellectual appetite or will. Section 3 focuses on the formal causes (modes) of virtue in general and of the cardinal and theological virtues in particular, as well as the relationships between various virtues in the larger structure of Thomistic virtue ethics – including the possibility of a unity of the virtues. And Section 4 discusses proposed efficient causes of such virtues, drawing on the various ways in which virtues are developed and related to each other in the Thomistic picture. Throughout, I consider connections between Aquinas’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary work in ethics, psychology, and education.

This chapter uses text from throughout Aquinas’s corpus to reconstruct the main elements of his views on causation. Causation for Aquinas is a type of ontological dependence. Following Aristotle, Aquinas recognizes four species of causes. The chapter focuses in particular on efficient causation since this is the type of cause that most closely corresponds to what contemporary philosophers mean by a “cause.” Aquinas thinks that efficient causes act through active casual powers to bring about their effects. To highlight the philosophical significance of Aquinas’s views, the chapter compares Aquinas’s views on efficient causation with two prominent contemporary theories of causation, Humeanism and Nomicism.

This Chapter outlines the national legal frameworks for applying security measures by the US, the EU, and BRICS in order to understand the level of securitization of their policy objectives. It focuses on the measures that are or can be applied by the US, the EU, and BRICS in pursuit of their national (regional) security interests and, thus, potentially subjected to security exceptions under international law. Specifically, this Chapter discusses the practice of application of economic sanctions and investment screening mechanisms in those jurisdictions.

In Chapter 3 knowledge from sociocultural psychology is integrated with other disciplines within psychology such as cognitive, social, and neuro psychology, and outside psychology such as sociology, visual studies, and philosophy, to tackle the power of images to influence our seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering.

The seven surviving printed collections of Strozzi’s vocal music (out of eight) have been well enough studied for their musical contents, but less so as bibliographical objects in the context of production methods that were increasingly ill-suited to the repertory in terms of format and typography. When viewed in this light, some of them are very odd indeed. Extreme examples are her opp. 5 (1655) and 8 (1664), which must have undergone some significant intervention during the printing process itself, chiefly – I suggest – because in each case, Strozzi identified a dedicatee in midstream, and changed her plans accordingly. My broader point is that any music print demands close examination in terms both of how it was put together, and of what it might reveal about the (now lost) manuscript sources on which it was based. But in Strozzi’s case, this also raises questions about her intentions in printing her music in the first place.

This chapter will highlight the crucial role of the Nicaragua Canal route in the ambitions of American filibusters Henry Kinney and William Walker, as well as the route’s centrality to the clash between Central American republics and the filibusters in the region’s guerra nacional. Ultimately, the short but frenetic period of filibustering in Nicaragua had several enduring consequences both for the fate of the canal route and the “Mosquito question.” While the war disrupted transit activities and undermined dreams of building a canal through Nicaragua, it also paradoxically speeded up the process of settlement of the Mosquito question as metropolitan governments realized that the longer the status of the Mosquito region remained unresolved, the more prone it would be to filibustering enterprises.

At least since Ellen Rosand’s foundational work on Barbara Strozzi, scholars have recognized both the libertine environment of Strozzi’s upbringing and the sensual, even erotic character of much of her music. While that eroticism is usually portrayed as heterosexual, I draw attention in this article to a handful of pieces whose same-sex orientation has largely been overlooked. In Eraclito amoroso and La fanciuletta semplice (both from opus 2), and, perhaps most strikingly, the Sonetto that launches opus 1, such desire emerges not only from the poetry Strozzi selected, but also from her treatment of that poetry. Of course, non-heteronormative expressions of sexual attraction were not so unusual in contemporary Venice. Same-sex activity was considered a facet of profligate sexual desire generally, and it appeared often on the operatic stage. I highlight these particular works, however, as especially provocative examples of Strozzi cultivating the eroticized image that her father seems to have intended for her.

As a founding member of the Jane Austen Society in the 1940s, Bowen helped spearhead the arrangements that, as a world war raged and hundreds of thousands of other homes were destroyed, saved for the nation the Hampshire house where the Regency novelist had written her books. Through the society’s efforts, Chawton Cottage, in its new guise as Jane Austen’s House Museum, became, as it remains, a mainstay of the English heritage industry. In Bowen’s fiction and critical writing, evidence suggests that, despite the norms of periodisation, the later novelist valued her predecessor’s work not as an emblem of tradition and repository of heritage values, but for the way it supplied the formal resources for a modern or modernist future of fiction. More than a practitioner of domestic fiction and marriage plotting, the Austen to whom Bowen pays homage is a figure notable for her surgical precision and mastery of form. The restraint and ironic detachment that Bowen ascribes to Austen is not alien to Bowen’s commitment to human passion. As some of Bowen’s essays on Austen argue, the novelist made passion her study – a study that, Bowen found, could renew the novel form.