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Why do self-described gender egalitarians support the state's draconian birth restriction? Following China's universal relaxation of its one-child policy in 2016, this Element excavates an under-theorized and distinctly political dimension of the gendered work-family conflict: the incompatibility of rights. I demonstrate that young urban Chinese women have experienced the expansion of their civil right to mother-through birth quota relaxation-as intensifying labor market gender discriminations and undermining their civil right to equal employment. To cope, these women turned to various individualistic strategies of rights-trading, such as promising to limit childbearing when seeking to secure employment. In this process, young Chinese women have further come to perceive employment and motherhood as two incompatible moral claims of entitlement. This Element highlights how women's quotidian work-family encounters present a fruitful yet underexplored site for understanding their political ideations and citizenship struggles. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Introduces the topic of God representations in monotheistic traditions. Section 2 examines belief in the authoritarian (e.g., controlling and punishing) and benevolent (e.g., helping and forgiving) attributes of God as a person-like being. The discussion is expanded in Section 3 to include abstract representations (e.g., the Universe, Nature, and negative theology). Section 4 describes measures used to assess people's beliefs about God and presents survey data of group differences in beliefs about God as authoritarian and benevolent. Section 5 addresses the under-studied question: where is God? Representations of God do not exist in a vacuum, and Section 6 explores the cognitive building blocks, life circumstances, worldviews, and personal motivations that can inform diverse God representations. Finally, Section 7 concludes with an overview of some of the antecedents and outcomes of God representations surveyed in this Element and how they relate to various ways of thinking about, relating to, and imagining God.
This Element examines how contemporary poets reimagine virtuosity as a mode of poetic performance. It sees virtuosity not as a fixed attribute but a strategic choice - one a poet may enter at specific moments, in specific forms, to heighten the reader's experience. Certain forms are themselves virtuosic, inviting expectations of difficulty, display, and compositional drama. Through readings of Paul Muldoon, Tyehimba Jess, and Joyelle McSweeney, the Element explores how poetic virtuosity stages not just skill, but stakes: a charged interplay of technique and expressivity. These poets embrace formal extravagance and linguistic excess, making visible the labour of composition while risking the charge of style over substance. Drawing on a nineteenth-century lineage of debates in music and art, the Element traces how poetic virtuosity confronts crisis. In doing so, it rethinks poetic form as an aesthetic of risk, outpouring, and resistance.
Does the 'Muslim World' signify a geopolitical bloc, a civilizational unit, or a theological ideal? This Element interrogates the concept of the Muslim World as a persistent yet under-theorized category in International Relations (IR). Although widely invoked in policy discourse, academic literature, and public debate, the term often functions as a geopolitical shorthand that essentializes Muslim-majority societies and obscures their internal diversity. Rather than accepting or rejecting the term outright, this Element offers a critical reconstruction. Drawing on constructivist IR theory, postcolonial studies, and Islamic intellectual traditions, we reconceptualize the Muslim World as a transnational public sphere shaped by shared debates, symbols, institutions, and histories that generate varying degrees of referential coherence across societies. By treating the Muslim World as historically contingent, internally plural, and relational rather than fixed or monolithic, this Element advances the agenda of Global IR and the project of 'worlding beyond the West.'
Conservation covenants and easements are legal mechanisms for private landholders to contribute to long-term protection of natural values. This book furnishes a unique international legal and policy study of how covenants and easements in seven jurisdictions are supporting global biodiversity goals, and it considers how they may address new challenges associated with ecosystem restoration and climate change. It compares laws in Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States, countries where these mechanisms are increasingly used to support national and global goals of relevance to Earth System Governance. Through interjurisdictional comparison, the book analyses key themes, including recruitment and retention of landholders into conservation agreements, climate adaptation and compliance. This study also offers practical advice on potential directions for law reform or improved implementation of existing covenants and easements law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Heidegger characterizes the history and essence of metaphysics as ontotheological. Ontotheology concentrates on the being of entities and conceives of this being in two interdependent ways. First, as common to all entities, being serves as the ontological ground for their coherence and intelligibility. Second, being is understood theologically, that is, by recourse to a highest entity that both exemplifies what is common to entities and serves as the causal foundation of entities and their being. Heidegger often speaks of an ontological difference, but what interests him is not simply the difference between entities and their being but what enables us to make this distinction in the first place, that is, being itself. Notoriously, Heidegger accuses the philosophical tradition of neglecting this non-ontotheological, enabling condition. This Element reconstructs and critiques Heidegger's conception of metaphysics as ontotheological. It then examines his non-ontotheological understanding of being itself, God, and divinity.
This Element examines a phenomenon that reflects a distinctive and insightful Christological imagination, yet one that has received little sustained attention within the field of Christology. Specifically, it focuses on the sphere of deputation, characterized by Jesus' authorization of his disciples to serve as his proxies. In their deputized capacity, Christians engage in activities that reflect the dynamics through which Jesus' presence is enacted in his post-earthly life, albeit within the limits of his prerogatives. Jesus may choose, through such enactment, to act by means of his disciples, both individually and collectively as the church. I argue that attention to this sphere of deputation moves both formal Christology and informal, grassroots Christology beyond the traditional Christological concentration on ontology, function, and significance.
This Element introduces the conceptualization of language weaponization, examining how dominant groups use language to control, marginalize, and harm minoritized communities. It proposes a three-phase framework- (1) stigmatization and othering, (2) dehumanization, and (3) harm-to explain how linguistic practices evolve from prejudice to violence, shaping both social structures and individual identities. Through analysis of the dynamics between dominant and minoritized groups and case studies focused on LGBTQ+ communities, the Element reveals the historical and ongoing consequences of weaponized language. Moving beyond critique, it advances a vision for transformation by positioning applied linguists as central actors in promoting societal healing. Further, storytelling is presented as a vital practice for (re)humanization and collective restoration. Ultimately, this Element invites readers to critically examine how language constructs power and to imagine its potential as a force for healing, peace, and goodness across diverse societies.
What does it mean to be in the world with others? To what degree is sociality a dimension of our experience? This Element explores the social aspects of our experience as shared and common, focusing on Heidegger's thought on this theme in the period surrounding the publication of Being and Time. It begins by situating Heidegger's position in contrast to alternative phenomenological conceptions of the relations between self and others. From there, it continues to address a key challenge to Heidegger's approach: the problem of Dasein's individuation. Finally, in response to this challenge, the work reframes Heidegger's conception of sociality through the prism of part-whole relations. As social, Dasein emerges as a dependent part of an unfolding shared whole, yet as part of a complex social context, it retains its relative wholeness.
In recent writings on popular science, there has been much handwringing about the apparently deterministic picture of human decision making suggested by the latest scientific research. Robert Sapolsky's bestselling Determined boldly argues that morality must be reformed because free will has been effectively refuted. But the question of whether free will and morality can be reconciled with a causally determined world is nothing new, nor is it the sort of question that can be answered by scientists. This Element examines how these questions were answered by Spinoza, history's most forceful defender of the claim that all things are necessarily determined, who also was keenly interested in the prospects for morality in a determined world. The Element aims to show that this figure from the past offers a timely and insightful explanation of how we can be free and responsible even if our actions are inevitable.
This Element seeks to unpack the varied modalities of democratic erosion in Latin America by proposing a novel analytical framework that breaks down backsliding episodes into their constituent parts: (1) the actors that promote autocratization and those that resist it, (2) the strategies that autocratizers and oppositions employ, (3) the arenas of contention in which they struggle over democratic norms and institutions, and (4) the objectives that these different actors pursue in the promotion of or resistance to democratic erosion. This framework is applied to five contemporary cases that reflect a new, diversified wave of democratic erosion, including El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Honduras. Through comparative analysis, we derive preliminary insights on the kinds of strategies pursued by different constellations of autocratizers and opposition actors, in hopes of stimulating future avenues of research and contributing to scholar and practitioner efforts to reverse alarming autocratic trends in the region.
This Element is about the interacting socio-ecological relationships of a contemporary Aboriginal foraging economy. In the Western Desert of Australia, Martu Aboriginal systems of subsistence, mobility, property, and transmission are manifest as distinct homelands and networks of religious estates. Estates operate as place-based descent groups, maintained in both material egalitarianism (sharing, dispossession, and immediate return) and ritual hierarchy (exclusion, possession, and delayed return). Interwoven in Martu estate-based foraging economies are the ecological relationships that shape the regeneration of their homelands. The Element explores the dynamism and transformations of Martu livelihoods and landscapes, with a special focus on the role of landscape burning, resource use practices, and property regimes in the function of desert ecosystems.
Efficient market theory has made an important contribution to economic and financial analysis, but markets do not always behave according to the theory's predictions. The behavioral finance approach advocated in this Element is a complement to efficient market theory. The Element stresses the effects of perverse incentives, complexity, and uncertainty, as well as the roles of mental models or narrative and behavioral biases. It emphasizes limits to arbitrage, suggesting that international capital mobility is often far from perfect. It reviews popular models and considers alternatives in areas such as currency crises, exchange rates and the balance of payments, the international monetary trilemma, capital flow surges and sudden stops, and the discipline effects of international financial markets. The behavioral approach of the Element also helps to explain why governments often fail to undertake necessary policy adjustments in time to head off currency and financial crises.
The digital age has afforded the governments new technologies of control, allowing them to co-opt, pre-empt and repress dissent. But, what if they lack the technical capacity to access digital tools of control? In what ways have digital technologies altered the way governments conduct statecraft? Based on an analysis of more than 3,000 public procurement documents, and a dozen elite interviews with various stakeholders, we found that the Chinese state has outsourced various functions of online surveillance to private and for-profit arms of state-owned corporations. We found that outsourcing surveillance is intended to augment state technical capacity to moderate and fine-tune the conduct of digital repression. Outsourcing digital repression opens a Pandora's box of state-business collaborations. This Element contributes to the literature on outsourcing repression, state‒business relations, and conduct of digital statecraft.
This Element is about language, water and power. It challenges the terracentric bias of much scholarship in language studies, suggesting instead that oceans and rivers should be central in investigations of language, history, culture, society and politics. Working through different engagements with water – swimming, surfing, sailing and diving – this Element explores how thinking in and with water can transform our understandings of justice, power and language. By taking water seriously as both a social and material category, hydrosocial perspectives draw attention to the ways modern water and language are controlled, restricted, standardized and contained. A hydrocolonial lens focuses on the centrality of water in colonial regimes, the oceanic origins of creoles and the need to decolonize control and conceptions of water. For critical hydrosocial language studies language is entangled in an inequitable watery world, and language study from below is a form of spiritual, material and embodied engagement.
Immigration to Western nations has risen sharply, fueling political backlash and the ascent of far-right, nativist policymakers who favor restrictive migration policies. Yet such restrictions are unlikely to succeed over the long term because they fail to address the root causes that drive people to seek better lives abroad. Foreign aid has long been viewed as a tool for tackling these underlying causes, though its effectiveness in shaping migration remains contested. The recent curtailment of aid by the same governments advancing migration restrictions creates a pivotal moment to reconsider the role and design of aid programs. This volume contributes to that effort by offering a systematic assessment of the intersections between aid and international migration. It identifies four distinct pathways through which aid affects migration and a fifth feedback pathway through which migration influences the allocation of aid, providing a comprehensive framework for future research and policymaking.
The Element reconstructs economic developments in the crucial phase of State formation in Mesopotamia, from the 4th to early 3rd millennium BCE, trying to understand how interrelating environmental, social, economic, and political factors in the two main areas of Mesopotamia profoundly changed the structures of societies and transformed the relations between social components, giving rise to increasing inequality and strengthening political institutions. The interrelation between economic changes and state formation and urbanization is analyzed. Mesopotamia represents a foundational case study to understand the processes that transformed the function of economy from being an instrument to satisfy community needs to become a means of producing “wealth” for privileged categories. These processes varied in characteristics and timescales depending on environmental conditions and organizational forms. But wherever they took place, far-reaching changes occurred resulting in emergent hierarchies and new political systems. Reflecting on these changes highlights phenomena still affecting our societies today.
Within French subsidised performing arts institutions, productions involving non-professional contributors have been gaining traction over the last decade. The trend is spearheaded both by artists, seeking to increase their interactions with society, and by public authorities, preoccupied with people-participation. The recent acceleration of this trend notwithstanding, participatory productions have long been a peripheral phenomenon in French institutions, keen to differentiate their work from socio-cultural approaches. This Element investigates the current rise in participatory creation, examining the motivations underpinning it and charting the artistic processes and forms it produces. The aim is to explore the realities of the presumed democratic reinforcement attached to participation, placing particular emphasis on the nature and scope of the democratising modes in play both on and off stage, and discussing how they interact with the prevailing conventions and value systems of French public theatre.
This Element is an introduction to classical computability theory and scientific efforts to use computability-theoretic notions to explain empirical phenomena. It is written for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in philosophy, assuming no prior exposure to computability theory. Its goals are threefold: (1) to introduce some important theoretical tools and results from classical computability theory; (2) to survey some of the ways these have been used to support explanatory projects in computer and cognitive science; and (3) to outline a few of the more prominent philosophical debates surrounding these projects.
This Element critically examines the claim that United States economic sanctions on Venezuela constituted 'collective punishment' of the Venezuelan population, contributing significantly to the country's economic collapse and humanitarian crisis. Through comprehensive analysis of economic, developmental, and welfare indicators from 2013 to 2023, it demonstrates that the bulk of Venezuela's economic devastation - including 52 percent of GDP losses and 98 percent of import declines - largely occurred before financial sanctions were imposed in August 2017. Key welfare indicators such as infant mortality, undernourishment, and life expectancy had deteriorated substantially by 2017 and subsequently stabilized or improved following sanctions implementation, contradicting narratives that attribute Venezuela's collapse primarily to external economic pressure. The Element provides a timeline of Venezuelan economic and political events around sanctions and a critical review of the literature on their economic effects. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.