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If the head is religion, the gut is magic. Taking up this provocation, this Element delves into the digestive system within transnational Afro-Diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Lucumí (also called Santería). It draws from the ethnographic and archival record to probe the abdomen as a vital zone of sensory perception, amplified in countless divination verses, myths, rituals, and recipes for ethnomedical remedies. Provincializing the brain as only one locus of reason, it seeks to expand the notion of 'mind' and expose the anti-Blackness that still prevents Black Atlantic knowledges from being accepted as such. The Element examines gut feelings, knowledge, and beings in the belly; African precedents for the Afro-Diasporic gut-brain axis; post-sacrificial offerings in racist fantasy and everyday reality; and the strong stomachs and intestinal fortitude of religious ancestors. It concludes with a reflection on kinship and the spilling of guts in kitchenspaces.
In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly all humans were potential chattel, that once they had become owned beings, they could then be either sold or inherited. Yet, despite being representative of perhaps the most universalizable human practice of that age, slavery in medieval East Asia was also endowed with its own distinctive traits and traditions. Our awareness of these features of distinction contributes immeasurably to a more nuanced understanding of slavery as the ubiquitous and openly practiced institution that it once was and the now illicit and surreptitious one that it intractably remains.
Since the late first millennium CE, Maritime Southeast Asia has been an inter-connected zone, with its societies and states maintaining economic and diplomatic relations with both China and Japan on the east, and the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East on the west. This global connectedness was facilitated by merchant and shipping networks that originated from within and outside Southeast Asia, resulting in a trans-regional economy developing by the early second millennium CE. Sojourning populations began to appear in Maritime Southeast Asia, culminating in records of Chinese and Indian settlers in such places as Sumatra, Malay Peninsula and the Gulf of Siam by the mid-first millennium CE. At the same time, information of products that were harvested in Southeast Asia began to be appropriated by pockets of society in China, the India and the Middle East, resulting in the production of new knowledge and usages for these products in these markets.
This Element recounts the tumultuous history of the Unification Church Movement, deriving from the messianic ministry of MOON Sun Myung (1920–2012). It begins with the UCM's origins in Korea and traces its development into a global conglomerate of churches, related nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses. Known for its mass marriages, or 'International Marriage Blessings,' the UCM has been one of the most controversial new religious movements throughout the world, particularly in Japan and the West. Moon fit Weber's classic definition of the charismatic leader. The post-Moon UCM is a textbook case of a new religious movement transitioning from its founding to succeeding generations. Utilizing both external documents and internal UCM sources, the account highlights the leading personalities, organizations, and circumstances which facilitated the UCM's rise, its present challenges, and future development.
This Element defends mathematical anti-realism against an underappreciated problem with that view-a problem having to do with modal truthmaking. Part I develops mathematical anti-realism, it defends that view against a number of well-known objections, and it raises a less widely discussed objection to anti-realism-an objection based on the fact that (a) mathematical anti-realists need to commit to the truth of certain kinds of modal claims, and (b) it's not clear that the truth of these modal claims is compatible with mathematical anti-realism. Part II considers various strategies that anti-realists might pursue in trying to solve this modal-truth problem with their view, it argues that there's only one viable view that anti-realists can endorse in order to solve the modal-truth problem, and it argues that the view in question-which is here called modal nothingism-is true.
This Element details how elites provide policy concessions when they face credible threats of revolution. Specifically, the authors discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent formation of Comintern enhanced elites' perceptions of revolutionary threat by affecting the capacity and motivation of labor movements as well as the elites' interpretation of information signals. These developments incentivized elites to provide policy concessions to urban workers, notably reduced working hours and expanded social transfer programs. The authors assess their argument by using original qualitative and quantitative data. First, they document changes in perceptions of revolutionary threat and strategic policy concessions in early inter-war Norway by using archival and other sources. Second, they code, for example, representatives at the 1919 Comintern meeting to proxy for credibility of domestic revolutionary threat in cross-national analysis. States facing greater threats expanded various social policies to a larger extent than other countries, and some of these differences persisted for decades.
Recent developments in behavioural economics have deeply influenced the way governments design public policies. They give citizens access to online simulators to cope with tax and benefits systems and increasingly rely on nudges to guide individual decisions. The recent surge of interest in Behavioural Public Finance is grounded on the conviction that a better understanding of individual behaviours could improve predictions of tax revenue and help design better-suited incentives to save for retirement, search for a new job, go to school or seek medical attention. Through a presentation of the most recent developments in Behavioural Public Finance, this Element discusses the way Behavioural Economics has improved our understanding of fiscal policies.
This Element offers an accessible introduction to theoretical writing on the rule of law for anyone who wants to understand more about how we think and write about this central idea of legal and political thought. Part 1, 'Approaching the Rule of Law', examines the methods through which the idea of the rule of law is typically approached by those who set out to theorise it. Part 2, 'Untangling the Rule of Law', asks whether it is possible to untangle the rule of law from the various contributions, companions, connections, conflations and controversies with which it tends to be associated. Part 3, 'Revisiting the Rule of Law', signals to new frontiers of rule of law thought by addressing the assumptions about legal form that shape its theoretical treatment, and by investigating what we know about the people who carry its burdens and benefit from its offerings.
The tension between innovation and financialisation is central to the business corporation. Innovation entails a 'retain-and-reinvest' allocation regime that can form a foundation for stable and equitable economic growth. Driven by shareholder-value ideology, financialisation entails a shift to 'downsize-and-distribute'. This Element investigates this tension in global pharmaceuticals, focusing on the two leading UK companies AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline. In the 2000s both adopted US-style governance, including stock buybacks and stock-based executive pay. Over the past decade, however, first AstraZeneca and then GlaxoSmithKline transitioned to innovation. Critical was the cessation of buybacks to refocus capabilities on investing in an innovative drugs pipeline. Enabling this shift were UK corporate-governance institutions that mitigated US-style shareholder-value maximisation. Reinventing capitalism for the sake of stable and equitable economic growth means eliminating value destruction caused by financialisation and supporting value creation through collective and cumulative innovation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This collection of essays addresses technical developments in telecommunications and sound recording that have guided the direction of musical aesthetics in the post-1950 era. Such information is readily available online but may appear counterintuitive to many who find its priorities difficult to grasp from a musical perspective. The author hopes to draw attention to the place of ideas of communication and flight in western tradition. This Element begins with Varèse and his 'noble noise', traverses the arrival of Information Theory and its influence, examples of early computer music, and ends with a defence of the sublime logic of Stockhausen's singing helicopters and tornados.
Token forces – tiny national troop contributions in much larger coalitions – have become ubiquitous in UN peacekeeping. This Element examines how and why this contribution type has become the most common form of participation in UN peace operations despite its limited relevance for missions' operational success. It conceptualizes token forces as a path-dependent unintended consequence of the norm of multilateralism in international uses of military force. The norm extends states' participation options by giving coalition builders an incentive to accept token forces; UN-specific types of token forces emerged as states learned about this option and secretariat officials adapted to state demand for it. The Element documents the growing incidence of token forces in UN peacekeeping, identifies the factors disposing states to contribute token forces, and discusses how UN officials channel token participation. The Element contributes to the literatures on UN peacekeeping, military coalitions, and the impacts of norms in international organizations.
Cryptology of the long eighteenth century became an explicit discipline of secrecy. Theorized in pedagogical texts that reached wide audiences, multimodal methods of secret writing during the period in England promoted algorithmic literacy, introducing reading practices like discernment, separation, recombination, and pattern recognition. In composition, secret writing manipulated materials and inspired new technologies in instrumentation, computation, word processing, and storage. Cryptology also revealed the visual habits of print and the observational consequences of increasing standardization in writing, challenging the relationship between print and script. Secret writing served not only military strategists and politicians; it gained popularity with everyday readers as a pleasurable cognitive activity for personal improvement and as an alternative way of thinking about secrecy and literacy.
Most research has investigated Multiracial and Multicultural populations as separate topics, despite demographic and experiential overlap between these. This Element bridges that divide by reviewing and comparing Multiracial and Multicultural research to date—their origins, theoretical and methodological development, and key findings in socialization, identity negotiation and discrimination—to identify points of synthesis and differentiation to guide future research. It highlights challenges researchers face when studying these populations because such research topics necessitate that one moves beyond previous frameworks and theories to grapple with identity as flexible, malleable, and influenced both by internal factors and external perceptions. The areas of overlap and difference are meaningful and illustrate the social constructive nature of race and culture, which is always in flux and being re-defined. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element argues that relational policy analysis can provide deeper insights into the career of any policy and the dynamics of any policy situation. This task is all the more difficult as the relational often operates unseen in the backstages of a policy arena. Another issue is the potentially unbounded scope of a relational analysis. But these challenges should not dissuade policy scholars from beginning to address the theme of relationality in public policy. This Element sketches a conceptual framework for the study of relationality and illustrates some of the promise of relational analysis using an extended case study. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element introduces a biological approach to cognition, which highlights the significance of allostatic regulation and the navigation of challenges and opportunities. It argues that cognition is best understood as a juggling act, which reflects numerous ongoing attempts to minimize disruptions while prioritizing the sources of information that are necessary to satisfy social and biological needs; and it provides a characterization of the architectural constraints, neurotransmitters, and affective states that shape visual perception, as well as the regulatory capacities that sustain flexible patterns of thought and behavior.
Portuguese explorations opened the sea-route to Asia, bringing armed trading to the Indian Ocean. This Element examines the impact of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of the port-kingdom of Melaka on early travel literature. Putting into dialogue accounts from Portuguese, mestiço, and Malay perspectives, this study re-examines early modern 'discovery' as a cross-cultural trope. Trade and travel were intertwined while structured by religion. Rather than newness or wonder, Portuguese representations focus on recovering what is known and grafting Asian knowledges-including local histories-onto European epistemologies. Framing Portuguese rule as a continuation of the sultanate, they re-spatialize Melaka into a European city. However, this model is complicated by a second one of accidental discovery facilitated by native agents. For Malay texts too, travel traverses known routes and spaces. Malay travelers insert themselves into foreign spaces by forging new kinship alliances, even as indigenous networks were increasingly disrupted by European incursions.
Scholars and practitioners seek development solutions through the engineering and strengthening of state institutions. Yet, the state is not the only or the primary arena shaping how citizens, service providers and state officials engage in actions that constitute politics and development. These individuals are members of religious orders, ethnic communities, and other groups that make claims on them, creating incentives that shape their actions. Recognizing how individuals experience these claims and view the choices before them is essential to understanding political processes and development outcomes. This Element establishes a framework elucidating these forces, which is key to knowledge accumulation, designing future research and effective programming. Taking an institutional approach, this Element explains how the salience of arenas of authority associated with various communities and the nature of social institutions within them affect politics and development. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Does democratization lead to more meritocracy in the civil service? The Element argues that electoral accountability increases the value of competence over personal loyalty in the civil service. While this resembles an application of merit principles, it does not automatically reduce patronage politics or improve public goods provision. Competent civil servants are often used to facilitate the distribution of clientelistic goods at mass scale to win competitive elections. The selection of competent but less loyal civil servants requires the increased use of control mechanisms, like the timing of promotions, to ensure their compliance. The Element tests these claims using novel micro-level data on promotions in Indonesia's civil service before and after democratization in 1999. The Element shows that national- and local-level elections led to increased promotion premiums for educated civil servants, and simultaneously generated electoral cycles in the timing of promotions, but did little to improve public goods provision.
This Element explores the role of public managers as designers. Drawing from systems-thinking and strategic management, a process-tracing methodology is used to examine three design processes whereby public managers develop strategies for adapting to climate change, build the requisite capabilities and evaluate outcomes. Across three cases, the findings highlight the role of managers as 'design- oriented' integration agents and point to areas where additional inquiry is warranted. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Susan Stebbing (1885–1943), the UK's first female professor of philosophy, was a key figure in the development of analytic philosophy. Stebbing wrote the world's first accessible book on the new polyadic logic and its philosophy. She made major contributions to the philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophical logic, critical thinking and applied philosophy. Nonetheless she has remained largely neglected by historians of analytic philosophy. This Element provides a thorough yet accessible overview of Stebbing's positive, original contributions, including her solution to the paradox of analysis, her account of the relation of sense data to physical objects, and her anti- idealist interpretation of the new Einsteinian physics. Stebbing's innovative work in these and other areas helped move analytic philosophy from its early phase to its middle period.