This chapter analyses how industry analysts identify, evaluate, and promote disruptive ventures through designations such as ‘Cool Vendor’, ‘Innovator’, or ‘Market Disruptor’. These endorsements act as powerful funnelling devices, amplifying some narratives while marginalising others. The chapter interrogates the paradox of analysts as both critical evaluators and active promoters of the innovations they assess. Drawing on valuation studies, it distinguishes between evaluation (assessing worth) and valorisation (creating worth), showing how analysts simultaneously constrain speculative excess while conferring legitimacy. Through empirical cases, the chapter reveals the dual role analysts play as gatekeepers and amplifiers in the digital economy. By legitimising select start-ups, they transform localised narratives into widely recognised signals of market potential. This valorisation process illustrates how hype is not merely curtailed but actively channelled into market-making dynamics, underscoring the analysts’ central role in the institutionalisation of hype.

Chapter 3.8 highlights the importance of funding as a tool for preparing for and responding to pandemics. A pandemic can wreak health, societal and economic havoc. Prioritizing common and global public goods for health and specifically for pandemic planning is complex and requires financing mechanisms at national, regional and supranational levels. Key learning, including from COVID-19, is that

• – Pandemic preparedness is subject to inherent market and collective action failures and is often underfunded.

• – Governments need clear strategies for funding preparedness.

• – Preparedness depends on strong health system foundations and contingency funding mechanisms that go beyond simply setting funds aside. It is crucial that funds can be mobilized quickly and in a coordinated fashion.

• – Key steps for planning responses include

• Assessing existing activities and mapping value for money

• Agreeing the need for public financing for population-based functions (i.e. common goods)

• Identifying appropriate types of financing that reflect the complexity of determining resource needs and allow for nuanced cost estimation

• Developing context-specific financing tools that include flexible funds and address accountability

• Holding transparent discussions about trade-offs

• Improving budget transfer mechanisms

• Integrating domestic finance into multiyear budgets, and

• Managing and strengthening international collaboration

• International guidance and learning from COVID-19 can help inform preparations. Organizations including the WHO and World Bank offer tools to help decision-makers. It is crucial that these are assessed for suitability to context and customized to the national and local setting.

This chapter asks how two subjects defined in the terms of ‘religion’ – the ‘Muslim’ and the ‘Jewish’ subject – became recognizable as such in the decades prior to the independence of the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Pakistan and the ‘Jewish National Home’ of Israel, which aligned the recognition and formation of the religious minority, the nation, and the state. It addresses the recognition of Israel and Pakistan in the contexts of their colonial pasts and analyses the role of demography, the claim for political representation, and the work of two international commissions that shaped the borders of their statehood. It shows how emerging modes of cultural recognition built on and cemented very particular understandings of ‘religion’ and funnelled certain aspects of social, political, and cultural life into coherent, representable, and recognizable forms of religious difference. By looking in detail at the epistemological politics of religious difference, the chapter illustrates the costs that come with the recognition of ‘religion’ and ‘religious difference’ in the transition from empire to state. The double face of the imperial recognition of the ‘Indian Muslims’ and the ‘Palestinian Jews’, in other words, worked both as a condition for legitimate government and power and as a resource for the future challenge against them.

Chapter 3.4 explores how pharmaceutical care is financed. Paying for medicines includes how the end-purchase of existing medicines is managed but also the way investment in research and development (R&D) is handled. Key learning includes that

• Pharmaceutical innovation draws on substantial public and private resources.

• – The public sector primarily supports early-stage research, regulates the industry and incentivizes development.

• – The private sector is typically central to development, commercialization, manufacture and marketing. It seeks high profit margins and is not always transparent or responsive to policy priorities.

• Novel and specialized therapeutics as well as population ageing are likely to accelerate medicines expenditures. This requires careful management of pricing and reimbursement.

• Policy-makers can leverage a mix of push and pull strategies to align industry efforts with societal need including through

• – Clear communication of health system priorities

• – Transparent incentive and pricing systems and measures to enhance R&D efficiency

• – Payment mechanisms that foster equity and sustainability

• – Cross-country collaboration including on preparedness, procurement and pricing transparency.

Chapter 3.10 evaluates innovative financing for neglected diseases. Neglected diseases (NDs) account for about a fifth of the global burden of disease and affect over a billion people. They are neglected because the pharmaceutical sector does not consider it profitable to develop treatments for them. This reflects that fact that NDs are most prevalent in low- and middle-income countries with relatively low purchasing potential. Key learning includes that

• Global pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) invests a disproportionate share of innovation, activity and resources in low burden diseases and fosters significant inequities.

• A range of push and pull incentive mechanisms have been developed to delink the cost of research from market profitability and promote innovation in areas of need.

• – Reduce the upfront costs by subsidizing R&D pre-discovery (push incentives) and

• – Offer a reward post-discovery (pull incentives)

• The evidence on the effectiveness and reach of incentive schemes is scant and more needs to be done to understand the relative cost-effectiveness of the different incentive mechanisms and the extent to which they mitigate inequalities in innovation and access to new medicines.

• A global, unified governance framework for needs assessment and resource allocation could usefully

• – Carry out systematic comparison of the relative needs associated with NDs globally

• – Assess the costs and benefits of addressing these

• – Set priorities for the coordinated global allocation of funding and targeted incentive mechanisms, and

• – Consider payment mechanisms that will translate research into market launches.

I set the scence, discuss the scope of the book, and summarize each chapter.

This chapter is about the concept of religion in International Relations (IR) scholarship, the pitfalls of multiculturalist approaches, and the potential of alternative approaches centring genealogical care. It illustrates this through close conceptual readings of central figures such as Daniel Philpott, Jürgen Habermas, William Connolly, and Iza Hussin. It argues that such conceptual analysis is necessary in order to understand the endemic ideological and cognitive bias built into the dominant multiculturalist framework on religion in IR, as well as the importance for alternatives to it. This is significant because these biases continue to structure both scholarship and political practice of religious freedom, the regulation and governance of religious minorities, the identification and evaluation of ‘religious’ conflict and conflict parties, as well as the initiatives for reworking the relationship between religion and politics within international practices and theory.