This chapter is based upon an extensive examination of US statutes, regulations, and executive orders from 1994 to 2021 containing US blacklists against Cuba. The chapter discusses the effects of the listing on individuals or targeted entities. Because many of these targets are Cuban government officials or state-owned enterprises, the listing of these persons and entities has the effect of interfering with sectors of the Cuban economy. The chapter also discusses the secondary impact on Cuba’s trade partners in general, and the consequent “chilling effect” that interferes in Cuba’s overall ability to import and export goods, and attract foreign investment.

Chapter 1 begins by introducing the quantum world as part of the physical world, not in opposition to or separate from the classical world. It then introduces the basic tools needed to work with quantum mechanics, and describes the scope and purpose of this textbook. It discusses how despite its successes, current quantum mechanics lacks adequate explanations for important observed atomic properties, suggesting an incompleteness of the theory. After a brief overview of its main interpretative issues , the chapter concludes with an introduction of the vacuum or zero-point field as the physical element that restores causality and serves to complete the quantum picture by providing a causal explanation of characteristic quantum phenomena.

Sanctions have overall made a negative impact on the health outcomes of the North Korean people. The reasons are multifactorial. Sanctions are complex and have created massive administrative barriers and logistical challenges for the organizations that wish to take the time and effort to navigate them to provide humanitarian aid. Banks are hesitant to partner with those who work in the DPRK to avoid any possible risk that they could unknowingly be evading sanctions. For a similar reason, international funding for health in the DPRK has plummeted. The Covid-19 pandemic and associated DPRK-imposed border shutdown has exacerbated the precarious health status of the North Korean people. A reform of the sanctions regime is needed to ensure necessary humanitarian aid reaches the most vulnerable.

United States sanctions undermine Iran’s ability to import critical agricultural products, especially wheat. Despite long-standing exemptions for humanitarian trade, sanctions have fragmented Iran’s wheat-supply chain, deterring major commodities traders, interrupting payment channels, and delaying shipments. While Iran does continue to import wheat to meet its food security needs, commodities traders can extract a higher price from Iranian importers, citing the unique challenges of exporting to the country. In this way, sanctions contribute to structurally higher prices for wheat in Iran. The country’s growing dependence on wheat imports, driven by demographic changes and worsening climate conditions, has made these disruptions more acute. Efforts to mitigate these effects, such as humanitarian trade arrangements launched by multiple US administrations, have largely failed due to bureaucratic inefficiencies and financial sector overcompliance. As a result, Iranian households have had to contend with significant food inflation, even for staples such as bread. Considering that the negative humanitarian effects of sanctions are both persistent and systemic and have been long known to US officials, it is difficult to conclude that the effects are truly unintended.

This chapter reviews recent advances in addressing the identification of the effects of sanctions on cross-country and country-level studies. It argues that, given the difficulties in assessing causal relationships in cross-national data, country-level case studies can serve as a useful and informative complement to cross-national regression studies. However, case studies pose a set of additional potential empirical pitfalls that can also obfuscate rather than clarify the identification of causal mechanisms at work, so they should be treated as a complement rather than a substitute to cross-national research. As an example, the chapter discusses the impact of sanctions on Venezuela and shows how they contributed to the country’s economic collapse through their impact on oil production, public sector revenues, and imports of essential goods. These findings are consistent with those of the broader cross-national literature, which identifies constraints on an economy’s trade and financial links as a key channel for the impact of sanctions.

Chapter 16 begins by showing how quantum mechanics explains the structure and basic properties of multielectron atoms and their position in the periodic table of elements. It introduces the main approximation methods that have been developed to study such systems, explains the atomic shell structure, and discusses the helium atom in detail. It then looks at the different types of forces that bind atoms together to form molecules, focusing on diatomic molecules and the hydrogen molecule in particular. It discusses the long-range intermolecular forces that are responsible for many of the chemical and structural properties of matter, and identifies the zero-point or vacuum field as being responsible for the van der Waals and Casimir forces. In the final section, the properties of atomic nuclei are shown to reveal an internal structure with periodicities reminiscent of those of atoms and to disclose the effect of the nuclear spin–orbit interaction.

Throughout thirteen years of conflict, Syria was experiencing one of the world’s major humanitarian crises, necessitating a vast humanitarian response involving various UN agencies and (inter)national and local nongovernmental organizations (INGOs, NGOs). Humanitarian operations in Syria faced numerous challenges, with sanctions and unilateral measures being prime examples. Despite the theoretical availability of humanitarian exemptions, the semi- comprehensive sanctions and donor conditionality directly and indirectly hindered humanitarian efforts. Drawing on various data, the chapter illustrates how sanctions created obstacles for humanitarian work falling into three categories: financial challenges related to money transfer due to overcompliance and de-risking; legal challenges linked to due diligence, compliance requirements, and interpretation of sanctions; and operational challenges related to “dual-use” regulations, “State Sponsor of Terrorism” designation, as well as direct sectoral sanctions. The chapter further highlights the limitations of humanitarian exemptions, arguing that they fail to effectively mitigate the negative impact of sanctions. Additionally, the chapter elaborates on the indirect impact of sanctions with regard to oil supplies and currency depreciation and fluctuations. It emphasizes the urgent need for sanctioning states to actively engage in protecting and insulating the work of humanitarian organizations, and raises the question of accountability for the impact of sanctions on aid beneficiaries.

Chapter 18 is entirely devoted to the quantum theory of scattering, which is normally covered in more detail in a course on quantum field theory. We introduce the main concepts, including scattering amplitude, differential and total cross sections, and form factors, and derive the main formulas for elastic scattering, in a nonrelativistic framework; this allows us to appreciate how the information obtained from scattering experiments is used to explore the intricacies of quantum particles that are otherwise inaccessible. The Born approximation is studied and applied to scattering by a periodic potential, a weak potential, and Rutherford scattering. The partial wave expansion is derived and applied to obtain the optical theorem. The chapter concludes with a complementary section on resonant scattering.

This Introduction offers a historical survey of the relationship between impressionism and literature, especially poetry. The chapter foregrounds the stylistic variety of the visual form – what Renoir called its ‘irregularité’ – as well as its wide range of cultural connotations during the period. It then explores how this irregularity was replicated in literary responses to impressionist art. Tracing the word’s passage out of the Paris salons, into contemporary French writing and across the Channel, it charts how various important ideas in the history of modern poetry – ideas such as decadence, symbolism, vers libre and imagism – were formulated as expressions of (or sometimes as antidotes to) impressionist aesthetics. In doing so, it suggests that ’impressionism’ was one of the crucial terms – often the crucial term – through and against which verse of the period was defined. The Introduction concludes by discussing the drawbacks of recent attempts to propose unified theories of ‘literary impressionism’, and suggests that the relationship between impressionism and literature might more fruitfully be conceived as one of irreconcilable irregularity, particularity and self-difference.

Chapter 4 shows that, just as Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics represented a break with classical physics and the beginning of a new physics, Schrödinger’s wave mechanics represented another, no less radical, break with classical physics and at the same time opened up another path to the quantum world. Schrödinger’s theory is shown to make substantial use of de Broglie’s waves and related phenomena. The Schrödinger equation, being wave-like, constitutes mathematically an eigenvalue problem for bounded systems, and thus naturally leads to quantization, as is illustrated with a couple of simple examples. The chapter ends with Dirac’s abstract formulation, which has the advantage of being suitable for any description, be it Heisenberg’s, Schrödinger’s or any other.

This chapter frames the adverse consequences of sanctions as a product of the interplay between government policy and commercial decision-making. It argues that corporate decision making about economic sanctions is an important factor behind the efficacy of sanctions. Commercial actors also play a central role in causing or amplifying the adverse consequences of sanctions. The chapter presents sanctions from a legal perspective, treating sanctions as legal rules that are limited by traditional notions of jurisdiction. At the same time, these rules contain significant ambiguities and are accompanied by heavy enforcement. Commercial actors respond by adopting risk avoidance strategies such as de-risking and overcompliance. These strategies produce adverse consequences for innocent populations, NGOs, and others that are not the stated targets of sanctions. The tendency for commercial actors to terminate trade relations beyond the actual terms of sanctions regulations is worth studying because it reveals a gap between the expectations of government policymakers and business practices. It can also make sanctions weaker and incentivize the creation of “unsanctioned” trade channels. The chapter concludes with a call for governments to clarify expectations about sanctions so that commercial actors do not face a dilemma between crippling compliance costs or crippling enforcement.