Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East signal the return of geopolitics. This book challenges conventional approaches that ignore border change, arguing that geopolitics is driven by nationalism and focusing on how nationalism transforms the state. Using geocoded historical maps covering state borders and ethnic groups in Europe, the authors’ spatial approach shows how, since the French Revolution, nationalism has caused increasing congruence between state and national borders and how a lack of congruence increased the risk of armed conflict. This macro process is traced from early modern Europe and widens the geographic scope to the entire world in the mid twentieth century. The analysis shows that the risk of conflict may be increased by how nationalists, seeking to revive past golden ages and restore their nations’ prestige, respond to incongruent borders. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Publicly funded international organizations have traditionally been cautious in engaging with the private sector. This contribution will study the different types of relationships of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – as a quasi-international organization – with the private sector. As illustrated, they are multi-faceted and relatively advanced. It will assess how the different types of interactions with the private sector have evolved over time and operate in practice. The contribution will also touch on how intergovernmental organizations that are members of the Alliance engage with the private sector as part of Gavi-funded activities. Some of those are complementary while for others intergovernmental organizations and private sector entities can be considered as alternatives.

Surface layer integrals are introduced as an adaptation of surface integrals to causal fermion systems and causal variational principles. Conservation laws are derived and formulated in terms of surface layer integrals.

The mass oscillation property is proved in Minkowski space using methods of scattering theory.

In Chapter 10, we shift the attention toward the right-peopling of states within their existing borders. We test conventional constructivist expectations by flipping the causal pathway back to ethnic settlements via ethnic cleansing. This is a crucial complement to our focus on border change since even a casual reading of European states’ violent history and our analyses suggest that much of their current ethnic homogeneity resulted from ethnic cleansing. We directly link ethnic cleansing to states’ fear of being right-sized. As rising nationalism in the nineteenth century threatened multiethnic states with the secessionism and irredentism examined in the preceding chapters, some states turned to ethnic cleansing to prevent territorial losses. To test this argument, we analyze our spatial data on changes in ethnic settlement areas from 1886 to the present, which we link to episodes of ethnic cleansing. Building on Chapters 7 and 8, we find that border-crossing groups and those with a history of lost home rule were most at risk of ethnic cleansing, especially in times of interstate war. The analysis closes the circuit and shows how right-peopling and right-sizing are part of the same macrohistorical process of nationalist state transformation.

Chapter 7 links specific violations of Gellner’s congruence principle to ethnonationalist conflict within and between states. While it is generally accepted that violations of state-nation congruence can cause conflict, less is known about which configurations increase the risk of either civil or interstate conflict, and how these conflict types interact. Inspired by Myron Weiner’s classic model of the Macedonian Syndrome, this chapter proposes an integrated theoretical framework that links specific nationality questions to both conflict types. Using our spatial data on state borders and ethnic settlements in Europe since 1816, we show that excluded and divided groups are more likely to rebel and, where they govern on only one side of the border, to initiate territorial claims and militarized disputes. Compounding the risk of conflict, rebellion, and interstate conflict reinforce each other where ethnic division coincides with partial home rule. We obtain similar, but weaker, findings for civil wars and territorial claims in a post-1945 global sample. After World War II, governments have typically shied away from engaging in interstate disputes to address nationality questions and instead support ethnic rebels abroad.

The introduction points out that changing human presence in the Pacific affected Japanese politics throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, the whaling boom of the 1820s to 1840s caused security anxieties among policymakers, while Japanese whalers by mid-century struggled with declining catch rates. Building on scholarship from Oceania, the introduction suggests thinking of Japan not as an island, but as a “Sea of Islands,” a terraqueous zone awash in currents such as the Kuroshio south of Honshu that allocate warmth, humidity, and nutrients and create a specific, though fluid, offshore geography in which consequential historical conflicts and competitions unfold. It lays out a set of questions that emerge from such framing and suggests conceptualizing the history of the Kuroshio’s catchment area as an oceanic frontier. This brings the historical significance of ocean, islands, and human travelers beyond the traditional human habitat to the fore. Since the seventeenth century, ongoing attempts at controlling this frontier has informed business practices and expansionist ideologies of Japan.

This chapter summarizes the aims, scope, and contents of the book. Both science and humanism have evolved over hundreds of years, and both are associated with influential forms of inquiry into the world. Throughout this evolution, humanism and science have been intimately connected, in ways that are crucial for thinking about whether, as a significant strand of humanist thought contends, the sciences can (or can be relied upon to) enhance the welfare of humans, other life, and the environment. It is clear that there is no necessary connection between scientific inquiry and social or moral progress; the sciences have facilitated both significant goods and significant harms. Faced today with pressing challenges to the well-being of people and the planet, our attitudes toward science call for renewed scrutiny. With chapters spanning the history of entanglements of forms of humanism and science up to the present, and case studies of the value implications of the sciences, this book asks us to think about what relationships between science and humanism we should build for the future.