This chapter examines how Sophoclean tragedy approaches and conceptualises the relationship between divine and mortal. It demonstrates that Sophocles builds on the early Greek theological, philosophical and literary tradition outlined in Chapter 1, but steers his own, distinctive course. It argues that Sophocles’ tragedies deploy ideas and beliefs about humans and gods in three, closely interconnected ways: in the explicitly theological and philosophical discourse uttered by characters and choruses; in the trajectories and experiences of individual characters on the stage; and in the broader, religious and ethical patterns that underlie these trajectories, which are occasionally and partially revealed to audiences. As part of its attempt to foreground the close interrelation of dramatic structure, form and content, the chapter devotes considerable space to a new interpretation of dramatic irony. This general discussion relies on readings of four Sophoclean plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, Ajax, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, as well as on brief comparative analyses of some Aeschylean and Euripidean examples.

This chapter discusses the circumstances of Ginsberg’s arrival and deportation from Czechoslovakia in 1965. Although it is often thought otherwise, Ginsberg did in fact have long-formed plans to travel behind the Iron Curtain, and his expulsion from Cuba only expedited, rather than facilitated, his arrival to Europe. During his stay in Czechoslovakia, Ginsberg had the opportunity to look behind the façade of the Communist Party and observed firsthand that Czechoslovaks lived in an oppressive regime they increasingly tried to challenge through various means, one of them being the publication and performance of Beat poetry. However, he underestimated the surveillance practices of the regime, which only intensified after Ginsberg was elected the King of May in front of a 100,000-strong crowd during May Day celebrations. Ultimately, his often frank discussion of his views and experiences not only placed several of his associates in danger, but also led to his deportation from the country.

Chapter 8 tests the cross-regional validity of the refined theory by tracing processes in Ecuador and Peru and comparing them with patterns in Slovakia and Poland. After a brief discussion of antecedent conditions and crises before critical periods of major market reform, I assess neoliberal junctures in Ecuador and Peru with special attention to the hypothetically crucial variations in terms of political agency. The next two sections analyze divergent path dependencies that stemmed from nuanced juncture contingencies, ultimately showing that illiberal tendencies in the Andes were shaped in ways consistent with theoretical expectations. Finally, I compare the South American and Eastern European cases by focusing on the mechanisms of production and reproduction linking neoliberal junctures and subsequent illiberal tendencies. Contrary to prior research, I conclude that Andean illiberalism’s capacities to be politically dominant and to be contestatory vis-à-vis liberal democracy are, as in Eastern Europe, best understood as distinct adaptations to societal reactions resulting from prior historical contingencies. By offering a theoretically grounded comparative account, this chapter invites new ways of thinking about developments after neoliberal reforms in Latin America.

Alcohol and other drug use (AOD) use tends to hold a privileged position within legal decision-making (Seear, 2020; Flacks, 2023), and the criminal case of R v Taj (2018) was no exception. The defendant, who was – it was agreed by all parties – experiencing paranoia and psychosis, launched a violent attack on a man he suspected of being a terrorist. Mr Taj had been drinking on eve of the incident, and the night before that, but tests on the day found no trace of alcohol in his bloodstream. He was nevertheless unable to plead self-defence on the basis that he honestly believed there was a risk to life and limb because, successive courts argued, he was already at fault for drinking alcohol, which led to the psychotic thoughts. There were some significant and potentially far-reaching claims in the case, including that intoxication-related behaviour does not require the presence of alcohol in the body, and that psychosis can be caused by alcohol alone. This allowed the court to conclude that Mr Taj was wholly responsible for his actions and so could not claim excuse or mitigation.

The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s arguments and findings and discusses their implications. Whether we seek to understand the electoral viability of illiberal forces or their behavior in power, the legacies of critical junctures of market reform remain pivotal. Crucially, as institutional developments entail the interplay between historical legacy and human agency, illiberal outcomes unfold in the probabilistic shadow of prior neoliberal deepening. The chapter closes with a discussion of (1) the study’s contributions to research in the tradition of Karl Polanyi; (2) the social bases and neoliberal adaptations of illiberal incumbents; (3) the legacies of Eastern Europe’s transition to democracy and the market; and (4) the crisis of liberalism and the Left. Although intense market reforms have failed to produce democratic stability and illiberals have kept finding ways to opportunistically exploit neoliberalism to their own advantage, the book ends on an optimistic note. Far from inevitable, the illiberal challenge can be countered – and democracies strengthened – if forward-thinking political agents learn from past experiences and progressive examples, build parties around new ethical principles, and focus on delivering economic well-being to broad social coalitions.

While Sancho discussed slavery in his letters decades before British opposition to that institution coalesced and became institutionally codified, he undeniably took a firmly anti-slavery and anti-racist stance in his manuscript correspondence. He used his familiar letters to critique and oppose slavery as a practice and an institution as well as to reject and undermine the validity of emerging concepts of “race” in an effort to oppose their effects in the world. Three core strategies emerge: first, satirizing and critiquing the metaphorical mapping of moral character onto skin color in the service of white supremacy; second, reappropriating and resignifying animal metaphors and racial tropes to undermine their efficacy in subjugating humans and non-humans alike within a slaving society; and third, recovering self-determination and agency for Black subjects by asserting ownership over his own body through the manual labor of writing.

Chapter 6 explores developments in Czechia and Romania and once again assesses the validity of the book’s central argument – now by using a more qualitative approach to comparison. I begin by tracing processes in these two countries, where, following aligning junctures, mainstream leftist parties critiqued and moderated neoliberalism, thus remaining electorally strong and effectively constraining the electoral prospects of illiberals during most of the 2000–20 period. I then engage in comparisons with Slovakia and Poland to reassess the study’s core proposition vis-à-vis rival explanations of voting for illiberal parties. As the evidence supports the postcommunist juncture theory, I emphasize, on the one hand, the linkages between critical periods of early market reform and parties’ subsequent programmatic positions and, on the other hand, the relevance specifically of economic statism in terms of illiberalism’s chances of electoral success. Moving beyond the four cases, the final section offers a panoramic view of developments in Eastern Europe, which affirms the theorized linkages between postcommunist junctures, the evolution of the Left, and illiberalism’s electoral viability. With its focus on divergent legacies and comparative analysis, the chapter offers much evidence in support of the book’s main argument.

Chapter 2 develops the book’s core theoretical framework. After discussing some relevant literature that focuses on the significance of historical legacy and political agency in Eastern Europe, I turn to political economy, sociological, and anthropological perspectives influenced by the work of Karl Polanyi and then elaborate on the Latin American parallel. Next, I define postcommunist junctures and locate fifteen Eastern European countries in three categories, depending on who led the charge for and against market reforms during relevant periods. The chapter then develops the book’s central argument, according to which distinct political configurations during junctures led to persistently varying odds of illiberal electoral viability via a two-step process. Concretely, postcommunist junctures shaped divergent path dependencies on the Left, which, in turn, conditioned subsequent antiestablishment parties’ programmatic choices and probabilities of electoral success. As in Latin America, illiberal outcomes in Eastern Europe were products of contingencies during neoliberal junctures. Unlike Latin America's key market reform periods, postcommunist junctures triggered a more specific mechanism, in which the status of the Left is a crucial intervening variable.

Sellars, like Kant, adopts a conception of what is required for experience which makes it seem as if nonhuman animals could not have experience. This follows from what I call the Sellars–Kant Principle (SKP): the experience of a world requires an integrated holistic interpretation of the world and of oneself as a subject in that world. Nonhuman animals seem to lack the conceptual resources for such interpretation and hence would seem to be unable to experience the world. I argue that the SKP should be replaced by what I call the Activity Domain Principle: the experience of a domain requires an integrated holistic interpretation of a domain and of oneself as an agent in that domain. I distinguish three different kinds of the ADP: ADP-A (animal agency), ADP-M (mental agency), and ADP-D (discursive agency). This allows us to accept what is right in the Sellars–Kant rejection of empiricism while avoiding the implication that nonhuman animals lack experience tout court.

Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.

Chapter 3 constructs the broad and historicised conceptualisation of mitigation politics by building on, critiquing and combining insights from constructivist political economy; climate policy, political economy of transitions; and socio-technical transitions research. The aim of this chapter is to present a perspective on mitigation politics that at once allows for analysis of different phases of climate mitigation policymaking and politics over time, recognises and incorporates mitigation-related constraints and opportunities, and takes account of a wide range of features of politics – collective choice, agency and capacity, deliberation, and social interaction. Doing so also offers up a more nuanced and detailed account of different but related varieties of politicisation – and how they interact with one another. The following four chapters apply this broad, inclusive, and historicised framing to explore and interpret different phases of constructing mitigation policies that have emerged over the past 40 years or so.

This chapter focuses on the influence of women in Neruda’s life and poetry. Starting from the poet’s assertion that his life is made up of all lives, and the unfortunate passage in his memoirs that the Chilean feminist movement interpreted as the sublimation of a rape, it analyzes Neruda’s poetic work and the accounts of Teresa Vásquez, Albertina Azócar, Laura Arrué, Josie Bliss, Marijke Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang, Delia del Carril, Matilde Urrutia, and Alicia Urrutia, who accompanied him at different times in his life, to demonstrate that women always had agency in Neruda’s work and life. They were more than muses. It also shows how Neruda dialogued with the poetic work of women poets who preceded him, as in the case of Alfonsina Storni.

This chapter explores the relationships between regulations (laws, senatorial decrees) and female visibility in Republican Rome. The focus is on the earliest epigraphic and literary evidence for regulations mentioning women, citizen and non-citizen. Key examples include the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (186 BCE), one of the Clusium Fragments (late second to early first century BCE), the lex Osca Tabulae Bantinae (100–91 BCE), the Tabula Heracleensis (post-Social War), the lex Coloniae Genetivae (59 to 44 BCE), as well as Cicero’s references to a lex on female mourning from the XII Tabulae (Twelve Tables), the lex Voconia of 169 BCE and the pontifical responsum and senatus consultum on the Vestal Licinia in 123 BCE. These are compared with Republican regulations attested in later sources. This chapter argues that these regulations rendered some women visible, both physically and symbolically, and that they offer us valuable insight into women’s agency, authority and property in the Roman Republic.

This chapter delves into female influence on money and wealth from an individual perspective, using the concept of matronage as a framework. Cicero, who was often burdened by financial concerns, had two women as intermediaries: his wife Terentia and Teucris, possibly to be identified with Mucia Tertia. Mucia, by leveraging her personal and familial wealth, showcased remarkable agency in strategically deploying capital during her marriages to Pompey and Scaurus. Her career and influence highlight the power of matronage, particularly in times of crisis, when Scaurus relied on her network. The chapter calls for a re-evaluation of sources, which often take an androcentric perspective and neglect the significant role of women in power structures and their impact on political and economic events. Mucia epitomizes many elite women who exercised decisive influence through their networks and resources.

Intermediary actors are key catalysts in accelerating sustainability transitions. Since 2019, the academic literature on intermediaries and intermediation has expanded rapidly, leading to inconsistent usage, proliferating lists of activities, and questions about their impact on transition processes. These challenges risk making the concept fuzzy and less accessible while limiting its practical relevance. This chapter provides an accessible introduction to intermediaries in sustainability transitions, followed by a historical account of the concept’s development. It then presents empirical examples of intermediaries and their activities, highlighting a key gap: the lack of an explicit theory on why intermediaries exist in transition processes. To address this, we position intermediaries alongside other actors, such as system entanglers, orchestrators, and champions. This chapter concludes by outlining future research directions, emphasizing the need to move beyond individual intermediaries to ecologies of intermediation as transitions accelerate and interact.

This chapter surveys modern experiences with irregular warfare from the Second World War until today. Specific attention is paid to the ‘golden age of counterinsurgency’ during the Cold War as well as its more recent ‘renaissance’ and expansion, to include counterterrorism, in Iraq, Afghanistan and globally. The themes here are continuity and change: the former in the shape of relatively unchanging principles based on best practices, and the latter in terms of organisational adaptation, most frequently in the form of specialised units. The chapter identifies and explores four pathologies related to irregular warfare that make countering or conducting it difficult, including mistaking ways for ends, politicisation, over-inflating or mirror-imaging an opponent and the agency of groups too often assumed to be under your control. It concludes by addressing myths associated with specialised forces and irregular warfare and suggests that success results from understanding this form of warfare’s highly political nature.