The book concludes with the practical and theoretical implications of the study. The chapter shows that ZANU PF gained from a combined HIV/AIDS and migration exit premium of 5 percent in the 2000 and 2002 elections, 2 percent in the 2005 elections, 12 percent in the 2008 elections, and 4 percent in the 2013 elections. If not for voter exit, the opposition would have had more parliamentary seats and won the presidency in the disputed 2008 elections. This chapter also demonstrates that the theory of exit and party sustainability can be generalized to other states, including but not limited to Russia, Venezuela, and Syria—countries that have also experienced a mass exodus of citizens from authoritarian regimes. This chapter provides a brief comparison of the role of migrant voters in Ghana and the Gambia, where democracy struggled but ultimately thrived. I discuss the study’s policy implications, considering ongoing debates about the global immigration crisis.

A key challenge for the party since 1949 has been to forge a new Chinese nation within the boundaries of a vast, ethnically heterogeneous former empire. The party has experimented with a variety of policies and mechanisms for securing the loyalty and obedience of non-Han groups, shifting between accommodative and assimilative approaches depending on the broader political climate at any given time. Frustrated by continued ethnic unrest, which the party sees as a threat to social stability and its political legitimacy, the party has, in recent years, sought to fortify the unity of the nationalities via increasingly coercive administrative and technological measures. This chapter examines the coercive measures implemented by the CPC to guide and control China’s minority nationalities. These include controls over religion, language, traditional practices, minority nationality regions, and minority nationalities who ventured to other parts of China. The controls are designed to prevent ethnic protest and to forge a common Chinese ethnic identity that subsumes all other ethnic identities and which is united by loyalty to the party-state.

This chapter analyzes the impact of remittances – the money migrants living abroad send to their family members in the home country – on the survival of authoritarian regimes, particularly in developing countries where poor economic and political conditions lead people to exit en masse. Immigrants have remitted over $500 billion in the last decade, with much of the money flowing from high-income to low- and middle-income countries. In 2018 alone, officially tracked remittances to low- and middle-income countries reached $529 billion. The actual amount is probably more because much money is channeled via unofficial routes. Ethnographic data from family interviews shows that senders can bargain for or against political participation with their receivers. Parents of young adults were likely to discourage them from engaging in politics, fearing for their lives. Receivers could also opt out of political engagement because they did not see the government playing an essential role in their economic lives. Remittances also cushioned the government from possible voter protests and welfare demands.

Functionalism proposes that the translation process is guided by extra-linguistic factors, more specifically by the function of the translation. Chapter 2 reviews the theory of functionalism (based on Skopos theory, from the Greek skopos meaning “purpose”) and some basic notions associated with it, while also explaining how to apply them in translation practice and discussion. It addresses basic functionalist concepts: extralinguistic factors (also known as situational features) and how they shape both monolingual and translated texts; the translation brief and translation norms; changes in situational features, and how they influence and guide translation decisions; and the “lifecycle” of a commissioned translation. Examples and illustrations accompany the presentation. The chapter starts by considering the relationship between extra-linguistic factors and monolingual texts, progressing to translated texts and translation tasks.

The relation of subordination that characterises the contract of employment is created by the implied terms of the contract of employment such as the duty of obedience. Recently the courts have confirmed that both parties are under a duty not to destroy mutual trust and confidence and to perform the contract in good faith. The employee owes a duty of loyalty and both parties have to respect confidentiality. The chapter also examines the legal effect of breach of health and safety standards, tax law, immigration law and competition law on the enforceability of the contract of employment.

Failures of environmental law to preserve, protect and improve the environment are caused by law’s contingency and constitutional presumptions of supremacy over the self-regulatory agency of nature. Contingency problems are intrinsic to law and, therefore, invite deployment of technologies. Constitutional presumptions can be corrected through geo-constitutional reform. The latter requires the elaboration of geo-constitutional principles bestowing authority on nature’s self-regulatory agency. It is suggested that principles of autonomy, loyalty, pre-emption, supremacy and rights have potential to serve that aim and imply proactive roles for technologies in environmental governance. Geo-constitutional reform is necessary to prevent the fatal collapse of the natural regulatory infrastructure enabling life and a future of environmental governance by design. Once environmental catastrophe has materialized, however, geo-constitutionalism loses its raison d’être.

This chapter examines how the head of the Safavid order, originally a Sufi master, came to acquire the mantle of kingship. Using sociolinguistics to analyze the political language, the chapter explores how the Safavid leader maintained his ties with the Qizilbash tribal chiefs. Their power dynamic was underpinned by a set of moral codes, with the concept of shukr al-niʿma (obligation of gratitude) being central. The chiefs viewed their loyalty as a debt owed to the Safavid leader, who provided them with both material and spiritual benefits.

By the mid-fifteenth century, the Safavid order had militarized, emerging as a significant threat to regional powers like the Aqquyunlu, Qaraquyunlu, Shirvanshah, and later, the Ottomans. This provoked the deaths of key Safavid leaders – Sheikh Junayd, Haydar, and Sultan ʿAli – along with thousands of their followers, who were killed in battle or executed. Despite these devastating losses, the Safavid community’s loyalty to their cause remained steadfast.

By tracing the origin and evolution of the Safavid order, the book offers fresh insights into how religious and sociopolitical forces merged to create a powerful Shiʿi empire. Iran remains the only Shiʿi nation in the world today. Ideal for readers interested in Middle Eastern history, religious studies, and political thought, Mantle of the Sufi Kings is essential for anyone seeking to understand the complex roots of Iran’s identity.

Chapter 5 brings together a range of “voices” of Indian ayahs – ventriloquized voices, epistolary voices, and juridical voices – which provide rich first-person insights into their lives and perspectives. Indian ayahs’ care labor involved entertaining British children with fairy tales, which this chapter uses as an archive of the worldviews of ayahs. This chapter reproduces some rare unpublished handwritten letters from ayahs to their British employers, to let the voices of ayahs speak for themselves. The letters reveal how ayahs cultivated intimate epistolary relationships across imperial hierarchies of race and class. The letters also show how ayahs reiterated the British narrative of their fidelity and cannily deployed their own precarity to appeal to the sentiments of British employers, thereby securing monetary gifts during their old age. Inevitably, only voices that upheld the idealized ayah archetype were preserved by British employers in private archives. Voices of ayahs complaining about financial and sexual abuse, however, survive in the form of petitions and testimonies in official archives, which this chapter uses to provide a different side of ayahs’ experiences.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the war was a relatively united, patriotic struggle for liberty and freedom, generations of scholars have established that the American Revolution was a destructive and violent civil war – a conflict between former friends and neighbors who inhabited the same colonies and states. Through a survey of the relevant historical literature and an examination of the nature of this civil war in both the east and west of North America and the experiences of its participants, the chapter examines the continental and transatlantic scale and implications of this internecine feud, both for the British empire and for the United States of America. Yet, in discussing the experiences of African Americans and Native Americans, the chapter argues that labeling the Revolution as a civil war is but one part of the story. If the Revolution was a civil war, then the conflict was also an imperial crisis, war of independence, enslaved revolt, war of elimination against Indigenous peoples, counterrevolution, and insurgency. As it has become widely acceptable and fashionable to call the Revolution ‘America’s first civil war,’ vast, connective histories are required to pull these frameworks together into a new narrative that illuminates America’s past, present, and, perhaps, its possible futures.

In the digital economy, quality is increasingly becoming the predominant variable of competition. Markets are expected to seek out that state of affairs in which product quality rather than efficiency is maximized. But an effective conceptual resolution of what constitutes product quality is more complex and elusive than previously thought, and there has been a widespread repudiation of the notion that dominant online platforms can be held accountable for failing to deliver something that a single descriptive standard would command them to produce. Furthermore, microeconomic theory provides little guidance for evaluating how adjustments in the level of competition in a market have a bearing on product quality. This chapter suggests that claims relating to product quality can best be resolved by underscoring loyalty. Product quality, viewed from this perspective, provides a framework for assessing the behavior of digital platforms while at the same time legitimizing the manner in which zero-price markets operate. The issue is most prominent with regard to search engine rankings, privacy, and the sale of goods in online marketplaces.

I begin by highlighting three characteristics that ancient elites imagined that enslaved persons ought to have: usefulness, loyalty, and property. I start by noting how discourses of enslavement and utility are intertwined. The Shepherd’s concern for utility is most clearly expressed in its two visions of a tower under construction, in which enslaved believers are represented as stones who will be useful (or not) for the construction of the tower before the eschaton. Second, I turn to the concept of loyalty (pistis), suggesting that the Shepherd uses such language in a way that encourages God’s enslaved persons to exhibit loyalty to God at all costs. Finally, I point to how enslaved persons in antiquity were often characterized as commodified by placing the Shepherd alongside inscriptions about enslaved people from Delphi and documentary correspondence. Not only does the Shepherd portray its protagonist Hermas as lacking bodily autonomy while being exchanged between divine actors, but the text also calls on God’s enslaved persons to purchase other enslaved people who are imagined to be their physical property (e.g., as houses, fields) when they arrive in God’s city.