This chapter investigates why people join pro-oil campaigns. Attending to the case study of Canada’s Energy Citizens (CEC), the chapter argues that the campaign’s early stages relied on personal connections between members as much as fealty to a political cause. The fledgling campaign mobilized staff’s friends and coworkers, who joined as a show of collegial support. These bonds were solidified by shared feelings of precarity, with members believing that their own livelihoods and communities were dependent on the largesse of oil companies. It was the threat of losing their way of life – or more exactly, the perception that their way of life was under attack from environmentalists and legislators –that kept pro-oil campaigners mobilized. Joiners’ enthusiasm for supporting industry was often tempered by feelings of risk, however, as they worried about how becoming the face of Big Oil might affect their employability or personal relationships. Joiners also critiqued CEC’s focus on civility, which they believed undercut the effectiveness of the campaign.

While it has been argued that relational egalitarianism can capture the vulnerability to inequalities of people’s self-respect, the relationship between vulnerability and relational equality remains largely underexplored. In this chapter, I embark on this project, with a particular focus on risk. I argue that both risk and vulnerability capture situations in which there is a possibility of harm, but harm has not yet materialised and I claim that a number of situations in which one’s interests are at risk of harm matter for relational egalitarians. Sometimes risks and vulnerabilities amount to relationships of domination, in other cases exposure to risk, especially when unequal, signals a failure of the state to treat citizens as equals. Bringing together the literature on vulnerability and risk, which are rarely put in dialogue, is key in reflecting on the terms on which people are able to relate to each other as equals: this ex-ante outlook brings to the forefront the different ways in which risk and vulnerability not only can amount to objectionable forms of inequality but can also endanger equality. This, I argue, should lead relational egalitarians to regard the commitment to the robust protection of people’s equal status as central to their theory.

This chapter explores two kinds of vulnerability which appear to cause a problem for neo-republicanism as a form of relational egalitarianism: the vulnerabilities involved in intimate and caring relationships, and those generated by complex economic and social processes like the global financial system. I argue that the standard neo-republican strategy of constraining arbitrary power can successfully account for the former; the value of the vulnerabilities involved in intimate relations depends on the presence of constraints which prevent power being exercised in ways which do not track relevant interests. But this approach is less successful in dealing with the latter kind of vulnerability, which generates cases in which agents can be subject to domination without suffering the loss of status, and accompanying inequality, usually characteristic of domination. I argue that while these cases count as exceptions to the standard relationship between non-domination and egalitarianism, neo-republicanism remains a form of relational egalitarianism.

Mothers who kill their own children are unusual women whose offences often elicit fear, horror and condemnation in others. Psychiatrists may be asked to assess such women to explore the relationship between the offence and maternal mental illness, and the potential risk to other children. In this chapter, I discuss some available data on mothers who kill, in terms of criminal justice statistics, and review accounts of motives for such killings. I briefly discuss the legal processes that mother who kill must face, and the role of the psychiatrist. I then discuss some recent research about the role of maternal attachment security in relation to attitudes towards children and the transition to motherhood and the potential for psychological disorder that arise during that transition. I also comment on social factors, such as the role of partners and fathers. I conclude with some discussion about the management of cases where mental illness is a risk factor for filicide, and the associated child protection issues that may arise in such cases.

Under the extremes of Indian socialism, the financial system was a handmaiden for state control of the economy, directing resources according to the wishes of the government. State control was achieved through government ownership. A great deal has changed, with a first (1947–1992) and second (1992–2016) phase of central planning where there were conflicting themes of liberalization and enhanced state control. In many areas, private financial firms are now important. The full ecosystem of modern finance, with information processing and risk taking by private persons, blossomed in the equity market. For two decades there was a remarkable policy process that yielded gains in fields such as the equity market, pension reforms, bankruptcy code and so on. But alongside this there was the expansion of the ‘administrative state’ in the form of financial regulators. Regulators engage in micro-management of products and processes. While there is isomorphic mimicry with many things that look like a financial system, officials retain substantial control over how finance works. In a functional perspective, Indian finance today resembles the environment of the 1980s more than meets the eye.

Several themes shape the historiography of economics in western India in colonial times, including the history of ryotwari land tenure, international factors like the growing engagement of agriculture with the world markets via cotton exports, dependence on monsoon agriculture and the outbreak of famines and epidemics, and the industrialization of Bombay and Ahmedabad. Although these processes may seem disparate, there were also deep connections between them. The chapter offers an economic history integrating these processes, and shows how western India in the colonial period saw significant innovation and entrepreneurship in industry, in the broader context of an economy that remained largely agricultural, with low productivity and high risk.

This chapter provides a systematic introduction to the book.

The introduction sets out the central question and critical framework of this book. It presents the debates around the book’s three keywords: risk, play and Franco–East Asian literatures. It proposes a new comparative reading of world literature that is not based on canonicity, the global circulation of literature via English translations or identity categories.

This is the conclusion of the book. It reiterates my argument that in literature, risk is a necessary and creative force, an aesthetic category before anything else. It ends by proposing Franco–East Asian literatures as one form of world literature, one that is based on the aesthetic experience offered by particular texts, the potential for critical interactions between them and the imaginative comparison of literary traditions and areas that have traditionally been seen as separate.

Chapter 1, “Introduction,” welcomes you to day 1 of your new life as an upgrader. In this introduction we not only provide an overview of the book’s thesis for better problem solving and more effective technological advancement, we start to draw out the contours of what it means to be an Upgrader. This loosely nit cohort of changemakers has rejected both the inadequacy of the status quo and the destructiveness of innovation. Here, you’ll begin to learn what it means to solve some of the most urgent problems facing our society today through the lens of upgrades. We’ll also begin to provide examples of ways that innovations have fallen flat, or blown up completely, in the past. Crucially, upgraders aren’t just backseat drivers in the journey of social change, they are forward looking experts who are often able to see the dangers of pending innovations before they occur. In your life as an upgrader, you’ll not only be able to avoid these missteps yourself, but you’ll be able to see the innovation traps so many others are poised to fall into.

It would be ‘convenient’ to have a climate solution, where technological innovations fix the problem without any change to current institutions, structures, and lifestyles. However, even though we have some interesting options at lab scale, innovation must be scaled up to make a difference, and it is impossible between now and 2050 for the ‘convenient’ solution to be built at the necessary scale. In addition, there can be no physically meaningful offsets because trees take too long to grow and there are no realistic emissions-negating technologies. This book’s journey to zero emissions reduces technological risk to a minimum by assuming that only technologies that already exist at scale can help, and that they will be deployed only at rates comparable with recent history. This is not ‘convenient’ in that it involves some societal change and therefore we must find the courage to act. However, we can still have a high quality of life, and expand many of the activities we most value.