The first chapter places Coase, Pigou, and the US environmental policies examined in the volume in the broader context of the literature on the economics of institutional change. This academic research provides background for Coase and suggests the tradeoffs that emerge when decentralized approaches to economic problems are displaced by those of centralized regulation.

Making a safe climate for the generations that follow us requires that we reduce our emissions to zero, at least at a steady rate, and by 2050. We can take five steps to deliver this change: understand our emissions; anticipate the moments when we take important decisions about big purchases; gather good information about the way we cause emissions in daily life; reflect on how our emissions trade off with other priorities; and re-think the main priorities and goals of our life. Living with zero emissions does not require misery, but requires restraint that can be life-enhancing, and the seed for new creativity and fulfilment.

Inventories across the continent differ little, except in the north-east (Cape York Peninsula). From a typological perspective, there are a number of patterns that are common in Australia, but uncommon elsewhere. A significant number of Australian languages show a four-way coronal place opposition. The great majority of Australian languages have only one obstruent series; neither [continuant] nor [voice] are contrastive for obstruents. Typically, obstruents and nasals show the same set of place oppositions: there are as many nasals as obstruents. We discuss the evidence for various natural classes within the consonant and vowel inventories. The characteristics of coronal place oppositions are discussed in detail, drawing on evidence from perception, neutralisations, alternations, distributions, and acoustics. We discuss arguments for featural analyses on articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual bases. Also examined are complex articulations (pre-nasalised stops, pre-stopped nasals) and contrasts based on laryngeal mechanisms (the fortis/lenis contrast, the glottal stop).

Conflicts with adversaries can sometimes be unavoidable. Decision making in conflict can be unpleasant, stressful, and troubling. Success in an adversarial situation will not necessarily be achieved by the participant with the better initial position, but rather by the decision maker who is experienced in conflict situations, understands the dynamics of conflict, and is able to outsmart their adversary. This chapter differentiates between interests, disputes, and conflicts. Methods for conflict resolution are outlined as well as strategies for prevailing in a conflict. The chapter summarizes institutions in society where some disputes or conflicts may be addressed. Important structural similarities found in many disputes and conflicts are highlighted, including the different approaches of offense and defense, and the impact of timing and movement. Whether the parties to the conflict are individuals, corporations, or nations confronting each other at a negotiating table, a courtroom, or in a military battlespace, many of the strategies, dynamics, and interactions are the same.

The question of when to initiate and conduct negotiations concerns the conditions in which the parties are ready to talk about the fundamental issues. This can be described as an opportune moment in the course of the mediation effort. It also raises the question of where the negotiations should take place, how the format of the negotiations in practical terms should be arranged, who should represent the different sides in the conflict, what the mediator should communicate to the public, and which issues should be taken up at the negotiating table. The answers to these questions, along with all their underlying problems, must be drafted by the mediator after contacting the parties and inquiring into their actual positions on them. These questions are the foundation of mediation diagnostics. There is variation across the Nordic mediators in how they handle the different diagnostic questions. Sometimes the mandate of the mediators sets specific requirements in terms of underlying questions, but usually the mandate is more open and it is up to the mediators themselves to ascertain the optimal design of the process.

As in music, stress and accent in natural language are phenomenal prominences. A phenomenal prominence is always the most salient aspect of an acoustic contrast. A stress or accent might consist of a higher pitch, a greater amplitude, or a longer duration. It might also arise from differences in aspiration, vowel quality, or voicing. The primary purpose of stress and accent is to indicate a form’s temporal structure. It does this by indicating the positions of metrical prominences on the metrical grid. When phenomenal prominences correspond to metrical prominences, as they do in both music and language, they indicate the locations of metrical prominences and overall temporal organization. The key difference between metrical patterns in music and metrical patterns in language is that the former are typically more cyclic – or repetitive – than the latter with a more even distribution of prominences. Metrical organization is always rich and constructed automatically. Even when presented with a series of identical isochronous pulses, a hearer will automatically construct an analysis with multiple metrical levels. Stress and accent indicate which metrical analysis a listener should construct. This typically requires minimal information. A single accent per form can distinguish between the four perfect grid patterns, the simplest binary metrical patterns.

Chapter 9 summarizes the main points addressed in previous chapters. The main issues addressed in Chapter 1 are phenomenal prominence, metrical prominence, and the relationship between them. Chapter 2 addresses the Prosodic Hierarchy and structural prominence. Chapter 3 examines the typology of word stress. Chapter 4 examines two correspondence relationships: the relationship between prosodic categories and grid entries and the relationship between syntactic categories and prosodic categories. Directionality effects are addressed in Chapter 5, and grid well-formedness are addressed in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 examines boundary effects, and Chapter 8 focuses on feet.

Chapter 5 focuses on the different temporalities that are interwoven in the station, feeding into everyday experiences and informing patterns of action. In Accra’s station, just as in most bus stations in Ghana, departures do not follow designated scripts dictated by clock time; instead, they are collectively timed by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow different rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served by the station. By detailing the daily work activities of an inexperienced and an experienced station worker, it teases out different levels of perceptual attunement to movement and rhythm taking shape hundreds of kilometres away. It argues that the tacit dimension of temporal and kinaesthetic enskilment highlights important qualities needed to make hustle successful, which essentially requires the ability to ‘read’ the different rhythms of eruptive situations and to align and time one’s actions accordingly.

As children learn more about language, they use it more effectively to achieve their conversational goals. They choose appropriate speech acts, establish joint attention, contribute new information, take up information from others, and take turns. They learn how to enter an exchange among others from as young as age two. Their intrusions in ongoing exchanges typically contain new information. Planning an utterance takes time, and children learn to plan what to say so as to take turns on time. This can be tracked in their answers to yes/no and wh- questions, where they get faster with age. They plan pretend play, assigning roles, assigning actions, and also utterances for each character enacted. They track common ground and design referring expressions for their addressees, and they repeat new words to mark uptake. They distinguish requests from offers, and, on occasion, persist in making repeated requests themselves. They clarify what they mean when asked and offer spontaneous repairs as well. In all this, they track what the others in the exchange say and choose when to enter the exchange themselves.

The best public speakers use a series of tricks to enchant an audience. They are revealed in this chapter and include: incorporating interactions to make a crowd feel part of the performance, signposting to continually refresh interest, the showbusiness of magic moments for truly memorable talks, the use of commanding body language, how to deal with nerves and preparing for the question and answer session.

This chapter introduces the forty-six policy episodes that we study in detail. We present their timing, their politicization, and their substantive focus. The association between politicization and pressure, both problem and political pressures, proves to be rather variable across member states and looser than expected. We account for this finding by taking into account the endogenous political dynamics during the crisis. Policy responses at the national level were not only required by the failure of the CEAS and by the inability of the leaders to adopt joint solutions at the EU level, they were also the result of a series of endogenous factors at the national level, which operated independently of problem pressure and, in part at least, created the political pressure in the first place. The strategies of political entrepreneurs – Orbán, Salvini, Seehofer, and Erdogan – most clearly fit this bill, but anticipation of crisis situations to come, legislative cycles, conspicuous events like terrorist attacks, and sequels of policy decisions made earlier in the crisis all contributed to these endogenous dynamics.

This chapter contains four parts. To some, questions of time and politics may appear extraneous – they may be valid issues to study but not a central concern for contemporary IR, much less a necessary one. For them, it is just another area of study and deciding whether to pursue it is a matter of personal choice. The first section shows how international politics and time are already intertwined and argues that time impacts the main issues of concern for IR. The second shows how IR is “stuck in the past” – even as it furiously gestures toward the future – because it theorizes temporality and time as universal and linear, privileging the past, all while resisting thinking about the present. The third section briefly introduces what I call presentism, an alternative temporal imaginary for IR that explicitly values the present, thinks in time, and resists naturalizing the contemporary political dominance of universal, linear time. The final section outlines the rest of the book, identifying theoretical and conceptual implications, concretizing both by showing how it enables a different perspective on war, American foreign policy during the Trump administration, and IR’s primary theoretical architectures.