This chapter introduces the ‘structuralist’ form of political settlements analysis employed in this book. The political settlements framework, initially developed by Mushtaq Khan, has gained increasing popularity but has evolved in very different directions. Political settlements analysis (PSA) was appealing to scholars because it encouraged analysis of power relations shaping development policy, highlighting how distributions of power among organised groups shaped how institutions operated. Influential donor-funded research programmes have aligned it more with neoclassical economics, and this has led to the obfuscation of the structuralist and historical materialist roots of the framework. This chapter elaborates the structuralist and historical materialist roots of political settlements analysis. It highlights the differences between non-structuralist and structuralist approaches to political settlements analysis in relation to the concept of holding power and its components: economic structure, rents, ideas and ideology, and violence and conflict. The chapter highlights how PSA can be used to help understand the contemporary transnational nature of vulnerabilities shaping late-development challenges.

This chapter provides a snapshot of Rwanda’s evolving political settlement and economic development trajectory. The chapter begins by highlighting significant structural vulnerabilities that shaped Rwanda’s domestic politics historically, including ethnicity-based inequalities and political contestation, historical divisions associated with the royal family and aristocracy, refugee issues, inadequate employment opportunities and regional inequalities. It then highlights the rapid growth that took place in Rwanda over the last three decades, which has also been accompanied by significant export diversification. It then provides a brief political settlement analysis of present-day Rwanda, highlighting how development is being contested transnationally, pointing to the key vulnerabilities characterising its hub-based strategy. In particular, it describes how increased elite vulnerability has meant that the government has been reluctant to support domestic capital. As a result, the Rwandan government has failed to develop effective state–business relations aimed at achieving structural transformation.

This chapter turns to the collapse of moral judgment Arendt saw in the early weeks of the Third Reich, and which she connects to the collapse of common sense and adherence to conspiracy theories in mass societies. The chapter draws on The Origins of Totalitarianism, coupled with contemporary “virtue epistemology” – the study of intellectual virtues and vices and their relation to knowledge. Arendt, I argue, is an exceptionally insightful virtue epistemologist. The chapter analyzes Arendt’s account of how European social conditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to the collapse of common sense in the face of a barrage of political lies. She warns that “if everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore.” The result is a dangerous mix of gullibility and cynicism, what in the chapter I label culpable credulousness.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

The introduction begins with the book’s central argument: Egyptian cultural and media institutions have constructed a coherent state project after the 1952 revolution through a praxis of ‘achievement’ (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). Inspired by the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state, the book intervenes in the longstanding historiography on the Nasser era to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance have worked to create a unified state-idea after 1952, while constituting a bureaucratic corps on a similar ideological basis. Such bureaucrats, as well as higher-ranking officials and ministers, are central actors in the book’s narrative. The introduction also reviews the book’s main sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival visits in institutional repositories and personal libraries, as well as regular dives into the second-hand book market in Cairo.

The epilogue examines the persistence of the term ‘achievements’ in Egyptian governmental media today, which is indicative of the concept’s resilience. This persistence raises an important question around the social and historical reasons undergirding the continuity of achievement praxis. Why are cultural and media institutions reproducing the achievement state in Egypt? The answer would seem to be that the current bureaucratic apparatus inherited, via institutional means, certain ways of thinking and working established after the 1952 revolution. This simple answer belies my ethnographic experience, because contemporary bureaucrats – with few exceptions – have a very faint sense of the history of the bureaucratic apparatus prior to their own entry into the workforce. A more likely answer, I suggest, is that the institutional context within which bureaucrats work did not change in some identifiable ways since 1952. The continuity of achievement praxis is tied to the institutional environment in which it thrives, rather than a conscious will among state officials transmitted across generations.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies that have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

Social democracy may sometimes present itself as technocratic, but within its wider world of meaning, there are beliefs that speak to more radical change, even upheaval. The world of social democratic ideology is one of possibility, rather than something narrowly circumscribed. Using Charles Taylor’s concept of ‘common meanings’, this chapter explores the multifaceted nature of social democracy, which is significant for understanding how adaptable it has been as an ideological tradition. In elaborating what social democrats – and people on the centre-left more broadly – can think, the chapter presents analyses of literature from the twentieth and twenty-first century, with novels and poetry as representations of our social world. Rather than making empirical claims about what social democratic ideology is right now in a particular country or political party, the chapter explores the possible beliefs – very recognisable ones – of social democrats, and how those beliefs shed some light on the everyday dilemmas that people on the left of politics encounter. Three broad, common meanings of clear relevance to the world of social democracy are identified: money, class, and indignation. All three are discussed in relation to dilemmas social democratic actors must consider in contemporary politics.

The future will see a perpetuation of the present coexistence of unbalanced bipolarity, polycentrism, and emergent regional multipolarity. As in the past, twenty-first-century world politics will be chiefly defined by competition among the powerful. Asia is the only region where the world’s heaviest hitters come into steady and direct contact with one another. As such, it presents the maximum risk for major-power war. Most critical is the direction of the U.S.–China relationship, and this, in turn, will be significantly affected by China’s power trajectory. More broadly, geoeconomic competition and status challenges will be persistent features of international politics, as established and emerging powers try to keep up with changes in relative power and technology. The disintegration of power and principle will also continue apace, impeded by the fact that internationalist principles and institutions are themselves deeply heterogenous. Nevertheless, the future should be bright, presenting only a moderate-to-low risk of conflict. States can best navigate future risks and dangers by muddling through rather than straight-jacketing themselves by means of a grand strategy.

This chapter examines the ideological origins and political impact of the American concept of the “free world.” From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, “free world leadership” served as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. Although American officials imagined the “free world” as the self-evident expression of international liberalism, they defined it negatively as equivalent to the entire “non-communist world.” Cold War liberals’ persistent failure to fill the “free world” with positive content forced them to maintain a series of inflexible and ultimately counterproductive positions, including an intolerance of nonalignment, a commitment to global containment, and an axiomatic insistence on the enduring and existential nature of the Soviet threat. Although the “free world” mostly fell out of circulation after the 1960s, the logic of the concept has continued to underpin an American project of global “leadership” that derives its purpose and extent from the prior identification of a single extraordinary threat.