The Introduction sets the scene by outlining the lives of the book’s main protagonists, young women in Calabar, and the types of uncertainty that shape their lives. The discussion builds up an understanding of the complex and opaque social terrain that these young women must deftly navigate as they work towards a future marked by marriage. In urban Nigeria, the belief in the unseen compounds other political, economic, and physical uncertainties that shape everyday life, contributing to an understanding that nothing is ever quite as it seems. The discussion outlines how young women, far from only falling victim to the irregularities of life in Calabar, turn uncertainty into a resource that they can use to manage their reputations and realise their much hoped-for futures. As well as establishing how the book contributes to anthropological and Africanist literature on uncertainty, the Introduction also opens the debate on the time of youth in Africa by focusing on feminine livelihoods and respectability. The Introduction also provides context of fieldwork and research methodology and provides a chapter outline of the rest of the book.

Drawing together the previous chapters’ discussions of feminine respectability, the Conclusion focuses on the tensions young women experience as they attempt to reconcile personal ambition with societal expectations and as they navigate quotidian life in the city alongside the longer-term objectives of ending their single status. The Conclusion reiterates the book’s two arguments, articulating how feminine youthhood is a period shaped by contingencies, which not only render young women vulnerable but also encourage them to contribute to the uncertainties that shape urban life in contemporary Nigeria. While the previous chapters have discussed how dissimulation, illusion, and concealment shape young women’s lives, and the ambiguous attitudes young women have towards these forms of uncertainty, the Conclusion questions when the fake is categorically immoral. Doing so, young women are inserted into a broader discussion of the means of sustaining, as well as the perceived threats to, social reproduction in urban Nigeria.

The multi-contingency model frames organizational design as a continuous executive task shaped by globalization, digitalization, AI, sustainability, and shifting societal expectations. It identifies nine interdependent components – goals and scope, strategy, environment, configuration, leadership, climate, task design and agents, coordination and control, and incentives and people – whose alignment drives performance. Extending traditional contingency theory, it integrates insights from economics, information processing, and organizational theory, viewing organizations as systems that manage complexity by balancing information-processing demand and capacity. This can mean reducing demand (e.g., modularization, predictive tools) or increasing capacity (e.g., AI, lateral communication, skilled talent). Examples from Microsoft, Aarhus University, Danish healthcare, Uber, and luxury fashion brands show how design adapts to digital innovation, sustainability, and agility. A seven-step method supports the model: getting started, strategic positioning, structuring, defining agents and leadership dynamics, setting coordination and incentives, finalizing architecture, and implementing change.

A tort is a special kind of wrongdoing. ‘Tort’ is a legal term that describes a particular category of interpersonal wrongdoing dealt with by the civil justice system. The law of torts covers a wide range of different types of misconduct, including many torts with well-known names like ‘assault’, ‘battery’, ‘trespass to land’, ‘defamation’ and ‘negligence’. The task of defining the word ‘tort’ is notoriously difficult, given that more than 70 torts are known to the common law world, each with a different focus and a distinctive set of elements to protect different personal interests.

Curiously, there does not appear to be any shared identifying characteristic nor any unified set of interests that the law of torts seeks to protect to the exclusion of any other area of the law. The search for a clear definition is further complicated by the constant state of development of the law of torts. Some torts are outdated and no longer recognised in Australia, while others that have existed in other common law jurisdictions for many years have not yet been widely accepted here.

Central banks are promising a more climate-based focus on matters ranging from communication to prudential regulation and supervision, including monetary policy. The chapter examines the various arguments that analyze whether the European Central Bank (ECB) can tackle climate change, in light of its mandates. In our view, climate change fits within the narrower central bank mandates, focused on price stability, while other ‘peripheral’ mandates and ‘transversal’ environmental principles can play a supporting role. Prudential regulation and supervision can also be a main point for assimilation. Finally, we examine the considerations of courts of climate change when scrutinizing governmental action and compare them to the considerations of courts of ECB acts. We conclude that the integration of sustainability considerations, and especially climate change, into the ECB price stability mandate seems to be on relatively firm legal ground.

This chapter introduces entropy as a fundamental measure of information, linking it to uncertainty and informational tasks.

Chapter 2 develops a theory explaining when states pursue arms control agreements and why they choose different levels of monitoring provisions. It argues that domestic political volatility in adversary states creates uncertainty about their incentives for cooperation, making formal agreements more likely through two distinct pathways. The "hedging" pathway occurs when states become uncertain about previously cooperative opponents and pursue low monitoring agreements rather than relying on informal coordination. The "risking" pathway emerges when states become uncertain about previously competitive opponents and pursue high monitoring treaties to cautiously seek cooperation benefits. The theory is built on a game theoretic model that analyzes how states select monitoring provisions based on their beliefs about adversary types and implementation challenges. The chapter identifies two key sources of domestic volatility that drive uncertainty: leadership/elite turnover and public pressure on governments. The theory generates testable hypotheses about when states will pursue agreements and what monitoring levels they will select, conditional on their baseline beliefs about adversary intentions. This framework provides new insights into the relationship between domestic politics, uncertainty, and international security cooperation.

This chapter estimates the distribution of cases among the categories of stasis established in Chapter 9, as well as two additional subcategories, using a blend of qualitative and (especially) quantitative analysis. Broadly speaking, it shows that only a miniscule minority of staseis involved the most extreme type of violence (internal war); that a larger minority involved less-extreme-but-still-bloody forms of violence, such as mass executions and battles; and that a majority relied exclusively on types of violence that limited the number of fatalities, such as assassinations, betrayals, and expulsions.

Clinical ethics consultation was requested by the intensive care unit regarding a young woman with a near full-term pregnancy on the brink of COVID respiratory failure. She refused lifesaving mechanical ventilation, as she embraced the religious instruction of her upbringing to distrust religious outsiders and instead allow God to personally direct her choices. A psychiatrist determined that her beliefs were atypical, but she had medical decision-making capacity to refuse ventilation. Without it, her intensivist team anticipated her death along with the fetus within hours. Ethical consultation weighed the following: rights to bodily autonomy; standards of informed refusal; religious coping; nonabandonment and trust; moral distress and sympathetic regret. With her permission, the ethics consultant contacted her family, who were dismayed by her choices and reached out to persuade her otherwise. Within hours, she provided consent for ventilation and cesarean section; despite these, she required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for ten days. Ultimately, she and her healthy newborn were discharged home. In follow up, she described no regrets over her care nor distrust of her providers. The clinical ethicist is haunted by the uncertainties of the practice of medicine and ethics, as well as by missteps in the consultation process