Mediation ends in three distinct ways: achievement of the mandate, for instance in the form of a peace agreement; termination by the mediator, by the term limits given by the mandator, or by the warring parties themselves, in effect undermining the third party; or due to external events such as changes in conflict dynamics or concerns about the mediator’s security (threats or assassination). These possible endings are explored using concrete cases.

Leonard Peltier was convicted in 1977 for the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Despite allegations of governmental misconduct and questionable legal rulings, the conviction was affirmed on appeal by several federal courts. After nearly fifty years in prison, Peltier was granted clemency by President Biden in 2025 and allowed to finish his sentence under home confinement. This chapter recounts Peltier’s background, his involvement with the American Indian Movement, and the events surrounding the incident at Pine Ridge. His memoir, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, was published in 1999. The chapter examines the book’s experimental, transgressive form and its subversion of standard memoir style and structure. Prison Writings utilizes a nonlinear structure, multiple voices, surreal elements, and political and legal analyses, as well as the inclusion of poetry and photographs. Peltier also incorporates Native history and social issues as well as a critique of carceral standards in the federal prison system.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

In this chapter three prison memoirs are recalled, detailing the stories of three men that significantly shaped the civil rights revolution during the 1960s. Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver wrote about their lives before prison, during the struggle, in prison, and after prison. They tell the story of the Black Panther Party and introduce the readers to their deepest feelings about life in America as oppressed Black men fighting for liberation. Nonetheless, their history stands apart

from other people who have written about this period simply because their personal journeys led them to prison and jail where these narratives were organized, outlined, and composed

as prison memoirs.

This chapter explores how mediation starts, using different concrete examples from the Nordic mediation experience to illustrate the complexities around mediation selection and initiation. It addresses a number of central questions: Why do the warring parties want mediation? Why do belligerents choose Nordic mediators? Why do the Nordic countries want to mediate? Which individuals are chosen as mediators? Why do international organizations appoint mediators from the Nordic countries? We also discuss the issue of perceived bias in mediation and how potential mediators can manage and relate to such perceptions. The key finding of the chapter is that the mediation selection process is closely associated with how the mandate for mediation is formed. In this chapter, we show how the formation of a mandate can be a multifaceted process and mediation efforts can be initiated in many ways, including through direct appeals to governments from the parties to a conflict. The Nordic countries’ mediation efforts constitute an interesting cross-section of these initiatives.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.

Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and – against their will – to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.