This chapter illustrates and interprets the transformation of Segesta. More than any other Indigenous settlement in Sicily, this site was rapidly transformed in the span of about a century from a small community into a true polis, equal to its colonial Greek counterparts. The focus is on two of the three sacred areas of Segesta dating to Archaic and Classical periods, namely the sanctuary extra moenia of Contrada Mango and the sacred area of the North Acropolis, where a dialectic between Indigenous traditions and colonial innovation played out.

Archaeological evidence offers an insight into the relationships between the Indigenous settlements and Greek colonies of central and western Sicily, in particular Himera, Selinunte and Agrigento. Three main phases are outlined from the second half of the seventh to the first half of the sixth century BCE; from the second half of the sixth into the first decades of the fifth century BCE; and from the second quarter to the end of the fifth century BCE. These mark a gradual path of acceptance by and assimilation with the Greek colonial world, which includes moments of economic and cultural development as well as phases of profound crisis.

The so-called Tomb of the Diver is a fifth-century stone cist tomb from Paestum/Poseidonia famous for its painted depictions of a young man diving and a symposium. While both the style and iconography of the images have strong Greek connotations, the tomb as a whole is no less deeply rooted in the local social and cultural environment of Iron Age Campania. This burial testifies to the richly diverse and multicultural nature of the late Iron Age societies that lived in South Italy and that included Etruscans, Lucanians, Oinotrians, and Greeks, to name but the principal communities.

In late 2021, as schools and colleges in the Indian state of Karnataka resumed in-person classes after nearly two years of institutional closures provoked by the pandemic, a new script for continuing the work of exclusion had to be prepared. Prolonged educational disruption and a forced digital outsourcing of curricular processes had already borne out a nationwide ‘crisis’ in terms of increasing school dropouts, especially among the socially deprived (and those further economically precaritized by the Covid outbreak). Because the pandemic made apparent how the same viral ‘cause’ can exacerbate historical differences in ‘impact’ on the basis of populations’ rights of access to infrastructures – for example, the physical site of the hospital or the school or the college – the state's script for a return to ‘normalcy’ was first dressed up in a shared existential predicament of man, and then in the myth of a common national destiny, a uniform(ed) national-secular humanity.

Both government-funded and private pre-university colleges in Karnataka – enrolling students for higher secondary schooling – started denying Muslim women students entry into classrooms if they insisted on wearing the hijab over prescribed uniforms. College administrators and government officials insinuated, over different moments in the course of the controversy, that formal dress codes had been in existence for a long time and therefore the recent demand for a hijab exception must have been provoked by ‘outside support’ from radical Islamist organizations. While, in principle, the restriction of a freedom for any amount of time cannot become the justifying ground for maintaining status quo, the irony of this inversion of juridical logic is glimpsed in the verdict of the Karnataka High Court on this matter.

Chapter 5 analyzes Russia’s changing gas interdependencies in the post-Soviet space and reveals how economic forces brought about by asymmetrical dependence on Russia have shaped strategic thinking according to the availability of other transnational opportunities for gas trade, and the interpretation of the effects of natural gas interdependence with Russia on their economies and national security. The chapter focused on international economic incentives along with a focus on domestic shifts in identity politics to account for the emergence of new dominant narratives. The case study focused on the differential impact in Belarus and Ukraine of asymmetrical gas dependence on Russia. It showed how policies differed depending on the ideas of those in power. Chapter 5 demonstrates the book’s framework’s applicability to variation across otherwise similar cases and elaborated an alternative explanation to the field’s ongoing realist versus liberal debate on the effects of asymmetrical energy interdependence. Finally, it considers the war in Ukraine and the rewiring of the disparate gas trade dependencies in post-Soviet Eurasia.

This final and concluding chapter highlights the main points discussed in the book and explains the importance that Early German Romanticism can have in the ecological and environmental-philosophical debate today.

In the previous chapter the fragmentation of the modern age has been discussed. In this chapter I will show that for the Romantics this fragmentation is a form of stagnation of time, where the transformative power proper of Becoming is missing and where, therefore, freedom is not deemed possible. How can the transformative power be re-introduced into history without falling into the illusion that the self could be the sovereign agent of such a transformation? The Romantic answer to this question deals with three key concepts: critical thinking, humanity, and utopia. Critical thinking is viewed as a creative act that detects in the present signs of a better future, humanity as the future non-sovereign subject of history, and utopia as the imagination of a possible future that, at the same time, does not imply a concept of history as ‘progress’. Together, as will be analysed at the end of the chapter, they allow us to think the relationship between history and nature neither as opposition nor as identity, providing thought-provoking and original perspectives on the actual debate in environmental philosophy.

The Iron Age and the Archaic period were a period of profound transformations in Sicily: Greek and Phoenician colonial settlers interacted with the Indigenous communities of the hinterland and played a key role in processes of change that also involved daily social and economic life.

This chapter presents the archaeological evidence from three settlements in western Sicily, dating from between the early Iron Age and the late Archaic period: Monte Maranfusa, in the middle Belice valley; Makella, located in the Eleuterio valley; and the small settlement on the Castello della Pietra in the lower Belice valley.