Early 2016 served as a spectacular point of collapse for the Indian public university. I opened this book by setting the frame of this ‘collapse’ in an incident of student arrests. ‘Seditious’ slogans, allegedly raised by the arrested students, were sound-mixed within television studios and superimposed as a voice-over to the university's presumed war against ‘national interests’. There was a slow and steady build-up of forces towards this spectacle for more than two decades,1 but the effect of the spectacular is most compelling when it combines with the force of an exception. The exception in this case was Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) – one of the few havens of relatively free academic inquiry, surviving in stark contrast to vast expanses of intellectual barrenness and political conformism that passed for public university culture in the rest of the country.

It is true that the founding conception behind the establishment of JNU in 1969, and the breadth of legislative-administrative will that allowed it (Kidwai 2017; Batabyal 2020: 86-91) tried balancing the need for social mobility with the desire for social justice. To achieve a bureaucratic codification of this balance – at the heart of a university ‘idea’ which stratifies rights of access through proof of deserving – was not an easy task, and there is enough historical testimony to its long tortuous processes (Thorat 2020: 108–113). Some of such testimony will find its place later in this chapter, when I discuss whether this delicate balance may be given the name of ‘academic freedom’.

Based on Appadurai’s concept of locality and neighbourhood, this concluding chapter situates the contributions of this volume as well as the author’s own research in Italy in a multidisciplinary and multiculturally long-term comparative perspective. Introducing the concept of ‘qualities of locality’, it discusses landscape properties, settlement (dis)continuity, culture contact and cult as basic elements in the shaping of neighbourhood and the production of locality in Indigenous Mediterranean Iron Age contexts. At times, it also reveals the fragility of the production of locality as a social achievement, as mentioned by Appadurai.

This chapter explains how the Romantic gnoseology goes together with the concept of a dependent subjectivity. Indeed, the Romantics imagine their ontology as based on relationships (rather than on identity) and, consequently, the self as entangled in a mesh of reciprocal dependencies. This perspective on the Romantic gnoseology begins with the notion of ‘experiment’, which for the Romantics is a genetic method through which the subject–object dualism is undermined. Thinking of philosophy as an experiment implied, for them, accepting that the human being does not dominate nature but is instead constantly influenced by it. The deep relationship between the knower and the known is manifested in feeling, which reveals the primordial connection between subject and object and is at the core of the relational idea of the self. The relational ontology underlying the Romantic conception of feeling is even more evident in their analysis of love as a universal force that unites beings to and in the Absolute. Love designates the network of relationships constitutive of Being, of which the self is not the apex.

Drawing on a series of sixteen focus groups with Brazilian and Argentine citizens from low-income groups in four cities, this chapter documents the challenges individuals face when trying to access public health and early childhood education benefits. The chapter provides a conceptual framework for classifying citizen responses to these challenges. It argues that while some citizens exit from seeking access to public services, an important response is what the authors call "state-centric persistence": the act of repeatedly and directly engaging with government offices or officials after an initial failed attempt. The focus group narratives illustrate that this form of persistence is often necessary for successful access and that it is distinct from other options like giving up or turning to private alternatives. The chapter also uses survey data to show widespread belief in the usefulness of state-centric persistence.

Chapter 3 analyzes the evolution over time of EU-Russia natural gas interdependence in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. It considers that popular support for trade with Russia varied widely in selected dyads regardless of material benefits. It applies the viewpoint of dominant narratives in different contexts to understand the processes of foreign policy formation and change in contexts of internal and external contestation. The chapter details two notable trends: (1) internally, ultimately dominant narratives emerge from domestic political struggles and the priorities of those norm entrepreneurs who are in a position to engage in “framing” practices for the remainder of the society; (2) externally, especially in markets such as gas where finding substitutes is difficult (due to the rigidity of trade via pipelines), new international economic opportunities can alter domestic interests and power relations among different segments of society. The study integrates responses to both (normative) local aspects and (material) international influences. Finally, a post-scriptum considers the war in Ukraine and the resulting near-termination of contested EU-Russia gas trade.

In southern France, the transition to the Iron Age was synonymous with major changes in Celtic societies, which partly depended on the intensity of contacts established with the Mediterranean world. These changes were marked by the emergence of a ruling class whose power was fundamentally based on control of land and communication routes. The expression of these powers that centred on notions of symbolic or real violence evolved over time. The sense of identity referenced a past embodied by emblematic figures or places and was articulated by the process of ethnogenesis that we can trace in ancient sources and archaeology.

This chapter focuses on the relationality that constitutes the Romantic Self, highlighting the ethical and political consequences that derive from it. The Romantics refuse the lexicon proper to modern political thought, centred on the concept of sovereignty and autonomy: they highlight the illusory essence of these concepts and the dangers they imply. Consistently, they also dismantle the possibility to write a political theory that pretends to offer universal principles. Relations are not extrinsic elements added to a fully formed subject and to be considered only after the identity of the subject has been defined. Relations are what we are. That is why in its political reflections, Romanticism’s primary polemical target is modern contractualism, founded on the tacit assumption that it is possible to study human beings in their individuality, skating over the interplay among them. This chapter shows how the idea of forces and the priority given to relationships influence the Romantic political concepts. These concepts in particular will be scrutinised: representative, constituent and constituted powers, democracy, individuality, equality, and justice.

‘If Rohith Vemula had not poetized his death in the English language, would he have resonated with the “collective conscience” of the secular university-subject in as immediate a way?’ This was a question I posed to a friend working on contemporary Indian university movements. We then re-read Rohith's suicide letter together, almost as a cold ritual of remembrance – in the same way that it has been published and re-published and excerpted and textualized in innumerable articles, posters and slogans, ever since the handwritten note was recovered from a hostel room.

Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar and Ambedkarite activist, was driven to suicide by the University of Hyderabad (UoH) administration under pressure from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ministers and the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). A member of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) at UoH, Rohith was at the forefront of campus movements against caste discrimination and communal violence. The ASA's principled resistance against Hindu fundamentalists irked the student front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which demanded intervention from a union minister and locally elected member of Parliament. The BJP leader immediately swung into action, and orders were passed directly from the central government to the university's vice-chancellor urging a censuring of ‘casteist’ and ‘anti-national activities’ indulged in by the ASA. In a day's time, on 5 August 2015, Rohith and four other ASA activists were evicted from their hostel rooms; an ongoing Proctorial inquiry compounded the penalty in September by suspending these students and barring them from all social spaces on campus.