What makes music an enduring art that has withstood the test of time across so many cultural contexts? Here we review the literature on emotion and reward as it relates to music, grounding our review on multiple methodological traditions in neuroscience, as well as newer work that combines these tools with music technology and sound design. Key to these disparate lines of research is the idea that the reward system is functionally and structurally connected to the auditory system, giving rise to individual differences in the sensitivity and felt emotion for music. We conclude with implications of this research for the design and implementation of music-based interventions for improving cognitive and brain health, especially for those with neurodegenerative diseases.

An innovation in this book is the introduction of the mediation staircase as a way to estimate the “success” of mediation efforts by connecting achievements to mandates. The steps in this staircase (levels 0 to 5) extend from establishing direct contacts to arriving at accords between the warring parties and include participation in agreement implementation. Most of the Nordic cases that had been terminated by the end of 2024 are assessed in this way. It is hoped that this approach to evaluating success will provide a better understanding of what mediation wants to – and can – achieve. The chapter shows that mediation is more than a one-person commitment, as it involves a more long-term effort. It also discusses the impact of military developments on the outcome.

This chapter develops the book’s main theoretical argument, positing that American economic hierarchy has generally enhanced property rights and state capacity in partner states over the past forty years. It traces the shift in United States’ economic priorities toward property rights promotion in the 1980s, driven by foreign direct investors and exporting firms. The chapter explores the mechanisms linking property rights to state capacity and discusses the contrasting effects of American security hierarchy. It also considers alternative explanations and potential scope conditions.

This chapter focuses mainly on travel writing from inside Wales, describing some of the ways in which these narratives record encounters that challenged and often transformed regional and parochial identities. Such travel narratives written from the inside place more emphasis on geography – on the landscape, the contours of the regions, the topographical boundaries and markers – than on the people within. The more frequent and more specific the place-names mentioned in a text, the more familiar the region is to the writers who map the terrain of their own homelands. In contrast, examples of accounts of travel into Wales from the outside exemplify the kinds of stereotypical and colonialist thinking about Wales and the Welsh people that kept it subject to the hegemonic power of England. From the outside, Wales is an undifferentiated land typically constructed as mysterious, even rebarbative, hostile to outsiders and difficult to navigate, while the Welsh themselves are untrustworthy and belligerent rebels whose very existence threatens the unity of the English kingdom.

In 1966, A. H. Kamau walked through the corridors of the Hayes Repository in west London, guided by Bernard Cheeseman, as a part of a six-month training on archives administration. Kamau, Kenya’s first African assistant archivist, reported on his visit to colleagues in Nairobi explaining that “this repository is known as ‘Limbo’ because the type of records accommodated in it had as yet to have their fate decided.”1 Unbeknownst to Kamau at the time, among the 215 linear miles of records awaiting their fate that surrounded him, were 100 feet of Kenyan records. His escort, Bernard Cheeseman, had arranged the deposit of more than 300 boxes, consisting of documents that mainly dealt with the Emergency and flown in from Nairobi, just three years prior. With a duplicity characteristic of the UK Colonial Office’s Intelligence and Security Department, Cheeseman boldly led Kamau through the stacks lined with locked steel cages of secret Kenyan documents under the guise of teaching best archival practice to the new professional, trusting that his pupil would not know any better which documents lay hidden. Cheeseman’s ease was misguided. Shortly after Kamau’s training, Kenya’s Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Kibinge, wrote to the British High Commission in Nairobi wishing to begin negotiations for the return of these documents.

This chapter analyzes the doctrine of ḥākimiyya in the writings of two twentieth-century thinkers, the Indo-Pakistani Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and the Egyptian Sayyid Quṭb. These authors were the first to articulate a consistent system in which the conflict between divine law and man-made law was considered the primary differentiator between faith and unbelief. Like the premodern monolatry tradition, Mawdūdī and Quṭb view monolatry (exclusivity of worship) as the essence of Islam; but they characterize exclusivity of obedience to Allāh’s legal sovereignty as the most important form of worship, thus converting the basic monolatry framework into a polemic against secularization. This theonomy doctrine was already fully elaborated in Mawdūdī’s writings in the 1930s and 1940s, which exhibit some familiarity with the premodern anti-taqlīd polemic and may have been influenced by it. Quṭb’s embrace of the doctrine in his final writings had a major impact on the emergent radical salafī tendency in the 1970s and 1980s and presaged the decisive split between these groups and the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood.

Travel was a significant part of Scotland’s economic, national, and literary history. Incursions by English forces generated travel narratives in the form of campaign itineraries; Scottish writers harnessed the power of travel to demonstrate their place in broader transnational communities. Beyond the Anglo-Scottish relationship, Scotland had significant connections to Ireland, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia, each leaving its own imprint on Scottish history. Focusing on Scottish travel–both in the sense of travel to and from Scotland–reveals the importance of travel as both a mode of aggression and defense, a means to assert domination and a way to create transnational coalitions that resist that domination. Though no traditional travel narratives from medieval Scottish writers exist, Scottish literature reimagines travel as a literary mode expressed through lyric poetry, romance, and history writing.

This chapter traces the evolution of American interests in external property rights from the American Revolution to the present day. It examines the United States’ colonial experience in the Philippines, highlighting the challenges of implementing effective property rights reforms and the prioritization of other economic interests over property rights. The chapter identifies a pivotal shift in the 1980s toward prioritizing property rights abroad, influenced by the lobbying efforts of American firms and the growing salience of the trade deficit. It presents original data involving over a dozen government agencies, 160 countries, and more than 340 unique activities, illustrating the extensive scope and scale of United States’ efforts to enhance property rights globally through a multifaceted approach encompassing international treaties, domestic development programs, and bureaucratic initiatives.

Chapter 7 frames Kenyan attempts of archival retrieval as a matter of decolonization at the international, bilateral, and national levels. Importantly, it also draws attention to how the concealment of the “migrated archives” affected political activity not only within Kenya but also in England, as a country undergoing its own re-nationalization process at the end of empire. The process of recovering records from the UK provided the Kenyan Government a framework in which to invoke a sovereign and unified Kenyan polity as the rightful home for the “migrated archives,” while dissent over Kenyatta’s centralized authority grew within the country. Meanwhile, British engagement with the “migrated archives” throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the consolidation of postcolonial archival secrecy with other European partners as evident in the voting blocs formed in the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts.

This introductory chapter describes how this Companion offers an up-to-date and accessible guide to the doctrinal sources, historical reception, and philosophical and theological investigation of Christology. Written by a broad and diverse collection of internationally renowned scholars, the volume showcases excellence in multiple scholarly methodologies, from biblical exegesis to historical investigation, from philosophical inquiry to theological reflection. In addition to methodological diversity, the volume also emphasizes christological approaches from different religious starting points, among both Christian denominations and non-Christian perspectives.

A common feature of all existing organisms is their ability to adapt, survive, and even thrive in the face of danger. Evolution has endowed organisms with a myriad of defensive mechanisms, from bodily phenotypes and sensory apparatus to learning mechanisms. Humans are no different, and a wide variety of defensive mechanisms has allowed us to adapt to changing landscapes and threats. Yet, we are unique in our capacity to predict the future, to learn from others through many streams of communication vicariously, and to experience emotions consciously. In this chapter, we briefly go through the evolutionary history of defensive behaviors and how they are guided by a canonical set of ecological conditions, by the characteristics of the threat, and by the organisms’ repertoire of cognitive and sensory abilities. We explore the converging mechanisms across species and highlight the uniqueness of humans, including the rich internal representations of the dangers that allow us to experience a large array of emotions.