Chapters 8 and 9 recount group interactions during the final three island times, leading to RA’s deliberate dissolution and reorganization. Unlike previous chapters, these chapters use a first-person, present-tense narrative to closely examine management issues and group dynamics during the last RA meetings and to reaffirm findings presented earlier in the book. Throughout these meetings, RA struggled to manage the transition from a close-knit group of friends to a formalized organization while retaining its foundational social practices, idioculture, and relationships. The group underwent a secularization process and became polarized over future directions. These chapters depict a group grappling with powerful sociological forces in tension with one another and trying to maintain effective collaboration and decision-making as the conditions for effective group decision-making eroded. Ultimately, RA lost its adaptive capacity and became stuck in a resilient yet undesirable state, leading to the decision to disband and seek new pathways to transformation. My own role in RA also comes to the foreground when during pivotal moments of interaction group leaders asked me to provide guidance based on my research, which consequently shaped their decisions and RA’s future.

Chapter 4 shows how, paradoxically, RA’s success led to the gradual loss of its generative idioculture and collaborative processes. This is described as the challenge of “getting big while remaining small.” Emotions and social bonding drove the group’s early successes, but RA’s increasing influence on sustainability science created pressure to expand and diversify. This pressure caused the gradual erosion of the idioculture and social practices that characterized early RA. Irreverence and informality gave way to bureaucratic processes. Rituals that once fostered solidarity and commitment started to lose their meaning or created rifts, leading to factions and lost faith. As key roles and relationships vanished with the departure of original members, the group faced challenges like those involved in routinizing charismatic authority in religious movements.

Chapters 8 and 9 recount group interactions during the final three island times, leading to RA’s deliberate dissolution and reorganization. Unlike previous chapters, these chapters use a first-person, present-tense narrative to closely examine management issues and group dynamics during the last RA meetings and to reaffirm findings presented earlier in the book. Throughout these meetings, RA struggled to manage the transition from a close-knit group of friends to a formalized organization while retaining its foundational social practices, idioculture, and relationships. The group underwent a secularization process and became polarized over future directions. These chapters depict a group grappling with powerful sociological forces in tension with one another and trying to maintain effective collaboration and decision-making as the conditions for effective group decision-making eroded. Ultimately, RA lost its adaptive capacity and became stuck in a resilient yet undesirable state, leading to the decision to disband and seek new pathways to transformation. My own role in RA also comes to the foreground when during pivotal moments of interaction group leaders asked me to provide guidance based on my research, which consequently shaped their decisions and RA’s future.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.

Chapter 6 examines the lives, intellectual discourses, and working conditions of those who were supposed to build socialism in postindependent Africa. Workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions the state and its leftist supporters imagined. Despite the state and leftist intellectuals championing themselves as a worker’s party and embodying workers’ rights, laws were passed to handicap workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial, socialist African government that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands. The workers used ingenious techniques to resist and negotiate the power of the state and capital. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation was only possible in coordination and conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair. For workers, they believed that their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would prove them right. The chapter complements histories highlighting African workers’ centrality – through their letters and feet – in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states and socialism.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

This chapter explores a range of theoretical and conceptual resources for making sense of the state, with an accent on those most relevant to the role of the state in sustainability transitions. It looks at how the state has been addressed to date in literatures on socio-technical transitions, but also how conceptualisations in disciplines as diverse as politics and political theory, political economy and international relations, geography, sociology and development studies can be selectively combined to provide a more multifaceted, historical, global and political account of the state in all its dimensions as they relate to the challenge of sustainability transitions.

This chapter discusses the background and characteristics of the Desolate Boedelskamer’s staff, in order to analyze how they contributed to the professionalization of insolvency procedures in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Through a closer examination of the ways in which the institution dealt with fraud or mistakes, it will become clear how it helped to create a more professional and trustworthy insolvency procedure. Ultimately, it was the daily labor of commissioners and subordinate officials that constituted the foundation of the systemic trust generated by the Desolate Boedelskamer as a crucial means to repair broken relations between insolvents and their creditors.

The Indian constitution was poised to create a new map of power, transforming the relationship between existing state agencies and new authorities. This chapter demonstrates how the individuals staffing the state apparatus were not mere spectators, passively following the constitution-making process, but actors who actively sought to influence, change, or resist the emerging constitutional order through both public and private channels. The success of the future constitution of India required a smooth transition of the organs of the colonial state to the postcolonial order. Turning their loyalty and ambitions to the new state and its constitutional order was not an obvious outcome in 1947. The chapter examines how provincial legislators sought to guard their autonomy; how the higher judiciary endeavoured to protect their judicial independence; the contested constitutional status of Delhi; and finally, how the ‘neutral’ bureaucracy who were managing the process of constitution making actively sought to defend their own jurisdiction and interests at the time. This process, which paralleled the integration of territories, led to the functional integration of the units of the state.

Why did the United States lose the war in Afghanistan? Only a repeated habit of decision-making explains consistent strategic miscalculation. Policymakers in every administration prioritized counterterrorism – a comparatively simple, easily defined, “realistic,” concrete mission. They subordinated broader, more ambiguous, harder-to-define, morally aspirational, long-term goals, such as counterinsurgency and nation building. Policymakers did so even though – as repeated strategy reviews showed – the Taliban and al-Qaida were linked; success in the war against either depended on success in both; and counterinsurgency and nation building were necessary, alongside counterterrorism operations, to achieve the larger goal of al-Qaida’s defeat. These policies became embedded in the US bureaucracy, ensuring the bureaucracy kept implementing bad strategy on autopilot even when policymakers and repeated strategy reviews highlighted the problem.

The case for more aid to Afghanistan slowly gained ground from late 2002. The Accelerating Success initiative, coupled with the Bonn Process and a new Afghan Constitution, began to move reconstruction efforts in the right direction. A new reconciliation program recognized the need for a settlement with the Taliban. But enduring challenges from recalcitrant warlords, international donors, inflexible diplomacy, and a sclerotic bureaucracy counteracted whatever progress was achieved from 2003 to 2005.

Some common themes emerge from these lessons about strategy and bureaucracy. The statesman and strategist also need wisdom to take the long view, prudence to discern what is practical, persistence and fortitude in implementation, courage to overcome groupthink and pride and bureaucratic resistance, temperance and humility to toil in unglamorous details. Above all the strategist must have a passion to pursue justice and peace. Statesmen and stateswomen need wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. If that is true, such timeless principles do not apply only to the individual policymaker. They apply to the nation we serve. American foreign policy should be characterized by wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice; our role in the world should serve those principles. Our grand strategy should take the long view, be practical and aware of our limits yet also courageous and visionary, fearless and uncompromising in the face of obstacles. Above all it must aim at justice – which means it must serve American interests, but it must do so with an awareness of how our interests are entwined with others.

The conclusions aim to bring together all these strands and show how the armed forces in nineteenth century Peru were integral to the development of an incipient State, with a bureaucratic structure that can be clearly witnessed through the lived experience of its members. It is a social history of an institution that developed despite intense instability to provide a safety net for its members. This institution developed through trial and error, building from the colonial legislation ensuring pensions were handed out to the infirm, to those who had served for many years as well as to some surviving family members. With time this relationship between the army, its members, former members and their families became the glue that bound society to the armed forces, which in contrast to what had been often asserted in the past was much more than a collection of armed men mobilized by local leaders known as caudillos.

A common yet often overlooked political service provided by companies is funding authoritarian officials’ visibility projects – the key concept in this chapter. In the absence of elections, authoritarian officials often demonstrate their competence and loyalty to leaders by initiating ambitious, large-scale infrastructure or public projects. These projects prioritize appearance and scale over practicality, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability, as they are designed to enhance the officials’ political visibility in the system and career prospects. This chapter defines this concept and identifies the conditions under which visibility projects arise within a sector. It offers numerous real-world examples of visibility projects, including wastewater treatment plants, industrial parks, desertification control efforts, and programs such as “Grain for Green,” among others. It traces the emergence of visibility projects to flawed authoritarian personnel management systems that emphasize both competence and loyalty.

Owing to their scale and wasteful nature, government officials often solicit contributions from firms to launch visibility projects. Private firms, however, are at a disadvantage compared with state-owned enterprises, given their more limited financial resources. Consequently, visibility projects are often associated with the decline of private firms within a sector.

The introductory chapter details what is gained by using the concept of social role when studying power relations in Late Antiquity and how it ties in well with ancient ideas about why people act in the way they do. It shows how Late Antique thought and practice conceptualized social hierarchies in moral terms and argues that precisely the expectation that social and moral hierarchies coincide injects the dynamism in social interactions that this book chronicles. It also underscores that society was conceived of as held together by justice and shows how this was intertwined with hierarchical conceptions of society and the cosmos.

This chapter argues that petitions have hitherto been too narrowly studied as bureaucratic acts defined by Roman law and shifts attention to informal petitions, whereby any superior could be petitioned even when they did not have formal power, and to oral petitions, whereby immediate justice was demanded. Petitions then appear as reflecting a culture of entreaty characteristic for a hierarchical society.