Chapter 2 introduces the field site. It provides a historic overview of Heyang village and provides “a ‘guided tour’” of the village’s principal tourist area, the ancient heritage dwellings complex, guminju, a nationally recognized and protected heritage site. It takes a brief detour into the village’s history, stretching as far back as the Five Dynasties era (AD 907-960), the period in which the village was supposedly ‘founded’ by Zhu Qingyuan, a high-ranking gentry who fled the imperial court to avoid being embroiled in war. Revered as the apical ancestor of the Heyang Zhu Clan, the discussion of Zhu rejoins the twenty-first century, where these historic tales of ‘origins’ are told and sold as part of the ‘xiangchou Heyang’ tourism brand. The development of Heyang’s tourism industry is discussed to highlight its transformation from its fledgling grassroots iteration in the mid-1990s, to becoming a developmental priority for the county government in the 2010s.

Chapter 4 describes Heyang as a migrant sending community, built upon and even sustained by migrants’ homesickness. These migration patterns are deeply entangled with the local duck farming industry, and ’duck tales’ told by locals who have personally engaged in the industry at various stages of their lives are highlighted. Informants’ reflections on the significance of duck breeding reinforces the importance of cyclical migration through different stages of a rapidly transforming China. However, four recent ’returnees’ explain how this industry was proving to be unsustainable because of local, national, and global processes of change by the mid-2010s. They each returned to Heyang to work in the ‘Xiangchou Tourism’ industry as tour guides and security guards. Their stories provide insight into the complex emotions that underscore their respective returns to the hometown, ranging from comfort and familiarity to perpetual feelings of precarity due to lingering debts, unstable livelihoods, and uncertain futures.

The development of continuous distribution (CD) proposals for lungs, kidneys, pancreases, and livers display the interrelationship of values and evidence. CD involves identifying attributes that assess progress toward five goals: (1) prioritize sickest candidates first to reduce waitlist deaths; (2) improve long-term survival after transplant; (3) increase transplant opportunities for patients who are medically harder to match; (4) increase transplant opportunities for candidates with distinct characteristics, such as pediatric and prior living donor status; (5) promote efficient management of organ placement through consideration of geographic proximity between donor hospitals and patient transplant centers. Weights are then assigned to the attributes and goals to obtain a composite priority score. Both values and evidence influenced the choice of attributes and their functional forms. Rather than primarily statements of values, weights became design features in machine learning optimization exercises that allowed for the identification of alternatives that predicted the most favorable combinations of efficiency and equity outcomes.

Chapters 1 and 2 suggest that prostitutes not only had a significant presence in the north Indian military cantonment, especially in the hybrid space of the sadr bazaar, but exercised an outsized degree of social influence. This is confirmed by police records from north Indian cantonment towns, including Meerut, examined in this chapter. While the historical literature on colonial India to date has emphasized the official subjection, suppression, and immiseration of prostitutes, especially in the wake of the contagious disease acts of the 1860s, a survey of police records from the 1850s suggest that prostitutes possessed a secure place in the cantonment, and in the official mind, and were even deemed worthy of official protection from criminal persecution. These points are situated in the context of violent crime against women generally, in which the state took an active interest, as well as the officially disfavored slave traffic in girls and young women. The 1850s emerges as an extended moment of transition between the early-modern figure of the urbane tawāif (courtesan) and the marginalized, scandalous figure of the cantonment kasbi (prostitute).

Chapter 4 extends my exploration of time management by looking at Sheila Heti’s novel-from-life, Motherhood (2018), interrogating how Heti’s engagement with contrasting models of time management allows her to consider questions of everyday time use within broader negotiations of socially normative lifecycles and the ‘infinity’ time she associates with art-making. Through close readings of Heti’s texts alongside self-help works by David Allen, Stephen Covey, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, it argues that Heti’s writing dramatizes tensions between conflicting temporalities, from the linear, future-oriented time of productivity guides to the expansive time of creative flow, fate, and chance.

The book’s introduction draws the reader to the unique case study of the Iraqi diaspora and its involvement in state-building following military intervention in 2003. The chapter introduces the book’s puzzle, which questions why diasporas have thus far been ignored in analyses of state formation and state-building. Contextualising the book within the diaspora and state-building literature will also delineate the book’s unique contribution to both fields and its wider appeal to policymakers, the media, and thinktanks. The chapter then underlines the book’s original conceptual and empirical contribution to the study and understanding of the role of diasporas in state formation and state-building processes, which also includes the role of civil society in weak, postcolonial, post-conflict states. This is then followed by an outline and breakdown of the book to guide the reader.

Chapter 1 discusses the main concepts of the book, including diaspora and transnationalism, providing an understanding of the cross-border connections that link people and nations across time and space under modern processes of globalisation, facilitating diasporic political engagement. This is then followed by introducing the conceptual framework of diasporic state-building, which is drawn from three theoretical discussions related to the state, state-building, and civil society literature. The framework captures how diasporas are engaged in this process through an original conceptual and typological framework that operationally captures the two categories associated with building a state: firstly, diasporic mobilisation towards building the apparatus of the state and, secondly, supporting and challenging the state through civil society. This original conceptual approach to state-building captures the plethora of activity that is shaping the evolution of conflict, post-conflict, and post-colonial states. The framework guides the reader as well as demonstrating the multiple domains in which diasporas are influencing state formation under modern processes of globalisation.

The OPTN routinely secures public comment on its proposals. The public generally consists of organ transplantation practitioners, individual patients, and organizations representing patients with transplant-relevant diseases. Thus, it might be better labeled “community participation.” Community participation occurs within the organ-specific committees that lead on the development of allocation rules as well as through interaction with committees with crosscutting portfolios, such as those considering patient and minority interests, and regional meetings. Committees issue white papers, progress reports, and proposals for community comment. Particularly with respect to proposals, committees respond to community comments in their submission of final proposals to the Board of Directors. For the CD initiative, the OPTN also sought community input from analytical hierarchy process (AHP) exercises at both the committee and community level. Information from the AHP had some influence in the development of the CD proposal for lungs. More generally, its value was in providing a focus for eliciting more participation and obtaining more focused qualitative comments.

Chapter 4 presents how diaspora elites and parties mobilised following the 2003 intervention and occupation of Iraq through top-down state-building. It traces how they manoeuvred to take advantage of the United States-led coalition and insert themselves in the corridors of power. It charts their involvement throughout Iraq’s political process from the Iraqi Governing Council to the transitional Administrative Law, Iraq’s first democratic elections in 2005, and beyond. It emphasises their transnational recruitment and role in building an ethno-sectarian governance system that would indelibly cast the die for the modern state of Iraq and its future politics. This chapter also discusses how elite diasporas also worked outside the structures of power, and the challenges of confronting an ethno-sectarian system in Iraq. It also highlights how diaspora initiatives in certain sectors were able to influence state practices by working transnationally through professional associations and transnational networks. Finally, it explores the agency of Iraq’s non-Muslim minorities and their transnational mobilisations towards the country, as they’ve attempted to protect their communities and heritage in Iraq and maintain their links to the country, albeit in limited ways.

Policy networks can inform policy design with expertise and build support, or at least acquiescence, for policy change. When policy networks do not arise organically, they can be created through various forms of constructed collaboration. At one extreme, the construction may simply involve tapping expertise through advisory committees. At the other extreme, the constructed arena may delegate policy choice to organizations of stakeholders like the OPTN. Prior research assessed the capacity of the OPTN for evidence-based incremental change in organ allocation rules. This study considered continuous distribution as a radical change in allocation rules. The success of the lung CD serves as a proof of concept for continuous distribution and suggests that it can be effectively implemented for other organs. It also considers stakeholder rulemaking as an institutional alternative in other complex policy areas. Key considerations include whether it can be constructed to engage all relevant stakeholders and induce their willingness to provide expertise.

Chapter 6 provides an analysis of the impact of diasporic state-building and its legacy for Iraq, asking what kind of state the diaspora helped to build. Analysing the effects of elite and civil society mobilisation shows how the legacy of diasporic state-building is still felt today and how it has shaped the relationship between state and society in significant ways. This chapter also briefly explores differences in diasporic mobilisation for state-building over time between the United Kingdom and Sweden. With each political period during Iraq’s nascent democracy, opportunities shifted and were reinforced by homeland political dynamics. Charting diasporic state-building over time underscores the patterns and trends that have emerged within the diasporic transnational field to reveal the hegemonic identities, actors, and movements being shaped between Iraq and the diaspora. This two-way transnational flow not only creates attachments, allegiances and loyalties but also has significant implications for the future of the Iraqi state and the Iraqi nation. Finally, the chapter briefly explores the transnationalism of second-generation Iraqis and their commitment to Iraq. It investigates the effects of events in Iraq on their identities and senses of belonging, as well as political transnationalism towards the country.

This book has discussed the power, responsibility and accountability of the US President, examining the Founders’ intentions and the very different presidency we have today. The President is more powerful and less accountable than the Founders ever imagined. Responsible exercise of presidential power today depends more than ever on the character of the person who occupies the presidency. Americans for good reason have less confidence in the constitutional checks and balances the Founders anticipated would restrain abuse of presidential power.