This chapter examines the relationship between English satire and libel law between roughly 1670 and 1730. It takes up the growth of verbal ambiguity and the use of irony, circumlocution, and allegory among satirists such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Delarivier Manley, and demonstrates how the courts responded to verbal ambiguity by refining the supposedly “objective” interpretive standards to be used by jurors. Such standards created mechanisms for delimiting verbal ambiguity and restricting the interpretive latitude of jurors while permitting the crown to skirt technical linguistic issues. These revisions to the law were part of a more general refinement of libel laws, which furnished the government with its primary means of regulating the press during this period. The interaction between libel law and satire had consequences for both legal procedure and literature – consequences that extended well beyond the eighteenth century and that continue to shape legal and literary practice today.

Using press advisors – and, in Continental Europe, press bureaus – politicians employed repressive and proactive methods for influencing the press. The older, repressive method consisted of censorship, but politicians gradually shifted towards proactively shaping rather than preventing publicity. They wrote and edited newspaper articles themselves and ‘inspired’ content in different newspapers. In Britain, politicians relied on the papers of their political party; in Germany, the chancellor and emperor had to rely on (semi-)official newspapers. Despite Britain’s free press rhetoric, papers like the Times closely interacted with government as well. Newspaper ownership was already more concentrated in the colonies, enabling a politician to gain widespread control there – as did Rhodes in South Africa. Press agencies formed nodes in international communication, subjecting them to politicians’ interference. Politicians’ contacts with the press were smoothed through secret payments, though such secrecy was often exposed, making it counterproductive. Traditional methods of influencing the press lost effectiveness. Censorship became counterproductive, with court cases generating only more publicity for censored content. Commercialization made newspapers financially independent and less susceptible to politicians’ payments. The mass readership was less interested in newspapers that expressed political opinions, or even described politics to begin with. While politicians still managed the press, they thus needed new strategies for attaining favourable coverage.

This chapter follows the trajectory of an early Cold War ideal of a pro-American Islam that could serve US foreign policy goals. It asks how and why Islamic mysticism generally, and Sufism specifically, came to be seen as the West-friendly “moderate Islam.” What role did transculturation and comparativism between Türkiye and Iran under America’s global hegemony play in forming this common perception?

Chapter 6 explores five outlier cases, called “The Unfortunate Five,” in which the US Supreme Court rejected landowners’ challenges to land use and environmental regulations despite the Court’s strong protection of private property rights against regulations generally. These five cases have one factor in common: the developers’ plans to build affordable housing. After exploring the potential that Supreme Court justices are motivated by explicit race and class biases, the chapter delves into the potential for implicit bias to explain why these cases deviate from the norm: the justices believe that they are protecting the private property interests of neighboring landowners against unwanted affordable housing developments. Strategies are proposed, based on a number of empirical studies, for convincing courts that affordable housing does not pose a threat to the property values of nearby landowners and that, therefore, many government policies reflect an unconstitutional, irrational prejudice against low-income people of color who need affordable housing and the developers who seek to build it.

Publicity created a central position for the politician in a transnational communicative space. The politician played a ‘personal’ role as a public persona. Competition forced commercial newspapers to focus on entertainment, which hurt political coverage but benefitted individual politicians. Particularly politicians with eccentric physiques and props profited from human interest journalism. Politicians’ ‘complex’ personalities, moreover, provided food for psychological analyses. Possibilities to visualize politicians and their private lives – literally in photographs; figuratively in character sketches – completed this personal appeal. Mass media favoured political personalities over abstract institutions. Newspapers projected family values onto politicians that enabled bourgeois readers to identify with them. This focus on politicians and their private lives made them ‘celebrities’. In celebrity reporting, monarchs enjoyed an advantage: they were famous by descent, provided entertaining pomp, and stood above partisanship. Yet journalists described charismatic career politicians, greeted by excited crowds on political journeys, in royal terms as well. These celebrities functioned as ‘brands’. A brand name buttressed a politician’s position but could also be exploited commercially. The media focus on the personal shaped expectations for politicians to become mediagenic and ‘special’ – to make the private public. The celebrity culture surrounding a brand-name politician finally underpinned the imagined community and widened the scope of politics.

Prominent policy debates about environmental justice center on drinking water. In California’s Central Valley, this engages a complex, multilayered regulatory landscape. Traditionally, a key gap has been protecting access to groundwater for disadvantaged communities that rely on domestic wells. Addressing this gap requires conceptualizing "what matters" to include groundwater levels, and "who matters" to include these communities. California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act substantially reformed California’s groundwater law. It addresses groundwater levels but deals unevenly with disadvantaged communities. It also misses a regulatory opportunity to take a cumulative view of these communities that would recognize that a threat to drinking water is one burden among many that adds to environmental injustice. This chapter introduces the use of the CIRCle Framework to assess rules for conceptualization and how they link to the other CIRCle Framework functions of information, regulatory intervention and coordination. It reveals omissions and mismatches that pose an ongoing challenge to securing environmental justice for communities facing critical threats to groundwater resources used for drinking.

In this introduction, we highlight the importance of psychological viewpoints to understand the dynamics of how, why and in what way relations between social groups do and do not change. Systems are defined as sets of interconnected elements that form a complex whole that is more than the sum of their parts. This definition underlies our discussions of how social systems change and the resistance to social change through the chapters. In this introduction, the main focus of each chapter is briefly presented, as well as the interconnections between them.