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The Russian invasion of Ukraine came on the heels of a series of crises that tested the resilience of the EU as a compound polity and arguably reshaped European policymaking at all levels. This Element investigates the effects of the invasion on public support for European polity building across four key policy domains: refugee policy, energy policy, foreign policy, and defence. It shows how support varies across four polity types (centralized, decentralized, pooled, reinsurance) stemming from a distinction between policy and polity support. In terms of the drivers of support and its evolution over time, performance evaluations and ideational factors appear as strong predictors, while perceived threat and economic vulnerability appear to matter less. Results show strong support for further resource pooling at the EU level in all domains that can lead to novel and differentiated forms of polity-building. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Wood is, and always has been, one of the most common and versatile materials for creating structures and art. It is therefore also a ubiquitous element of the archaeological record. This discussion of the study of archaeological wood introduces a number of approaches to the analysis of these organic remains, including a brief overview of wood science, factors that impact the survival of wood materials, wood anatomy, and dendrochronology. These sections are intended to help archaeologists and other interested non-specialists prepare to encounter archaeological woods, and to understand the potential scientific data that these remains could contribute to our understanding of the human past. This is followed by additional approaches from the social sciences. The study of woodworking techniques and toolmarks, combined with ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology, can push wood analyses further. A combination of these approaches can help to create a more holistic view of humankind's relationship to wood.
This case study examines the implementation of Namibia's first Productivity Task Force focused on the high-value fruit sector from 2021 to 2024. Productivity task forces, modeled after Peru's Mesas Ejecutivas, facilitate public-private dialogues to resolve sector-specific productivity issues. The Namibian Investment Promotion and Development Board, the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform, and the Ministry of Finance led the Namibian task force. The study highlights critical stages, including the task force's management and organization, political authorization, and the identification and resolution of productivity problems. While some challenges remain unsolved, the PTF has laid the groundwork for long-term improvements in government capacity, better public-public coordination, public-private collaboration, and a more business-friendly environment. The study offers valuable insights for implementing similar public-private initiatives in other developing countries. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element offers an opinionated and selective introduction to philosophical issues concerning the metaphysics of color. The opinion defended is that colors are objective features of our world; objects are colored, and they have those colors independent of how they are experienced. It is a minority opinion. Many philosophers thinking about color experience argue that perceptual variation, the fact that color experiences vary from observer to observer and from viewing condition to viewing condition, makes objectivism untenable. Many philosophers thinking about colors and science argue that colors are ontologically unnecessary; nothing to be explained requires an appeal to colors. A careful look at arguments from perceptual variation shows that those arguments are not compelling, and especially once it is clear how to individuate colors. Moreover, a careful look at scientific explanations shows that colors are explanatorily essential. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Although claims to sacredness are often linked to the power of a distant past, the work of making places sacred is creative, novel, renewable, and reversible. This Element highlights how sacred space is newly made. It is often associated with blood, death, and geographic anomalies, yet no single feature determines sacred associations. People make space sacred by connecting with 'extrahuman' figures – the ancestors, spirits, and gods that people attempt to interact with in every society. These connections can be concentrated in people's bodies, yet bodies are particularly vulnerable to loss. The Element also examines the multidimensional and multisensory dimensions of sacred space, which can be made almost anywhere, including online, but can also be unmade. Unmaking sacred space can entail new sacralization. New and minority religions in particular provide excellent sites for studying sacredness as a value, raising the reliably productive question: sacred for whom?
The city of Liverpool is renowned for its popular music, although the formidable hagiography which has developed around the Beatles tends to dominate historical considerations to the virtual exclusion of the many other varied genres which have flourished in the city before, during, and after them. Within Liverpool's popular-music past is a partially hidden history of women's musical leadership. This Element concerns the Grafton Rooms' bandleader, dancer, and pianist Mary Hamer (1904–1992). Hamer led the otherwise all-male dance band at the Grafton for two decades, providing dancers with first-class dance music. The Element considers Hamer within the rapidly evolving dance music culture of interwar Liverpool, and discusses the different genres and sub-genres of popular music and dance presented at the Grafton and the role(s) of women in popular music and as bandleaders. This is contextualised within the contemporary social anxieties of popular dance cultures, sexuality, faith, class, and race.
Known as a place, a people, and a kingdom at various points in the second and first millennia BCE, Moab has long sustained the attention of archaeologists, philologists, and historians, in part because of its adjacent location to ancient Israel. The past 150 years of research in what is today west-central Jordan has proffered a significant corpus of evidence from the region's archaeological sites. However, a critical analysis of this evidence reveals significant gaps in knowledge that challenge attempts to narrate Moab's political, economic, and social history. This Element examines the evidence as well as the debates surrounding Moab's development and decline. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element considers recent changes to the long-standing pattern in US politics that women are less politically active than men. On one hand, the gender gap in political activity beyond voting has disappeared. On the other, the disparity remains when it comes to political money. What is the explanation? The Element begins with politics – both the long-term increase in women occupying political positions and the way that trends/events like MeToo, the defeat of Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump's performative masculinity made gender salient. It then turns to social structural changes, examining in particular women's relative gains in income and, especially, education. Paying consistent attention to intersectional differences among men and among women, whether based on political party, race, or ethnicity, the authors find the explanation of these trends to be rooted not in politics, but rather in social structure. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Historians explain the eighteenth-century origin of European colonialism in Asia either with the profile of the merchants or an argument about uneven power. This Element suggests that the environment was an important factor, too. With India (1600-1800) as the primary example, it says that the tropical monsoon climatic condition, extreme seasonality, and low land yield made the land-tax-based empires weak from within. The seaboard supplied a more benign environment. Sometime in the eighteenth century, a transformation began as the seaside traded more, generated complementary services, and encouraged the in-migration of capital and skills to supply these services. The birth of a new state from this base depended, however, on building connections inland, which was still a dangerous and uncertain enterprise. European merchants were an enabling force in doing this. But we cannot understand the process without close attention to geography.
The reform of the international financial and tax systems has been at the center of global debates in recent years –in the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD and the G20. The fourth United Nations Conference on Financing for Development that will take place in Spain in 2025 also represents a great opportunity to enhance global cooperation in this area. This Element analyzes six elements of the global financing for development agenda, which are dealt with in individual sections: the role and evolution of development financing; the international monetary system; sovereign debt restructuring; international tax cooperation; international trade; and critical institutional issues. Although focusing on the international agenda, many of these issues have domestic implications for developing countries. The analysis covers both the nature of cooperation and recommendations on how to improve it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Walking is a determining trope and structure in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, furnishing a textual and performance figure, a framing device, and a material practice. The walk begins as a motif, becomes a rhythm, expands into a compositional principle, and culminates in an ontology -- a defining means by which his characters are cognitively embodied and by which meaning is grounded. The book contends that Beckett's literary pedestrianism involve passage from an evasive and narcissistic vestige of Romanticism and a solipsistic variation on Edwardian autonomy to an embrace of mutuality and transitory being: life not as a network of stations so much as a meshwork of ways, peripatetic coming and going as the basis of human possibility and ethical value. The study examines the Beckett walk with reference to, for instance, cognitive theory, materialities theory, environmental studies, infrastructure theory, cultural and literary history, speech-act theory, mobility studies and performance studies.
This Element discusses the role of the government in the financing and provision of public health care. It summarises core knowledge and findings in the economics literature, giving a state-of-the-art account of public health care. The first section is devoted to health system financing. It provides policy rationales for public health insurance which rely on both equity and efficiency, the co-existence of public and private health insurance, how health systems deal with excess demand, and the effect of health insurance expansion. The second section covers the provision of health care and the effect of policy interventions that aim at improving quality and efficiency, including reimbursement mechanisms, competition, public–private mix, and integrated care. The third section is devoted to the market for pharmaceuticals, focusing on the challenges of regulating on-patent and off-patent markets, and discussing the main incentives for pharmaceutical innovation.
This Element proposes a new understanding of Kant's account of marriage by examining the context and background conversations that shaped its development and by discussing the conception of equality at its core. Marriage as Kant understands it relies on a certain form of equality between spouses. Yet this conception of equality does not precede marriage, and carries important limitations – one of which being its inaccessibility to a significant proportion of the German population at the time. The protections and rights conferred by marriage were thus not accessible to all. Their shared preoccupation with this issue allows the author to put Kant's thoughts in relation with those of eighteenth-century feminist writers Theodor von Hippel and Marianne Ehrmann. Despite these limitations, the author finds that Kant's conception of marriage is compatible with the achievement of certain egalitarian goals, suggesting that it may be able to improve women's lives in a liberal state.
Processability Theory (PT) is a psycholinguistic theory of second language acquisition. The theory builds on the fundamental assumption that learners can acquire only those linguistic forms and functions which they can process. Therefore, PT is based on the architecture of the human language processor. PT is implemented in a theory of grammar that is compatible with the basic design of the language processor. This Element gives a concise introduction to the psycholinguistic core of PT - showing that PT offers an explanation of language development and variation based on processing constraints that are specified for typologically different languages and that apply to first and second language acquisition, albeit in different ways. Processing constraints also delineate transfer from the first language and the effect of formal intervention. This Element also covers the main branches of research in the PT framework and provides an introduction to the methodology used in PT-based research.
Iris Murdoch is well-known for her moral philosophy, especially for the light it sheds on the inner life. This Element focuses on the political significance and contours of Murdoch's ethics. Its chief aim is to illuminate the affinities between Murdoch's concept of the individual and the Enlightenment ideal of a society in which people live together as free equals. There are five sections in this Element. Section 1 provides context for the discussion. Section 2 compares what Murdoch calls the liberal and naturalistic outlooks and argues that she develops a modified version of the naturalistic outlook to better support an Enlightenment sensibility. Sections 3 and 4 examine the three main features of Murdoch's 'naturalized' individual. Section 3 considers the individual's uniqueness and transcendence. Section 4 considers the individual's knowability through love. Section 5 offers some concluding remarks.
Once hailed for implementing an industrial policy so effective that it transformed Japan into a model 'developmental state,' from the 1980s Japan steadily liberalized its economy and Japanese firms increasingly shifted production abroad via outward foreign direct investment. Yet industrial policy did not just fade away. With the emergence of new competitors in South Korea and Taiwan, and especially the rise of China as a security threat, the Japanese government strove to enhance the viability and competitiveness of Japanese firms as a means to strengthen economic security and reduce reliance on imported energy. Using newly compiled data on Japan's policy apparatus, political environment, and policy challenges, this Element examines how Japan, once an exemplar of 'catch up' industrialization, has struggled to 'keep up' with new challenges to national economic security, and more briefly considers how its policy evolution compares to those of its East Asian neighbors.
This Element examines various aspects of the demarcation problem: finding a distinction between science and pseudoscience. Section 1 introduces issues surrounding pseudoscience in the recent literature. Popper's falsificationism is presented in Section 2, alongside some of its early critics, such as Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos. It is followed in Section 3 by the notable criticism of the Popperian program by Larry Laudan that put the issue out of fashion for decades. Section 4 explores recent multi-criteria approaches that seek to define pseudoscience not only along a single criterion, but by considering the diversity and historical dimension of science. Section 5 introduces the problem of values (the 'new demarcation problem') and addresses how we can use values in the problem of pseudoscience. Finally, Section 6 concludes by emphasizing the need for an attitude-oriented approach over a rigid, method-based demarcation, recognizing scientific practice's evolving and multifaceted nature.
Islamic finance is rooted in Shariah or Islamic law, which promotes the well-being of humanity and discourages harmful practices. This Element highlights the nexus between Islamic finance and sustainable development, emphasizing the ethical and socially responsible nature of Islamic finance. It discusses how Islamic financial institutions contribute to sustainable development through the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals , Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria, and Socially Responsible Investment practices. Case studies from different parts of the world demonstrate practical applications of Islamic finance principles in supporting SDG. It suggests reforms that can unlock the full potential of Islamic finance, including the institutionalization of Islamic social finance, convergence with commercial finance, leveraging technology, integrating Shariah-based financial products, considering social return as a benchmark for approving products, introducing blended finance, and collaborating with humanitarian agencies. The potential of Islamic finance for sustainable development provides valuable insights for academicians, practitioners, and policymakers.
Metacognition, the awareness and regulation of one's own learning process, is a cornerstone of effective language learning. This element is a ground-breaking text that offers a comprehensive guide to incorporating metacognitive strategies into the teaching of reading, writing, vocabulary, and listening. This element stands as a bridge between theoretical frameworks and actionable teaching practices, enabling educators to enhance their students' language proficiency in a holistic manner. This element is replete with case studies, examples from diverse learning contexts, and evidence-based practices. It is an invaluable resource for language educators who aspire to cultivate independent learners capable of self-assessment and strategy adjustment. By fostering metacognitive awareness across all facets of language learning, this element empowers students to take charge of their own learning journey, leading to more profound and lasting language mastery.
The most prestigious musical ensemble of early-modern Naples remained the Royal Chapel or Cappella Reale di Palazzo. Conceived to serve directly the ruling authority of the capital city – whether the viceroy (Spanish or Austrian) or monarchs (Carlo di Borbone then Ferdinando) – membership in this elite organization offered prestige, financial security, and access to the broader networks of music culture in Naples, attracting the best musicians within and beyond the physical confines of the capital. This Element introduces readers to the largely unknown history of the Neapolitan Cappella Reale in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is based on primary sources, reconstructing the entire personnel of the ensemble (1750–99), recovering previously unstudied contractual agreements, offering details about the musicians while also examining the original music of the principal musicians of the orchestra.