Warfare did not evolve in a linear fashion. This is most obvious on the physical level: the weapons and armies of polities across time and space have fluctuated in sophistication, so that early European medieval armies had more in common with ancient Israelite or Greek contingents than with the Roman war machinery, and, up to the nineteenth century or even the twentieth, raiding warfare in some parts of Africa or the islands of south-east Asia was akin to patterns of pre-Columbian warfare in the Americas, prehistoric warfare in Europe and ghazis and booty expeditions in Europe and around the Mediterranean. Where warfare’s aims went beyond mere raiding, for much of world history, the paucity or even absence of relevant sources has made it difficult to reconstruct political–strategic aims. We also encounter vast varieties conditioned in part by hard factors such as climate, geography and resources. We have encountered and possibly not always avoided the danger of squeezing cultural differences into a Procrustean bed of Western concepts and languages. Yet some striking patterns have emerged. Not only Indo-European cultures, but also Mongols and Chinese, came up with a strategic aim of establishing a universal monarchy, or defending against the imposition of such an overlordship. The forming of alliances for common strategic purposes and the defence of allies or clients is another widespread pattern, strategic co-operation counterbalancing long-term hostilities. The distinction between client states and allies was often blurred. Non-kinetic tools of strategy were also employed widely, from giving gifts, to tribute payments (again a distinction often difficult to make), to marriages to confirm peace treaties or cement alliances. And most cultures seem to have had some rules or code of honour with regard to the conduct of war which in many contexts imposed limits on the pursuit of strategic aims.

Health-care systems within most countries are resource-limited – budgets are finite and not every service one would like to provide can be funded. In publicly funded health systems, those responsible for procuring health-care need to be able to explain how taxpayers’ money has been spent. Decisions are made at both individual patient and population levels. At an individual level, the decision might be: which statin should this patient get a prescription for to lower her blood cholesterol? At a population level, the decision might be: will a health and social care commissioning organization purchase a heart-failure specialist nurse or an additional sexual health clinic?

This chapter focuses on how such decisions are made and considers a framework for priority setting, a discussion of what factors should be taken into account when comparing options, a consideration of basic health economic concepts, and an overview of ethical principles which influence decisions.

“A text that revolutionised the Shāfiʿī school of law” is the best way to characterise the law book Minhāj, the central subject of this chapter. Soon after it was written in Damascus in the thirteenth century, it acquired an immense popularity among Shāfiʿī jurists, to the extent that no other text of the school ever achieved. In the following centuries, it not only influenced but also framed the very ways in which they discoursed about their school. It inspired generations of jurists in their legal-textual praxis, leading to the production of a copious amount of commentaries, supercommentaries, abridgements, poetic renderings, etc., and that continues to today. Its story presents an interesting phenomenon in the histories of Islamic law, law and Islam at large. This chapter explores its inception and trajectories. It asks why so many jurists engaged with the text and what made it so idiosyncratic that it influenced the textual discourses of such a large community across centuries. Embedded in the larger commentarial mode of juridical advancements of the time, it argues that Nawawī codified the school’s diverse opinions while synthesising the existing divisions. His own detailed engagements with the broader textual corpus of the school in his other works provided material for him to bring out a concise, comprehensive and coherent work that would address larger pedagogical and juridical requirements.

New and emerging environmental issues make policy and practice difficult.A pressing need to respond when knowledge of the problem is limited is added to an already challenging conservation agenda. Horizon-scanning is an evolving approach that draws on diverse information sources to identify early indications of poorly recognised threats and opportunities. There are many ways to conduct horizon scans, ranging from automated techniques that scan online content and mine text to manual methods that systematically consult large groups of people (often experts). These different approaches aim to sort through vast volumes of information to look for signals of change, for example the rise in microplastics or the use of mobile phones to gather data in remote forests. Identifying these new threats and opportunities is the first important step towards further researching and managing them. This chapter reviews different approaches to horizon-scanning, together with ways of encouraging uptake of scanning outputs. It concludes by introducing emerging technologies that will add value to horizon-scanning in the future.