The current context of regressive border regimes challenges critical theory’s commitments. Can we still take recent legal and political practices as starting points for reimagining political norms and institutions based on a reconstruction of hidden emancipatory potentials? The chapter argues that critical border theory could benefit from recentering the idea of political representation, and especially from building on insights of the recent constructivist turn in representation theory. Understanding political representation as shape-shifting and constituency-mobilizing changes long-held assumptions about the spaces, subjects, and demands articulated in border politics. While this representative perspective has diagnostic advantages, it is unable to criticize the legitimacy of existing border regimes owing to its thin normative assumptions. Reconstructive approaches to border politics should therefore use the diagnostic tools of the recent representation scholarship without committing to their limited critical potential

This chapter empirically analyzes how portfolios of external finance impact aid agreements. The chapter integrates data on external debt and foreign aid to establish a comprehensive picture of developing countries' portfolios of external finance, demonstrating that these have become less reliant on traditional donors over time. The analysis tests if a greater share of finance from Chinese or private sources is associated with favorable terms from traditional donors, using measures of aid volume, infrastructure project share, and conditions attached to World Bank projects. The findings indicate that as countries draw a greater share of their external finance from nontraditional sources, they are more likely to receive aid on preferred terms. The relationship is stronger for countries of strategic significance to donors and, especially, those with higher donor trust.

Suppose you are running a company that provides proofreading services to publishers. You employ people who sit in front of screens, correcting written text. Spelling errors are the most frequent problem, so you are motivated to hire proofreaders who are excellent spellers. Therefore, you decide to give your job applicants a spelling test. It isn’t hard: throw together 25 words, and score everyone on a scale of 0–25. You are now a social scientist, a specialist called a psychometrician, measuring “spelling ability.”

The reader should be officially informed that in this chapter I take leave of the widely accepted consensus about nature–nurture. This is not a textbook, and everything that I have said up to now has been very much my own take on things, but for the most part I have not strayed far from what most scientists would say about the intellectual history of nature and nurture. Not everyone perhaps, but most people agree that Galton was a racist, eugenics a moral and scientific failure, heritability of behavioral differences nearly universal, heritability a less than useful explanatory concept, twin studies an interesting but ultimately limited research paradigm, and linkage and candidate gene analysis of human behavior decisive failures.

Has it always been the case that living people must struggle with the moral failings of their dead ancestors, or is that a special burden that has been placed on the shoulders of citizens and scientists living in contemporary Europe and North America? Recently, the culture feels as though it is being torn apart by this question. I was taught in grade school that the United States is the greatest country in the world, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where anyone could be a millionaire or president if they put in the effort. It is hardly radical to recognize that this is less than true today and isn’t even close to true historically, especially if one is not white, Christian, and male.

Notwithstanding Galton’s admonition to count everything, counting is just a tool; it is no more science than hammering is architecture. One hundred years after Galton, Robert Hutchins remarked, contemptuously, that a social scientist is a person who counts telephone poles. The obvious way to turn counting into science is by conducting experiments, that is by manipulating nature and observing what the consequences are for whatever one is counting. Gregor Mendel, for example, was certainly a counter – he counted the mixtures of smooth and wrinkled peas in the progeny of the pea plants he intentionally crossed. What made Mendel’s work science was the intentional crossing of the plants, not the counting itself. It would have been much more difficult – perhaps impossible – to observe the segregation and independent assortment of traits by counting smooth and wrinkled peas in the wild.

Why is divorce heritable? It’s clear that it is heritable, in the rMZ > rDZ sense. I hope I have convinced you that the heritability of divorce doesn’t mean that there are “divorce genes,” or that divorce is passed down genetically from parents to children, but seriously: how does something like that happen? I am aware that my constant minimizing of the implications of heritability can seem as though I am keeping my finger in the dike against an inevitable onslaught of scientifically based genetic determinism, the final Plominesque realization that our genes make us who we are, the apotheosis of Galton’s proclamation in 1869: “I propose to show … that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world” (Hereditary Genius, p. 1).

Robert Plomin, whose name has come up a few times already, is unquestionably the most important psychological geneticist of our time. Trained in social and personality psychology at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s (my graduate alma mater, though we didn’t overlap), he went on to faculty positions at the University of Colorado and the Pennsylvania State University (both major American centers for behavior genetics) before moving to London to take a position at the Institute of Psychiatry. Plomin’s career has embodied the integration of behavioral genetics into mainstream social science and psychology. Everywhere Plomin has been, he has initiated twin and adoption studies, many of which continue to make contributions today. Although genetics has always played a central role in Plomin’s research, you would never mistake his work for that of a biologist or quantitative geneticist: he (like me) has always been first and foremost a psychologist.

The Second World War marked a turning point for what was considered acceptable in genetics and its implications for eugenic and racially motivated social policies. To be sure, the change in attitude was not quick or decisive. Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized involuntarily after the war. Anti-black racism, antisemitism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, needless to say, persisted for a long while and have not yet been eliminated; interracial marriage was still illegal in much of the country during my lifetime. But – and despite the foot-dragging, I think this needs to be recognized as an advance – it slowly became less and less acceptable to adopt openly eugenic or racist opinions in public or to justify them based on science. Retrograde attitudes about such things persist to this day, but they have mostly been relegated to the fringes of scientific discourse.

Many people outside of psychology and biology come to the subject of nature–nurture because of an interest in race. That is unfortunate, but I get it. People, especially in the United States, are obsessed with race, for obvious reasons: American history is indelibly steeped in racial categories. The two foundational failures of the American experience – genocide of Indigenous Americans and enslavement of Africans – happened because of race and racism. Even today in the United States, people of all persuasions think about race all the time, whether as hereditarian racists convinced that there are essential biological differences among ancestral groups, progressives fascinated by personal identity and the degradations that non-white people still experience, or the dozens of racial and ethnic categories obsessively collected by the U.S. census.

Let’s summarize where the nature–nurture debate stood as the twentieth century drew to a close. When the century began, thinkers were faced for the first time with the hard evolutionary fact that human beings were not fundamentally different biologically than other evolved organisms. Galton and his eugenic followers concluded that even those parts of human experience that seemed to be unique – social, class, and cultural differences; abilities, attitudes, and personal struggles – were likewise subsumed by evolution and the mammalian biology it produced. People and societies could therefore be treated like herds of animals, rated on their superior and inferior qualities, bred to maintain them, treated to fix them, and culled as necessary for the good of the herd. Not every mid-century moral disaster that followed resulted from their misinterpretation of human evolution, but it played a role. Society has been trying to recover from biologically justified racism, eugenics, and genocide ever since.