In Chapter 6, I offer a narrative of how Tehran, as both a physical reality and a conceptual entity, captures the imagination of its residents. The chapter is organized around two emerging cities. The first is a material city that is sometimes admired as “modern,” “developed,” or “comparable to other modern capitals,” and sometimes criticized as “a betrayal of Tehran’s history,” “superficial,” “fake,” “a parody of other cities, with no authenticity.” I explore a second emerging city, a perceptual Tehran, through the narratives that engage with the city as a symbolic entity. Through these expressions, I lay out how Tehran is perceived by its residents, showing that identifying with the city is common and that place identities are more influenced by a sense of belonging to the city than to specific neighborhoods. Furthermore, Tehran has become a new source of inspiration for an unprecedented number of artworks and literature in recent years. Accordingly, while the chapter explores perceptions of the city through narratives of its residents, it also draws on examples of works of art and literature to examine how the city is reproduced and, thus, remembered and celebrated.

As Chapter 4 has already made clear, this chapter is not another caravan-to-car story. Nor is it another case study of threatening mobility vs. governmentality. It is rather a continuation of Chapter 4 on the transformations of economic and political geography that put caravans to the test. Building on Chapter 4 and contrary to developmentalist notions of modernisation, this chapter argues that the end of caravans was a cumulative process, just like its persistence until the interwar period. New kinds of territorialisation (automobility and what I define as the ‘evening of mobility’ were part of it, indeed) fostered gradual disintegration and divergence across the caravan regional market. This would gradually erode the caravans’ raison d’être and deepen their transition to shorter routes while camels and traders would find new employments.

This chapter begins with the First World War, when camels were used in unprecedented numbers by fighting armies. The First World War was the first step in the gradual transformation of the economic and political geography of the Middle East. It had deep influence on caravan trade and, following the caravans during the war and in the midst of borders negotiations, one can see how transnational and national form in parallel through overland mobility. With the following one, this chapter benefits from a dense and heterogeneous source base, which allows for the inclusion of lively narratives in order to give a full extent to Middle Eastern experiences of these transformations.

The Introduction begins by unpacking a 1929 Taiwanese civil case where multiple parties were concerned with the formation of a marriage, showing how the case – and public debates as well as other civil and criminal cases presented in this book – evolved around sociolegal problems across the empire, social customs and new forms of family, masculinity tied to household relationships, and Taiwanese women’s agency. The argument of the circulation of gender ideals is followed using ethnographic and historical backgrounds on marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships in Japan and Taiwan from the late nineteenth century through the 1910s. Grounded in these historical contexts, the Introduction suggests gender was at the center of Japan’s international and colonial relations, the competition surrounding Taiwanese masculinity in society and law, and the contested formation of Taiwanese women’s agency in the colonial courts. The final section outlines the organization of Geographies of Gender by highlighting the shift in narrative from the larger historical circumstances surrounding the Japanese empire to the specific interactions between discourse and colonial law in gendered terms.

This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts. In a plea to move beyond equating the global with openness, connection, and integration, I address the role of closure, boundaries, and limits in global history in a wider sense. For this purpose, I explore in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spherescan be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. The first part explores the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. I then move to think about the globe as composed of many bounded spheres – geopolitical but also social. Here, I take central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.

This chapter investigates fundamentalist experience in self-described fundamentalist communities in order to ascertain the structures and motivations of their experiences. It shows how fundamentalist experience provides an alternative space and time, thus separating itself from society and living in highly structured fashion. Such experience is marked by an intense preoccupation with corporeality in particular, although affect also plays an important role. Fundamentalist communities provide a whole vision of the world – a way of being in the world – that makes other ways of living impossible to envision. Fundamentalist experience is essentially not at home in the world and is marked by profound angst about its own existence. It therefore cannot allow individual appropriation of religious life, but imposes tight control on its members. Fundamentalist experience is deeply marked by the desire for assurance and security in the face of the loss of the home, the world, and one’s identity within it.

This chapter gets to the heart of why the disciplinary imagination of international law is only able to see deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation, by excavating the content of the orthodox concept(s) of territory and scrutinising the spatial assumptions. For it is how territory is understood that forces the production of aterritorial functionalist account of law. The chapter reviews the standard definition(s) of territory before deconstructing the characteristics and qualities of the concept of territory. These include: that territory is only states’; that territory is imagined in a two-dimensional, flat, jigsaw-like form; that the physical referents are analytically prioritised over the social; that territory tends to be imagined as homogeneous, uniform, and contiguous ; that territory is bound by a particular technology and representation of borders; and that territories are relatively static. The final sections delve into the signification of territory and outline five different uses for territory in the discourse, before exploring how territory has mediated legal theoretical understandings of sovereignty.

The book’s closing Chapter 9 on change in economics begins with an examination of the methodological problem of explaining what counts as change, and argues change in economics needs to be explained in terms of economics’ relationships to other disciplines. It argues that economics’ core–periphery structure works to insulate its core from other disciplines’ influences upon it, minimizing their influences. This raises the question: Can other disciplines influence economics’ core and potentially produce change in economics? To investigate this question, the chapter develops an open–closed systems model of disciplinary boundary crossings and argues that economics’ core is only incompletely closed and consequently its adopting other disciplines’ contents can change its interpretation. Using the different forms of relationships between disciplines distinguished in Chapter 7, mainstream economics’ relations to other disciplines are argued to currently be interdisciplinarity, but may also be unstable and can break down. When and under what circumstances? Moving from what happens within social science, two sets of external forces influencing change in economics – change in how research is done and historical changes in social values and social expectations regarding what economics is and should be about – are argued likely to increase boundary crossings between economics and other disciplines, undermine the insularity of its core, and move economics toward being a multidisciplinary, more pluralistic discipline. What would then be especially different about economics would be that individuals are seen as socially embedded and an objective economics is seen as a normative, value-entangled science.

This chapter explores the contrast between two types of ultimate authority (the tyrant and the sovereign) and the material limits on both through a study of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. It begins with an examination of the shared terrain between the two terms, and then moves to a study of the discursive development of tyrannos in ancient Greece. Two insights result: first, notions of sovereignty depend on some idea of limits or boundaries, whether recognized or not, to differentiate it from illegitimate tyranny. Second, the legitimacy problem is always political, depending on power and contestation; claims to either sort of ultimate authority will never find secure or self-evident foundations. Oedipus – a benevolent tyrant who has faith in his power because he escaped his fate and has bested the Sphnix – ends up unwittingly demonstrating the limits of both types of claims to ultimate authority. Attempting to find freedom beyond democratic knowledge and the constraints of time and inheritance, Oedipus’s refusal to remain bounded by the material limits of human existence results in his tragic downfall.

The Precipice of Hope: a conversation with Hahrie Han The concluding contribution to the volume features a conversation with scholar and activist Hahrie Han. Drawing on Han’s extensive experience as an adviser to popular movements across political divides, the conversation revisits the main questions of the volume: what is popular sovereignty and how can we understand and repurpose this historically important concept today? What is a people and under what conditions can a sense of solidarity across a vast array of social and political differences be build? Last but not least, are the idea and regulative ideal of rule of the people, and the very existence of a people that can govern itself, necessarily fictional, and to what extent is fiction an indispensable dimension of political concepts and norms.

Group Analysis is a particular approach to group psychotherapy as developed by S. H. Foulkes. Key influences and shared ground with other approaches are noted. This brief overview focuses largely on key constituents of the setting and format of group analysis as a psychological treatment. The group analyst, referred to as the conductor, and their dual roles of group administrator and group therapist are briefly explored. Vignettes show this therapeutic approach, in both therapeutic and non-clinical settings. Some key group analytic phenomena are illuminated as is the minimally interventive, analytical approach of the conductor. We encounter ‘John’ at three key stages namely pre-group preparation, joining a new group, and a preparing to leave the group. The conductor’s responsibilities are explored, specifically their intention to help the group develop a therapeutic culture, where dependence on the group conductor is replaced by a greater connectedness to each other. The conductor’s ability to trust the group to find its way is noted while their role in helping this process is not undervalued. Communication, both conscious and unconsciously is a central concern of the group analytic approach.

Working online and by phone can be useful in certain circumstances. However, it is important to be mindful that psychodynamic therapy online or by phone requires a shift in frame, boundaries, and setting. In order for the therapy to remain helpful and containing, both therapist and patient should be clear on the new framework and be able to review and consider in-person sessions if needed. This chapter uses clinical examples to illustrate some of these differences and how they might offer opportunities and also challenges. In addition, it includes discussion on technical and practical issues to consider if embarking on psychodynamic therapy online or by phone.

This chapter examines the impact of state formation, in the form of the rise of the civil parish, on manorial governance structures. Through examining churchwardens’ accounts, it demonstrates that these officials at Worfield and Cratfield transformed from being local managers in the parish to being important agents of the state. However, comparison of the identities of churchwardens and manorial officials reveals that, throughout this transformation, the same individuals continued to hold both manorial and parochial roles. Moreover, qualitative evidence reveals that the powers of churchwardens and manorial officials were combined to meet the same objectives by these individuals, helping them meet their obligations to the lord and the crown. This questions a model of replacement of manor by parish which has been put forward by some early modernists, instead suggesting that the local parochial elite that state formation is often argued to have created was deeply rooted in the governing structure of the medieval manor.

This chapter discusses the ways in which collective identity fuels mobilization in Chile’s urban margins. It looks at how activists’ cohesiveness and their differentiation from other social actors produce a mobilizing identity that advances contentious politics. The chapter draws on participant observations and interviews to outline the contents and dynamics of political consciousness production in Santiago’s urban margins. In their interactions, activists wield discourses of informality and marginality to strengthen a sense of pride in their neighborhood that is immune to hegemonic narratives of stigmatization. The thick boundaries that local activists use to promote mobilization depend on them dynamically differentiating between two realms of collective experience: the formal and the informal. On the one hand, the informal represents the protected sphere of confidence and close connections within neighborhood organizations. Activism works as a way of keeping the informal alive. The formal, on the other hand, is seen as a threat that motivates protective collective action. Finally, the chapter shows how activists’ reactive and defensive mobilization generates a sense of self-determination.

We cannot avoid the ambiguities that are inherent in the process of drawing social boundaries. This essay suggests thinking about the nature of those boundaries in three ways, to show how each can reframe our relationships. First, ‘notation’ is an attempt to conquer ambiguity by creating ever more categories and rules. This is the usual way we think about boundaries, but it also contains important limitations. Second, ‘ritual’ includes those acts that are formalized by social convention and repeated regularly. Ritual crosses boundaries of all kinds: between humans and spirits, men and women, food and people. Third, we can bracket away the categories of both notation and ritual by focussing on the full complexity and idiosyncrasy of a given moment, which we will call ‘shared experience’. On a temporary and ad hoc basis, this strategy lets us take practical action, eliding the problem of categories and the ambiguities they produce. These three analytic models are not mutually exclusive. Using ethnographic examples primarily from China, we argue that all three are necessary, but they intermix in different ways, and the nature of that mix contributes significantly to the local nature of pluralism.

This chapter reviews the history of the IPCC’s efforts to achieve and maintain policy relevance while remaining policy-neutral and staying far away from ‘policy prescriptiveness’. The chapter argues that the boundaries between policy relevance, neutrality and prescriptiveness are a practical achievement – they must be constantly negotiated as the science and politics of climate change evolve. The chapter uses historical case studies to illustrate this point, such as the controversy over the so-called ‘burning embers’ diagram. It ends by discussing recent debates about the IPCC’s new role in the post-Paris Agreement policy landscape. While IPCC actors call for greater policy relevance, observers and critics contend that the IPCC will always and inevitably be policy-prescriptive, even if on a tacit and unintentional level. Achieving even greater policy relevance may therefore mean jettisoning or modifying the aspiration to be policy-neutral.

In 2018, Lauren Alaina released her single “Ladies in the ’90s,” which takes a nostalgic look at her childhood through cleverly chosen lyrics from chart-topping songs of the 1990s. “Ladies in the ’90s” references women—and only women—from country music, as well as pop, rock, and R&B. The song establishes Lauren Alaina’s broad musical lineage and evokes nostalgia for an earlier decade. This chapter explores the performative and affective use of nostalgia and lineage in country music. A close reading of “Ladies in the ’90s” reveals how the generation of country artists coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century are redefining and expanding the stylistic, cultural, and even racial boundaries of the genre through the nostalgic tropes that have been used for decades in country music. In so doing, artists like Lauren Alaina are challenging the industry and carving out new musical and narrative spaces.