"This chapter will examine the practice of strategy – the relationship between available resources, competing aims and geopolitical realities – by focusing on the Habsburg dynasty in the period from 1500 to 1650. The Habsburg monarchies brought together a diverse series of different concerns focused on dynasty, geopolitics and religion, within a framework of planning, prioritisation and opportunism. I will also seek to examine changes in practice over time. How do strategic conceptions and the pursuit of strategic aims shift in the century between the reign of Charles V and the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg rulers at the time of the Thirty Years War? How did changing political and military circumstances over this century alter the aims and dynamics of strategy? Or were there fundamental continuities in, for example, the constraints on mobilising financial and human resources, sustaining warfare or achieving desired outcomes through war or diplomacy?

The chapter will be based on two case studies. The first of these examines the strategic implications of the transformation to the dynasty enabled by the extraordinary inheritance of Charles V, and the vast European monarchía that this brought into existence. It will look at Charles’s strategic aims and goals; the resources, both material and ideological, that could be mobilised in pursuit of these goals; the enemies that he faced; and the way in which they forced him to prioritise and compromise. Ultimately the largest compromise was the decision to divide his inheritance between two branches of the family. The account will pass over the later sixteenth century and resume with the strategies, priorities and resource mobilisation of the Austrian and Spanish branches of the family during the Thirty Years War. The account will look at the way in which they sought to re-create a strategy based on close family co-operation, and mobilising resources that were significantly different from those of Charles V. The comparison raises a number of themes, both structural and contingent, that I hope will contribute to the larger discussion of the volume.

Chapter 4, Moratorium or guarantee (May 25 - May 27), traces the communications between central and private bankers as they realize that a moratorium may be on its way. Central and private bankers increasingly try to avoid a moratorium and Norman uses his network to get the international creditors to organize themselves. There is an increasing sense of urgency and uncertainty, but it seems that the BIS and central banks are successful in averting a moratorium and getting a guarantee instead. There are still many unknowns, however, and the occasional conflict in the epistemic community also appears.

Chapter 5 takes the reader to a community-based weekend Chinese language school. Drawing upon reflections from a Chinese language teacher there, it delineates the historical complexity of Chinese language traits and cultural values as well as the challenges in choosing what to impart to children who speak Chinese as a heritage language and how to instill a cultural ethos which may be divergent from mainstream culture. It explores the history and evolving emphasis of Chinese language schools over time, the nature and cultural significance of the Chinese writing system as well as the challenges it poses to learners of Chinese as a heritage language, the culturally specific ways of conceptualizing education, and the cultural shift that accompanies and motivates language shift.

After a brief introduction to the outbreak of the Austrian Credit Anstalt crisis in May 1931 and the early response by central bankers from Bank of England, the BIS and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, this chapter proceeds to present the book’s overall issues and main concepts, which will be used as a heuristic framework throughout the narrative. The main concepts of the book are radical uncertainty, sensemaking, narrative emplotment, imagined futures and epistemic communities. In the chapter, I discuss how these concepts are helpful in understanding central bankers’, and other actors’, decision-making and practices in the five month from May through September. The chapter also discusses my analytical strategy and presents the empirical material, which comes from the Bank of England, Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the J.P. Morgan Archive, the Rothschild Archive and a few others. At the end of the chapter, I present the structure of the book.

The extant literature on the liberal commons takes as granted secure property rights, freedom of association, and the rule of law, all of which have been the exception rather than the rule throughout human history, and therefore fails to explore the origin of the liberal commons (from an illiberal regime). Authoritarianism poses a fundamental challenge to, but also an opportunity to explore the origin of, the liberal commons. This chapter defines the authoritarian commons by examining the tension between authoritarianism and the liberal commons both theoretically and in the specific context of neighborhood governance in urban China.

Section 7.1 examines the idealized setting where optimal utilitarian planning is feasible. I quantify the value of covariate information in improving achievable social welfare. Conditioning treatment choice on more refined covariate information cannot lower social welfare in this setting. It increases welfare if covariate refinement has predictive power that affects treatment choice. I also discuss nonutilitarian arguments to disregard certain covariate information when making clinical and criminal justice decisions.

The remainder of the chapter considers planning when uncertainty about treatment response makes optimization infeasible. Section 7.2 distinguishes settings where the planning problem does or does not decompose into a set of separable covariate-specific problems. The former situations are easier to study than the latter. Section 7.3 considers the common medical problem of choice between surveillance and aggressive treatment of patients, with partial knowledge of personalized risk of illness. Section 7.4 extends the analysis to sequential choice of whether to acquire costly covariate information as a prelude to treatment choice. I focus on medical choice to perform a diagnostic test before making the treatment decision.

This chapter focuses on two of Elizabeth Bowen’s works – a semi-autobiographical play, ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’ (1949), and a novel, A World of Love (1955) – which register a phenomenon that historian Katherine Holden has termed ‘imaginary widowhood’. This psychological coping mechanism, encouraged by newspaper headlines, political speeches, and educators in the interwar years, allowed Britain’s two million ‘surplus’ women to view themselves not as shameful spinsters, but as those who had lost their rightful husbands in the Great War. The first half of the chapter charts competing representations of unmarried women in the early twentieth century and notes the attention paid to ‘imaginary widowhood’ in both Bowen’s The Hotel (1927) and ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’. Concluding with A World of Love, the chapter ends by arguing that Bowen’s long-term interest in this type of consolatory counterfactual produced a tonally complex mid-century novel, whose formal exploration of the imaginative and conceptual limits of traditional literary plots echoes the struggle of its two heroines as they weigh up the benefits of continuing to see themselves as the would-be widows of a long-dead soldier.

Chapter 16 comparatively examines the national legislation in EU member states in order to reveal common patterns and differences in legal rules and their practical application with respect to gathering digital evidence for the purpose of criminal investigations. The study is essentially based on the information provided in the preceding book chapters, covering seven national legal systems selected for this research: Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland and Spain. The comparative analysis investigates not only the rules on access to digital evidence but also their broader legislative context. Indeed, before analysing how data can be obtained, it is important to understand the legal terminology and categorisations used in the different legal systems, as well as the national rules on data retention in light of the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU.

For Jerome Robbins, musical theatre dance provided spectacle, but its primary function was to communicate story, acting as a cohesive thread between visual, aural, and textual elements. Robbins turned dance into a common language in the world of the play, an extension of a character’s vocabulary. For West Side Story, Jerome Robbins envisioned a prominent ensemble comprised of singing–acting dancers responsible for conveying essential narrative elements. By centering the action of the ensemble, movement and music lead lyrics, book, and design in translating given circumstances and character action. He enhanced aesthetic unity, thematic synthesis, and flow by developing a choreo-direction process which integrated American Stanislavski-based method acting principles with staging and dance composition. This ultimately contributed to the legacy left by West Side Story on film, Broadway, and concert dance.

This chapter reads the formulation of modernism itself as a passive revolution in Virginia Woolf’s experimental prose. The passive revolution she conceives in The Waves, like Gramsci’s rendering of the “revolution without revolution," plays on the paradox of conservative content and radical form. Woolf’s novel illuminates the failures of high modernism to represent the world and performs a kind of self-critique, as well as a critique of the limitations of Western modernism created by a bourgeois class with a pretense for world-making in concert with the British establishment. The Waves advances the idea of global modernism by seeing the world as an invention of language wielded by an ambitious few. Colonial India stands at the center as that misty site of desire and loss against which the communal identity of its six characters is formed. Empire is imagined here as a vacuum, with absence at its center, and formalized in Woolf’s novel as a passive revolution tied to the advancing day.

Chapter 8 shows that Palladio’s design for the unbuilt wings would have reinforced the villa’s hybrid character through their allusions to a range of urban and rural building types. Their evocation of the ancient triumphal arch would have made a bold claim for Pisani hegemony in Montagnana.

How were post-Arab Spring constitutions drafted? What are the most significant elements of continuity and change within the new constitutional texts? What purposes are these texts designed to serve? To what extent have constitutional provisions been enforced? Have the principles of constitutionalism been strengthened compared to the past? These are some of the key questions Francesco Biagi addresses. Constitution-Building After the Arab Spring: A Comparative Perspective examines seven national experiences of constitution-building in the Arab world following the 2011 uprisings, namely those of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. This interdisciplinary book, based largely on the author’s own work and research in the region, compares these seven national experiences through four analytical frameworks: constitution-drafting and constitutional reform processes; separation of powers and forms of government; constitutional justice; and religion, women, and non-Muslims within the framework of citizenship.