Agents typically make choices in succession. This may lead to situations where past choices seem to influence future choices, but often such a correlation is spurious and goes away if the analyst has as much information as the agent.

Through the narratives of everyday experiences, I have sought to examine the transformation of gender identity, relations, and roles of Rohingya women in the refugee camps in Bangladesh – of how they see themselves and how they make a life despite their difficult circumstances. Focusing on the voices of Rohingya women helps to highlight the impacts of forced migration on how the ‘gendered self is transformed’ and the ways in which these women learn to negotiate and navigate new environments, thereby reshaping ‘strategies of selfhood’ (Bhabha 1994; Abusharaf 2009; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014). While the prevailing scholarly literature on refugees details many of the complexities of displacement, much of the attention is put on the challenges and suffering faced by refugees during and after forced migration. One strand of research that remains underrepresented is a grounded understanding of refugee experiences more broadly – and that of refugee women specifically – that focuses on their ability to reconstruct their lives after displacement. This book is an attempt to look beyond these broad assumptions by providing a lens into the everyday, the mundane, the quotidian parts of Rohingya women's lives in the Kutupalong–Balukhali mega-camp, after experiencing violence and forced migration. Through the narratives, stories, and emotions conveyed in the preceding chapters, I have sought to uncover how the experiences of Rohingya women during and after forced migration, as well as their strategic deployment of varying forms and degrees of economic, social, and cultural capital, help them to recreate a sense of community and ‘life’ in the camps. This book thus showcases the creative capacity of refugee women to apply their own frames of meaning within the camps – frames that are distinct from the commonly promoted or taken-for-granted assumptions of NGOs and humanitarian aid agencies.

Through feminist ethnographic research, this book has shown that the camps have neither destroyed pre-existing conceptions of masculinity and femininity, nor have they left them unchanged – instead, these notions have come to occupy an ‘in-between’ space, opening up the possibilities of empowerment while also reifying gendered expectations. Gendered positions do not remain static – rather, Rohingya women negotiate and navigate patriarchal structures and power asymmetries, highlighting their agentic capacity.

The Introduction includes an explanation of the use of the word “secret” in the title. It is taken from Walter Bagehot’s 1867 book The English Constitution, in which the author famously argued that “the efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion," the “singular approximation” of the executive and legislative powers. This is a suitable description of what happens in trilogues, as these indeed realize a singular approximation of the different European legislative institutions. It could therefore be claimed that trilogues are the “efficient secret” of the European constitution – that is to say, something not expressly regulated in the Treaties but crucial to the existence and functioning of the European political system.

This chapter discusses the transform fault precursors, continental strike-slip fault zones, and the role of pre-existing anisotropy on their development. It focuses on the potential perturbation of their controlling dynamics and its effect on their structural architecture. The chapter contains a series of examples from failed and successful rift systems, helping to understand the role of different scales of pre-existing anisotropy. These examples serve to illustrate the wide variety of transform, transfer, and accommodation zones that may evolve as a result of crustal inhomogeneities during the activity of a controlling stress regime. They also show how the anisotropy zones manifest themselves in different ways, depending on the relationship between the type of anisotropy and the imposed slip vector.

During the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore sought to spread his intellectual ideas in a fight against a scientific racist ideology which presented non-White or non-European individuals as downtrodden and in need of European colonialism to civilize them. Tagore was born in 1861 into a prominent Bengali Brahmin family as the youngest of thirteen children. His family was extremely wealthy, mainly due to the success of his grandfather Dwarkanath who had amassed a fortune through his firm, Carr, Tagore and Co. Dwarkanath had earned a great deal of respect from the British for his business accomplishments. From an early age, Tagore was an avid reader. Heavily influenced by the Upanishads, he was inspired to become a writer himself. In his works, Tagore set out to find unity and “a stability of belief and moral principal to give meaning and order to everything he did.”1 He looked for harmony in all things while paying attention to the deep religious beliefs of ancient India. Tagore believed the “unity of God and his creation was the unity of a creative personality.”2 He expressed his creative passions by writing poetry that had strong spiritual messages. His writings referred heavily to the landscape of eastern India where he described the flowers, forests, birds, and the sacred Ganges River. Many of Tagore's poems created a sense of nostalgia. In one of his poems, titled Shah Jahan, named after the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Tagore lamented the end of the Mughal Empire, writing, “You are gone now emperor – Your empire has dissolved like a dream, Your throne is shattered, Your armies, whose marching shook the earth, Today have no more weight than the windblown dust on the Delhi road.”3 Tagore believed that the British Raj neglected the histories of the great Indian empires within their schools for Indian pupils. He wanted Indians to be proud of their ancestry, and sought to reassert their cultural brilliance both at home and abroad.

Maximus’ physicalism is the result of his combination of the creationist ensoulment model with an exacting application of the Adam-Christ parallel in which the agency of Christ must mirror that of Adam. Since the creationist ensoulment model excludes the soul from universal fallenness, Maximus reasons that Adam’s singular agency had a universal effect only on bodies. The fall of souls cannot be entirely accounted to Adam; rather, it requires individual wrong willing. Maximus insists that Christ mirrors Adam’s agency by having a universal physicalist effect only on human bodies, while the rectification of souls and wills requires individuals to follow Christ’s example in accepting suffering, thereby escaping the destructive cycle of pain and pleasure. Maximus demonstrates that the triumph of the creationist ensoulment model fatally limits the theological usefulness of physicalist soteriology.

The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) is a militant ethno-nationalist movement that achieved mass-democratic power in Pakistan during the 1980s. Propelled by ethnic riots and led by university students with lower-middle-class backgrounds, the MQM used a vigilant style of militancy to transform the cities of the southern Pakistani province of Sindh into an ethnic majoritarian stronghold – this, at the unlikely height of Pakistan's third military dictatorship (1978–1988). From the outset, leaders from the movement voiced long-standing concerns that Muhajirs – partition-era migrants from what is today India – had been systematically pushed out of public sector institutions by native Pakistanis (often referred to by activists in English as “sons of the soil”). The more novel aspect of the MQM's platform, however, was its demand for the recognition of Muhajirs as a separate, “oppressed nationality” (mazlum qaum) within Pakistan. This demand for an ethnic nationality and the displacement it enacts on both official and minority conceptions of the nation is the subject of this book.

Some sense of what is at stake in the displacements of Muhajir nationalism can be found in the story of its original leader, Altaf Hussain. Soon before the MQM achieved mass-political power, Hussain was arrested for burning the Pakistani flag on the steps of the mausoleum of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim nation-state's “great founder and leader” (Quaid-e-Azam). A senior MQM activist's voice swelled with feeling as he recalled the ghostly encounter between the two leaders, which took place shortly after the military coup of 1978. The question of what Hussain was trying to convey that day on the steps of the mausoleum hung between us as we sat there, just slightly removed from the evening bustle of the party office. Sensing my apprehension, he turned in closer to break the silence: “After all, what else can a lover of Pakistan do when they don't receive rights?” (Akhir, jab haq nahi milta to mohib-e-vatan ko kiya karna chahiye?).

Further insight into the MQM's distinctive critique of the Pakistani nation-state can be found in Safar-e-Zindagi (My Life's Journey, 1988), Hussain's hastily written political biography published on the eve of Pakistan's return to civilian democratic rule in which he writes, “[T]he Mohajir [sic] nation had its beginnings (shuruat) in the Two-Nation Theory of Pakistani nationhood” (A. Hussain 2011 [1988]: 132), thereby framing the latter simultaneously as a point origin and departure.

Women’s agency was contingent on the multiple parties concerned with it, and they formed its gendered understandings and practices. This chapter traces those understandings and practices in the courtroom, where Taiwanese women in premarital sexual relationships expressed their interests. From the early 1920s, more women made their voices heard in civil cases on marital affairs and divorce, which revealed changing attitudes toward marriage and premarital sexual relationships among themselves, their partners and family members, and Japanese judges. The judges joined the male litigants in highlighting the formal state of marriage and wifehood against women’s informal personal status and their sexual histories. Meanwhile, Taiwanese women continued to react against the discriminatory treatment of premarital sexual relationships and eventually won the more flexible treatment of premarital relationships as if they were formal marriages in the mid-1930s. However, this result was achieved only when those women agreed to be submissive to their male partners or otherwise considered promiscuous. Changing the direction of their sexual, marital, and family lives took on a gender-specific tone.

The final published debate in which Neurath participated was with Horace Kallen, founding member of the New School in New York. This discussion with manifold cultural dimensions was a fitting swansong for Neurath, summarizing key themes of his thought and highlighting essential issues of his complex and contentious legacy. Kallen suspected Neurath’s drive for ‘Unity of Science’ as harbouring the danger of totalitarianism, but Neurath defended the pluralism of his approach while accepting Kallen’s proposed term of ‘orchestration’ instead of ‘unity’ for the sciences. Neurath felt rather neglected for his scholarly achievements at the end of his life, but these now become increasingly more relevant.