This chapter marks the starting point of our investigation of actual policy solutions to tackle armed conflict. When a doctor has reached her diagnosis, she must then decide on the right medication to administer. Similarly, while economists started by studying the drivers of political violence, in recent years increasing efforts have been made to understand how to cut the Gordian knot of conflict. As argued in this chapter, a first-order factor is the institutional environment, and in particular the need to give a voice to all citizens and groups in society. Democracy is desirable, but without proper safeguards it can have a dark side and result in blood being spilt. Furthermore, the type of democracy and the provisions of sharing power between groups matter. Closer inspection of local-level power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the building of modern Switzerland after its civil war in 1847, the difficulties for current democratization in Iraq and the franchise extension during the British Age of Reform drive this discussion forward.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

De Tocqueville helps us see American democracy as a way of life shaped by individualism and a dislike of theatrical display. In John Adams, the ideals of Protestant Christianity and Roman republicanism collided. Adams believed in personal integrity, but was unashamed to perform a social role, inspired by the Roman republican orator Cicero. In the nineteenth century Hugh Blair repositioned rhetoric as a way to speak truth, in a language that in practice confined truth-speaking to the elite. When working-class Irish Americans sought a more inclusive democracy, they found a symbolic representative in the actor Edwin Forrest, and many died in the ensuing riot outside a new opera house in 1849. Black Americans first found a public voice through the person of Frederick Douglass, whose oratory was founded both on preaching and on the old flamboyant republican tradition. Women first demanded a voice in the context of Quakerism and the campaign to abolish slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later argued for female suffrage in terms that were more secular, more individualist and ultimately more elitist.

Children add more information to their utterances by packing more material into a single clause. They can specify roles, modify nouns with adjectives and verbs with added locatives and adverbs. They can add demonstratives (those) and quantifiers (many) to nouns, and make clearer what they are referring to. Young children’s early constructions tend to mirror parental usage, just as their lexical choices do. They follow preferred argument structure and place given information in the Agent slot of transitive verbs, and keep the Object slot of transitives and the Subject slot of intransitives for new information. They may omit given information at this stage and only later add the relevant pronoun subjects. In both questions and negations, they take time to master the use of auxiliary verbs and rely on fixed “frames” for some time as they learn the meaning of each wh- question word. Children also take time in learning how different perspectives can be marked within the clause, with choices of causative, location, or voice alternations. Here children must learn the options verb by verb.

This chapter explores the concept of voice, both as the marker of an individual poet and as a poem's specific configuration of form and content. Taking as its chief case study the work of Ishwar Gupta, the chapter examines voice as vocal utterance and as the representation of identity. It shows how Ishwar Gupta's singular and innovative voice, epitomizing a shift in the history of Bengali poetry from an oral to a written poetics, is characterized both by intricate sound play and by its politically charged representation of the modern city in colonial India. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that, even when encountered as text on the page, the voice of Ishwar Gupta's poems remains living and material: this is a vernacular voice, sensitive to the everyday, the local, and the urban. In this way, the voice of the poem conveys the lived materiality of a specific historical moment.

This chapter offers a thorough overview of choral composition from its historical foundations in the church to modern trends in choral music today. It outlines technical issues around text setting, writing for specific voice types, notation, and tips for writing for amateur or less experienced groups.

There are certain foundations of effective communication, and all are revealed and explored in this chapter. They are: clarity, brevity, simplicity, authenticity, and – sometimes surprisingly – humility, or the power of listening.

This chapter explores the voice as a complex, expressive instrument. It begins by outlining voice types, techniques, and styles – ranging from opera to musical theatre and popular music –  before looking at the relationship between language and music, and finally exploring the nature of idiomatic vocal writing and so-called extended techniques. The chapter finishes with a nod to the future of vocal music by briefly thinking about the voice in conjunction with electronics.

This chapter describes the prevalence of prosimetrum – the alternation of narrative prose and skaldic verse – in the Íslendingasögur, with a brief consideration of prosimetrum in konungasögur and samtíðarsögur. A distinction is introduced between verses which are quoted as the dialogue of characters and those which appear to corroborate the narrative prose; it is explained that this distinction is established through the way the verses are incorporated in the prose, and is not inherent in the stanzas themselves. The aesthetic effects of verses representing dialogue in saga prose – additional content, the direct perspective and apparent voice of a character, control of narrative pace and ornamentation – are set out. The plausibility or otherwise of the impromptu recitation of skaldic verse is discussed, and a contrast drawn between the elaborate artificiality of skaldic verse and the ostensible simplicity of saga prose. The distinction between the two kinds of verse use is then problematized. A discussion of how and why the prose and verse first came together comes next, with speculation about how authors constructed their prosimetrical sagas and the literary effects achieved.

Chapter 4 introduces the main empirical case of the book, The Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, and documents its progression from 2001 to 2022, a key period of autocratization in Russia. This chapter details how participatory technologies can be positioned as a credible form of voice and the strategies used to increase the Direct Line’s credibility while still maintaining control.

Chapter 7 assesses how specific individual characteristics, particularly political awareness and beliefs, condition the impact of participatory technologies on attitudes toward authorities and individuals’ own perceptions of voice in politics. It argues that awareness of participatory technologies influences attitudes primarily among those with low levels of political sophistication and pro-regime beliefs. The chapter also demonstrates that participatory technologies can negatively impact attitudes toward authorities for regime critics, ultimately contributing to political backlash and polarization.

Chapter 6 empirically tests whether and how participatory technologies influence political attitudes. Using two original survey experiments and qualitative data from interviews and focus groups, this chapter examines the impact of awareness of the Direct Line on approval of President Putin and perceptions of voice. The results indicate that participatory technologies have a positive impact on attitudes toward authorities. It also argues that, while government responsiveness to citizen demands does improve attitudes toward autocrats, the mere presence of participation opportunities bolsters support regardless of authorities’ response to these demands.

In this chapter, Aris Georgopoulos and Petros Mavroidis examine the contribution of the WTO dispute settlement body to the resolution of trade disputes. This chapter documents the problems and challenges faced by the WTO’s dispute settlement body and reveals their debilitating impact on its work. This chapter then puts forward concrete proposals for the establishment of a new WTO Court and explains why such a course of action has a realistic chance of breaking the current impasse and creating an effective dispute settlement body for trade disputes.