Georgia under Mikheil Saakashvili provides a two-part illustration in which initial success in concealing its quasi-authoritarian rule from the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation might have been, but ultimately was not, repurposed into success with its most important audiences: the European Union and NATO. Georgia after the Rose Revolution was just illegible enough for the Americans, given their strong asymmetrically interdependent relationship with the new regime, even though Saakashvili’s government had increased legibility by consolidating corruption into his inner circle’s hands. This was not enough for the EU or NATO, even though each has found reasons to overlook domestic insufficiencies before and, according to some members, the Russian threat prior to the August War of 2008 demanded rather than prevented Georgian accession. Georgia had the same mid-level legibility as it showed the Americans, but it faced a deeply divided audience in the other organizations. With no agreement on what Georgia meant for either organization, an asymmetrically interdependent relationship did not coalesce, and Georgia did not manage to conceal its quasi-authoritarian domestic rule from either one.

This chapter recovers the shifting ways in which landscape occupied the political and aesthetic imaginations of the group of radical liberals with whom Vaughan Williams spent his formative years. This generation of liberals was concerned with bringing the life of the mind directly to bear on the world at hand. It was a worldview that included particular assumptions about the processes of history, the future, and the role of the exceptional individual in the work of social reform, and which was made tangible through an affective relationship with landscape. Walking, cycling, and mountaineering became forms of spiritual exercise within a landscape that was ‘storied’ by family and national histories, and which exhibited the same processes of incremental change that were characteristic of certain liberal approaches to political, legal, and aesthetic reform. The chapter compares Vaughan Williams’s outlook with that of his close friend G. M. Trevelyan in particular, tracing the ways in which both men struggled to adapt their liberal values after the First World War. For Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams, and their liberal intellectual peers, a circumscribed vision of the landscape became emblematic of that feature of English political and legal history that tended towards incremental change, as well as the liberal sense of ‘continuity within change’ that arose as an expression of the importance of personal freedom and of national self-determination.

The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation continued to serve as a common normative platform for state–society interactions when each state's capacity was greatly enhanced under new socioeconomic circumstances in England (1640–1780), Japan (1853–1895), and China (1840–1911). The state–society interactions over domestic public goods provision were politically similar to those in the earlier episodes, though the scale and organizational capacity of social actors became much greater. Petitions to the state to redress specific welfare grievances did not escalate into demands for political reforms. In contrast, issues of nonmaterial public good, such as "true Christianity" in England and "national honor" in Japan, as well as the ensuing tension between the international and domestic dimensions of public interest, mobilized large-scale cross-regional and cross-sectoral petitions of public grievance. These petitions demanded fundamental political reforms in England and Japan. In China before 1895, the lack of conflict between diverse dimensions of the public interest accounts for the absence of such petitions of public grievance. When that changed, China likewise saw petitions for political change prior to the collapse of the Qing in 1911.

Taken as a whole the story told in this book is one of disembodiment, a loss of body. As such it corresponds to other stories of alienation told by sociologists. Yet restoring what has been lost is fraught with dangers. We cannot readily go back, and attempts to do so have had disastrous consequences. It is not enough to simply add physical exercises to our daily routine. Instead, we need once again to take movements seriously as intentional acts.

Chapter Seven discusses the evolution of the opposition movements seeking Hong Kong’s democracy and autonomy before and after the handover. The mainstream democratic opposition in Hong Kong grew out of the anti-colonial and Chinese nationalist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Their moderate, non-confrontational approach to gradual democratic reform made some gains in the first 15 years of China’s rule. Simultaneously, the increasing aggressiveness of Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom, coupled with the rising social polarization caused by the influx of Chinese capital, fueled the growth of more radical, confrontational social and opposition movements.

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This chapter shows how many of the events and much of the work of the second interim government in Tunisia, the National Constituent Assembly (NCA) and Troika, were directly linked to or produced by the behaviors, traits, and decisions of the TPA. The chapter begins by explaining how – in line with the previous chapter – the TPA was not operating in wide open territory; rather, it faced many constraints by nature of its role as a first interim government. These included pressure to swiftly hand power to an elected government, thus forcing it to work quickly; the need for care as it tried not to overstep its mandate, thus constraining its decision-making ability; and a host of constraints created by the legacies of the outgoing autocracy and inexperience with democratic government, including its own lack of preparation. The chapter then describes the series of events and actions under the TPA's successor, each with its own echoes of what had come before.