As a theology student in North Wales, Gerard Manley Hopkins immersed himself in Welsh landscapes and the Welsh language; in so doing, he developed his distinctive poetic idiom. Yet Hopkins’s responses to Wales are also charged with political and psychological complexities. Wales has a deep, contested history of invention and reinvention, and Hopkins is part of a tradition of writers who have performed identity against the backdrop of an ideological Welsh landscape. Hopkins’s bardic nom de plume, ‘Brân Maenefa’ – the name with which he signed ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ – has often been understood as a jest, but it is better understood as a psychic-aesthetic identity, one whose performance gave Hopkins permission to pursue a poetic vocation. Wales was Hopkins’s ‘mother of Muses’ because he required Wales, and in a sense created Wales, as a m/otherland that, by virtue of its alterity, could mother-forth a unique poetic identity.

Chapter 3 presents localized peace enforcement theory. It first discusses the challenges facing individuals involved in a communal dispute. Reflecting on these obstacles to peaceful dispute resolution, the chapter outlines a formal micro-level theory of dispute escalation between two individuals from different social groups who live in the same community. It explains how international intervention shapes escalation dynamics. The chapter then shifts the focus to local perceptions of intervener impartiality, which the theory posits are a key determinant of whether a UN intervention succeeds in preventing the onset of violence. The identifies the importance of multilateralism, diversity, and the nonuse of force as critical factors shaping local perceptions and, as a result, UN peacekeeping effectiveness. Critically, the theory does not suggest that UN peacekeepers will always succeed, or that all kinds of UN peacekeepers will succeed. Indeed, perceptions of UN peacekeepers vary depending on the troop-contributing country and the identity of the civilians involved in the dispute. The chapter closes with a discussion of the most important hypotheses derived from the theory.

Doris Lessing was one of the most restless novelists of her generation. She toggled between realist bildungsromane, autofiction, postmodernist experimentation, and speculative fiction. Despite her restlessness, she remained committed to the novel of ideas, using these different subgenres to entertain philosophical debates about autonomy, group membership, racism, and social progress. Surprisingly, as this chapter demonstrates, Lessing’s swerve into speculative fiction was conditioned by her status as a target of MI5 surveillance. Although Lessing knew she was being watched, she did not turn to the paranoid style of George Orwell. Instead, she used her fiction to suggest that an imperialist intelligence network could be outwitted by individuals who harness the powers of intelligent perception, or ESP: reading minds, forecasting future events, even communicating across species. The way to beat a repressive police network was to mimic its capabilities, bringing the arts of surveillance into the fold of human consciousness itself.

Existing conceptualizations of thriving at work are dominated by White Eurocentric hegemonic beliefs. This is done by focusing on individual experiences and workplace resources and privileging universalisms over pluralistic, local, and regional understandings. Many individuals and communities across the globe are engaged in precarious work, operate in informal economies, and lack the opportunity to gain equal access to resources. With fairness as the foundation to thriving, I have expanded on existing conceptualizations on thriving at work by restoring multiple perspectives, centering decent work as a basic goal, and by including an ecological systems perspective. Thriving workplaces require equitable opportunities for self-determination available for all.

The introduction to Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a survey of recent and historical transnational approaches to Irish cultural production. In doing so, it shies away from insisting on a definitive method for the scholars in the field, choosing rather to highlight the diversity of approaches in the chapters in the volume. The introduction calls for a “weak theory” of the transnational, recognizing the myriad ways that both cultural producers and critics understand the term and the project. It also calls for a critical evaluation of the methods and scope of studying Ireland in a transnational phase, one that does not simply accept that a globalized world must necessarily be read in a globalizing frame.

This chapter considers the relevance of postcolonialism to the discipline of ‘international relations’ (IR). It argues that postcolonialism advances a powerful critique of traditional approaches to IR (see chapters on realism and liberalism) since it calls into question the discipline’s foundational ontological and epistemological assumptions. In particular, it challenges the dominant assumption that states are the basic units of IR and that we should examine the relations between these units in the context of an anarchical system. Postcolonialism refocuses our attention on the constitutive role played by colonialism in the creation of the modern world and sees international relations as hierarchical rather than anarchical. It sees academic disciplines such as IR – and Western rationalist, humanist and universalist modes of thinking in general – as complicit in reproducing colonial power relations and seeks normatively to resist practices of colonialism in its material and ideational forms, whether political, economic or cultural.

This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

The Introduction outlines the theoretical framework, starting with a review of the existing literature on musical modernism, global musicology and related theories, including discussions of universalism, methodological nationalism, the centre versus periphery paradigm, multiple modernities, hybridity and postcolonial and decolonising approaches. It further introduces the interdisciplinary concept of ‘entangled histories’, which is illustrated with three short cases studies: the Orchesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) from Bolivia, the Bow Project from South Africa and Uwalmassa, a trio creating ‘deconstructed gamelan music’ from Jakarta, Indonesia. What unites these cases is that they are rooted in local traditions, rather than on the adoption or imposition of Western practices, although they undoubtedly respond creatively to Western ideas.

Hansen and Witkowski introduce a new theory to understand how societal needs are met. The authors develop the cross-sectoral BIAS theory, an adaptation of the BIAS model, to assess factors that lead to persistent unmet needs among marginalized populations. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the authors indicate that the standard economic model of understanding the provision of services by market, government, and nonprofit sectors (three-failures theory) systematically fails to account for the underprivileged in society. The cross-sectoral BIAS theory explains that societal biases drive the persistent insufficient provision of goods to marginalized populations by all three sectors.

This essay examines the changing fortunes of the university in Ireland through a history of the English department. With literary references to Joyce and Yeats, it describes colonial and postcolonial encounters in the classroom.

The epilogue looks at what of Baeck’s thought remains relevant by turning to the presence of empire and the memory of genocide today. This is done by looking at institutions that bear Baeck’s name, including the Leo Baeck House in Berlin, the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles. The latter stands for the tradition of ethical monotheism and resistance to state power. The LBI represents the creative legacy of German Jewry, and the concern with the writing of history, that Baeck embodied. Finally, the Leo Baeck House stands for the vexed relation between postcolonial thought and the memory of the Holocaust in the contemporary public sphere in Germany, as expressed in a recent debate around the work of Achille Mbembe. I contend that the fact that Baeck, and other German-Jewish thinkers, are often treated without regard to the imperial context has a corollary in contemporary debates in Germany about the relation between the colonial past and the memory of the Holocaust. Such heated debates, for example, the Mbembe Affair, show that the intertwining of the Jewish and Colonial Question is still very much a German Question.