loyalties of black soldiers to the Rhodesian Army became highly contentious during the war in the eyes of nationalists, who labelled them sell-outs for what they saw as their collaboration with the Smith regime. Black soldiers rejected this portrayal of their loyalty and positioned themselves both during and after the war as apolitical troops who served their country and the ‘government of the day’, regardless of its political orientation. In this there was a stark contrast to white soldiers, whose loyalties were often premised upon political support for minority rule; their commitment to the war waned as the inevitability of decolonisation became clear. Black soldiers had strong instrumental reasons during the war to portray their loyalty as apolitical and distance themselves from accusations of collaboration. Veterans may have emphasised the apolitical aspect of their service in retrospect, but this chapter shows that there is a great deal of evidence that this stance was both genuine and contemporary. Black RAR soldiers’ positioning of themselves as apolitical and militarily effective also meant that they could become the acceptable face of the Rhodesian Army.

In this chapter, we take a closer look at the cross-level episodes, which include roughly half of the national episodes of our study. This is a remarkably high share, which indicates that national asylum policymaking is taking place in the shadow of EU policymaking. These episodes have been more intensely politicized than purely domestic episodes. They have either been rooted in domestic conflicts that expanded up into the international realm or in international conflicts that were closely associated with domestic politics. We present a fourfold typology of such cross-level episodes, which distinguishes between top-down and bottom-up cross-level interventions for both international and domestic conflicts. The intense cross-level interactions in the domestic episodes during the refugee crisis demonstrate the interdependencies between the member states and between the member states and the EU in this policy domain. At the same time, they also demonstrate the difficulties in coming to joint solutions, even under great pressure, and the amount of effort that it takes to search for joint policies in a polity that requires consensual decision-making.

This chapter presents three empirical studies on disabled individuals who use their disability strategically as they navigate the labour market. In our first case, we reveal that disabled employees in France reflect on factors on societal, organizational, and individual levels. More specifically, they determine whether the quota system can be used to their own advantage, decreasing their precarious position in the labour market. In the second case study, we draw on 257 qualitative surveys with individuals with mental health conditions in a variety of countries and outline how these individuals make their career choices. More specifically, we show how they self-select into sectors in which the characteristics related to their mental illness can be turned into an advantage. The third case presented highlights that disabled individuals use social comparison based on the characteristics of their disability when determining how they compare with other disabled workers. When they feel their disability characteristics are less stigmatizing than that of others, they tend to use this strategically, enhancing their own employability, securing less precarious employment. Through these three cases, we show the inequalities that exist within the population of disabled workers. More specifically, individuals with a disability in countries with less constraining disability legislation and individuals whose disability is more stigmatizing in nature are more likely to end up in employment that is characterized by low wages, few career development opportunities, little autonomy, and unstable or hazardous working conditions. Practical implications and avenues for future research are provided.

Robots in fiction seem to be able to engage in complex planning tasks with little or no difficulty. For example, in the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL is capable of long-range plans and reasoning about the effects and consequences of his actions [167]. It is indeed fortunate that fictional autonomous systems can be presented without having to specify how such devices represent and reason about their environment. Unfortunately, real autonomous systems often make explicit internal representations and mechanisms for reasoning about them.

This chapter discusses how decarbonisation will affect capital markets and how capital markets can support decarbonisation. One notable focus is on the risk of ‘stranded assets’, that is assets that lose value because of decarbonisation, and the potential implications for financial stability. The chapter also analyses how capital markets can become a key enabler of decarbonisation, also thanks to new sustainable finance instruments such as green bonds.

Between the sixth and eighth centuries ce, the image emerged as a rhetorical category in religious literature produced in the Mediterranean basin. The development was not a uniquely Christian phenomenon. Rather, it emerged in the context of broader debates about symbolic forms that took place across a wide range of ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups who inhabited the late Roman and early Byzantine world. In this book, Alexei Sivertsev demonstrates how Jewish texts serve as an important, and until recently overlooked, witness to the formation of image discourse and associated practices of image veneration in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Addressing the role of the image as a rhetorical device in Jewish liturgical poetry, Sivertsev also considers the theme of the engraved image of Jacob in its early Byzantine context and the aesthetics of spaces that bridge the gap between the material and the immaterial in early Byzantine imagination.

Peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, Turo, TaskRabbit, Eatwith, and Uber are transnational market actors, generating millions of transactions, in multiple jurisdictions across the globe. These companies connect individuals and small businesses via online platforms and mediate transactions in the real, offline world between owners and renters, service providers and service recipients. Despite their clear importance and their market influence, the legal role of peer-to-peer platforms remains elusive. The emerging transnational legal order is a mixture of self-regulation and sporadic, concrete state or local regulation in several jurisdictions. I suggest thinking of platforms as transnational actors and offer a conceptualization of their legal role. Access platforms create and maintain a market with its own rules, conventions, and entry and exit points. To capture the role of platform as constituting a market, I rely on fiduciary law, an area of private law area concerned with power and vulnerability. This role creates duties toward the participants in this market. This duty explains why, for example, the platform should be responsible for the discriminatory actions of its participants. Other obligations include the duty to give prior notice before pulling out from an area of activity, and duty to create and maintain fair entry and exit rules.

This chapter studies the dynamics of elite support, which varies considerably across time. This temporal fluctuations are explained by three different sets of variables: the changing political and problem pressure that governments face, the contextual characteristics that may moderate this relationship, and the endogenous dynamics unfolding between different elite groups. Far from the elite closing ranks behind government proposals as the “rally-around-the-flag” perspective may suggest, nongovernment elites rather use the strategic opportunity offered by mounting problem pressure to articulate opposition to these proposals and signal distance from governments as a result. This dynamic is mostly confined to destination and transit states, and it is more prominent during debates on border controls and in the early phase of the crisis. By contrast, the impact of political pressure is largely in line with our expectations: In response to the growing strength of the radical right, the elite steps up dissent, with the strongest effect found, again, in destination states. In addition to responding to external pressure, elite groups were also shown to engage in strategic behavior with respect to each other.

Chapter 1 begins with the Fable of the Belly, a foundational myth of civic organization that Roman thinkers dated to the Conflict of the Orders. Naturalizing the hierarchical distribution of power between the senate and people, the fable identified concord as the basis of civic health. Late Republican thinkers used this metaphor to explain the problem of discord, which seemed akin to the splitting or doubling of the res publica. While writers like Cicero, Sallust, and Varro crafted such imagery to lament the loss of civic unity, Catiline used it to justify the acquisition of personal power. Describing the senate and people as separate bodies with little in common, he proposed reworking the Republican constitution to better reflect their divide. He then laid claim to the role of the caput populi, which confirmed his aspirations to tyranny. His conspiracy would be put down in a matter of months, but the language he used to articulate his ambitions proved more difficult to extinguish.

Governors are motivated to change public policy in response to issues and have powers that influence the shape and direction of budgets; however, interest groups are ultimately providing opportunities for action. We conclude with some broad recommendations for institutional and political tinkering in the American states. Specifically, we argue that policymakers can embrace the inevitability of interest group involvement in policymaking and be more thoughtful about the way they structure policies. This process enables diversity – by which we mean more groups with difference and alternative policy concerns – in representation. In addition, we argue that decentralization of gubernatorial power over the budget to alternative institutions could facilitate budgets that are more responsive to problems.