This chapter analyzes the norm impasses over the status of Kosovo after its declaration of independence in February 2008 and over the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia following the 2008 August war. Both cases happened within quick succession, revolved around the same well-established norms in the United Nations (UN) Charter – the rights to territorial integrity vs. self-determination – and showed an interesting reversal of sides: While the United States (US) and European states recognized Kosovo’s statehood and rejected Russia’s emphasis on Serbian territorial integrity, the US and European states rejected Russia’s support of South Ossetia’s statehood and emphasized Georgian territorial integrity. These norm impasses became protracted because each side received social support from key audiences, or at least only muted criticism, for their interpretations, lowering the cost of disagreement. These disputes show both the power and limits of international law: The US’s sui generis frame and Russia’s quasi-legal argumentation indicate that there is a strong collective expectation regarding using international law to justify claims. Yet these cases also indicate that protracted norm impasses weaken individual norms: Unclear norm meaning gives leeway for interpretation, which can be used to craft interpretations that appeal to important audiences and thereby reduce pressure to abandon contested norm interpretations.

Malignant plasma cell proliferations are characterised by specific clinical, immunophenotypic and genetic features. Multiparameter flow cytometry (MFC) is an essential component of the diagnosis of these diseases. Clonal proliferations can be identified through their aberrant cell-surface immunophenotype or, more precisely, by demonstrating monotypy, i.e. selective expression of the same light chain in the cytoplasm of plasma-cells. This chapter reviews these immunophenotypic features, the technical points of caution to observe for proper use of MFC at diagnosis and during therapy to assess measurable residual disease.

Belgium: A Brief Historical Context

To understand Camille's childhood and youth in Belgium, it is imperative to have an overview of the political, social and cultural milieu of that time and some of the historical processes that shaped them. While Belgium was not considered a major European power, it held an enormous influence in Europe and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carved out of the Netherlands, Belgium emerged as an independent state in 1830 and was a small country of 30,000 square kilometres; its ‘population was divided between often antagonistic French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch speakers of the Flanders region, alongside a small German community’ (Aldrich and Stucki 2022, p. 430). The birth of Belgium as a new nation-state in 1830 reflected the two interrelated trends of the modernisation of state apparatus such as law, institutions and bureaucracy and the quest for ethno-nationalism.

Like the rest of Europe, this trend of modernisation also marked strains between the state and the Roman Catholic Church and growing tensions between autocracy and democratic principles. Coupled with these political churnings, Belgium also witnessed major social and economic changes; capitalist industrial production advanced rapidly, changing the fundamental nature of the agrarian and cottage-industry-based economy. Remarkably, while Belgium stood out as a champion of liberalism and as the world's second industrial nation, the socio-economic disparities were rampant. Karl Marx found refuge in Brussels between 1845 and 1848 and wrote the Communist Manifesto during his stay, calling Belgium an archetype bourgeoisie state. In Das Capital, Marx presented Belgium as the ‘paradise of continental Liberalism’ against ‘the paradise of capitalists’ (Vanthemsche and Peuter 2023, p. 249).

The population of Belgium remained devoutly and almost exclusively Catholic; the region was seen as ‘a bastion of the Counter-Reformation’ (ibid., p. 6). For the first 50 years, the Belgian parliament was dominated by the Catholics, facilitating the expansion of the Catholic Church and its morals over the society. Liberals were another significant political group who sought an end to religious domination in the state and society. The church overcame the opposition of the liberals to regain domination over the education system, holding a monopoly on primary education while controlling secondary and university education.

The dissensions which go hand in hand with the unfolding of sacrifice begin to take on new forms which reach beyond the executions themselves, after the promulgation of the 1990 Constitution. This democratic turning point in the history of Nepal led to a weakening of the monarchy and to critics of the ‘sacrificial’ organisation of society. The questioning of consecrated forms of violence within a renewed political framework already occurred after the fall of the Rana and the opening of the country to foreigners in 1951. At that time, a first democratic regime which lasted from 1951 to 1959 led to the introduction in 1963 of a new code of law in which the notion of caste and its associated notions of social pollution and contamination were expunged. Following the 1990 Constitution, which re-established political parties that had been banned for thirty years, the Indigenous peoples organised themselves into associations to work towards their emancipation. From them emerged the very first organised protest against sacrifice, targeting Dasaĩ, the supreme moment of the reaffirmation of Hindu power. The Untouchable castes, now federated under the name Dalit, also created associations for the defence and promotion of their group, which advocated boycotting the consumption of sacrificial remains. And animal sacrifice finally became the object of growing opposition in urban and educated circles, who began to contest its violence. In this arguably more diffuse type of activism, the opposition to sacrifice is the most radical, in the sense that it does not target the place or role of a group in the sacrificial system, but its actual core, the ritual killing of animals itself. From this point on, conflicts over sacrifice became more than disputes over local issues of power and governance, with each of the protesting groups supported by an ever-growing network, the most extensive of which being the ‘anti’ animal killing, who combine followers of a purified Hinduism, as practised in India, and international animal rights organisations, both of whom advocate vegetarianism.

In this second context of democratisation the Nepalese Maoist party developed during the second half of the 1990s, growing so large that they ended up eclipsing the entire political landscape.

This chapter reviews the literature on the teaching of history, and defines the purpose of this book: to offer a clearer definition of the aims and benefits of the study of History at the college and university level. Two principles are at the heart of that conception. One is that long-standing methodological and epistemological divisions within the discipline are a source of its unique pedagogical value. The other is that History assumes a particular ethical posture relative to its subjects – the people it studies – and that this too is a source of its unique pedagogical value.

Flow cytometry relies on the use of fluorochrome-conjugated antibodies, most of them identified and produced after the discovery of the technology allowing to generate large amounts of monoclonal antibodies. Hence, nearly all these reagents are named after the cluster of differentiation (CD) number that was given to newly discovered molecules they recognize, many of them having no other name. Although some CDs have become very popular and well known, others are less familiar. This chapter provides a guide to recover the characteristics of surface or cytoplasmic antigens explored with the CDs most frequently used in the field of haematological malignancies.

In the late Iron I, the Galilee was dotted with small farming villages. In the early Iron II, these were all abandoned while at the same time, large, fortified towns such as Hazor were built in the adjacent regions. The two processes were connected, reflecting the Israelite takeover of the region. As the highland polity expanded into the hilly Galilee, the local groups, many of which had a similar background and lifestyle, had to choose whether to affiliate with it or fight against it. Many, especially in more mountainous regions, simply became Israelite “tribes,” whereas settlements that were regarded as non-Israelites (“Canaanites”) were mostly destroyed. Like in other regions, the result was a complete reshuffling in settlement patterns, and the new polity built new centers to control the area. Here, however, the new polity had to contend with another polity, Tyre, with which it wished to remain on friendly terms. Thus, the western part of the Galilee (along with the Galilee coast) was left in Phoenician hands.

Much before the Western radical youth ‘invented’ Occupy politics of 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy St Paul) in the West, inspired largely by the Arab Spring, there were instances in the Global South where precarious workers and communities unleashed their agency with unpredictable outcomes. What Hardt and Negri (2012) attribute to Occupy politics – their imaginations, revolts, slogans, movements and insistence on democracy as characteristics of multitudes – was also relevant for the subaltern struggles in the Global South. It is remarkable how the multitudes, both in the West and in the Global South, though spatially and temporally distinct, declare historically evolved truths through imaginative interventions towards a more egalitarian way of living. In South Asia, they also practised it as social movement identity politics in a world where corporates, often with the support of the state, threatened their rights to the commons, including their traditional environmental rights to land and water resources, and their human right to a decent living,3 thus bearing wider connotations than the Western-style Occupy protests. Latin American and African resistance movements such as the Landless Workers Movement in Mexico and Zapatistas/Chiapas in Brazil, and those in Buen Vivir (Ecuador), Cochabamba (Bolivia), the Estallido Social (Social Uprising) in Chile, and Ongoni (Nigeria) share similar traits in the way they assert and attribute new meanings to land rights, autonomy, food, water, environmental sovereignty, and identity. As a critical complement to the earlier-mentioned literature, the present monograph examines the livelihood, environmental, and identity struggles of the marginalized with a focus on Kerala, the state known for its twin legacies: the communist experiments and social development.

More on Premises

The protests, struggles, and movements in the Global South challenging corporate capital and the state, and even the mainstream male-led trade unions, take the form of what I would refer to as ecospatial struggles, resulting in the conceptualization of political ecospatiality in which ‘eco’ represents the varying dimensions of critiques of economics and ecology/environment and ‘spatiality’, the power relations ingrained in the social body politic (see Raman 2020b; Peluso and Watts 2001; Wapner 1996; Lefebvre 2011; Massey 1994; Harvey 2000).