The need to reform pedagogical practice in Peruvian schools has been on the country’s policy agenda at least since the mid-1990s. Since then, the country has undergone several attempts at reform through curriculum change and various in-service training attempts that relied on top-down implementation models and achieved only partial changes. In 2013, an innovative programme named Soporte Pedagogico (SP) devised a strategy to work on changes from within schools and intervening in several key areas at once. It combined teacher mentoring with training workshops, strategies to strengthen a school’s pedagogical leadership, remedial strategies for students lagging behind and parental involvement for improving learning. In sum, an integral approach to reform pedagogical practice. While implementation and impact evaluations showed great promise in the programme, the Ministry of Education introduced cuts and later dismantled the programme. The story of SP is illustrative of how the political economy of education policy making and reform operates in contexts described as Sysiphean states, whose weak institutions give rise to often erratic policy making processes. The case of SP also speaks about how competing visions of education – technocratic versus pedagogically minded – might clash and work against promising change strategies.

The 1958 and 1960 United Nations conferences were of a piece, with the second convened to settle the unresolved questions from the first: the breadth of the territorial sea and fishing limits. At the earlier conference, the maritime powers had been preoccupied with disputes among themselves, but by 1960 they were forced to meet the challenges presented by states from the global South. Delegates from the latter took the view that the old maritime system upheld a discredited imperialist order, and they sought to bend the law of the sea to their own ends. Their campaigns to regulate the passage of warships through the territorial sea and to claim exclusive fishing zones and preferential fishing rights gave rise to disagreements with the powers, who sought to maximise the scope of their own naval and fishing operations. These differences would lead to the breakdown of the conference.

Expo 70 in Osaka was a watershed, in the histories of post-war Japan and of exhibitions. Following the Tokyo Olympics, it substantiated Japan’s reemergence on the international stage of the Cold War world. In time, it also proved a turning point from the productionism of the immediate post-war years to the consumerism of the 1970s and 1980s. Most significant, it confirmed the Japanese state’s embrace of mega-events as a way of implementing the national planning regime, and thereby canalizing development. This chapter explores Expo 70 in detail, situating it in both the post-war reemergence of international exhibitions around the world and the benefits and costs of high economic growth in Japan. It shows how the Expo became a magnet, for intellectuals and creatives, both for and against, and for visitors, who flocked in greater numbers than for any expo before. It also explores in detail how the expo became a media event. Newspapers and TV attested to the implacable but manifold nature of development, which was evident in the ability of the Expo to conjure infrastructure and catalyse demand, even while it accommodated a fractured world, teeming crowds, and intransigent protest.

In spring 2024, the European Union formally adopted the AI Act, aimed at creating a comprehensive legal regime to regulate AI systems. In so doing, the Union sought to maintain a harmonized and competitive single market for AI in Europe while demonstrating its commitment to protect core EU values against AI’s adverse effects. In this chapter, we question whether this new regulation will succeed in translating its noble aspirations into meaningful and effective protection for people whose lives are affected by AI systems. By critically examining the proposed conceptual vehicles and regulatory architecture upon which the AI Act relies, we argue there are good reasons for skepticism, as many of its key operative provisions delegate critical regulatory tasks to AI providers themselves, without adequate oversight or redress mechanisms. Despite its laudable intentions, the AI Act may deliver far less than it promises.

Over a century and a half, expos have been used by the Japanese state, local authorities, and private companies, not to prescribe meaning, but to aggregate interest – to accommodate the multiple demands of organizers, exhibitors, and visitors – and thereby to foster development. After three decades of economic stagnation, the age of regional expos in Japan seems to have passed, though ‘expo’ (haku) remains a useful, protean term. Japan also remains a reliable participant in international exhibitions overseas, rehearsing an old story about harmony between nature and culture, first retailed in the late nineteenth century. The Japanese state also continues to use expos at home to promote its vision and plans for the future. The next world expo will open in April 2025, promulgating the United Nation’s sustainable development goals and the Japanese government’s vision of Society 5.0, while also promising Osaka’s neoliberal ‘restoration’. Meanwhile, the Japanese lesson about the utility of expos for development has been absorbed elsewhere. Shanghai in 2010 and Dubai in 2021 deployed, Riyadh in 2030 and possibly Busan in 2035 will riff on, a template first made in Japan.

Young people with cognitive disability found school to be both good and bad. Things were good when young people had friends and when teachers listened and tried to help. Things were bad when the school wanted young people with cognitive disability to be like everyone else. Young people could be punished or neglected if they didn’t fit in with everyone else. Leaving school could be hard. Young people with cognitive disability often didn’t have a job or university to go to. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities says that all people with disability have a right to a good education, and that people should be supported to get a job or to learn more after school.

Slave vessels dispatched from Northwest Europe were larger and more heavily armed than their Iberian and American counterparts. The barricado, a heavy wooden barrier located midship, separating off men-slaves, was a central feature not found among slavers in the South Atlantic. The Portuguese operated vessels in which many crew were Black, including some enslaved. These were able to talk to captives in their own language and provide some assurance that they would not be eaten on arrival and would have some familiarity with their new environmrnt. Rebellions of slaves on Portuguese vessels were unusual. The Portuguese/Brazilians also did very little ship trading. Instead, they used bulking centers on land to hold slaves prior to their embarkation en masse. This reduced the time a captive would spend on board, which was already shorter than those of their Northwestern European rivals because of the shorter voyage times to Brazil from most parts of Africa. The Portuguese were thus the most efficient of all national slave traders. The bulking centers in Upper Guinea and Angola were connected to trade routes through to the interior and manned by lançados, usually half-African and half-European. The shipping part of their system was adopted by all slave traders in the nineteenth century.

This chapter studies the voting behavior of members of the House of Representatives. If the presence of Fox News in a district shapes potential candidates’ perceptions about district party composition and the constituency’s electoral preferences, there are good chances that the same can be said of sitting House members. Here, of course, the expectation is not about how these perceptions affect the decision to run for office; instead, they affect decisions about how to perform so as to stay in office. Much like potential candidates, sitting members of Congress have to make inferences about what their constituents want. Typically, they make these inferences based on their perceptions of the partisan composition of their district, among other considerations. If sitting members are influenced like potential candidates, Fox News might shift their perceptions in the direction of thinking their district is more right-leaning. Alternatively, based on our evidence from Chapter 3, they might feel more vulnerable to challenges from potential candidates to their (ideological) right. In either case, a reasonable expectation, which we find evidence for, is that member roll call votes will move in a rightward direction, especially among Democrats representing more competitive districts.