Is philosophy a playful pursuit?

This book's central argument is that playfulness is an essential quality of philosophical practice, and that there is something essentially philosophical about play. Ways of doing philosophy well invariably require the same wonder, hope, co-operation and positive freedom that define healthy modes of play.

Matthew McLennan explores this intrinsic connection in the way that philosophy and play shed light upon one another through three core concepts: the realities of play define what it is and how it manifests; the rules of play determine how it functions; the 'what comes next' of play depends on what we want or hope to find in it. Together, these meditations explain how both play and philosophy are essentially oriented towards the indefinite, the infinite and the possible. Working across disciplinary boundaries and calling on an eclectic range of thinkers, this paradigm-shifting approach redefines how we understand the doing of philosophy and how we perceive the traditions that underpin it.

In the first monograph dedicated exclusively to the nexus requirement, Dr. Elvina Pothelet explores the idea that an issue is governed by IHL only if it bears a sufficient connection to an armed conflict. Challenging the prevailing assumption that the nexus is merely an element of war crimes, the book demonstrates instead that it constitutes a regime-wide condition of IHL applicability. Developing a systematic theory of the nexus, Pothelet reveals that this requirement is polymorphous: different rules of IHL require different types and degrees of connection to an armed conflict. Through detailed analysis of doctrine, jurisprudence, and contemporary operational practice, the book proposes practice-oriented nexus tests applicable across a wide range of factual scenarios relevant to courts, governments, armed forces, and humanitarian actors confronting the legal boundaries of war.

This path-breaking book will become a foundational reference for students and scholars in the fields of IHL, public international law and international criminal law. It will also serve as a valuable resource for practitioners and policymakers within the judicial, legal, and humanitarian sectors.

This book analyses the complex relations between racism and neoliberalism in the lives of middling migrants in Poland.

Focusing on 'middling migrants' - a heterogeneous category of migrants who are neither a highly paid elite nor low-paid or low-skilled workers - it offers a novel approach to the manner in which the intricate relationship between racism and neoliberalism plays out in migrants' lived experiences of and their strategies for coping with racism. Based on qualitative research among migrants from Western Europe, South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and the post-Soviet area, the authors argue that while experiencing racism on a daily basis, middling migrants perpetuate the neoliberal hierarchy of desirable and undesirable migrants, while reproducing its logic of silencing and marginalising racism as a social problem.

An empirically grounded study of the relationship between racism and neoliberalism in relation to migration - and the conditions under which racism is enabled to persist - Neoliberalism, Racialisation and Middling Migrants in Poland will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and politics with interests in migration and diaspora and race, racism and ethnicity.

Drawing on regional case studies and spatially differentiated impacts, this book counters one-size-fits-all solutions, capturing the diversity of transition pathways, risks and opportunities across the EU. Expert authors evaluate the effectiveness of EU policies, emphasizing practical governance strategies, monitoring approaches and deliberative democracy as key factors in achieving sustainable and resilient regional development outcomes. Engaging with case studies from across Western and Eastern Europe and key governance challenges, this book proposes pathways for advancing transitions in future EU programming cycles.

Academics and students of human geography, public policy, environmental governance, EU studies and sustainability will appreciate the conceptual debates and empirical case studies this book offers. With its practical insights and evidence-based recommendations, policymakers and practitioners will also find it a useful tool for policy implementation.

This book offers a groundbreaking exploration of postqueer politics within the Indian context, reimagining queer theory and activism through an intersectional lens. Moving beyond the binary of queer and straight, it examines how queer epistemologies can address broader sociopolitical challenges, including majoritarian nationalism, caste and class stratification, Islamophobia, environmental crises, and mental health.

By interrogating colonial disruptions of indigenous sexual cultures and envisioning a postcolonial future of egalitarian coexistence, the book advocates for collaborative engagements between queer and non-queer actors to reshape India's social and political fabric. A key highlight is its innovative approach to queer theory, positioning queer perspectives as tools for disrupting mainstream norms and fostering inclusivity. The book introduces postqueer politics as a non-queer-inclusive worldview, emphasizing collaboration and intersectionality to liberate the most marginalized. It critiques exploitative hierarchies and advocates for queer futurism aligned with broader social justice commitments. Through nuanced analysis, it demonstrates how queer knowledge can empower individuals to challenge socio-cultural unfreedom and create a more equitable society.

Essential for those interested in sexuality, gender, and Indian politics, this book is a valuable resource for students in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Political Science, Minority Studies, and Cultural Studies, particularly in courses on identity politics and intersectionality.

This book explores the existence of a Christian discursive space in Japanese literature, extending from the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) eras to the postwar period. It examines a crucial question: what is the correlation between Christianity and Japanese literature, and how did these two realms continue to interface following the significant Christian experience of the Meiji and Taisho years?

Highlighting a major shift across the World War II divide, from narratives that emphasized humanity's inability to change its fate and avoid spiritual damnation to narratives that contemplated the possibilities of salvation, this study argues that such transformations, and the subsequent developments at the intersection of art and faith, were largely a dialectical response to earlier paradigms of despair, nihilism, and ineluctability. Examining the works of eight major authors from these intervening years, this volume explores the important mutual connections that fuelled their fiction and deliberations, challenging conventional understandings and periodization of Christianity's influence on twentieth-century Japanese literature.

This work will be a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in literary criticism, Japanese literature, religion, and Christianity.

Recent crises and emergencies - together with the idea that international law may benefit from automating parts of the fact-assessment process involved in legal decision-making - have accentuated the importance of these questions. In an attempt to come to grips with them, this book brings together contributing authors from different academic affiliations, backgrounds and research expertise. Their chapters explain the importance of more fully understanding discretion in international law but also highlight the complexity of the task. They point out the way forward for further research.

The Exercise of Discretion in International Law is an essential resource for students and scholars of public international law. Policymakers, practitioners and judiciaries who engage with international legal decision-making will also benefit from the detailed insights into the constraints on the exercise of discretion.

This book uncovers the history of emotions surrounding death in colonial and semi-colonial Anglo-China during the 19th century. Engaging with both English and Chinese sources, including obituaries, memoirs, personal correspondence, missionary publications, mourning poetry and travel accounts, Death and Emotions in Anglo-China explores how this common human experience was understood, expressed, and felt across different cultures, where it became not merely a personal matter but a hotly contested issue.

Illustrating how emotions of death solidified communities, buttressed regimes and galvanised political movements, the book pays attention to the dilemma between personal grief and communal commemoration, arguing that the chaotic process of grieving was often pushed aside by collective narratives, which stressed the emotional norm of solemnity. Such collective emotions provided the Western powers, namely the British, a sentimental rhetoric of sacrifice for their imperial cause, and for the Chinese, a powerful impetus to rising Chinese nationalism by the turn of the century.

Focusing on a culturally dynamic context previously overlooked in the field of emotional history, this book contributes to the global dimension of growing interests in historicizing the universal human conditions of emotions and death.

Is America in the midst of an electoral transformation? What were the sources of victory in 2024, and how do they differ from Republican and Democratic coalitions of the past? Does the Republican victory signal a long-term decline for Democrats' chances in presidential elections?
Change and Continuity in the 2024 Elections attempts to answer those questions by analyzing and explaining the voting behavior in the most recent election, as well as setting the results in the context of larger historical trends and patterns in elections studies. This top-notch author team meticulously explains the latest National Election Studies data and discusses its importance and impact. Readers will critically analyze a variety of variables such as the presidential and congressional elections, voter turnout, and the social forces, party loyalties, and prominent issues that affect voting behavior. Readers will walk away with a better understanding of this groundbreaking election and what those results mean for the future of American politics.

This book examines how the United Nations Secretariat built a coordinated regional peacekeeping architecture across the Israel-Arab conflict between 1967 and 1982, tracing its operational achievements and the structural limits that ultimately constrained them.

Drawing on previously classified UN archives, the book offers the first integrated institutional history of four UN operations - UNTSO, UNEF II, UNDOF, and UNIFIL - treated not as isolated deployments but as components of a deliberately managed regional system. It introduces the concept of Inter-Operation Collaboration (IOC), demonstrating that mission integration was practised decades before it was formalised in UN doctrine. Central to the narrative is General Ensio Siilasvuo, the Finnish officer who served successively as force commander, ceasefire negotiator at Kilometre 101, and Chief Coordinator of UN Peacekeeping in the Middle East, and whose career embodies the blend of military and diplomatic innovation that defined the era. The book also recovers the critical role of the Office of Special Political Affairs as the Secretariat's institutional engine.

The book will be of interest to scholars of UN peacekeeping, Middle Eastern history, and international organisations, as well as to practitioners and policymakers engaged with contemporary questions of multilateral conflict management.

Celebrity 'Outsider' Politicians in the Digital Realm: Donald Trump's Online Charismatic Authority considers Trump's impact on elite level behaviour by analysing how his extremist online political discourses shape communications outputs.

Celebrity 'outsider' politicians like Donald Trump command credibility by establishing themselves through a conjunction of deinstitutionalisation, personalisation and parasocial familiarity. To provide a systematic analysis of this phenomenon, the book asks how Trump's celebrity has been utilised to transfer his 'business assets' from the 'field' of entertainment to the 'field' of politics through his populism. It analyses, assesses and explains the significance of Trump's celebrity personality in shaping the impression management throughout the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination and General Elections processes. Throughout his campaigns it has not been about who Trump is, but it is about what he represented in terms of American supremacism, brash salesmanship and personal narcissism.

Celebrity 'Outsider' Politicians in the Digital Realm will appeal to students, scholars and political practitioners interested in political communication, popular culture and politics.

This book investigates how different forms of extreme nationalism are sustained in contemporary Norway, offering critical insights into the social, relational, and interactional contexts that enable these movements to persist.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including in-depth interviews with 25 extreme nationalist activists and participant observation at 13 protest events, the book explores how distinct articulations of extreme nationalist ideology, encompassing cultural, ethnic, and 'racial' variants, mobilize activists through the construction of fixed collective (in-group) identities and shared emotions. It illuminates internal and external group-level dynamics within and between movements, examining patterns of collective action, strategic approaches, recruitment methods, organizational structures, leadership styles, and resource mobilization.

This will be of interest to researchers of right-wing extremism, social movements, and Nordic politics.

Ausgezeichnet mit dem Avicenna-Promotionspreis.

This essential resource provides introductions to fifteen classics of 19th and 20th-century Protestant theology, ranging from Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith to Dorothy Sayers's The Mind of the Maker to Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.

Each chapter gives a sketch of the author's life, traces the main themes of their classic work, and indicates the impact of each theologian and their approach. By including known works and introducing new contributions into the story, Vander Lugt expands standard notions of the theological canon and provides a refreshing retelling of how Protestant theology has developed over the last two hundred years.

Students of theology and Christian leaders will find this an accessible introduction to a rich and dense theological world.

This volume examines Greenland's challenging paths toward independence and explores the fundamental tension between Greenland's aspirations for sovereignty and the geopolitical realities of Arctic strategic competition. The book provides a comprehensive framework for understanding Greenland's strategic options through detailed examination of its socio-economic, foreign, security, and defence policy, the Kingdom-Greenland relationship, and external pressures and offers from major powers. It analyzes how Greenland can maintain external resilience while pursuing greater autonomy in foreign policy, addressing the conflicting goals that arise when domestic independence processes intersect with international security concerns. Drawing on recent geopolitical developments-including renewed US interest in acquiring the territory and remilitarization of the Arctic-the analysis demonstrates how gradual economic diversification and strategic partnerships offer more sustainable paths than hasty independence or resource extraction dependency. The book reveals the mutual interdependence between Denmark and Greenland in protecting sovereignty against great power influence, while critically examining whether Greenland's inclusive foreign policy vision ('nothing about us without us') can be implemented without adequate resources.

Essential reading for scholars and policymakers working on Arctic governance, sovereignty studies, and small state diplomacy, this book will appeal to researchers in international relations, political science, Indigenous governance, and Arctic studies. It provides crucial insights for understanding how sub-state territories navigate independence aspirations within complex geopolitical environments.

This book examines the 2024 U.S. presidential election, providing a critical analysis of how race shaped one of America's most consequential political moments. In a society as racialised as the United States, presidential elections are inherently racialised affairs, and this collection addresses urgent questions arising from Trump's return to power.

The contributions to this volume explore the historical conditions that allowed a nativist, white supremacist political movement to go mainstream in the twenty-first century, examine how racism is embedded in American political institutions, and discuss how differently racialised people understand the connections between their racial positionality and their political interests. Contributors analyse, variously, how racial ideologies and constructions of racial selfhood are stratified by liberal or conservative political identification, the connections between emotions, politics, and race, and how gendered and racial projects intersect in contemporary political discourse.

This book will appeal to to academic researchers, graduate students, and policy analysts interested in political sociology, racialization, and American electoral politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This book critically rethinks the dominant narratives around the so-called 'liberal international' / 'rules-based' order, by examining how China discursively engages with, and mirrors, the very hegemonic order it contests. Moving beyond the commonplace representation of China as a paradoxically 'revisionist' yet occasionally 'compliant' power, it aargues that what appears contradictory is, in fact, a coherent counterhegemonic strategy rooted in discursive rearticulation rather than outright rejection.

Using a Gramscian analytical lens, the book disarticulates the ideologically fused concept of the 'liberal international order', revealing it as a hegemonic construct that equates liberalism with order and opposition with illiberal disorder. It demonstrates how China's international practices expose the ideological and relational structures underpinning liberal hegemony. Rather than simply resisting liberal norms, China mirrors and re-articulates them in an effort to position itself as a more legitimate global leader.

This book challenges IR orthodoxy by examining hegemonic representations, and by foregrounding the role of the global South - not as a passive recipient, but as an active co-producer of order. In doing so, it raises provocative questions about whether liberal hegemony is tied to Western dominance at all, or whether it may survive its unmaking by being mirrored into new forms.

The gothic is far more than a genre preoccupied with ghosts, vampires and the supernatural. It is a phenomenon that has influenced the expression of unease and fear across many cultures.

Comprehending gothic textuality from the 18th century to the present, the Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature, Second Edition addresses not merely supernatural fiction but also film, television, graphic works and the subtle influence of the genre upon global popular culture. Containing a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography, the dictionary section contains cross-referenced entries on African American gothic, cyberpunk and steampunk, dark academia, folk horror and Japanese gothic. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about gothic literature.

Gabriel M. Lentner provides a clear, principled method for deciding when to follow a specific state's law, when a treaty uses a broader shared concept, or when a mix of both is necessary. He bridges domestic and international law by setting out how domestic law concepts enter investment law. The book treats legal concepts as context-dependent inference structures in order to highlight the importance of not simply borrowing domestic meanings in isolation. Lentner critiques a homeward bias in arbitral reasoning, especially when tribunals invoke domestic concepts as general principles of law without meeting the demanding evidentiary threshold under the doctrine of sources of international law.

Scholars and academics of international investment, private international law, and legal theory will benefit from the clear, analytical framework put forward. This book is also an essential resource for investment arbitration practitioners, treaty drafters, and policymakers looking to better understand how domestic law concepts play out in international investment law.

The carceral imaginary explains Americans' stubborn attachment to or at least acceptance of prisons, both in the hyperbolic tough-on-crime practices and in seemingly progressive sectors.

Joining a critical reading of John Locke with theorists of storytelling, the imaginary, decolonial theory, and carceral logic, Shari Stone-Mediatore brings new philosophical resources to bear on the question of how Americans have become so attached to punishment-based social policies despite the failure of our vast network of prisons to protect us from harm. Stone-Mediatore argues that, alongside the political and economic forces driving prison expansion, a carceral imaginary in which we have become deeply invested emotionally has bonded our imaginations to carceral myths and prevented us from thinking meaningfully about safety and justice. Tracing a pattern in the violence-rationalizing myths studied by Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, James Baldwin, and Ida B. Wells, Stone-Mediatore develops a theory of the righteous-violence imaginary. Viewing contemporary U.S. punitiveness-which has led to the incarceration of nearly two million Americans in 6,000 jails and prisons across the country-through this lens, she elucidates the structure of our carceral imaginary and how it embroils us in ever more needs for violence and mythmaking.

Stone-Mediatore explores how stories that take us on journeys with those on the other side of prison walls can help unsettle the masonry of carceralism and build support for safety practices that do not perpetuate trauma and abuse but advance our mutual healing.

The book codifies the DRC Research Practice's methodological heuristics for its several research process elements: conceiving cases as endeavors, characterizing them, explaining their system behaviors and process outcomes, and drawing lessons about how endeavors of the kind could possibly work. These heuristics are fully exemplified in three original case studies.

Critically engaging with Herbert Simon's idea of disciplines concerned with artificial phenomena, Michael Barzelay and Alan Love show what it would mean for disciplines like Public Management to take a stand that they are endeavor-centered disciplines. All told, the book makes the affirmative case that Public Management can cumulatively develop knowledge that is original, rigorous, and relevant to practice, while exemplifying endeavor-centered academic disciplines in the academy.

From Walter Benjamin in Argentina to Theodor Adorno in Japan, this collection brings together leading scholars of Critical Theory to examine the impact of the Frankfurt School across global histories of the 20th century.

Featuring essays on Critical Theory's role in Brazil during dictatorship and redemocratization; the influence of Herbert Marcuse in Pinochet's Chile; the politics of Critical Theory in South Korea and intellectual relationships across Yugoslavia, Germany and the United States, the chapters in this volume consider how social, political, historical and intellectual conditions shaped local receptions of the Frankfurt School, and how the School's key thinkers in turn helped to transform these conditions.

Guided by Max Horkheimer's seminal distinction between critical and traditional theory, in which Critical Theory is distinguished by its self-reflexivity and awareness of its location within a larger social totality, The Internationalization of Critical Theory offers a groundbreaking reflection on Critical Theory at an international scale. Tracing the legacy of the Frankfurt School across Latin America, East Asia, Europe and North America, this volume offers new insights into the intellectual histories of both Critical Theory and global politics.

Japanese Joinery and the Future of Timber: Fibre to Fibre explores the rich legacy of Japanese timber joinery and examines how advanced robotic timber fabrication methods can benefit from the ancient art of wood-only connections. It blends historical insights with captivating imagery and interviews with industry experts.
The book is split into three chapters, with each chapter further subdivided into sections. The first chapter reveals the secrets of traditional Japanese joinery, featuring ancient temples and expert craftsmen. The second chapter studies advanced fabricators and engineers in Europe who operate in the world of engineered timber construction but also choose to exploit timber-only connections in their work. The first two chapters contain case studies of two 7th century Japanese buildings and two 21st century Swiss buildings, the comparisons between them revealing similarities across the millennia. The third and final chapter features conversations with luminaries from the industry, including Pritzker Prize-winner Shigeru Ban, renowned architect Kengo Kuma, and Japan's most revered carpenter Mitsuo Ogawa. The book advocates for merging old techniques with new, aiming to design sustainable timber structures devoid of nails or screws. This approach not only reduces carbon footprint but also facilitates easier disassembly and reassembly, prolonging the lifespan of buildings and simplifying maintenance.
Japanese Joinery and the Future of Timber: Fibre to Fibre promises to enlighten readers with its poetic narrative, vivid photography, and engaging interviews, inspiring architects, engineers, and craftsmen to embrace timber-only joinery for a more sustainable future.