Misinformation and suspicion surrounding sexually transmitted HPV – along with the social implications of administering shots to young girls – significantly hinder worldwide uptake of the vaccine. The 2006 U.S. rollout hit a quagmire of public ignorance, suspicion and paranoia, and by 2020, just 61 percent of eligible U.S. girls had been vaccinated. In Japan, anti-vax sentiment led to an HPV vaccine ban, and in Denmark, the vaccine met similar resistance. Nearly twenty years after its introduction in higher-income countries, the vaccine is vastly behind its prevention potential; in lower-income countries, its trajectory has been abysmal. Hang-ups about sexually transmitted infections and baseless fears about the vaccine have made advocating its use a cause laden with stigma. In male-dominated cultures – and in the absence of an existing delivery system – a girls-only vaccine is often stopped before it can start. And yet, without a worldwide commitment to countering misunderstanding through trust-building, hundreds of thousands of women will miss their critical opportunity to beat this disease.

This chapter shows how changes to officeholding shaped practices of arrest in the capital. It uses a new dataset to rethink established accounts of early modern policing based on widespread participation. Most arrests in London were made by men and, from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, a growing proportion were made by officers. At the same time, constables and their colleagues acquired greater powers to arrest people on the basis of suspicion alone. These powers were frequently used against poorer women, who officers arrested on ill-defined charges of vagrancy, night-walking, or suspected theft. In the early eighteenth century one judge called for closer adherence to due process in such arrests, but this had little long-term effect.

This chapter provides a broad overview of existing anthropological work on exemplars and proposes a new relational way of understanding exemplarity. Most existing philosophical and anthropological work on exemplarity has taken an explicitly functionalist approach. Academics have often valued exemplars because of their ‘articulatory power’ to connect the world of things with the world of ideas. This chapter advances this conversation by examining exemplarity as a relationship between persons and things rather than an attribute of either. In doing so, the chapter explores the social effort that is required to stabilize exemplars in the world, and it shows how the creation of exemplars always goes hand in hand with scepticism and critique. Finally, the chapter investigates whether the modern world has been overcome by scepticism towards exemplars such that we now face a ‘crisis of exemplarity’ in which only ‘everyday exemplars’ can be recognized.

“Loyalty and Suspicion: The Making of the Civil Service after Independence” compares how colonial classifications of identity according to loyalty and suspicion were used by bureaucracies in the new states to define the administrators themselves and to shape the making of the civil services. Purification committees to vet former civil servants of Mandate Palestine, campaigns that designated certain types of corruption as disloyalty, and the explosive fight over representation by ratio in Cyprus were all carried out along the graded axis of suspicion. The chapter follows how political affiliation, mobility, and identity shaped perceptions of loyalty and belonging to the civil service that, in turn, dramatically delineated the boundaries of citizenship through mundane and routine practices of appointment and selection in the transition from colonial rule to independence.

Turns to the metaphorical usefulness of the box, which may be troubling because its contents are unknown, unexpected or dangerous, as epitomised by Portia’s caskets in The Merchant of Venice. Bassanio is the only suitor to realise that ‘the outward shows be least themselves’. These familiar theatrical boxes signal Hamlet’s anxiety that people, things, and words might have ‘that within which passes show’.

Two such boxes are pervasive in early modern writing: Plato’s Silenus, and the proverbial apothecary’s painted box. Repeatedly invoked from Erasmus to the King James Bible, these are favourite images for the challenges of interpretation. The Silenus requires the reader to get beyond its outside to locate hidden truths. The painted box necessitates a more cautious negotiation of its exterior. Both illustrate how the crisis of hermeneutics inherent in a box – the processes required to open it, and how to discern what might be inside – materialises assumptions about the superiority of hidden things. The chapter reveals how, in its renaissance as a persistent and versatile image in early modern writing, the box itself becomes as significant as what it might or might not contain.

Legal assessments of whether applicants qualify for political asylum in a country of refuge rely primarily on the applicants’ narratives and on their answers to questions posed by immigration officials during a face-to-face hearing. It is incumbent upon the applicants to attempt to persuade the officials of their credibility and of the merits of their case. In their assessments, the officials take into account the applicant’s demeanor, ability to recount a coherent narrative, and other often unarticulated measures of credibility. Lacking other evidence, or in the face of disputed identity documents, assessments of discourse are central to political asylum decisions. This chapter reviews what is now substantial research on the role of discourse in political asylum hearings and decisions. It considers how mistranslation and the failure to determine an applicant’s dialect have resulted in significant mistakes. It reviews the scholarship on demeanor and reported speech acts (e.g. bribery and threats). Our primary focus is on the dimensions of narrative in the political asylum process. We begin with the largest issues posed by the narration of trauma; the difficulties faced by people who have suffered atrocities are sometimes so beyond comprehension that they escape memory and narrative. In a close examination of narrative form and structure, we discuss how narrative fails in the asylum process, for example in misplaced orienting details, in the use of repetition, in attention to what the officials regard as extraneous information, in what is omitted (especially during accounts of rape) or in accounts that appear to be memorized or that contain stock elements that have become too familiar to the officials. Our discussion of narrative attends to the ways in which discourses are evaluated as too familiar or too strange. Finally, we consider the significant roles played by discourse analysts in the political asylum process.

This chapter explores the postcolonial resonances of Nietzsche’s Greeks by focusing on their appearance in the writings of the Nigerian political activist and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Soyinka encountered Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as a student of G. Wilson Knight at Leeds in the 1950s; this experience was part of the syncretic vision of dramatic traditions that he developed and which he later theorised in his essay ‘The Fourth Stage’ (1969). In this essay Soyinka argues for a globalised understanding of tragedy that does not rely solely on an exclusivist narrative of its ancient Greek origins, such as can be found in Nietzsche’s invocations of Aryanism in The Birth of Tragedy, and which can incorporate his own Yoruba identity. Soyinka draws links between Dionysus and the Yoruba god Ogun, and he later weaves these into his adaptation of ancient Greek tragedy, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973). The postcolonial ambivalence that Soyinka writes into this adaptation is the subject of the final section of this chapter, as is his amalgamation of contemporary discourses of heroic black nationalism such as négritude in the character of the Slave Leader.

The introduction sketches the scope and nature of Allied internment and outlines the key questions that internment raises. It situates internment within the history and historiography of postwar Germany and the broader study of the history of camps. It shows that internment, especially by the western powers, has often been overlooked. Even studies of post-Nazi transitional justice often neglect it, focusing instead on trials of Nazi and war criminals and on professional and civil sanctions against Nazi Party members and fellow travellers. The introduction argues that including internment reveals post-Nazi transitional justice to have been more severe than has long been believed and that Allied measures did not rest on undifferentiated accusations of German collective guilt, but on a more nuanced approach. The introduction identifies multiple meanings of terms such as ‘denazification’ that are crucial for understanding internment. It also discusses the existing literature on internment and the controversial question of the comparability of the Soviet and western cases. It argues that comparison is legitimate and that black-and-white depictions of brutal, arbitrary Soviets and fair, friendly westerners oversimplify a more complex reality. Finally, the introduction outlines the book’s structure, sources, and scope, which includes some comparison with Austria.

This chapter presents three exemplary stories of local bourgmestres on the border. One was a key member of a pro-Hutu opposition party, but attempted to cooperate with the Uprona government by displaying hostility towards Rwanda, while the second tactically changed parties at independence. The third was an Uprona hero from the start. In the turmoil of decolonisation, all three were trapped by political manoeuvring between their local constituents and the upper state: an alliance conducted through petitions and inquiries brought the bourgmestres’ local rivals into collaboration with their hostile superiors. By 1967, all three bourgmestres were eliminated in the same way, by different regimes. While ethnicity and Rwandan treason appeared frequently in the terms of denunciation, they were mostly subordinated in significance to local political circumstances, personal rivalries and the possibilities contained within the terms of official truth. The chapter uses these stories to show the potential for local action in invoking official truth to advance private interests, constituting a mode of citizenship that melded dependency and authority in the manipulation of state obsessions.

After independence, Burundi went through a process of rapid political disintegration. Uprona factionalised into political and ethnic blocs, while facing off against Rwanda as an ideological and geopolitical enemy. This chapter explores the rapid changes between 1962 and 1967, seeing the attempts to rule in the control of official truth. It examines the extreme hostility of the state towards the borderland population, and the forms of political language used in national address. It presents a moment of violence in 1964 when dissidents ran a campaign of arson from across the border, and the performances of loyalty enacted by others to display their obedience to official truth. Noting the national crisis over Prime Minister Ngendandumwe’s assassination in 1965, and the subsequent elections, attempted coups d’état and the first large-scale ethnic violence, it finally presents local responses to a military coup in 1966 that abolished the monarchy. Some resisted the coup by treating it as just another ‘rumour’, but most greeted the news with cautious silence. Official truth changed to exclude royal authority, but maintained old hostilities to Rwanda, rumour and ethnic politics.

This chapter presents the early years of the First Republic through the search for new terms of popular political inclusion and control, and through the internal suspicions and rivalries among the elite. After initial hostility and caution towards the new regime, the borderland population seemed to embrace the new ideology of ‘vigilance’ and the new party youth league, the JRR. Particularly suited to a border location, these modes of vigilance entailed the performance of absolute loyalty, and seemed to manifest the realisation of the state’s official truth, but also permitted some flexibility and protection for local communities by concealing their deviances and contradictions. The state, however, succombed to the ‘politics of gossip’, in which vigilance drove fatal feuds and accusations towards ethnic ideologies and paranoia. Presenting the emergence of the ‘Groupe de Bururi’ as a political faction and the farce of a treason trial that examplified the total subversion of truth among the elite, the chapter observes the drifting ‘zombification’ between an apparently loyal citizenry and the self-obsessed elite, beneath the deceiving truth of vigilance as a new mode of citizenship.