This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

This chapter explores queer theatre’s continued preoccupation with history, arguing that its persistent attention to the past is part of a broader cultural project of recuperation. By attending to the legislative and social landscape that has criminalised and excluded LGBT+ people in Britain alongside historic moments of political change, the chapter illuminates how queer theatre has been configured by the historical conditions of its production. The chapter traces both the emergence of queer theatre and the sites it continues to move across, from fringe venues and queer arts festivals to national cultural events. It then examines the multiplicity of ways that histories have been produced, remade, or recovered in performance, drawing on the work of queer theatre makers including Gay Sweatshop, Emma Frankland, Nando Messias, David Hoyle, Drew Taylor-Wilson, Elgan Rhys, Rosana Cade, Jo Clifford, Milk Presents, DUCKIE, and Mojisola Adebayo. In continuing to return to the past, queer theatre recovers previously excluded marginalised lives and experiences in Britain, disrupts linear narratives of progress that accompany LGBT+ politics, and makes space for reimagined futures.

A non-equilibrium perspective sheds light on why conventional conservation may fail to achieve its objectives. The human history of societies and the evolutionary history of species have shaped adaptations to disturbance regimes and the potential for resilience or irreversible tipping points in the face of change. Understanding the effects of disturbances such as storms, floods, and fires on post-disturbance recruitment can inform decisions about how key processes, structures, and interactions affect heterogeneity, diversity, and resilience over a range of spatial and temporal scales. Retention of structural legacies (dead and dying trees), mutualistic interactions (microbiotic soil crusts, mycorrhizal fungi), and key wild species (beavers) can promote biodiversity and carbon storage. Management of fire regimes, hydrological processes, and agricultural systems can promote carbon storage. However, difficult decisions about tradeoffs remain.

Attempts to re-write recent world history as a long series of struggles against European imperialism are inherently self-defeating, for the effect is exactly what it is purportedly trying to avoid. By making struggle against Europe the sine qua non of the past two hundred years of overall human experience, such an approach privileges Europe, and so is by definition Eurocentric. Furthermore, it would be wrong to assume that only European imperial pasts are present in the contemporary international system. Other imperial systems have also left their marks on historical polities that are kept up by today’s polities. In this chapter, we discuss ho what we have elsewhere baptised the steppe tradition is still alive in parts of Central Asia. It has also left a solid legacy in Turkey, as well as remnants in Russia. The difference between these polities and European ones are often observed. The debt they owe to the Eurasian imperial steppe tradition takes us one step closer to accounting for these differences.

This chapter offers a reassessment of the contemporary feminist legacies of the late surrealist novel. Historically, scholarship has reached a moment where the late surrealist novels of Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) and Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) now operate as active intertexts. Such legacies have become manifest in a new generation of contemporary novelists who identify as feminist: Chloe Aridjis (b. 1971), Kate Bernheimer (b. 1966), Ali Smith (b. 1962), and Heidi Sopinka (b. 1971). A range of feminist-surrealist stylistics in the contemporary novel become apparent. Self-reflexive framing devices such as transcription (daydreaming) and lecturing (epistemology) enable protagonists to take control of their voice or destiny in Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (2001), Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), and Smith’s Autumn (2016). Moreover, haunted texts and found objects serve as catalysts and/or disruptive plot devices in Sopinka’s The Dictionary of Animal Languages (2018) and Aridjis’s Asunder (2013) and Sea Monsters (2019). These novels mimic the surrealist techniques and the elderly characters found in Tanning’s Abyss/Chasm (1977/2004) and Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974). A comparative, intergenerational perspective ensures the historical authenticity of the surrealist novel, and acknowledges a critical inheritance of fictional, revisionary accounts of the avant-garde movement.

Arctic mining towns are vulnerable to de-industrialization, as most jobs are in a single industry, with long distances to other employers or business opportunities. Other challenges are the legacies of mining that companies leave behind. Research has shown that such legacies can be used for sustaining industrial settlements beyond the end of the industries that supported them. This chapter seeks to understand under what circumstances legacies of mining can contribute to the long-term sustainability of Arctic mining towns in crisis. It explores the history of two Arctic mining towns, Kiruna in Sweden and Schefferville in Canada, and how actors there dealt with the crisis, how they used legacies from the past in this process, and what the outcomes were, after both towns were hit by economic crisis in the 1970s. By using the concepts of re-use and heritagization we show that the possibilities to sustain Arctic mining towns in crisis by creating new values out of mining legacies, depends on several factors: institutions, perceptions of values, and the momentum embedded in socio-technical systems for mining. Local initiatives for sustaining Arctic mining towns in crisis are discussed.

The conclusion sums up the findings of the study and suggests new directions for future research.

The events in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 present a series of empirical puzzles unanswered in the comparative political scholarship: We see puzzling variation with respect to the particular processes of party formation, political mobilization, and opposition group survival or dissolution in the context of regime transitions. These puzzles are particularly evident in Egypt, where a repressed opposition group (the Muslim Brotherhood) won the 2011 founding elections only to be forced from office eighteen months later, while other opposition groups that were active in protesting the Egyptian regime did not even form a political party to run in the 2011 elections. Common explanations for events in Egypt focus on idiosyncratic features of the Egyptian political landscape and fail to explain similar events in other cases in Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America. An approach that takes into account the mechanisms linking the authoritarian past to the events surrounding founding elections offers not only an explanation for events in Egypt but also illuminates comparative cases of founding elections more generally. The book uses comparative process tracing to excavate the mechanisms at play in Egypt and then test them in five comparative cases, linking the authoritarian political ecosystem to the outcome of founding elections.

Chapter 7 concludes the book by revisiting key claims and discussing the implications of the research for broader debates in the fields of comparative politics, social movements, and democracy-promotion activities. Here we see that much of the focus of democracy promotion institutions and programs may be misplaced. Rather than focusing on existing political parties in hybrid regimes, as many democracy-promotion programs do, it is repressed societal actors that are more likely to mobilize supporters, win elections, and form the first government after an authoritarian ouster. These are the individuals and groups most in need of skills-building and governance training. Furthermore, much of the programmatic emphasis of democracy-promotion work falls on enhancing the “liberal” qualities of democracy: freedom of speech, human rights, inclusion of women and minorities, and the protection of civil liberties. However, what the cases here show is that democratic consolidation is most threatened by unmet benchmarks in economic and physical security after the fall of an authoritarian regime. When these benchmarks are not met, the support for democracy declines and a wedge is opened for the return of authoritarian actors. The chapter offers suggestions for future research based upon the findings.

This chapter discusses how the preceding analysis has wider, portable, comparative implications for understanding the drivers of variations in shades of authoritarianism and illiberalism in other communist legacy countries. I structure the chapter as follows. I first sketch out an analytical framework for a comparative analysis of two new cases: Hungary and China. The section also delineates limitations of scope and restrictions in applications to the universe of communist states and beyond. I then proceed to analyze each case with reference to the key variables of interest. A final section concludes with reflections on the utility of the framework for understanding social inequalities and the long shadow of premodern societies in effecting democratic vulnerabilities and resilience in the present-day illiberal world.

This chapter demonstrates that, before the Revolution, Russia had a vibrant public sphere. The institutionalization of society into dense webs of autonomous or semi-autonomous public and private institutions followed the contours of society. One’s estate continued to matter in the consolidation or extension of social networks. The Bolsheviks decimated segments of the state apparatus, but a large chunk of the autonomous, highly networked, and enterprising society survived the Revolution. The dense ties linking professional organizations like schools, hospitals, and the civic arena, and embracing museums, historical conservation bureaus, and archaeological interest groups, helped cushion and eventually catapult segments of the estatist bourgeoisie into the elite or otherwise comfortably well-off “intelligentsia” substratum of Soviet society. The autonomous agency of these institutions, and of the actors embedded within them, nurtured its own tensions, evasions, and complications in dealing with the Tsarist state and facilitated adaptation and survival under the new regime, something that I conceptualize as one element of the democratic legacy of the educated estates. The chapter describes the social character of the urban bourgeoisie in late imperial Samara; performs systematic social network analysis employing material from pre-revolutionary directories of the white-collar strata and civil society; and provides an account of the bourgeoisie’s post-revolutionary adaptation.

By 1953, the communist-led Resistance had been marginalized in much of the Mekong delta. But the cost was high. "Traditional" institutions of the village had, in large swaths of the delta, been destroyed. The Franco-Vietnamese "coalition" had defeated the communist-led Resistance. But who would win the peace? The militia leaders, so skilled in war, were not fluent in the arts of peace. This chapter looks at the endgame of empire, when France was withdrawing from rural areas all over the South, downsizing its military presence, and shifting its support to the State of Vietnam. The end result by 1954, however, was a balkanized southern Vietnam with fragmented sovereignty where militias entrenched themselves in rural fiefdoms. The chapter shows how Ngo Dinh Diem, faced with this divided South, won the battle for post-war control of the South. It pays particular attention to his expulsion to Cambodia of the Cao Dai leader Pham Cong Tac, the co-optation of the Hoa Hao militia leader Tran Van Soai, and the arrest, trial, and execution of the Hao Hao militia leader Ba Cut. The chapter also examines the regional, national, and international legacies of the war.

‘I have always sought to stand by myself’ Arnold announced in 1865.1 The remark is the more intriguing for its appearance in the first series of Essays in Criticism, a collection which, with its consideration of cultural tradition and the intricate relationality of writers, both affirms and denies autonomy. A poet-critic deeply interested in the legacy of the past and the influence of previous generations of writers, Arnold was very conscious of the particular challenges of pursuing a literary voice of one’s own in an age when the place and purpose of the arts was being questioned (not least by him), and with the Romantics still in living memory. The irony of Arnold’s wish ‘to stand by myself’ is that its registering of distinctness carries Byronic airs. With one eye on his present fame and one on posterity Byron had declared ‘I stood and stand alone’, sounding more sure of it than Arnold.2 Whether it was his powerful individualism and desire to go his own way, his defence of personal liberties and resistance to authority, or his estranged and egoistic heroes, Byron was the embodiment of self-determination for contemporaries and subsequent generations. Arnold admired Byron’s independent streak, and, ironically, found in it means of self-recognition as well as self-evaluation with which to carve out his own career. He sets up Byron as an example of what he wanted to be, as well as – more negatively – what he was prone to being, what he could not quite manage to live up to, or wanted to avoid becoming. Regard for Byron also enabled him to evaluate the legacy of different strands of English Romanticism and put his finger on what he felt was lacking in Victorian life and culture.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon is a pivotal figure in the dissemination of Byron and Byronic influence from the mid-1820s to the 1840s. This chapter details local encounters between the two poets during this period, before opening up further avenues for investigating the Byronic inheritance among nineteenth-century women poets.

W. H. Auden made it clear in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and various prose writings on Byron that what counted for him was the poet’s ‘voice’: ‘I like your muse because she’s gay and witty / […] / I like her voice that does not make me jump’.1 ‘Voice’ was no small matter for Auden, since as he famously declared in ‘September 1, 1939’ it was all he had ‘[t]o undo the folded lie’.2 Addressing Byron in the form of a verse-letter allowed him to find a new voice for himself. Within the context of Letters from Iceland, the format permitted him to talk on public matters while adopting the tone of a private communication; and, in addition, it allowed him to develop a broader conception of poetry’s scope, by finding in it a place for the non-earnest – something, as he saw it, that had been lost along the way in the development of poetry since Byron’s time. It gave a new direction to his own writing, preparing the way for the longer poems of the second half of his career.

Early in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written when Byron’s wanderings had led him at last to a more settled residence in Italy, he balances all that he has acquired in exile with a new wistfulness about England