Doris Lessing was one of the most restless novelists of her generation. She toggled between realist bildungsromane, autofiction, postmodernist experimentation, and speculative fiction. Despite her restlessness, she remained committed to the novel of ideas, using these different subgenres to entertain philosophical debates about autonomy, group membership, racism, and social progress. Surprisingly, as this chapter demonstrates, Lessing’s swerve into speculative fiction was conditioned by her status as a target of MI5 surveillance. Although Lessing knew she was being watched, she did not turn to the paranoid style of George Orwell. Instead, she used her fiction to suggest that an imperialist intelligence network could be outwitted by individuals who harness the powers of intelligent perception, or ESP: reading minds, forecasting future events, even communicating across species. The way to beat a repressive police network was to mimic its capabilities, bringing the arts of surveillance into the fold of human consciousness itself.

Existing conceptualizations of thriving at work are dominated by White Eurocentric hegemonic beliefs. This is done by focusing on individual experiences and workplace resources and privileging universalisms over pluralistic, local, and regional understandings. Many individuals and communities across the globe are engaged in precarious work, operate in informal economies, and lack the opportunity to gain equal access to resources. With fairness as the foundation to thriving, I have expanded on existing conceptualizations on thriving at work by restoring multiple perspectives, centering decent work as a basic goal, and by including an ecological systems perspective. Thriving workplaces require equitable opportunities for self-determination available for all.

The introduction to Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a survey of recent and historical transnational approaches to Irish cultural production. In doing so, it shies away from insisting on a definitive method for the scholars in the field, choosing rather to highlight the diversity of approaches in the chapters in the volume. The introduction calls for a “weak theory” of the transnational, recognizing the myriad ways that both cultural producers and critics understand the term and the project. It also calls for a critical evaluation of the methods and scope of studying Ireland in a transnational phase, one that does not simply accept that a globalized world must necessarily be read in a globalizing frame.

This chapter considers the relevance of postcolonialism to the discipline of ‘international relations’ (IR). It argues that postcolonialism advances a powerful critique of traditional approaches to IR (see chapters on realism and liberalism) since it calls into question the discipline’s foundational ontological and epistemological assumptions. In particular, it challenges the dominant assumption that states are the basic units of IR and that we should examine the relations between these units in the context of an anarchical system. Postcolonialism refocuses our attention on the constitutive role played by colonialism in the creation of the modern world and sees international relations as hierarchical rather than anarchical. It sees academic disciplines such as IR – and Western rationalist, humanist and universalist modes of thinking in general – as complicit in reproducing colonial power relations and seeks normatively to resist practices of colonialism in its material and ideational forms, whether political, economic or cultural.

This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

The Introduction outlines the theoretical framework, starting with a review of the existing literature on musical modernism, global musicology and related theories, including discussions of universalism, methodological nationalism, the centre versus periphery paradigm, multiple modernities, hybridity and postcolonial and decolonising approaches. It further introduces the interdisciplinary concept of ‘entangled histories’, which is illustrated with three short cases studies: the Orchesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) from Bolivia, the Bow Project from South Africa and Uwalmassa, a trio creating ‘deconstructed gamelan music’ from Jakarta, Indonesia. What unites these cases is that they are rooted in local traditions, rather than on the adoption or imposition of Western practices, although they undoubtedly respond creatively to Western ideas.

Hansen and Witkowski introduce a new theory to understand how societal needs are met. The authors develop the cross-sectoral BIAS theory, an adaptation of the BIAS model, to assess factors that lead to persistent unmet needs among marginalized populations. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the authors indicate that the standard economic model of understanding the provision of services by market, government, and nonprofit sectors (three-failures theory) systematically fails to account for the underprivileged in society. The cross-sectoral BIAS theory explains that societal biases drive the persistent insufficient provision of goods to marginalized populations by all three sectors.

This essay examines the changing fortunes of the university in Ireland through a history of the English department. With literary references to Joyce and Yeats, it describes colonial and postcolonial encounters in the classroom.

The epilogue looks at what of Baeck’s thought remains relevant by turning to the presence of empire and the memory of genocide today. This is done by looking at institutions that bear Baeck’s name, including the Leo Baeck House in Berlin, the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles. The latter stands for the tradition of ethical monotheism and resistance to state power. The LBI represents the creative legacy of German Jewry, and the concern with the writing of history, that Baeck embodied. Finally, the Leo Baeck House stands for the vexed relation between postcolonial thought and the memory of the Holocaust in the contemporary public sphere in Germany, as expressed in a recent debate around the work of Achille Mbembe. I contend that the fact that Baeck, and other German-Jewish thinkers, are often treated without regard to the imperial context has a corollary in contemporary debates in Germany about the relation between the colonial past and the memory of the Holocaust. Such heated debates, for example, the Mbembe Affair, show that the intertwining of the Jewish and Colonial Question is still very much a German Question.

This chapter begins to shape the theory of authority posited by this book, by exploring the way in which the authority of international criminal law is rooted in both justice and rights, exploring the development of international criminal justice in parallel with the human rights movement, and the way in which both have sought to serve victims of abuse. It also explores the way in which a reliance on State consent as the source of authority can undermine the authority of international criminal law. This argument is underpinned using Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship, which offers the opportunity to move away from the Euro- and State-centric approach to international criminal law and encourages a greater focus on domestic prosecution. The discussion engages with what this complete approach should comprise, exploring the impact of generalised support for domestic prosecutions to ensure that its exercises of power are truly legitimate.