The puzzle of this chapter is whether characteristics of BRI projects display patterns corresponding to a host country’s political regime. The prevailing counterargument is that BRI projects reflect primarily what China wants. The evidence presented in this chapter is based on a different dataset from the prior chapter and includes over 2,100 projects up through 2019 across 127 countries. For each project, ten characteristics were manually coded. The findings both corroborate the importance of electoral autocracies and also provide more detailed evidence for systematic differences in the structure of BRI projects depending on the political regime in which they are located. The analysis demonstrates clear and significant patterns between BRI project characteristics and political regimes as well as for strong versus weak electoral autocrats that are consistent with and extend the findings of the previous chapter.

Aristotle complained that though the original intention of the Laws was to institute a form of political system ‘more common’ to cities (presumably ‘more capable of being shared in’ by political communities generally), the social and political system Plato actually worked out in the dialogue turned out in the end not very different from the ideal articulated in the Republic. This chapter agrees with Aristotle’s identification of two projects in the Laws. But it argues that Plato makes it clear that the dialogue needs to develop (in relatively idealizing mode) a scheme for producing a citizenry educated for virtue as its primary aim, but that as a subordinate task it must also provide a constitutional framework that has sound empirical and historical credentials and a system of law providing for coercion as well as persuasion. There is just not much supply of persons eager to be as good as possible as fast as possible, and for the ‘tough eggs’ among them an elaborate penal system has to be devised. How Plato delivers on these two projects is then explored in some detail. The chapter concludes by sketching in summary the way both are fitted into a single plan.

Higher education in Canada seeks to provide opportunities for students to succeed by advancing scholarly, technical, and practical (employability) skills. Some institutions, especially research-oriented degree-granting universities, engage students with research in order to advance such skills. Increasingly, undergraduate research opportunities align with preparing students for further studies or the workforce through projects that connect with community and industry. Faculty, staff, and administrators provide undergraduate research through curricular and co-curricular initiatives as a proven way to enhance and amplify the student experience while driving research outputs and campus partnerships. Current trends mean an intensification of challenges to sustain funding for the traditional faculty-mentored student project. As a result, diversification of undergraduate research is occurring. While benefits for students are still generated in terms of skill development and career clarification, Canadian campuses are investing in more innovative opportunities.

Chapter 4 connects the emergence of transformative demographic governance to changes in natural philosophy, in particular to Francis Bacon’s works and their influence among projectors associated with the Hartlib Circle in the mid-seventeenth century. The problem of managing the qualities of populations in an empire raised the question of natural constraints on the power of policy to “improve” populations; the chapter examines Hartlibian projects concerned with this question on a large scale, including some in which putatively immutable racial boundaries and the enslavement of Africans indicate both limits to and paradoxes of demographic governance. It then turns to Cromwellian Ireland, showing that opposed arguments for either Irish transplantation or English –Irish mixture proceeded from a similar centering of demographic governance. Mid-century projects fed into William Petty’s “political arithmetic” in the Restoration. This fused Baconianism, alchemical ideas and quantification, treating the control of the numbers and of the economic, political, religious and cultural qualities of populations in England, Ireland and the empire as essentially similar problems for the state.

The introduction states the argument and introduces key concepts, including ideas of multitude and political arithmetic, as well as important distinctions, including that between quantitative and qualitative aspects of demographic thought. It briefly surveys past approaches to the history of population as an idea, paying particular attention to Michel Foucault. It then outlines the book’s episodic approach; explains its geographical and temporal scope (England, Ireland and the British Atlantic, circa 1500 –1800); characterizes the range and types of sources used; and describes its focus on the emergence of population as an object of knowledge and qualitative manipulation (referred to as demographic governance), as well as on questions of the locus and limits of power over population (referred to as demographic agency).

Projects are forms of organizing that have become increasingly common in the past decades. The ad-hoc and temporary nature of projects seemingly poses significant challenges to the patterning of activities into organizational routines. Yet, considerable research in routine dynamics has been carried out in project contexts. In this chapter, we show that projects and routines share some common characteristics and that acknowledging the project nature of routines as well as the organizational routine nature of projects offers significant opportunities for the advancement of routine dynamics research.