This chapter examines popular appeal to local Heimat as a site of political renewal in Cologne. It shows how democratically engaged localists advanced narratives of “Cologne democracy” and “openness to the world,” while replacing nationalist narrative of their region as a “Watch on the Rhine” with that of the Rhineland as a “bridge” to the West. Democratically engaged localists further argued that Heimat should be about promoting European unity and post-nationalist ideas of nation. Such groups constructed these narratives by pulling on useable local histories and reinventing local traditions. Such early democratic identifications, however, existed alongside major failures in democratic practice and frequent depictions of the Eastern bloc as an “anti-Heimat.” Emphasis on democratic local histories also aggravated failures to confront guilt for the Nazi past. Exclusion of newcomers also represented a significant challenge. More inclusively minded Cologners attempted to combat persistent exclusionary practices by arguing for “Cologne tolerance” as a local value and by insisting that a correctly understood Heimat concept should generate sympathy for the displaced.

Chapter 3 revisits the Cold War Scramble for Africa. Throughout the continent, the ‘concession model of extraction’ – the renting out of land to foreign corporations in exchange for royalties – was based on the early emergence of mining giants in South Africa. The concession model was not dismantled following independence. Gatekeeping politics were consolidated through the alternate paths taken by London and Paris. France incorporated its former colonies within a ‘post-colonial block’. Britain reconverted as a dual middle power – with London as jurisdictional apex and the City as financial powerhouse. The Cold War sidelining of The Hague justice institutions enabled the deployment of the US Cultural Cold War, based on the formidable sway of the alliance of Wall Street resources – finance, arbitration and corporate law firms – which contributed to the insulation of foreign corporate rights in property in resource-rich African states from national and international oversight.

This paper presents a comparative evaluation of Word Grammar (WG), the Minimalist Programme (MP), and the Matrix Language Frame model (MLF) regarding their predictions of possible combinations in a corpus of German–English mixed determiner–noun constructions. WG achieves the highest accuracy score. The comparison furthermore revealed a difference in accuracy of the predictions between the three models and a significant difference between WG and the MP. The analysis suggests that these differences depend on assumptions made by the models and the mechanisms they employ. The difference in accuracy between the models, for example, can be attributed to the MLF being concerned with agreement in language membership between the verb and the subject DP/NP of the clause. The significant difference between WG and the MP can be attributed to the distinct roles features play in the two syntactic theories and how agreement is handled. Based on the results, we draw up a list of characteristics of feature accounts that are empirically most adequate for the mixed determiner–noun constructions investigated and conclude that the syntactic theory that incorporates most of them is WG (Hudson 2007, 2010).

The chapter analyzes the place of the German nation in politics and society, particularly nationalist activism and ethnic conflict between Germans, Poles, Danes, and French speakers.

Chapter 6 examines the Probo Koala environmental catastrophe which involved the dumping of toxic oil residue by the global trader Trafigura in the port of Abidjan in 2005. The development of the scandal into transnational litigation strategies in Britain and European capitals exposes the legal lumpiness fostered by the financialisation of global value chains. The ‘Ivorian miracle’ relied on protected economic integration within the global markets of coffee and cocoa. The dismantling of the ‘post-colonial block’ fostered a displacement of the terms of Côte d’Ivoire’s relationship with global markets. This contributed to reinforcing the prominence of global traders as intermediaries between states, financial markets and corporate power. It also consolidated the symbiotic relationship between the onshoring of offshore capitalism and the offshoring of onshore justice. The case demonstrates that corporate accountability gaps along global value chains are an outcome of the bifurcation of state sovereignty enabled by financial deregulation.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of how emoticons and emojis are a human adaptation to online written conversation to compensate for the absence of non-verbal cues and physical context, but also an affordance of most written conversation to promote affiliation, creativity and play. The analysis highlights the role of emojis as ‘attendant activities’ (Jefferson, 1987) which express politeness (and impoliteness) and other pragmatic functions, including prosocial and anti-social behaviours, identities, contextualizations (physical/virtual), irony and meaning enhancement. By analysing the multiple, often overlapping interactional functions of emoticons and emojis, this chapter provides original insights into the unique role of emojis in children’s written conversation, highlighting some major differences between spoken and written interaction. Findings indicate that emojis fulfil interactional functions which go beyond simply replacing fundamental non-verbal, voice and contextual resources which are available to speakers in phone and face-to-face interaction. While further research in this area is required across different age groups and genders, the various categories of emojis identified in this chapter provide a comprehensive account of how children are likely to deploy and respond to these symbols in online interaction, and how multiple meanings are possible depending on the interactional context

In this chapter our goal is to determine the achievable region of the exponent pairs for the type-I and type-II error probabilities. Our strategy is to apply the achievability and (strong) converse bounds from Chapter 14 in conjunction with the large-deviations theory developed in Chapter 15. After characterizing the full tradeoff we will discuss an adaptive setting of hypothesis testing where, instead of committing ahead of time to testing on the basis of n samples, one can decide adaptively whether to request more samples or stop. We will find out that adaptivity greatly increases the region of achievable error exponents and will learn about the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) of Wald. In the closing sections we will discuss relations to more complicated settings in hypothesis testing: one with composite hypotheses and one with communication constraints.

Following Jasanoff and Kim’s concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries,” this chapter examines the rhetoric, regulatory frameworks and policies employed in constructing imaginaries of digital sovereignty in China, Russia, and India – three member countries of BRICS and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation). A central finding is that these sociotechnical imaginaries center on protecting national cultural identity, or “cultural sovereignty,” against the “free flow of information,” a motive echoing NWICO debates in the 1970s and 1980s and WSIS discussions in the early 2000s. The development of these countries’ digital sovereignty imaginaries is deduced from their unique histories and governance approaches. Furthermore, the SCO’s crucial role as a platform to promote the partly authoritarian Chinese conception of cyber/information sovereignty is demonstrated. Another key finding is that imaginaries of digital sovereignty relate to a non-secular understanding of the state in all three examined countries. In this sense, the global emergence of digital sovereignty is comparable to the evolution of Westphalian sovereignty from the confessional wars in early modern Europe. The chapter concludes that an informed debate on digital sovereignty must consider both the dangers of digital authoritarianism and the productive potential of digital decolonization.