Chapter 4 examines the ongoing rush for Africa, epitomised by the global competition for the critical minerals of the ‘energy transition’. It argues that the ongoing Scramble is embedded in previous imperial imprints. The 1980s debt crisis positioned international financial institutions as the vehicles of the neoliberal turn on the continent. But this did not displace gatekeeping politics. Rather, the concurrent onshoring of offshore capitalism fostered the power of global traders like Glencore as the prime interface between resource-rich African states and global markets and as the core engineers of the transformation of the geography of extraction, based on technological and infrastructural innovations and financial deregulation. The onshoring of swashbuckler capitalism is deeply connected to a codification of capital (Pistor 2019) based on Common Law and the law of New York which is enabled by the globalisation of the Wall Street model of the corporate law firm.

Dalit and low-castes literature vividly portrays their ecological experiences, perspectives, and aspirations through a wide range of forms and themes. Within their literary works, there is a rich tapestry of both human and non-human elements, encompassing figurative and imaginative landscapes, as well as representations of natural and social environments. They reveal notions of belonging and marginalization in relation to nature, examining issues such as access and alienation from natural resources. The discourse on caste and environmental justice has made efforts to acknowledge and appreciate the Dalit eco-literary tradition. This involves critiquing the prevailing nature writing traditions and analysing Dalit literature through ecological lenses. Unlike the pursuit of an idyllic era of environmental harmony, this literary tradition aims to carve out Dalits’ distinct language, memory, and vibrancy.

In her autobiography, Bama, the first published Indian Tamil Dalit woman writer, describes herself as Karukku, meaning palmyra leaves with their serrated edges on both sides, like a double-edged sword challenging its oppressors. Her life of cruel caste oppression within the Catholic Church was like that of ‘a bird whose wings had been clipped’ and her recovery from social and institutional betrayal felt ‘like a falcon that treads the air, high in the skies’. Manohar Mouli Biswas, a Bengali Dalit writer from West Bengal, writing for over three decades, thought of himself as a water hyacinth. Initially he had named his autobiography Prisnika (water hyacinth). Later he renamed it as Life and Death of Prisnika, while expressing this self-identity as deeply hurtful for him. The world of Dr Siddalingaiah, one of India's foremost Dalit writers in Karnataka, breathes and dies in ooru keri – a separate space in a village or a city, where a Dalit resides – so much so that his autobiography is titled after this place.

Growing up as a ‘Namashudhra’ in a peasant family in West Bengal, a Dalit woman in Tamil Nadu, a Dalit man in southern Karnataka – a diverse range of contemporary Dalit writers, working in different regions and languages, identify themselves in nuanced ways with nature in their literary works. Their rich and varied stories – of discrimination and creation, humiliation and heartbreak, hope and freedom – are also nature stories, where they forge a relationship with the environment in diverse ways.

This chapter contains answers to the Questionnaire on Constitutional Democracy for Chinese Liberal Intellectuals, which covers the basic concepts and institutional designs of constitutional democracy. China’s most pressing task is not making a new and better constitution, but rather formulating social contract through implementing the existing constitution, which does pay lip service to many political natural law precepts. Unlike many admirers of the American presidential system, I advocate for a Westminster-type parliamentary system, which has largely been borrowed by the current Chinese constitution, to be embedded in a federal framework for future China.

In Chapter 4 we collect some results on variational characterizations of information measures. It is a well-known method in analysis to study a functional by proving variational characterizations representing it as a supremum or infimum of some other, simpler (often linear) functionals. Such representations can be useful for multiple purposes:

• Convexity: the pointwise supremum of convex functions is convex.

• Regularity: the pointwise supremum of lower semicontinuous (lsc) functions is lsc.

• Bounds: the upper and lower bounds on the functional follow by choosing good solutions in the optimization problem.

At the start of the 1990s, the world was still a relatively hospitable place for cartels. Many enforcers, such as the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, viewed cartels as largely operating in local or at most domestic markets and that senior executives of major corporations were not so audacious as to operate a global cartel. Turning to the European Commission, it pursued several national business arrangements that affected trade between the member states as part of its European integration objective, but mostly with injunctive relief, and not punishing fines. Some of its countries, such as The Netherlands, did not even have a competition law prohibiting cartels. However, by the end of the 1990s, the DOJ’s Antitrust Division and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition were aggressively prosecuting a slew of international cartels that had been operating for years, while the Netherlands had at long last adopted a competition law and were prosecuting a massive construction cartel with hundreds of members.

In this section, we reassess the value of explicit prejudice measures. P.J. Henry starts this discussion by reviewing critiques of implicit prejudice measures and points to the overwhelming evidence of the power of explicit measures to predict important outcomes. To date, implicit measures have not yet been shown to be similarly capable. Henry explains how the “implicit revolution” was founded on the claim that explicit measures are useless, yet this is clearly not so.

Researchers in cognitive psychology have proposed that there are two distinct cognitive systems or dual processes underlying reasoning: automatic (implicit) processing and effortful (explicit) processing. Multiple measures have since been developed to capture implicit attitudes. However, do these new measures truly capture implicit attitudes? And can these implicit measures be used interchangeably? To answer this question, we investigated the differences between two of the most popular implicit attitudes measures used in the study of political behavior, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP). We examined data from an original survey experiment investigating gender attitudes and a nationally representative survey that measured racial attitudes. We found that it is important to consider implicit measures alongside explicit measures, as they are not redundant measures. However, when implicit attitudes are measured with the IAT, our inferences are more consistent with predictions of dual process accounts. Moreover, the IAT picks up out-group bias in a way that the AMP does not. The two studies point to the presence of significant differences between different types of implicit measures, and a need to reconsider how implicit attitudes are measured.

• ◦ This case study illustrates how a particular auction design, used for public procurement, can unintentionally provide fertile ground for bidding rings.

• ◦ Essentially, the average bid auction format awards the contract to the bidder whose bid is nearest to the average bid. The average bid auction format has been advocated in order to prevent contracts being awarded to bidders with unrealistically low bids that might result in low quality or ex post renegotiation.

• ◦ This case study shows how it facilitates collusion. The setting is the tendering of public work projects in Turin, Italy over 2000–2003 where subgroups of construction firms formed cartels and coordinated their bids to enhance their chance of winning the contract at an inflated price.

• ◦ To understand the ease with which bidders can collude when participating in an average bid auction, suppose the current expectation (in the absence of coordination) is that firms bid aggressively. In order to have a chance to win, a firm would have to submit a relatively low bid in order for it to be close to the average bid. Now consider firms forming a cartel. All they need to do is agree to submit high prices. That will reap higher profits and without the temptation to deviate as is present with the usual auction design where the contract is awarded to the lowest bidder. A firm that thinks about submitting a lower bid will move its bid farther away from the average bid and thus reduce its chances of winning. Once firms agree to submit high bids, such an agreement is self-enforcing. The average bid auction format thus makes collusion more likely because cartel stability is so easy to maintain.

• ◦ The case study also explores an incentive for a subset of firms to form its own coalition in order to increase their chances of winning. If it comprises enough firms, they can move the average bid up or down in a manner to cause their bids to be closer to the average bid than the bids of firms outside of their coalition. As a result, a collection of bidders can respond to a coalition by forming its own coalition. The proliferation of these coalitions is well documented for the Turin case.

• ◦ This understanding of cartel conduct is used to develop a marker for collusion based on the frequency of joint participation.

In this chapter, we take up the conceptual relationship between humiliation and glory. We argue that reversing humiliation has often been the cause for which glory is assigned. Leaning on James, Orwell, and Machiavelli, we explore the attraction of political causes in general and suggest that undoing a history of humiliation has a particular grip on the political imagination. We further note that while glory is the reward for ending political humiliation, the sentiment itself is often understood in terms of lost glory. We proceed to argue that the symmetry between the two terms was incomplete: While reversing political humiliation will always win glory, it is possible to become glorious for other causes, completely unrelated to that reversal. In Section 7.4 of the chapter, we note that the humiliation/glory dyad has very different consequences for men and women: While war can be humiliating for both, glory is typically reserved for the men planning and fighting the wars. We conclude by suggesting that a preoccupation with the humiliation/glory dynamic necessarily comes at the expense of the private, intimate milieu of the person who pursues them.