This chapter explores Pentecostal conversion as both an affective and a political process. It considers the kind of subjects young urban Pentecostals are called upon to become: organised, enterpreneurial, armed not only with a transformed heart but with a ‘vision’ for their future and a ‘strategic plan’. This subject both converges with and diverges from the RPF’s attempts to create ‘ideal’ subjects who are able to participate in the country’s post-genocide development. While some young Pentecostals benefited from such self-making, others became disillusioned. Instead, they highlighted the limits of the Pentecostal project and its inability to deliver the bright future they felt they had been promised.

The Select Citywalk mall in South Delhi occupies 1.3 million square feet of prime land. A Quora search reveals that that is equivalent to almost 21 football fields, 40 White Houses and 10 Walmart stores. Its looming glass building houses international brands – Zara, H&M, UNIQLO, Sephora, Dior, MAC, Burger King, KFC – providing an ‘upscale’ shopping experience. Its air-conditioned and gleaming interiors with high ceilings and spotless (somewhat slippery) floors open on to an expansive landscaped plaza, featuring tropical palms, fountains and a giant-sized statue of the Buddha. On a regular evening, it is not uncommon to see people, especially couples, sitting on the steps in the landscaped plaza of the mall, making it a convenient dating spot. The epithets ‘out of this world’ and ‘larger than life’ seem fitting for the mall that towers above and pushes out its surroundings. The year Select Citywalk opened – 2007 – falls in the early period of the emergence of malls in India, following the opening of the economy to global trade in the 1990s. In the first decade of the 21st century, malls were still a novelty, but by the end of the second decade, they became a much more common feature, alongside cafés, call centres and high-rise offices, transforming the urban Indian landscape. These spaces signify the advent of a global culture that has influenced the social fabric of urban India and, perhaps most remarkably, altered the desires, attitudes and aspirations of the youth, who comprise ‘liberalization's children’ (Lukose 2009).

Popular discourse suggests that the socio-economic changes of the last three decades have offered urban young Indians the opportunity to join the ranks of an expanding ‘new middle class’. While there are contestations over the size of the new middle class, with critics suggesting that the statistical significance of the new middle class in India may be overestimated (Aslany 2019; Banerjee and Duflo 2008), sociologists and anthropologists have delved into what characterises this new middle class and indeed whether there is anything ‘new’ about it. Leela Fernandes (2000: 90) argues that rather than expanding, it is the cultural basis of the middle class that has shifted so that the new middle class is, in the context of liberalisation, invented as ‘the social group which is able to negotiate India's new relationship with the global economy in both cultural and economic terms’.

The 9th Circuit ruled the MAS ban to be constitutional, but with a twist. They kicked it back to Judge Tashima giving more explicit direction about potential constitutional violations that state representatives may have engaged in while creating the legislation and banning the program. At this point in time, there was a huge change in the legal team as Wallstreet firm Weil, Gotshal & Magnes LLP agreed to take the case pro bono. It was the first time that MAS supporters would have more legal resources than the state.

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

A HIDDEN HISTORY OF BUDDHISM

There is a particular type of literature that sees empire as a nobler version of an Indiana Jones adventure. This literature suggests that British colonials were responsible for the ‘discovery’ and ‘return’ of India's Buddhist heritage. Charles Allen, for example, criticized Edward Said and scholars influenced by his important theoretical intervention Orientalism for failing to ask ‘where we would be without the Orientalists’. The orientalists, a particular breed of East India Company official-cum-adventurer-cum-scholars, ‘initiated the recovery of South Asia's lost past’ and ‘the European discovery of Buddhism and the subsequent resurgence of Buddhism in South Asia arose directly out of their activities’. British efforts to find, unearth, translate, collect and legislate around Buddhist material culture and India's built and literary heritage make for a fascinating story. However, to draw a direct line between British archaeology of Buddhist sites and the resurgence of Buddhism in modern South Asia as yet another instance of the great gifts of colonialism to India is to intentionally ignore the very considerable interventions, efforts, creativity and intellectual engagement of a range of Buddhists from not just the Indian subcontinent but further afield, from among Buddhist communities in Southeast and East Asia. It is one thing to dig up a site and write about it in an elite journal. It is quite another to undertake long and difficult pilgrimages in the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to bring these sites alive, as places of Buddhist worship and practice. This latter work was done by largely South, East and Southeast Asian Buddhists. If there is a story of the return of the Buddha, it is these actors who played the main role. And it is these actors whose efforts constitute what is clearly still a hidden history of modern Buddhism in India.

Not that the colonial context was unimportant, as mentioned earlier. The 19th-century transport revolution played a critical role in facilitating the movement of people at scale. Expanding shipping lines, the ever-growing railways, improved communications and dissemination of information about pilgrimage sites via print all contributed to an enormous expansion of pilgrimage, especially international pilgrimage, from the 1890s onwards. Mobility was at the heart of modern Asia's colonial history.