I wrote the initial drafts of this book over the period November 2018 to April 2020. Every time I had finished a draft chapter, Sri Lanka's appetite for power-sharing seemed to have crumbled further. The scene at the Galadari Hotel and the dim prospects of devolution in the concluding chapter are reflective of this. With Gotabaya Rajapaksa's election to president in late 2019 a new era appeared to start, and I decided to draw a line under my analysis. Academic books cannot continue to keep up with events, and it would be foolhardy to try.

Or so I told myself. Until an economic maelstrom of debt and shortages precipitated a popular uprising that ousted the Rajapaksa government, leaving Sri Lanka's entire political landscape in disarray. With the resulting whirlwind of ideas, hopes, puzzles and disillusions – as present in many readers’ minds as in mine, I presume – an epilogue is warranted to grapple with the afterthoughts to this book. As my manuscript wormed its way through the academic machinery of reviews and revisions, radio stations called me to comment on a country that appeared to have changed beyond recognition. Everything that had seemed unchangeable – the very genetic coding of Sri Lanka's political system and culture – got in flux. Through the aragalaya (struggle), as the uprising came to be known, the edifice of the state and its foundation of a sovereign people made a volte-face in the first half of 2022 – only to land roughly where they had always been, though maybe not quite, in the second half of that year. Many of the characteristics of this revolt connect to the central concerns of this book.

In late 2021 and early 2022, Sri Lanka spiralled into a foreign debt trap. The seeds for this had been sown in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, when the Rajapaksa government initiated a lending spree to bankroll a trajectory of postwar development that combined sensible infrastructural upgrades with misguided megalomanic prestige projects, as well as soaring corruption (Ruwanpura 2016). The impressive growth figures of the immediate postwar years and visions of becoming a new Malaysia or Singapore muted concerns over the debt burden from multilateral, Chinese and other loans.

Chapter 6 discusses the attempts of the European institutions, especially the European Commission and the European Parliament, to change the way in which corporations are structured and operate. This chapter tracks the European Commission’s initial ambitions to transform corporations by simultaneously improving their administrative capacity (due diligence) and reforming certain corporate fundamentals (civil liability and the remuneration of directors). After pushback by its own internal body, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission retreated from its more transformative plans, narrowing its focus mostly to due diligence. At the time of writing, however, even the resulting less ambitious proposal was facing intense (and to an extent even unexpected) resistance. Despite the drawbacks, there may be other avenues for the EU to transform corporations. In the last section, I discuss the possibilities for engaging more directly with the fundamentals of corporate activity – by legally facilitating those organisations consciously founded on different principles (ownership and governance), such as social enterprises, which are more distributive and inclusive by design.

Why is divorce heritable? It’s clear that it is heritable, in the rMZ > rDZ sense. I hope I have convinced you that the heritability of divorce doesn’t mean that there are “divorce genes,” or that divorce is passed down genetically from parents to children, but seriously: how does something like that happen? I am aware that my constant minimizing of the implications of heritability can seem as though I am keeping my finger in the dike against an inevitable onslaught of scientifically based genetic determinism, the final Plominesque realization that our genes make us who we are, the apotheosis of Galton’s proclamation in 1869: “I propose to show … that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world” (Hereditary Genius, p. 1).

This chapter is devoted to the study of infinitely divisible laws. It begins in §3.1 with a few refinements (especially the Lévy Continuity Theorem) of the Fourier techniques introduced in §2.3. These play a role in §3.2, where the Lévy–Khinchine formula is first derived and then applied to the analysis of stable laws.

Discusses the US government programs that aim to support commercially viable technological innovations, especially the Manufacturing USA program.

Writing about mental illness, treatment and stigma; being a mother, wife and friend as well as doctor and patient.

Back to work as a senior house officer in geriatrics. No formal support, but the kindness of some helped. I worked for my MRCGP exam, then decided I might after all become a psychiatrist, against most peoples’ advice. I applied for different posts, clear that there was prejudice in some.

Takes a broad look at mercantile networks that developed between consuls and others trading in the Mediterranean with a particular focus on the problem of self-interest faced by merchant-consuls.

This chapter provides the tools to compute catastrophe (CAT) risk, which represents a compound measure of the likelihood and magnitude of adverse consequences affecting structures, individuals, and valuable assets. The process consists of first establishing an inventory of assets (here real or simulated) exposed to potential hazards (exposure module). Estimating the expected damage resulting from a given hazard load (according to Chapter 2) is the second crucial step in the assessment process (vulnerability module). The application of damage functions to exposure data forms the basis for calculating loss estimates (loss module). To ensure consistency across perils, the mean damage ratio is used as the main measure for damage footprints D(x,y), with the final loss footprints simply expressed as L(x,y) = D(x,y) × ν(x,y), where ν(x,y) represents the exposure footprint. Damage functions are provided for various hazard loads: blasts (explosions and asteroid impacts), earthquakes, floods, hail, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and wind.

This chapter concludes the book and considers its major theoretical and practical implications. It begins by exploring how the book pushes us to think about fake news and factual misperceptions as an important “layer” of war – a layer that has been largely neglected despite the burgeoning attention to these issues in other domains. This final chapter then examines what the book’s findings tell us about such topics as the psychology and behavior of civilian populations, the duration of armed conflicts, the feasibility of prevailing counterinsurgency models, and the depths and limits of misperceptions more broadly in social and political life. It also engages with the practical implications of the book for policymakers, journalists, activists, and ordinary politically engaged citizens in greater depth, exploring how the problems outlined in the research might also be their own solutions. Ultimately, this chapter shows how the book has something to offer to anyone who is interested in the dynamics of truth and falsehood in violent conflicts (and beyond) – and perhaps the beginnings of a framework for those who would like to cultivate more truth.

Robert Plomin, whose name has come up a few times already, is unquestionably the most important psychological geneticist of our time. Trained in social and personality psychology at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s (my graduate alma mater, though we didn’t overlap), he went on to faculty positions at the University of Colorado and the Pennsylvania State University (both major American centers for behavior genetics) before moving to London to take a position at the Institute of Psychiatry. Plomin’s career has embodied the integration of behavioral genetics into mainstream social science and psychology. Everywhere Plomin has been, he has initiated twin and adoption studies, many of which continue to make contributions today. Although genetics has always played a central role in Plomin’s research, you would never mistake his work for that of a biologist or quantitative geneticist: he (like me) has always been first and foremost a psychologist.

Cristina De Simone catapults the collection into a twentieth century of avant-garde experimentation and the radical revision of what might constitute theatre. Focusing on the post-war period, De Simone describes how ‘action poetry’ and ‘performance poetry’, inspired by the historical avant-garde of the start of the century, positioned orality, namely the physical act of utterance, centre-stage. Artists including Artaud; non-professional actors such as Colette Thomas with whom he worked; movements such as the Lettrists founded by Isidore Isou; and events such as the Domaine Poétique evenings staged by poets such as Bernard Heidsieck, Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne and Brion Gysin had, until the 2010s, been relegated to historical oblivion. Now rehabilitated, they are considered, argues De Simone, as foundational figures and moments in modern and contemporary research-led experimental performance into the voice, the body and language.

This chapter examines the generalizability of the book’s main argument. It synthesizes the conclusions of other studies on the consequences of three similar episodes of forced migration in the twentieth century: the Greek-Turkish population exchange, the Partition of India, and the repatriation of Pied-Noirs to France. It then considers ways in which the argument can be extended to other cases of forced and voluntary migration.