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This book examines how government and scientific interventions have recast the Chernobyl aftermath as a complex political and health experience with its own bureaucratic and legal ramifications. In Ukraine, a decade after the Chernobyl disaster, waves of citizens poured into medical offices for care and compensation. Their “idiosyncratic” diseases would now encode different kinds of treatment discriminations and different kinds of neglect. The book shows how the Chernobyl explosion has been shaped as a tekhnohenna katastrofa, or technogenic catastrophe, and how Ukraine's response to the disaster combines humanism with strategies of governance and state building, market strategies with forms of economic and political corruption. The book focuses on the emergence of a collective and individual survival strategy known as biological citizenship, which it argues reflects a failure of politics and science to account for human welfare, particularly the welfare of Chernobyl sufferers.

This chapter summarizes the book's main findings and their implications. It describes the Chernobyl aftermath as a prism that reflects, contains, and reconfigures the vexed political-economic, scientific, legal, and social circumstances in post-Soviet Ukraine. It emphasizes the disharmony among lawmakers, radiation scientists, health professionals, and sufferers as they stood along the continuum of knowledge production, power, moral sensibility, and self-disclosure. It considers how the radiation research process facilitated the naturalization of illnesses in bodies as a matter of “social health.” The chapter also discusses a number of ethical issues that bear on the fate of Chernobyl sufferers; for example, how future changes in social and economic contexts will affect the legitimacy of compensation mechanisms and categories of suffering. Biological citizenship, it argues, represents a complex intersection of social institutions and the intense vulnerabilities of populations exposed to the determinations of the international political economy.

This chapter highlights the effects of the French Revolution on the noble power. The French Revolution experience had shown that nothing of reform in the political world ought to be held improbable. The rapid eradication of nobility looked problematic. The levers of power of nobles were torn; their social and institutional privileges were suppressed; the recognition of their titles and outward display withdrawn, but nobles clung to the identity of their families. Those who resisted the course of the Revolution by rebelling, by emigrating, and by conspiracy were penalized by loss of their properties and even their lives. The attempt to destroy nobility simply proved that it was indestructible, but not immutable.

This chapter discusses the history of the early settlers in Hong Kong, which has been a largely ignored topic. It describes the city of Hong Kong during its early years, and looks at the events that led to the first opium war. The first opium war eventually led to the foundation of Hong Kong and influenced the mindset of the residents. The chapter also discusses the aftermath of the first opium war, along with the influences from England and India.

This chapter re-examines the period 1967-1972 but focuses on Le Va's powder works, which used materials such as flour, mineral oil, chalk and iron oxide powder. This chapter takes a closer look at Le VaZ's often-cited model for analysing his work, that of Sherlock Holmes scrutinizing the aftermath of a crime scene in order to reconstruct the event and its perpetrator. After exploring the history of the clue paradigm and its relationship to information theory, this chapter discusses the intimate relationship between these ideas in the work of Le Va and Robert Smithson. It ultimately argues that while many of the tropes of Le Va's work derive from The Tales of Sherlock Holmes, it is the world of postmodern detective fiction, especially Alain Robbes-Grillet’s The Erasers, that best models the interpretative framework implicit in Le Va's work.

This chapter considers both public and personal memorialization of political violence, a form of violence that is afforded a high degree of visibility as opposed to the violence that took place within the Naxalite community. This visibility does not, however, guarantee the recognition or alleviation of individual suffering. On the contrary, the narratives of sacrifice and heroic resistance that infuse public forms of commemoration reinforce an imagined community in ways that preclude the possibility of individual mourning. This possibility is created, however, in other sites of memory such as poetry, reportage, fiction, and women’s memoirs. The final part of this chapter explores women’s testimonies of political violence suffered in police custody and prison in an attempt to theorize the complex labour of subjectivity, agency, and healing in the long afterlife of violence.

This chapter explores the aftermath of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) trials. Section 1 recounts the events that preceded John J. McCloy's appointment as High Commission of Germany in June 1949, focusing on General Clay's review of the NMT convictions, the deactivation of the OCC, and Tribunal IV's surprising decision to reconsider its judgment in Ministries. Section 2 then discusses McCloy's creation of the Advisory Board on War Criminals, which likely violated Control Council Law No. 10, and his decision in mid-1951 to grant clemency to the overwhelming majority of the convicted NMT defendants. Finally, Section 3 explores the events that followed McCloy's clemency decisions, focusing on the work of the U.S.-German Interim Mixed Parole and Clemency Board and its permanent successor.

The 1911 Revolution and the institution of the Republic stimulated the entry of thousands of women into national and local politics. In the urgent aftermath of the 1911 Revolution, suffragist and women's organizations were famous and frequent, rivaled only by Manchus and Bannerman in their zest for getting organized and expressing their political views. As a contemporary account of women's participation in politics explained, “Women are carried away by revolutionary work and increase their understanding of what the status and responsibilities of a citizen are.” Women who joined suffrage groups were described as acting “as if awakened from their illusions.” Embracing the fluid moment, they took to republican revolution “like fish to water.” The slaps delivered to Song Jiaoren carried the force of these women's idealism and frustration. Chinese women took the idea of natural rights from the West.

Some people had their aspirations dissatisfied by the surplus-siphoning techniques of feudalism, although others were able to realize their ambitions because they lived beyond the reach of the empire of subjugation and expropriation. Their existence makes it awkward to label the whole social formation as “feudal,” but on the other hand, it will not overlook the centrality of feudal relations of production in generating the wealth that kept the rulers afloat while giving the rest of society its distinctive coloration. Indeed, the period after the year 1000 was “feudal” in the same way that the American South in 1860 was a “slaveholding” society. The point is not that all the population conformed to this typology but rather that the typology captures the overarching importance of feudalism in Europe 1000 years ago and slavery in the southern United States 150 years ago. The ambitions and mobility the middling sorts displayed were hardly reconciled with the dominant models alive in the social imagination.

This book discusses the First World War's aftermath in two ardent nations. Its subject is the reintegration of disabled veterans in Britain and Germany contending that the war's burdens could not be met by these states alone. The First World War was a dangerous precedent. More than 9.5 million soldiers died over a period of fifty-two months and, on average, the war claimed the lives of 5,600 men every day that it continued. Twenty million men were severely wounded while 8 million veterans returned home permanently disabled. They had suffered the worst injuries ever seen. Soil peace came in the aftermath of the Great War, though slowly. Many of the new republics had been replaced by dictatorships intent upon imperial expansion. At the war's end, many disabled veterans in Germany still believed in the goodwill of their fellow citizens. Hope had turned to hostility as early as the mid-1920s.

This chapter discusses the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Watterson adopted a new foreign policy due to his belief that the older, somewhat fitful policies of the nineteenth century needed to be folded into a coherent program. This program was to be composed of equal parts colonialism and free trade imperialism. He also provided rather hair-splitting but frail distinctions between expansion and imperialism.

Whenever a lumber company ended its operations at a certain location, the landscapes that were once lush forests became open spaces battered and scarred by human intervention wherein tree limbs sprawlled, small trees staggered, and surface scars from railroad tracks and snaking routes wasted the once splendid natural landscape. This chapter discusses the aftermath of logging and timber acquisition and the intricate relationship of the farmers with the land and the relationships that traditionally existed between farms and forests. After the logging industries left a certain location, the cleared lands were usually used by agriculture for livestock grazing and crop farming. These patchworks of plantations and farms were often seen as the result of humans carrying out their duty to take full advantage of nature's bounty. By attempts of the paternalistic business community to use the cutover lands to bring reform and makeover southern rural life, cutover lands were revived in the form of agriculture. In addition to cultivating these bald patches of land, the farmers, by defending and holding their woodland holdings, steered the cutover development away from primary agricultural solutions to their perceived shortcomings. They steered the reclamation of the cutover toward reforestation. Farmers, by reducing their flocks and herds and by keeping them out of their wooded acreage, contributed to the health of both the forest environment and the mixed cultural economy. As a result, neither a republic of small farms nor an empire of ranches emerged, but rather new forests would aqppear after the lumbermen left.

This chapter discusses the common motifs of marriage and male/female relationships in 9/11 writing. It notes that there have been criticisms that American writers are turning away from the political consequences of the attacks, and argues that 9/11 discourses have been dominated by cultural anxieties concerning masculinity and femininity. It examines the plays The Mercy Seat and The Guys, which both utilise the male/female relationships in order to study the immediate aftermath of 9/11, although in markedly different ways.

The chapter considers the civilian world into which the Q.A.s returned at the end of the war and explores the options they faced. It begins with the immediate aftermath of war and the opportunities for interesting and worthwhile work that would only exacerbate the nursing sisters’ difficulties on demobilisation. This is followed by a consideration of the return to Britain and the options open for professional practice. The chapter argues that for some the option of interesting work remained, either in the colonial service or the military. However the main professional opening for returning nurses was the crisis ridden civilian hospital system that wanted and recruited cheap, malleable workers; this was not an attractive choice for demobbed nursing sisters. The chapter argues that despite nursing being a female dominated profession, the ideology that encouraged women to return to the home in the aftermath of war had significant ramifications for demobilised nurses. The social structure precluded married women from working outside the home and funds for postgraduate training available to returning male doctors were not offered to nurses. As the chapter maintains, most nursing sisters married, leaving the profession without their considerable talents and new ways of practicing.

This chapter deals with the closing of the cum-ex trade in Germany from 2012 and its aftermath. It explains how the trade came to be challenged and ultimately (after various failed attempts) successfully defeated by the authorities by means of a fundamental—yet simple—modification of the rules governing the obligation to apply dividend withholding tax. It then outlines the ongoing response to the cum-ex trade by the German tax authorities and its impact. The chapter also deals with the other aspects of the fallout from the cum-ex trade, including the German parliamentary enquiry into the trade and the impact on so-called ‘cum-cum’ trades. Besides the actions within Germany, there have also been developments in other countries, and the chapter considers these with reference to Austria and Denmark. The chapter ends by considering possible future developments, predicting that it will be years before the full effects of the cum-ex affair are finally clear.

Or almost ends. The grimmer realities of European life constantly threatened any fulfilment, great or small. Frederick the Great’s commitment to old political and military ways were at odds with his much-trumpeted attachment to the (French) Enlightenment. His was a ‘kingship[ of contradictions’. As once before, in the essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant enters into imagined dialogue with the King, critiquing rulers’ irresponsible addiction to war and setting out the conditions for a possible permanent state of peace. However seemingly improbable of achievement, they remain (like the critique) essentially valid today.

To invoke the “postcolonial contemporary” is simultaneously to offer a proposition and to raise a question. It is an invitation to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. This introductory essay explores, on the one hand, how new historical situations require different analytic frameworks and, on the other, that grasping the political present requires close attention to historical continuities, repetitions, and reactivations. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative. Our aim is to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity.