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This chapter reviews the evidence for the critical influence of unequal power relations on the four crucial Vietnam policy decisions. It evaluates the “unipolar moment” in global politics and U.S. foreign policy. It is suggested that the process of making policy toward Vietnam resulted in policy decisions which did not reflect the best judgment of the president about Vietnam. The April decision on troop deployment appears to have represented the apogee of influence of Johnson's inner circle of advisers. It is stated that the aggressiveness of the national security bureaucracy in asserting the necessity for a military approach to Vietnam in both the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations was not a function of the specific personalities involved. It is also suggested that unipolar experience shows that the problem of inadequate domestic restraints may be exacerbated by the tendency of the national security bureaucracy to assert itself in policy making.

This chapter focuses on the work co-produced with Coexist, one of the Productive Margins programme's community partners, in response to the theme of ‘spaces of dissent’. Coexist is a social enterprise set up to create a space where different communities and individuals can grow, share, collaborate, and learn what it is to live in coexistence with each other. Coexist performs the role of regulator, responsible for the safety of the users of Hamilton House and ensuring that the project is economically sustainable. In the period covered by the research, Coexist discovered problems reconciling its core purpose and values — being open to all and providing space for the community — with the challenge of managing the unequal power relations that make this vision potentially unachievable. Here, the chapter foregrounds notions of dissent not only as a practical question facing Coexist, but also as a means of addressing wider issues of privilege, disagreement, and other difficult aspects of socially engaged work.

This chapter discusses the British hypothesis and savage fear of Hawaiian cannibalism, and the Hawaiian hypothesis and fear of British cannibalism. It focuses on the dialogue between the anxious Hawaiians and the ethnographers on the issue of cannibalism. The chapter discusses Polynesian cannibalism within the complex dialogue between Europeans and Polynesians. This dialogue centered on the history of contact, unequal power relations, and the cultural values, fantasies, and the common dark humanity they share. The discourse on cannibalism, once initiated, affects a variety of cultural practices in which it is embedded. A discourse is not a matter of speech alone; it is embedded in a historical and cultural context, and is expressed often in the frame of a scenario or cultural performance. It is about practice: the practice of science, the practice of cannibalism. Insofar as discourse evolves, it begins to affect the practice.

This chapter articulates the unique characteristics of employment relations. It explains in what sense employer–employee relations are different from client–independent contractor relations. Employment is characterized by two inherent vulnerabilities: democratic deficits (subordination, broadly conceived) and dependency (for economic as well as social-psychological needs). These vulnerabilities explain the need for labour laws. The chapter proceeds to consider two additional ideas that share a similar structure, i.e. seeing labour law as a response to a ‘labour problem’. One is the prevalence of market failures and the other is inequality of bargaining power. It is argued that both concepts are useful as well, but only to a limited extent.