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Lake considers whether overstretch is likely to remain a problem for the foreseeable future. This chapter summarizes the initiatives the armed services are currently taking, and concludes that they are unlikely to have a major impact on the risk of overstretch. The chapter looks at the potential for the kind of fundamental transformation that is required, concluding that it is unlikely. Lake concludes analyzing the likely outcomes of the continuation of the status quo, including emulation by both allies and possible foes, attempts by foes to asymmetrically counter US technological superiority, likely recurrences of overstretch, and the possibility that the US military is no longer capable of major sustained operations.

For nearly 400 years, all rights were stripped from African Americans’ personhood, catapulting members of this community into the second highest prevalence of obesity, ones who are significantly more likely to report major depression, live in poor, segregated neighborhoods, and in inadequate housing. Well-being was supported by a wall covered with Black history posters, positioning a war veteran as an activist in challenging the status quo; a single-family house that allowed a woman to be “loud”; a first-floor bedroom and bathroom where an 85-year-old elder could be independent; a library that showcased the family’s worldview; and a table used to teach teenagers sufficiency and responsibility. Straining well-being were a tight kitchen space that limited a mother’s ability to demonstrate healthy eating practices and storage for keeping a house orderly.

This chapter explores the foreign policy of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, with a particular focus on the government’s use of international organizations (IOs). By providing access to support and funds, making it difficult for opposition groups to challenge the status quo, and helping the government to limit international criticism, many IOs have shown themselves to be useful tools in the ZANU–PF arsenal. Using them in this way is not without its challenges, however, and this chapter highlights the skill with which Mugabe uses the leverage he has to try and push his agenda within and through such organizations.

This chapter starts off by synthesizing and critiquing the status quo of research about Chinese internet. I present three case studies on the internet-mediated politics, around the themes of nationalism, gender and class, to challenge the dominant analytical framework. They unsettle a series of entrenched binary thinking, such as state vs. market, state vs. society, censorship vs. freedom, centralized control vs. dispersed network, deliberation vs. emotion. The three cases also illustrate the dialectic process of mediation, in the sense of media discourse being embedded in social and political context while also shaping subjectivity and practices.

This chapter discusses the cultural dimension power distance and how it relates to business and face. Power distance is described as a receiver perceptions that is part of the cultural imprint that affects responses to others and is correlated with collectivism. The association between power distance and unjust world beliefs, power, hierarchy, maintaining the status quo, direct communication (those who are powerful), indirect communication, consultation expectations, harmony, cooperation, passivity, innovation, motivation, and paternalism is explained in this chapter. Other topics relating to business such as leadership, superior-subordinate relationships, teams, participation, and petty tyranny are deliberated on as well.

This chapter offers an account of Theodor Adorno’s philosophical position, which is then used to analyze various aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking. Both thinkers interrogate the way in which the status quo is calcified within dominant forms of subjectivity—in the ascetic ideal for Nietzsche and the primacy of the subject in Adorno. Consequently, neither thinker is merely advancing a subjectivist critique of identity , but rather insisting on the suffered objectivity of the non-identical. In contrast to views of Nietzsche as valorizing immediacy, the body, necessity, or difference, one might see Nietzsche’s fragmentary style and critique of systems as expressions of a negative dialectics, based on the primacy of the object , in which subjectivity would trace and negotiate the suffered social histories that condition it.

Russia made a fruitless attempt at negotiating a beginning of a resolution for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the late 2000s, but with the start of Vladimir Putin’s current presidency, the preference for sustaining the status quo has been firmly established. Moscow views every attempt at reinvigorating the negotiations (particularly by the United States) as against its interests, and seeks to maintain an asymmetric but effective balance in relations with the two protagonists. The war in Ukraine has changed the salience of “frozen conflicts” in European security, and Moscow is deeply concerned about the connection between this problem and the issue of “color revolutions” that dominates political thinking in the Kremlin. The main proposition in Russian Caucasian policy remains the preservation of the eroding status-quo.

Chapter 8 reviews the issue of resistance to neoliberalism by stressing its importance in the context of the creation of alternatives to the current status quo. The chapter further illustrates the corporate colonization of contemporary resistance for activist organizations associate with corporations and/or act like corporations. The concomitant commodification of activism indicates the tendency to frame actions of resistance in market terms. The chapter concludes by stressing that the corporate colonization of resistance and the commodification of activism coexist with high levels of labor exploitation.

This introductory chapter summarizes the papers in this book. It shows that the topics covered by experts in their respective fields are engaging, provocative, timely, and critical as they address an emerging theme in development. The analyses provide cutting-edge knowledge about the extent to which capital from BRICS versus OECD member countries impacts Africa’s development trajectory and, as such, offers a contribution that is yet to take root in development economics. It further explicates current issues in ways that question the status quo and offers practical policies for a transformed and thriving Africa. The topics explored have particular resonance with, and relevance to, the changes currently taking place in Africa.

There is little doubt that the occupation one chooses, the meaning given to that choice, and decisions made within that occupation are all influenced by one’s life history. This is true across professions (Hilson, 2008; Sjolie, Karlsson, & Binder, 2013), cultures (Mpungose, 2010), and disciplines (McCulloch, Marshall, DeCuir-Gunby, & Caldwell, 2013). Perhaps nowhere, though, is the influence of life history more apparent and direct than in those who would be teachers. The self one brings to any occupation has been shaped by experiences in your life before that time. However, in fields like law, architecture, medicine, or aviation, practitioners have not been immersed in their future jobs in the way teachers have. As Knowles and Holt-Reynolds (1991) point out, “The influence of twelve years or more of observing and participating—often successfully—in ‘status quo’ school and university classrooms introduces a tension unique to teacher education” (p. 88).

Patron–client logics have long provided a crucial lens for the analysis and interpretation of sociopolitical imagination and agency in the Upper Guinea Coast and even in Sub-Sahara Africa in general. However, this lens also comes with limitations: as long as one expects patron–client relations, there is a good chance that one will (only) find relations that fit the patron–client picture. Menzel’s chapter explores a different perspective. Based on field research in southern Sierra Leone, she provides examples from interviews in which her informants not only voiced frustrations over a lack of “good” patronage but also hinted at more fundamental struggles. These examples indicate a contradiction between working toward individual/societal betterment and complicity in patron–client logics, which cement an undesirable status quo.

Worldwide, participatory action research along with arts-based methodologies has been applied in the context of marginalized groups to spark dialogue amongst participants with the ultimate goal of promoting social change. Here, we present two visual methodologies (Gossip Circle and Participatory Video) that we have developed as part of the Participatory Waste Management Programme (2006–2012) in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The stories shared by members of the recycling cooperatives affiliated with this programme illustrate the transformative potential these two methodologies embody to disrupt the status quo and engage participants in political conversations that affect their well-being.

Currently, in many Western societies, young people are often depicted as ‘lacking’. Most media, political discourses and social research tend to describe them as characterized by uncertainty—towards the future, personal relationships and professional tracks (Bauman, 1995; Beck, 1992; Means, 2015), disinterest—towards politics and public life (Jowell & Park, 1998; Kimberlee, 1998; Macedo, Alex-Assenhoh, & Berry, 2005; Putnam, 2000) and resignation—accepting the status quo without striking forms of protest, dissent or rebellion (Arthur & Davies, 2008; Beaumont, 2010; Harris, Wyn, & Youness, 2010; Levine, 2007).

The implications of dependent agency are multifaceted. First, it may influence donors’ ability to achieve their objectives, while also reinforcing the status quo and undermining local solidarity. Second, it may shape democratization by challenging liberal citizenship and undermining transparency and accountability in decision-making. Despite these limitations, dependent agency also illustrates local people’s desire for participation and their nascent demands for the powerful to be held accountable. The work concludes by exploring how the concept of dependent agency may shape scholarship on African politics, international relations, and global health.

Chapter 4 focuses on the tensions that culturally responsive and socially just leaders face in their daily practice in the contexts. These tensions of practice are the day-to-day issues that arise that must be navigated, and are challenging both professionally and personally. School leaders who engage in leadership that is critical, challenge the status quo, and seek to address systemic discrimination are sometimes faced with resistance and “pushback”. These tensions of practice can arise with students, colleagues, and the community. Being a culturally responsive and socially just leader is a journey that can be challenging, and this must be acknowledged. Ways that school leaders can navigate these challenges and tensions are explored. The chapter will give voice to practitioners on this journey.

In Southeast Asia, the military’s role in transition has been prominent, particularly in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar. In coalition with civilian opposition groups, reformist factions within the military helped usher a period of transition. In contrast, autocratic rulers in the MENA region were able to employ brutal force in attempts to crush revolts because rather than sidelining the military, they had ensured that key units were commanded by members of the ruling family, tribe, or sect. This gave those well-trained and well-armed units a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and effectively neutralized the risk and/or fallout of potential defections in times of crisis. It also cemented the family, tribe, or sect’s grip on power. The sharp contrasts in the role of the military during transition periods and the different outcomes for individual countries is the highlight of this chapter.

Much as we appreciate the bounties technological innovation has brought us, we seek not to succumb to technological enthusiasm. We seek to assess technological innovation pragmatically. Technology is neither good nor bad; neither helpful nor harmful. Technology is nuanced, and each technological innovation comes with its costs and benefits. The innovator’s utopian vision of the future, in which the innovation would receive universal accolades, rarely occurs. It is, however, this vision, frequently a single-minded vision, that urges the innovator forward, and we respect that. All innovation brings about disequilibrium of the status quo. In sum, innovation disrupts. Innovators see problems where others may not, and their innovations are intended solutions to these problems. Since the introduction of an innovation would disrupt the way we make sense of the world, it would induce any of us to adjust our relationship with the world. Often such adjustment takes time. Some of us may resist an innovation. Some of us may reject it, use it inefficiently, or differently than expected or proposed. Some of us will modify tinker with, disassemble, or reassemble the innovator’s technology.1 Once a technology is released into the markets, the innovator, like any other creator, loses control over the creation. This loss of control implies that it is necessary to think not just about the unintended consequences of technological innovation, but also about the complex factors that influence innovation before, during, and after its conception.

This chapter follows the last, where we observed contractions and contradictions in a youthful political movement. Frictions, fissures and disagreements, at any given time, threaten the survival of embryonic movement. After a careful study of the factors at play in a movement, one can offer an analysis rather than a panacea. Below are some considerations that sadly have affected the abilities and capabilities of many Black Nationalist movements and have rendered them ineffective in fighting white supremacy and reversing the status quo.

The AIIB is a major diplomatic success for China. China has the necessary financial power to accomplish its objective. Virtually every country has accepted China’s leading role in a financial institution, a global social reality construction process that legitimizes a greater Chinese influence. But the global financial market affects China just like anyone else. The AIIB does not measure up to the ordering projects by the United States. Yet it still constitutes more of a change to the status quo powers than the Japanese attempt at institution building. While the AIIB is a hybrid borrowing much from the existing international order, the birth and operations of such institutions will weaken the liberal international order because the dominant country in it is not a liberal democracy.

The identity I left behind 25 years ago, at least in terms of actual job description and lived experience, was that of elementary school teacher. However, as part of my personal history, I occasionally flash it in front of my teacher education students in an attempt to gain credibility. Neither do I hesitate to list those years of teaching when applying for jobs that require evidence of public school teaching experience. And, of course, I dust off anecdotes from my own teacher education program and early years of teaching as a point of comparison and critique of present trends, and as a source of stories that I tell my students like the family patriarch to his restless but indulgent grandchildren. Mostly, though, those past experiences rise up on their own as accusations of irrelevance and having “sold out”. Do I really have any claim to relevance based on teaching experiences that happened more than two decades ago in a professional climate that bears little resemblance to today’s classrooms? Can I claim to be working for change when I write mostly to a small group of peers and devote most of my energy to convincing novice teachers to go out and change a deeply entrenched status quo from which I ran away years ago? Personal demons, however, were not the primary focus of this chapter. Instead, I wanted to examine the more fundamental notion of drawing selectively on one’s past identities when it is pedagogically expedient—like masks at a costume party—and the ways in which those identities are perceived by the students they are intended to reach … or deceive. Moreover, I wanted the project to be more than personal musings so I extended my reflections on masked and conflicted identities to explore how the process and results might become part of my teaching and how I might nurture a similar type of reflection in the preservice and in-service teachers.

This chapter looks at institutional language (rhetoric) and its enactment (practice) through the lens of communication theory. Mayock here looks at codes of language, ways to challenge the status quo through language, women’s and men’s language uses and strategies, language on-script versus off-script, and the application of language to professional and social networking.

The book opens with the case of influence peddling in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to illustrate “the American way of ethics”—a condition that treats governmental ethical breaches with quick apolitical fixes, including the conspicuous consumption of ethics products, such as ethics codes and training, and the adoption of legal sanctions, which fail as remedies because the partisan status quo remains intact. Although aimed at ameliorating public outrage over corrupted governments, the quick ethics fixes dismantle the discretion of career public servants by reducing their moral responsibility and criminalizing democratic public service. The book then suggests the political ethics of public service as an alternative providing a better approach for balancing change and continuity in morally tainted governments without demonizing career public servants.

This chapter analyzes the use of political scandal to limit the power of social justice movements, focusing on the movement for civil rights and racial justice in the USA. This chapter relies on primary sources of letters that US citizens sent to their congressional representatives protesting social progress during the Civil Rights era. Attempts to “scandalize” Martin Luther King Jr., the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, and the broader Civil Rights Movement are examples of how scandal is deployed by defenders of existing social and political hierarchies in an effort to maintain their status quo.

Wan examines the theories of power and international order, the relationship between global finance and sovereign states and a broader scientific field of biogeography. The AIIB is a power move by a rising great power vis-a-vis the status quo superpower. Wan provides an alternative but unified framework to analyze power. Logically and empirically, power can be both goal and means. He follows a biogeographical approach that emphasizes evolving processes rather than simply action and reaction in a mechanical fashion. Evolution exerts pressure on the content and intensity of power. He also argues that power is both intrinsic and observer-relative. Power is partially a social construction. We should focus on what seems to come ‘natural’ for the players in international relations.

Since WWII, the USA has arguably been the most influential foreign actor in the Greater Middle East. The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the last biggest constraint to the USA’s hold on the region. This dominant position in one of the most strategically important areas of the world gave US policymakers a noticeable edge over their global competitors in order to advance the US national interest. Therefore, it is not surprising that successive US administrations’ primary concern in the Greater Middle East has been to maintain their country’s influential status. In particular, the USA has always been seriously concerned with any crisis that could substantially alter the existing distribution of power. Over time, US officials came to see the status quo in the region as highly beneficial to the US national interest and any threat to the status quo as correspondingly dangerous. Hence, US involvement in covert actions aimed at reinstating the shah to power in Iran in 1953, US assistance to the insurgency fighting Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and US military intervention in 1991 to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Though it was not top priority when she was elected, few of Margaret Thatcher’s reforms were as fundamental as her governments’ overhaul of the British financial system. When she entered 10 Downing Street in May 1979, British finance was cliquish, internationally closed off, and loosely controlled by the state. Within a decade, Tory policies successfully reforged it as a dynamic, internationally competitive, and thoroughly liberalized system. This transformation has proven remarkably durable: even after Labour returned to power in 1997, the Thatcherite approach toward financial markets established during the 1980s remained the British status quo. Britain, perhaps more than any other advanced economy, has adhered to the conventional wisdom that competitive, liquid, and deep financial markets—largely unhindered by state intervention—greatly benefit society.

Whether we want to admit it or not, there is a benefit to everything we do. This is why a pattern of behavior becomes the status quo. There is a benefit for continuing the behavior. But there is always some kind of pain, discomfort, or inconvenience involved with making a change. Sometimes we call the reluctance to change inertia or in the case of companies, charities and governments we call it organizational inertia. Often the status quo is benign, and this organizational inertia is harmless. But situations also arise where our inertia deprives us of receiving a greater benefit.

This chapter examines making of Turkey–Iraq relationship in an early Cold War episode. Contextual–discursive evidence suggests that Baghdad Pact (1955) was doomed to fail partly due to Turkey’s dualist discourse. Ankara’s pact narrative was divided in between utilitarian ontology and ideological rhetoric. Thus, Turkey had driven itself toward countervailing aims. Ankara sided with London to preserve pro-British status quo inside Iraq. However, this deliberate choice caused anti-imperialist and nationalist backlash. It was ironic that Turkey could not alleviate but inadvertently exacerbate implications of communism and Pan-Arabism threatening stability in Iraq and the region. Partial nature of Turkish–Iraqi cooperation was tested by Suez (1956) and Syria (1957) crises. The fall of pro-Western Iraqi monarchy (1958) uncovered ultimate costs of partiality in Ankara’s making of cooperation with Baghdad.

This chapter addresses the philosophical commitments driving the reduction of education to curriculum as techne and its ontological consequences. This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the Aristotelian notion of techne, as developed in Book VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and then briefly demonstrates how seminal conceptions of curriculum over the last century instantiate a technical approach to education. The reduction of education to curriculum as techne predetermines what possibilities students will have rather than allowing students to explore their own possibilities. The ontological consequences of losing ownership of our possibilities include an inauthentic disclosure of being and the privileging of actuality over possibility. Curriculum as techne is only interested in producing predetermined copies of the status quo rather than individuated beings who determine for themselves what it means to be. Thus, curriculum as techne narrows the possibilities that most fully characterize the ontological nature of human being as well as education because its predetermined objectives are driven by dominant socioeconomic ideologies.

Japan is undergoing an unprecedented transformation in its foreign and security policy arena. Behind these shifts is the rise of an increasingly confident and assertive China. Beijing is amassing substantial economic and military power, and is challenging the status quo with force, with a request that it wants to shape a new regional East Asian order that reflects its new status.

Absolute power leaves no aspect of life untouched. In authoritarian societies, power becomes the end and the means to the end. The result is that ever y thing in the public arena is manipulated toward maintaining the status quo. This leads to a form of political stability that is so stultifying, it might be more appropriate to call it stagnation.

On August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American youth, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer. The circumstances of the shooting and the intensity of the protests that followed were front-page news in the United States and abroad. This chapter examines how conflict, justice, and history entwined in the period after the shooting, attentive to the history of housing segregation and aggressive policing in the region that shaped an exclusionary status quo. The chapter concludes by discussing the US Department of Justice (DoJ) investigation of the Ferguson Police Department released in March 2015. To rectify policing practices that violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, the DoJ proposed reparative and inclusionary policies to bring Ferguson in line with federal standards for fair and effective policing.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, the year 2014 was the all-time bloodiest for the civilians living in the occupied Palestinian territories. According to the annual report of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA 2015), during the year 2014 Israeli activities resulted in the death of 2,314 Palestinians, while causing altogether 17,125 injuries. Although the year was overshadowed by the massive corollaries of the 50-day-long Israeli military aggression in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, which, along with the material destruction, led to the death of at least 2,220 Palestinians, 551 of them children, the significance of the everyday ill-treatment of Palestinians under the military regulation cannot be overlooked. While in the West Bank and East Jerusalem the number of Palestinian fatalities in incidents with Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) was the highest since 2007, the year 2014 also witnessed a sharp increase in the percentage of child casualties caused by the IDF (OCHA 2015, 7). After the decades of occupation, the exceptionalities of Israeli military rule have not only become a status quo in the Palestinian territories, West Bank in particular, but also accumulated into a complex system of government with overlapping clauses, exceptional laws, racist categorizations, and offsetting regulations.

Although this is our final chapter covering the sales transformation approach, and the final step (step 7) in our sales transformation process, it may be the most important. As you can guess, there’s little value in investing time, money, and effort in transforming a sales organization only to see it then revert back to the earlier status quo. The ability to sustain your gains and improvements is critical to realizing a significant return on your investment in transformation.

In business, meeting the needs of tomorrow’s customers requires constant innovation. Staying ahead of the game is the game. Success isn’t simply about churning out the next product first. Achieving the right balance between sticking with the status quo versus trying something new is every company’s challenge. This also applies to families as they strive to preserve their legacy while evolving with changing times.

Radical change, a fundamental change in the way people make sense of their surroundings, occurs on individual level, on organizational level but also on the level of larger systems such as industries and the societies as a whole. Hruska describes types of radical change and deals with the question of idiosyncratic radicalism. By distinguishing between the leader’s perspective and the status quo organizational perspective, Hruska identifies four types of arenas of change implementation: radical, navigated, leaderless and adaptive organizations. Finally, Hruska examines the four phases of the process of radical decision making and radical organizational change: construction of leader’s mental model, search for the new governing metaphor, radical decision taking and rhetoric of radical change.

Property has been a trope in the formulation of ideal social arrangements since the compilation of the Old Testament (Nelson 2010). It has served as a rationale for revolution in Locke’s writings, and a defense of the status quo in Burke. The norms associated with property, responsibility and independence, have been alternately celebrated (Pocock 1975) and reviled, when understood differently as acquisitiveness and accumulation, in the work of Rousseau and Proudhon. The ownership of property has been the justification for representation in government, and for the separation of powers (Nedelsky 1990). The foundation of political and economic arrangements, government and market, has been based on concepts related to property. The objective of this project is to trace these meanings of property historically for a better understanding of their conceptual foundations, institutional manifestations, and normative dimensions. Ultimately, this long-term analysis of property provides a contribution to the methodology of historical institutional economics, including the history of political and economic institutions as well as the associated systems of meaning. By expanding the field of study to include debates, the most astute defenses and critiques become part of the object of study, deepening understanding of institutional specificity and ongoing changes. Such a complete consideration of property as paradigm is necessary to undertake systematic critique and consideration of alternatives.

Hruska gives practical insight into the ways of persuasion. First, the author explores people’s resistance to change the status quo mental models. Particular attention is given to the leader’s role in the process of reducing resistance to change in radical decision making situations. Also, Hruska explores rhetoric based on beliefs as argumentation and expectation setting and rhetoric based on action as behavioral commitment and manipulation. The author also gives particular attention to the description of the three phases of the incremental process of rhetoric for radical change. Finally, Hruska describes a parrhesian approach to radical rhetoric, which in his opinion, is the most suitable way of persuasion in radical change situations.

In 2012, Barack Obama won the reelection, marking the 44th consecutive time a man would assume that office. At no point in America’s history has a major political party nominated a woman to be its presidential candidate. In contemporary elections, two women, Elizabeth Dole in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2008, were formidable contenders in primary races, but neither woman was able to clutch their parties’ nominations. Each of the two major parties has nominated a female vice president one time each; in 1984, Democrats nominated Geraldine Ferraro, and in 2008, Republicans nominated Sarah Palin. While these nominations were applauded for deviating from the status quo, neither ticket won its election. So few are competitive female runs at the White House that we can count them on one hand. Thus, the Office of the President has established itself, with no variation, as a man’s domain.

Although the inventory of Oman’s achievements is impressive by any standard, the sultanate, by virtue of geography, is part of a volatile world, where instability is currently the norm. As such, it is far from immune from the historic convulsions that have swept through the Middle East in recent years, undermining the status quo and toppling regimes like so many dominos.

In keeping with the unique visual exciting style of the handbook, we wanted to finish with a thinking-outside-the-box implication for future research design practices to question the status quo rather than summarize what is already articulated in the preface and introductory chapters. Four contributing authors volunteered to collaborate on this final concluding chapter. Each author brings a distinct sociocultural and ideological perspective to the table based on his or her contribution being in different sections of this book and his or her research experience being grounded in diverse epistemological disciplinary roots. In other words, each of us works in a different discipline, and we have different dominant research ideologies and ontological approaches to research.

On October 26 (November 8), 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, with its Bolshevik majority, called for a Leninist version of peace without annexations and without indemnities, that is, not just a universal peace based on the prewar status quo, but the principle of the universal right to national self-determination for all politically subjugated peoples prior to the war. The actual resolution of the Second Congress read: In accordance with the sense of justice of democrats in general, and of the working classes in particular, the government [Soviet government] conceives the annexation or seizure of foreign lands to mean every incorporation of a small or weak nation into a large or powerful state without the precisely, clearly and voluntarily expressed consent and wish of that nation, irrespective of the time when such forcible incorporation took place, irrespective also of the degree of development or backwardness of the nation forcibly annexed to the given state, or forcibly retained within its borders, and irrespective, finally, of whether this nation is in Europe or in distant, overseas countries.

This concluding chapter makes three major points. First, the 2001 AUMF will have met its intended purpose once the United States ends its combat role in Afghanistan and the core al Qaeda leaders are either dead or captured. Second, powerful obstacles stand in the way of the AUMF’s rightful repeal: organizational interests, irrational yet common reactions to risk, other psychological tendencies, and built-in political incentives. Finally, it is important to fight against these sources of inertia; not doing so will have real costs.

The previous chapter brought us to the eve of the 1973 war between Egypt, Syria, and Israel. The war was a result of the deadlock that followed the earlier war of 1967 and the devastating defeat for the Arabs. With Israel occupying and settling on captured Arab lands, and content with the status quo, the Arabs had little to no bargaining power in any peace process in order to retrieve their land and restore military and political balance in the region. With Resolution 242 still not enacted by Israel, Syria and Egypt launched a military attack on Israel on October 6, 1973, to turn around the disadvantage. Despite gains at the start of the war, and though the war served to challenge the notion of Israel’s invincibility, the Arab armies were ultimately pushed back by Israel’s counteroffensive, having to relinquish the Sinai and Golan, and suffering many casualties.

As Beck notes in chapter 1, academia (as well as institutions such as the World Bank) had identified many of the underlying causes of the Arab Spring over the past few years, but they had not sufficiently conceptualized them as a potentially imminent revolutionary event and pan-regional phenomena. What is at first empirically puzzling—the disparate effects of the Arab Spring across the region, causing existential change in some states and facilitating limited reforms in others—is to a certain extent explained by rentier theory. Increasing rent distribution, both internally (through increased spending on health and education, for example) and externally (through supporting allies and nonstate actors necessary for consolidating national security and therefore monarchical security), has played a major part in maintaining the status quo in the oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Beyond this, however, one should recognize the difference between relatively nonviolent transitions in Tunisia, versus the degree and duration of more violent struggles and clashes that have taken place in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Their impact on strengthening or undermining the transition process should not be underestimated. The international community has thus been left with choices to make regarding states that require specific, nuanced, and timely policy responses in order to encourage their renaissance rather than regression. So far, such responses have often been cautious, uncoordinated, and, at times, reactionary.

As social scientists, we are very fond of typologies and ideal types with clear-cut categories. Therefore, we see either secularism or theocracy, France or Iran. But how should Israel be considered? The two extremes of the spectrum, by definition, do not exhaust all the empirical cases that exist between them. This implies that, on the normative level, nobody in Israel is satisfied with the current situation. Everyone is looking at the same glass, and for opposite reasons, both secular and religious forces see it more as half-empty than as half-full.

This chapter explains the move to the left in Argentina and Brazil, arguing that it was the consequence of democracy against neoliberalism. A new complex political formation was activated at the margins of the power structures and gained a unified force, in turn challenging the dominant narrative cementing the oligarchic status quo that governed the 1990s. As a result, neoliberalism was undermined as central discourse and a new post-neoliberal formation gained hegemonic status and redistributed established places and functions, opening the possibility for the alternative political resolution of social problems such as unemployment, poverty, and inequality.