This chapter examines the specificities at work at the international level and their implications for the issue of legitimacy, concentrating on the contemporary context. These specificities have to be understood in relation to the notion and experience of the international community. There are five distinctive features that characterize the international level in connection with the sense of international community. Although the interactions of these characteristics make the international system what it is, this chapter addresses them individually to identify clearly their nature and respective significance for international legitimacy. These features include the ambiguity of the international community; the national bent of international life; cultural diversity and disparity of development; the hegemonic and yet fragmented and contested conception and exercise of power; and the extent to which actors (states and individuals, in particular) have the possibility of ownership—that is, of being represented and of participating at the international level, including in terms of consent.

O’Casey is both the Abbey’s most-produced playwright and also an Abbey writer who in a period of a decade or so submitted eleven plays, more than half of which were initially rejected. In O’Casey’s own often tetchy account of this relationship, the rejections are deplorable failures to recognise his genius, and some version of that view has been adopted by much O’Casey scholarship over the years. However, this chapter acknowledges the other side of this story, looking at the extent to which the Abbey in the 1920s functioned as a repertory theatre, part of whose institutional mission involved the mentoring and development of emerging writers.

This chapter explores adolescent involvement in cults. Adolescence is a time in which many individuals engage in group-like activity. However, this chapter defines cult-like behavior as beyond the range of normal group-like activity expected during the transitional time of adolescence. The biological, social, and psychological factors of adolescent development increase their susceptibility to peer pressure, predispose them to self-exploration, and contribute to characteristics that attract adolescents to cults. This chapter describes the characteristics of normal adolescent life that predispose adolescents to cult recruitment, characteristics of adolescents who are likely to join cults, and characteristics of the leaders of cults that attract adolescents. Important regarding adolescents in particular, the increased access to technology, the internet, and social media is redefining adolescent membership in cults and future considerations may offer an updated lens through which to define and consider adolescent involvement in cults.

The emerging awareness of self and other, especially with regard to compatible and conflicting aims, opens up dramatic new meanings for the toddler. Being able to be deliberately contrary gives the child experience with disruption and repair of the relationship and lets them explore the boundaries of appropriate behavior. The toddler also has a beginning capacity to control impulses and manage behavior, but doing this adequately requires continued scaffolding and guidance from parents. Meanings surrounding parental reliability brought forward from infancy impact how readily children now accept parental guidance. At the same time, clear, firm, and warm guidance can increase the child’s confidence regarding parents. This is how the transactional model works.

Before the infant can even engage in intentional behavior, it is embedded in a pre-existing meaning system, brought forward by parents. By caregivers responding appropriately to the meaning of infant behaviors, giving them signal value, the infant is fitted into this system. Intentionality then lets the infant experience such contingencies more directly, and this begins the process of the co-construction of meaning in relationships

Preschoolers purposefully seek to understand the environment. Their social world expands, as they work hard to interact with peers. Accompanying this active stance are surges in memory and other aspects of understanding the self in the world. Coherence in the organization of the emerging person becomes much more apparent, in both behavior and the child’s internal world, as seen in the child’s representation. Inquisitiveness and beginning understanding of causality are major strengths of the toddler. Because this understanding is limited, toddlers may at times attribute too much credence to their own perspective and too great a role to the self in causation. Thus, they can feel bad when negative experiences such as divorce happen, believing that they are the cause.

As researchers of family relationships have long suspected, it is now demonstrable that ways of parenting are carried across generations and that this cannot be reduced to genetics. A focus on meaning was the answer, because it is not specific parental practices that show continuity; rather, it is the distilled meaning of experiences. Warmth, hostility, or boundary violations can be shown in many ways. Your son may show warmth to his daughter in a very different way than you showed it to him. But the experience of warm care (or hostility) is carried forward. Research shows such continuity even from the first two years of life before the maturation of declarative memory. Similarly, the pattern of disorganized attachment shows continuity across generations, even though the signs of disorganization may vary. Studies show that this continuity is mediated by the tendency of those with disorganized attachment to dissociate and later behave in frightening ways toward their infants, which is then related to their disorganized attachment.

Four themes regarding the nature of meaning making are proposed: (1) That humans are inherently motivated to seek and find meaning, from cradle to grave; (2) Meaning making is an active process, always involving an interaction between person and event; (3) There is a dynamic, transactional relationship between meaning and experience, with past meanings impacting what is experienced and new experiences altering meaning systems; and (4) The developmental process underlying meaning making is inextricably social.

Age-by-age, it is the meaning of experience that is carried forward. Memory is “constructive.” Details of events are often left behind and different events are synthesized into “scripts” or generalizations about the self and the world. It is these abstracted meanings and scripts that guide behavior. The nature of individual adaptation is such that others will react to one’s way of seeing the world (and therefore behaving) such that pre-existing viewpoints are often confirmed.

For both developed and developing countries in the world, the twenty-first century will be marked by great challenges for healthcare systems. The overwhelming reason will be aging societies that will face an increase in multimorbid, chronic diseases which will include neurological diseases. The probability of surviving acute illness and the medical opportunities to prolong life in chronic-progressive disease will improve in future. As a result the numbers of neurological patients with respiratory impairment caused by prolonged, chronic or chronic-progressive life-threatening disease will increase. Minimizing dependency on life-supporting technologies and care, stabilizing vital functions, optimizing quality of life and participation and alleviating suffering are paramount goals for these patients. The therapeutic approach therefore must integrate intensive care, neurorespiratory care, rehabilitation and palliative care. Furthermore, patient-centered and family-oriented care, which covers the whole lifespan and bridges the gap between inpatient and outpatient care, is needed.

Most simply, the words ‘pedagogy and care’ capture and describe the core work that is done in the earliest years of education with very young children. Early childhood education (ECE) shares the same general aims as primary, secondary and tertiary education, with an overarching focus on learning and development. Educators working with infants and toddlers practice in a space where pedagogy and care are inextricably linked. It could thus be argued that ideas about pedagogy in relation to infants and toddlers are hardest to reconcile. This challenge may be due to the particular history of infants and toddlers as the youngest children in society, driven by discourses of maternalism and inherently tied to an image of their place in the home, where they were for many centuries. However, infants and toddlers are attending ECE settings in ever-increasing numbers and upholding their right to quality pedagogy is a professional responsibility of all ECE services, leaders and educators.

The final chapter concludes with broader implications. After recapping how the previous chapters fit together to form a larger window on social control beyond coercion, it scrutinizes the limits of political atomization with a focus on perverse outcomes that result from the accumulated effects of individualization. Next are implications for China for inequality, the economy, migrant welfare and citizenship, and the authoritarian state’s social control toolbox. China is not alone in using political atomization, and a comparative perspective can spur future research on how the phenomenon already exists in not only other developing and authoritarian countries but also in democracies and developed countries. It ends with an examination of inequality and the state, noting that individual-level schemes are no match for systemic deflection and demobilization to address the entrenchment of inequality in social policy.

Financial infrastructures are key agents in the competitive process of further expanding financial activities. Focusing on Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America with the most sizable capital market and stock exchange, it is argued that the extent to which financial infrastructures shape markets in middle-income economies is a function of structural (path-dependent) and conjunctural conditions (cyclical and less idiosyncratic). Despite significant technological and managerial advances in the operationalization of the national stock exchange, amid an increasingly more enabling regulatory environment, Brazil’s fundraising in capital markets is still relatively limited and greatly affected by macroeconomic cycles, particularly fiscal policy uncertainty. Persistently high-yielding public bonds still crowd out private securities for the most part. The country’s modern stock exchange hence operates within constraints that make evident the not-necessarily-linear connection between advancements in financial infrastructures and financial deepening. Infrastructural advances are hence necessary but insufficient steps toward domestic capital market development.

This chapter introduces curriculum in schools and the relationship between ideology and ideas as factors shaping education curriculum development. This approach stresses that curriculum is both dynamic and contested, and focuses on the development and implementation of the Australian Curriculum to illustrate how curriculum is shaped at the Commonwealth, state/territory and jurisdictional school levels. The chapter also discusses the key learning areas, cross-curriculum priorities and general capabilities. The intention is to examine how curriculum can be an empowering vehicle to frame content areas, and inform teaching, learning programs and assessment instruments. Concepts such as the overt and hidden curriculum are examined to better understand the nature of school curriculum. Further, there is a recognition that curriculum must be interpreted and contextualised so that it meets the needs of learners at different levels and in different ways. Finally, the notion of teachers as curriculum builders and enactors is a central concept in this chapter.