In response to First World War propaganda campaigns and the emerging science of behaviorist psychology, which downplayed or even denied the existence of “mind” (understood as an agency directed by human cognition and will), American modernists performed the mind in and as writing: as a potentiating agent of mental plasticity to reshape habits, modifiy beliefs and behaviors, and dramatize the strategies by which consent is “manufactured.” An American modernist literary “aesthetics of exposure” sought to arrest habitual thought by exposing the behaviorist strategies of conditioning behavior and regimenting beliefs. The major works examined in this chapter – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and John Dos Passos’ the U.S.A trilogy (1936) – deploy strategies of psychological and textual fracture and fragmentation in order to make state-sponsored propaganda technique visible and available for critique.

Chapter 5 marks the beginning of a more pointed analysis and justification of partial excuse across Part III, as the target site of the Real Person Approach. The chapter is concerned with exploring the nature and purpose of partial excuse through a historical overview, and with clarifying the version of the defence used to underpin the Universal Partial Defence (UPD), through touring divergent definitional and structural approaches of other common law jurisdictions. Key issues that bear on the definition of the UPD are also introduced. This analysis forms the backdrop of the argument for universalising partial excuse across all offence categories and expanding its grounds beyond mental disorder and provocation/loss of control. Core challenges to universalisation are explained and responded to, concerning the application of partial excuse to homicide only, its characterisation as a form of mitigation at the pre-verdict stage, and issues relating to both coordination and the notion of partial responsibility.

In Chapter 9 Harriet Piercy, Head of English at Haggerston School in London, turns her attention to the Unites States. Drawing on her experience as a Fulbright scholar Nashville, Tennessee, Piercy explores the challenges of promoting spoken language in English classrooms, citing time constraints and exam pressures as significant obstacles. She compares the oracy practices in the US, where policies like the Common Core State Standards prioritize speaking and listening skills, to the UK’s less-defined approach. She discusses how US classrooms vary in their implementation of oracy teaching despite clear guidelines, emphasizing the importance of professional development and pedagogical approaches. Additionally, she examines the role of assessment in shaping classroom practices, noting the absence of formal speaking and listening assessments in Tennessee. Piercy concludes by advocating for inclusive oracy practices across schools, highlighting the need for sustained investment and shared understanding among educators.

This chapter traces the long trajectory of Holocaust testimony from the 1940s to the present. It notes that there are different temporal registers for testimony, from accounts offered during the war to retrospective accounts offered after 1945, sometimes decades later. It notes the ways in which the testimony considered valuable expanded over time to include not just that of survivors of camps or ghettos, but also that of hidden children or Jews living in hiding with false papers. It also evolved in content, as testimony came to not just remember the dead, but also shape the living and the reconstruction of Jewish life. Even material culture has been incorporated into testimony, as artifacts from survivors have become “sacred relics” of a sort.

This chapter establishes and problematizes the category of “survivor” and the ways in which its meaning changed over the postwar decades. The definition of survivors is “unstable,” and includes diverse groups, not just those who lived through the camps or ghettos, but also those in exile or hiding. The chapter discusses how trauma affected not just survivors, but also their children and grandchildren, in complex ways. It analyzes the ways in which the experience of the Holocaust affected family life and the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture, as well as the (re)construction of Jewish communal life.

Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that was crafted mainly by Europeans and North Americans, but that never achieved mainstream acceptance in the West. It was, instead, in the Arab states and Iran that Holocaust denial entered into conventional public opinion and politics. The false claim that Jews had “invented” the Holocaust both to extort money from wealthy countries and to justify the founding of Israel became a cornerstone of postwar antisemitism. In this, deniers recapitulate the logic of Nazi ideology in attributing a pervasive, hidden power to “the Jew.” The instrumental appeal of this to geopolitical foes of Israel explains why this conspiracy theory gained broader legitimacy in the Middle East than in Europe or North America.

It is unsurprising that the legacy of the Holocaust was central to postwar Europe, but it is striking that the Holocaust became no less important in postwar America. It can be argued that the Holocaust has been “Americanized.” This phrase was initially deployed as a pejorative by critics who decried what they saw as the commercialization and trivialization of Holocaust memory. In some cases, they even argued that Holocaust memory was instrumentalized in the service of specific political agendas – support for Israel and the consolidation of a specifically Jewish identity in a multicultural America. At the same time, given the size and diversity of the Jewish diaspora in the USA, there was no way the Holocaust could not become central to American-Jewish self-understanding and, therefore, become a core part of American culture more broadly.

The introduction highlights the enduring impact of the Holocaust, the global reach of its legacy, and the ways it has shaped all domains of social and cultural life. Briefly tracing the changing shape of Holocaust memory and post-Holocaust politics, it is argued that the Holocaust has become a global touchstone for thinking about mass atrocity. The Holocaust has become a master metaphor for evil, which has led to it being appropriated and misappropriated for diverse contemporary political uses in ways that are often detached from the historical event itself. The introduction suggests that the various chapters in the volume trace these developments across a range of geographical spaces and cultural practices.

Chapter 4 examines how countries with different scientific institutional histories and income levels have dealt with scientific uncertainty and the ethics of ‘experimental’ interventions using so-called mesenchymal ‘stem’ cells, that is cells of uncertain therapeutic character. Observing regulatory practices for clinical research and commercial interventions in the context of global competition, the chapter describes the complex intertwinement of catering for patient needs and demands, the protection of high quality scientific research, the affordability of testing methods, and the prospect of economic growth through investment into regenerative medicine in China and in higher-income countries (HICs). HICs that traditionally have had the power to define standards and conditions set by regulation, even when that power is on the wane, still enjoy considerable ‘regulatory immunity’: their reputation allows HICs to tolerate regulatory violations. In HICs, a scientific boundary is commonly asserted between established stem cell scientists and clinical providers that violate official guidelines. Scapegoating, here, is used as means to defend the reputation of the regulated collective against unauthorized, but tolerated clinical cell-applications. Examples show that the USA and the EU have used regulatory immunization to protect the reputation of stem cell communities alongside violators.

The United States is the Wild West of algorithmic personalized pricing. It is practiced (and researched) extensively, possibly more than anywhere else in the world, and at the same time, it is less regulated than in many of the jurisdictions surveyed in this Handbook, most notably the European Union (EU) and China. This is not necessarily puzzling. American corporations have been the driving force behind many of the technological innovations associated with the rise and development of algorithmic personalized pricing. However, there is a long tradition in the US of opposition to regulating markets, and algorithmic personalized pricing exemplifies this approach.

Britain remained the world’s superpower in 1931, so how did it lose its Empire, become dependent upon the USA and reimagine itself as a European nation by 1976 and how did Briton’s respond?

This chapter addresses the three earliest constitutional lineages, in the USA, France and Poland. It shows how these constitutional forms were shaped by imperialism and how the intensification of military policies in the eighteenth century defined the patterns of citizenship that they developed. It also shows how, diversely, each constitutions established a polity with militarized features, so that the different between national and imperial rule was often slight. To explain this, it addresses Napoleonic constitutionalism in Fance and the tiered citizenship regimes that characterized the American Republic in the nineteenth century.

This chapter describes: the creation of the ICC; its main features (such as its jurisdiction and its rules for selecting cases); opposition and criticisms; and a brief assessment of its work, including its controversial and sometimes disappointing early efforts, and the challenges that the Court confronts. The chapter discusses the Court’s jurisdiction – including personal and territorial jurisdiction, temporal jurisdiction, and subject matter jurisdiction. It discusses the ‘trigger mechanisms’: State Party referrals (including self-referrals), Security Council referrals, and initiation by the Prosecutor. It explains preliminary examination, investigation, and prosecution, as well as the selection criteria of admissibility (complementarity and gravity), and the interests of justice. It discusses opposition to the ICC, including the criticisms from the United States and the African Union, as well as key developments, such as US attacks on the ICC and threats of withdrawal from the African Union. The chapter reviews the Court’s record, including problems of collapsed cases, slow proceedings, the early focus on Africa, and accusations of selectivity and bias, as well as recent indications of progress.