Introduction

To understand agency in the situation in Northern Ireland requires an appreciation of the underlying constitutional fault line underpinning politics and government in the Province. Northern Ireland's disputed status and divided society, based on a constitutional cum ethnonational cleavage with diametrically opposed views as to its long term geo-political position and best interests, provides a distorting lens or prism through which agency is refracted. One community sees Northern Ireland as continuing as an integral part of the UK (‘Unionist’ or ‘Loyalist’); the other desires a rupture of that Union and reunification with the rest of the island to form an all-island ‘United’ Ireland (‘Nationalist’ or ‘Republican’). With the collapse of its devolved institutions in January 2017, the Province's direct and formal political input into the negotiating process around Brexit has been much reduced, notwithstanding the ‘backdoor’ influence enjoyed by one of the leading political parties, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), as a result of its ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement (involving a formal written agreement) with the minority Conservative government at Westminster, following the general election in spring 2017. Agency ‘can be constrained by unequal power relations and/or the absence of enabling affordances and thus is not regarded as dependent on an individual's will or capacity alone but as a contextually enabled and constrained capacity’ (Miller, 2016, p. 350). Thus, in terms of Hay's ‘questions of political power [and] the question of who holds the whip hand’ (1995, p. 206), for the time being, it has been the DUP which has enjoyed an unexpected leverage over Westminster arithmetic and UK government policy. Concurrently, for the DUP's erstwhile coalition partners in the Northern Ireland Executive, with that avenue of influence not available (and from its perspective unsought anyway), Sinn Féin has pursued its own agenda with robust lobbying instead in the Republic of Ireland, seeking to outflank the Dublin government on the Brexit issue, with a view to building up its domestic political capital as the next Irish general election approaches.

This chapter examines Brexit and devolution, insofar as these relate to the devolved government in Northern Ireland, but also to those in Scotland and Wales to afford comparative perspective.

Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.

In a talk given at an National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute (2011) on advanced topics in the digital humanities, philosopher of science Paul Humphreys suggested that as soon as machines could create knowledge, a point in time he traces back to the launch of ENIAC in 1946, the distinction between the humanities and other fields of academic endeavor was rendered tenuous at best and probably even eliminated. One can, of course, quibble with Humphrey's use of the word knowledge when it comes to the data produced by computers. One can even take issue with using ENIAC as a marker for the beginning of the computer age. But even if one argues successfully that Humphreys overstates his case, one must admit that somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, whether it was in 1941 when Konrad Zuse developed the Z3, 1943 when Alan Turing developed Colossus, or 1946 when ENIAC entered the picture, the way we pursue knowledge and the nature of research drastically changed.

It is not an overstatement to claim that information technology (IT) is the first technology in human history that touches everything. Philosopher of science Steven Shaviro polemically points out that IT is to humans what nature was in a bygone era—that is, “the inescapable background against which we live our lives and from which we derive our references and meanings.” If we take Shaviro's suggestion seriously and accept his conflation of nature and machines and the derivation of reference and meaning with regard to machines, we can no longer content ourselves with a strictly outlined traditional understanding of the humanities.

Executive Summary

Case studies contribute more focused analyses which, in the context of human loss and damage, demonstrate the effectiveness of response strategies and prevention measures and identify lessons about success in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. The case studies were chosen to complement and be consistent with the information in the preceding chapters, and to demonstrate aspects of the key messages in the Summary for Policymakers and the Hyogo Framework for Action Priorities.

The case studies were grouped to examine types of extreme events, vulnerable regions, and methodological approaches. For the extreme event examples, the first two case studies pertain to events of extreme temperature with moisture deficiencies in Europe and Australia and their impacts including on health. These are followed by case studies on drought in Syria and dzud, cold-dry conditions in Mongolia. Tropical cyclones in Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Mesoamerica, and then floods in Mozambique are discussed in the context of community actions. The last of the extreme events case studies is about disastrous epidemic disease, using the case of cholera in Zimbabwe, as the example.

The case studies chosen to reflect vulnerable regions demonstrate how a changing climate provides significant concerns for people, societies, and their infrastructure. These are: Mumbai as an example of a coastal megacity; the Republic of the Marshall Islands, as an example of small island developing states with special challenges for adaptation; and Canada's northern regions as an example of cold climate vulnerabilities focusing on infrastructures.