This chapter provides a high-level comparative overview of how states around the world have regulated hybrid processes (med-arb or arb-med) involving the same neutral. Drawing on a database of national mediation and arbitration laws from 195 jurisdictions, it elicits broad regulatory patterns and seeks to determine whether they can be explained by reference to geographic region, legal tradition or a state’s level of development (measured by income level). The findings show that fewer than half of all jurisdictions surveyed legislate around same neutral hybrid processes. Of those that do, most are concentrated in Africa and Asia. Common law jurisdictions are less likely than civil law jurisdictions to regulate in this space, but when they do, they tend to be more thoughtful and innovative.

Although it is often said that combining mediation and arbitration using the same neutral is widely accepted in Continental European, Latin American, and Eastern Asian cultures, this is only somewhat borne out by national legislation. Assuming lawmaking mirrors culture, the study’s findings lend qualified support only to the idea that Eastern Asian cultures are receptive to same neutral arb-med.

Comparison involves morphology and syntax for describing something as ranking above or below something else, as being equivalent to something, or as falling at the very top or the very bottom of the scale. Many adjectives do this by inflecting for grade, having plain, comparative and superlative forms. This inflectional system applies also to a small number of determinatives and adverbs. Others are modified by ‘more’ or ‘less’.

Superlatives express set comparison, with one item outranking all of the others. The comparative form, by contrast, is predominantly used in term comparison – comparison between a primary term and a secondary term. There are also comparisons of equality, which are always marked by a modifying phrase rather than by inflection, along with a type of non-scalar comparison where the issue is simply of identity or similarity.

The prepositions ‘than’ and ‘as’ often license as complements a distinctive type of subordinate clause called a comparative clause. Comparative clauses constitute one of the three major kinds of tensed subordinate clause, being distinctive in that they are obligatorily reduced in certain ways relative to the structure of main clauses.

Although adjectives typically denote properties, that’s not definitive. The distinctive properties of prototypical adjectives are gradability inflection for comparative and superlative. Adjective phrases (AdjPs) function as predicative complements and modifiers in nominals, though some specialize in one of these. AdjPs take adverbs, notably ‘very’, as modifiers. These properties generally distinguish them from nouns and verbs which can be useful in fused modifier-heads or with overlap, as in ‘it’s flat’ vs ‘I have a flat’. AdjPs differ from DPs in always being omissible from an NP, while a DP in determiner function is often required. Also DPs, but not AdjP can occur in as a fused head in a partitive construction. AdjPs also occur as supplements, here differing from PPs in that AdjPs typically have a predicand that is the subject of the main clause. Like most other phrases, AdjPs allow complements, usually PPs or subordinate clauses.

The adverb category is the most heterogenous in the properties of its members. Many adverbs are formed from adjectives using the ‘⋅ly’ suffix, but AdvPs don’t function as attributive modifiers in nominals and rarely function as or allow complements.

The Introduction explains that veterans returned to Việt Nam in search of resolution, or peace, in their personal relationships with the war. This search manifested in nostalgia for “Vietnam,” with returnees acting as a diasporic community forged in war. While many returnees found a measure of peace upon return, they were also challenged by the erasure of their wartime presence. Veterans drew on wartime memories and performed nostalgic practices to recapture their sense of belonging in Việt Nam. Outlining three distinct eras of returnees, this chapter shows how a comparative, transnational perspective reveals stark differences in American and Australian war memories, narratives, and imaginings of “Vietnam.” This chapter presents a review of the existing scholarship on the topic of returning veterans, situating the book in broader literature on the war and its legacies; explains the book’s oral history methodology and analytic approach; and outlines the broader structure of the book.

This chapter introduces the key theme of the book, which is to challenge the dominant agenda in the history of science which concentrates on developments in the West since the seventeenth century. Once we focus on aims and methods rather than on results, the explorations of the members of ancient societies and of modern indigenous groups can be given due attention. Their different approaches offer us the opportunity to revise our own assumptions and so expand the horizons of the history of science.

The case study in this chapter aims to revise the way the comparison of adjectives is introduced pedagogically. The complex of rules which state that ‘one-syllable adjectives take “inflectional” (-er, -est) comparison, while three-syllable adjectives take “phrasal” (more, most) comparison’, followed by varying refinements of both for two-syllable adjectives, is challenged, on the basis of a corpus study of such forms. It is shown that several words break these ‘rules’, for example real, whose comparative form is almost always more real. Various factors are suggested as influencing the choice between the two options, in particular frequency: rare words are more likely (‘likelier’?) to take phrasal comparison. Suggestions for a revised rule are given, along with practical exercises. The chapter demonstrates the relevance of corpus analysis in devising appropriate advice for learners.

The history and historiography of Iran, as of the countries of the wider Middle East, have been dominated by the twin narratives of top-down, elite-driven and state-centred modernization, and methodological nationalism, the assumption that the geographical territory defined by the state and the population within its borders is the primary, and sometimes only, organizing principle for research and analysis. The chapters contained in this book seek to problematize both these narratives. Their attention is firmly on subaltern social groups, including the “dangerous classes,” and their constructed contrast with the new and avowedly modern bourgeois elite created by the infant Pahlavi state; the hungry poor pitted against the deregulation and globalization of the late nineteenth century Iranian economy; rural criminals of every variety, bandits, smugglers and pirates, and the profoundly ambiguous attitudes towards them of the communities from which they came; slaves and the puzzle of their agency. The historical experience of these groups is also deployed in a much larger attempt to understand the wider societies of which they were a part and the nature of the political, economic and cultural authority to which they were subject. In particular they are counterpointed to the praxis of modernism, hegemonic across the world from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century and depicted here in all its astonishing ambition, reaching from the state itself into the deepest and most intimate layers of everyday life. In addition, and complementary, to this spotlight on subaltern lives, the chapters contained here seek to move beyond a narrow national context, seeking to demonstrate, through a series of case-studies, the explanatory power of global, transnational and comparative approaches to the study of the social history of the Middle East.

While the story of Caribbean literature in English generally focuses on its emergence in relation to Great Britain, Caribbean writers also urgently explored the Caribbean’s relationship to the United States. US imperialism in the region was most explicit with the US presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War, in the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 1910s to 1930s, and in its post-World War II involvement in various territories. Caribbean migration into the US fuelled the alliances that Brent Hayes Edwards describes as ‘the practice of diaspora’. In the 1920s, Caribbean activists and writers such as Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay, and Eric Walrond helped shape the Harlem Renaissance. That movement’s aesthetic experiments and pan-African identifications inspired the development of literature within the region. The United States was also a hub from which some writers travelled to other parts of the world (Russia, France, the UK) and became part of a network of mutual influences. US writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston travelled to the Caribbean. Later, the ranks of the predominantly male writers in the United States were expanded with the emergence of women writers such as Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall, and growing Caribbean immigration to the US coupled with the rise of US cultural institutions meant that the US location continued to influence Caribbean writing.

All governments have budgets. Budgeting is a core state function. Effective budgeting empowers the state to prioritize policies, allocate resources, and discipline the bureaucracy. Proficient budgeting contributes to efficient fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This book offers a comparative framework that identifies eight categores called cultural clusters that help identify the budgetary institutions and policies adopted by different governments.

This essay develops a conceptual frame for the analysis of peace under a comparative area perspective. I discuss the main concepts (peace, violence, conflict) and assess them in relation to four main theoretical schools (realism, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, critical), demonstrating in the process how a global approach to peace resolves many of the difficulties these theoretical schools encounter by placing specific emphasis on the need to focus a lens on both international and national dynamics across cases. I also address the problem of reliable comparable date and suggest that a comparative area studies approach may be preferable as a means to measure the potential for and progress toward peace. I provide evidence for the added value of such a perspective based on an analysis of peace in Latin America. The concluding section discusses the necessity of a hybrid outlook on peace, which requires sustained action on the part of international and local actors toward reducing conditions of structural violence, and it formulates some avenues for future research.

In this chapter, I address important preliminary challenges to any discussion of deontic principles in ICL. Thoughtful scholars have raised concerns that familiar liberal principles may be entirely out of place in ICL. I will argue: (1) For any system that chooses to punish individuals, deontic principles do matter, and thus they should constrain ICL. (2) This does not necessarily mean replicating formulations of fundamental principles familiar from national systems; instead we can return to our underlying deontic commitments and see what they entail in these new contexts. (3) We can learn from common critiques of liberal accounts, to build a sensitive, humanistic account of deontic principles.

In response to various criticisms of criminal justice and liberal principles, I emphasize the ‘humanity’ of criminal justice. Criminal justice and its restraining principles are sometimes portrayed as abstract, metaphysical, retributive, vengeful, Western, or ideologically unmoored from experience. But criminal law serves pro-social aims. Its constraints are rooted in compassion, empathy, and regard for humanity. An intelligent liberal account considers all facets of human experience, including social context, social roles, and collective endeavours. Principles reflect broadly shared human concerns, and can be refined through human conversation.

In this chapter we evaluate not only how different paradigms approach the topic of peacebuilding but also how they compare and contrast with one another. This essay suggests that despite some clear incompatibilities, realism, liberalism, constructivism, cosmopolitanism, critical theory, public policy, and localism share some common ideas about how to pragmatically resolve conflicts, including focusing on the participants of these conflicts, developing locally grounded solutions, maintaining long-term commitments, and focusing on comprehensive approaches to peace. The main divide, we suggest, is between understandings of power in practice, with the more monist approaches positing that local actions come from structures that are not easily perceived. This critique, however, is minimized by the reality that all of the paradigms agree that peace cannot be sustained without both tempering the prerogatives of power with ideas of equality and consulting local actors. We conclude this chapter with comments about the benefits a cross-paradigmatic approach to peacebuilding has from methodological and theoretical standpoints.

Chapter 1 compares the curricular roles of technology in different language courses: Web-facilitated or -enhanced, blended, and fully online. The chapter also provides definitions of the term blended and a rationale for its adoption. In addition, Chapter 1 reviews comparative and noncomparative research studies conducted in the field in order to describe the conditions for effectively blending language environments. The review of research presented proves that blended learning (BL) in language education cannot be considered a monolithic enterprise and that there are currently as many different models – and divergent results – as there are programs or instructors implementing them.