The causes of ill health and death are changing and, as we live longer, new health-preventable problems emerge, bringing new challenges. Improving health (physical, mental or both) and promoting general well-being remain major priorities.

Just as important, the difference in health status between rich and poor continues to grow. At a global level, the picture is even more complex. Although there is some evidence that life expectancy is beginning to plateau in developed countries such as the UK, the biggest potential to improve health still lies in addressing inequality between or within countries.

Therefore, this chapter:

• summarizes the models of health improvement that are prevalent today;

• introduces a combined conceptual model to describe the factors affecting health in modern times; and

• presents some case studies of interventions designed to improve health which offer important insight and learning.

The relational health perspective offers a different lens through which to view how our health is shaped and what the most productive avenues are for achieving long-term positive health outcomes. This book draws on empirical research into how social relationships affect health outcomes, with a focus on three specific health problems –obesity, opioid use disorder, and depression in older adults – and incorporates examples of the untapped potential of community resources, social networks, and varied partnerships.

Our food systems have performed well in the past, but they are failing us in the face of climate change and other challenges. There is a broad consensus that transformation of food systems is required to make them sustainable and equitable for all. Transformation occurs via agents of change: individual behaviour, policies and institutions, research and innovation, and partnerships and alliances. Outcome-oriented agricultural research for development can help bring about directed transformation that maximises benefits and minimises trade-offs.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a sketch of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic as Cicero sees it, and to identify a problem internal to his account. Cicero argues at length in the Tusculan Disputations in favor of the idea that the good and wise person does not experience any form of emotional disturbance. That being so, how can one who signs up to the idea that emotional disturbance is ideally to be eliminated then in good conscience recommend a practice – namely, rhetoric – one of whose principal objectives is to arouse the emotions? There looks to be a clash here between the objective of the philosopher and that of the orator. I explore Cicero’s resources for tackling this tension, and suggest how his conception of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic may thereby illuminate some distinctive aspects of his philosophical approach.

This chapter argues that natural law duties and corresponding human rights require attention to moral and metaphysical frameworks, and education into moral traditions sustaining those frameworks. If such traditions are eclipsed, or lost for a time, there will be deformations in our understanding and language concerning the relationship between the self and the moral universe around us; and, thus, to our understanding and application of human rights. In particular, the chapter examines the shift in language from ‘virtue’ to ‘values’ and ‘person’ to ‘individual’. It explores how the abstracted concepts of ‘values’ and ‘individual’ create confusions in the application of human rights. Instead, it is argued that the moral language supporting human rights application should be sustained within a metaphysical tradition. And, for such traditions to thrive, they require subsidiarity for what Habermas calls ‘life-worlds’ – the many and varied voluntary associations that make up human life in community. Without commitment to subsidiarity, the pursuit of mere techné will undercut the moral sources embedded within those life-worlds, which nourish understanding of and respect for human rights.

One important aspect of the legal effects of CIL within the EU legal order concerns the questions of whether CIL can be relied upon in EU law-related administrative or judicial proceedings and, correspondingly, whether administrative and judicial authorities are obliged to apply CIL in such proceedings in order to decide the case at hand. This is the problem of the ‘invocability’, ‘enforceability’ or the ‘direct effect’ of EU law. As there has so far only been marginal treatment of the direct effect of CIL (as opposed to that of international agreements), the chapter aims at clarifying whether and to what extent the solutions devised for the direct effect of international agreements can be transferred to CIL, that is, whether the ‘treaty analogy’ holds. In this regard, the chapter pleads not only for a uniform direct effect test for international agreements and CIL norms, but for a uniform direct effect analysis for all provisions of EU law, internal and external alike. The chapter further argues that the existing differences among the various types of EU law norms as well as the specificities of each individual provision can be adequately dealt with by applying a context-sensitive analysis of the respective provision of EU law.

In one of the splendid essays brought together in his Personality in Politics, published just after World War II, British politician and civil servant Sir Arthur Salter speculates about why the USA failed to ratify the League of Nations Covenant, the brainchild of US President Woodrow Wilson. First, Sir Arthur suggests, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a one-time supporter of the idea behind the League, was embroiled in “bitter personal enmity” with Wilson, for reasons that have long remained unclear. Sir Arthur suggests that Lodge’s support could have made a decisive difference: it would most likely have resulted in further support by seven more senators, which would have been enough to secure the required two-thirds majority in the US Senate. But the personal relationship between Lodge and Wilson was such that this never happened.

The Conclusion reexamines Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population from the perspective of the transformative mode of demographic governance explored throughout the earlier chapters, as well as in terms of the eighteenth-century debates about the limits and locus of demographic agency examined in Chapter 4. Rather than seeing Malthus’s Essay as marking a definitive break with earlier demographic thinking, it argues for strong continuities, particularly concerning the importance of situation, the providential nature of demographic processes and the real effects of intervention in demographic governance. Instead, it identifies Malthus’s key departure as an emphasis on the propertied and rational individual as the legitimate locus of demographic agency under God. The conclusion ends by considering some of the implications of the history of early modern demographic governance for reinterpreting – and broadening – the history of modern demographic thought.

A discussion of the role of character in Plato, initially focused on Thrasymachus in the Republic, and on arguing that his person is less important to Plato than his view of politics as domination of the weak by the strong. The Socrates of that and other dialogues is certainly one of the most vividly characterised figures in world literature. Nonetheless, when this unique individual speaks of philosophy and the philosopher, he directs our attention away from individuals towards a realm of abstract generalities. Once the magnetism of Socrates has established the legitimacy of philosophy (under that name), Plato has reason to make philosophy independent of his idiosyncratic central figure. Accordingly, in some later writings he relegates Socrates to the margins, and brings on stage a nameless, generic philosopher – a visitor from Elea – to discuss the paradoxes of not-being in the Sophist and political expertise in the Statesman.

Plato’s treatment of justice in the individual in Book IV of the Republic has been heavily criticised. His radical proposal that it consists in an ordering of elements of the soul, parallel to justice in the city conceived as a social order maintained by specialisation of roles assigned to the three classes he specifies, is often seen as too remote from what anybody would recognise as ‘justice’. The criticism rests on two principal misconceptions: of the connection Plato is positing between psychic harmony and just behaviour, and of what he takes psychic harmony to consist in. First, he assumes law-abiding citizens behaving with what he like anybody else would count as justice. What harmony of the soul provides is the best explanation of their inner motivation for so behaving. Second, harmony is conceived as achieved when each element in the soul is focused as it should and will be, following good upbringing and education such as is described for the Guards in Books II and III.

This chapter will first discuss the main subjects of international law and explain their principal features. Second, this chapter will zoom in on states, the traditional and principal actors in the international legal system. It will discuss the criteria for statehood under international law, the role that recognition plays in this respect, and explain how new states emerge. Finally, this chapter will turn to an analysis of the right to self-determination, a notion that plays an important role in the creation of states and is considered to be the most prominent right of one of the subjects of international law: peoples.

This chapter will first discuss the main subjects of international law and explain their principal features. Second, this chapter will zoom in on states, the traditional and principal actors in the international legal system. It will discuss the criteria for statehood under international law, the role that recognition plays in this respect, and explain how new states emerge. Finally, this chapter will turn to an analysis of the right to self-determination, a notion that plays an important role in the creation of states and is considered to be the most prominent right of one of the subjects of international law: peoples.

This chapter focuses on individual-level aspects of inclusion in entrepreneurial ecosystems, using examples from gender-focused ecosystems research in Boston, Massachusetts, as part of broader research carried out by the authors between 2014 and 2017. Using data from fieldwork carried out in Boston, we outline how individual-level gender biases operate in entrepreneurial ecosystems and how they impact women entrepreneurs differently than male entrepreneurs. Our focus is explicitly on the gendering of social capital and trust within entrepreneurial ecosystems, as we highlight their gendered dimensions which lead to exclusion for women, even if ‘unintentionally’.

The chapter begins with a brief genealogy of new materialism and inquiry into the significance of the nonhuman stories entangled in the ethical, political, scientific, and theoretical complexities of the Anthropocene. It first explains the convergence of the new materialism(s) and environmental humanities on ecologically engaged collaborative thinking in responding to bioethical, socio-cultural, and scientific questions that arise from the challenges of Anthropocene. It then discusses how new materialism has espoused the postmodern and poststructuralist disclosure of the link between the dualistic conceptions of the world and the traditional realist systems of representation. The broad argument is that the significance of the agentic capacity of matter in producing layers of expressivity has undermined the established credo about storytelling being uniquely all too human. The “nonhuman story” is argued to mark an important shift in the foundational notions of narrative and storytelling. Material ecocriticism re-envisions narrative as the signifying agency of living matter or narrative agency. Material ecocriticism sees the world as a site of narrativity where narrative agencies – the building blocks of storied matter – demonstrate some degree of creative experience.

In his 1914 monograph, The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual, accepted as an Habilitation in law in the field of state theory in 1916, Carl Schmitt proceeds from a discussion of his view of the relation between law (Recht) and power (Macht), through a discussion of the role of the state in the realization of law, to a discussion of his view of the significance of the individual within the state. Schmitt argues that the value of the state consists in the realization of law in the world, while the significance of the individual is that of fulfilling the roles that the state assigns and ascribes to them for the completion of the state’s task of realizing law and right. Schmitt thus claims a great value for his view of the state and a correspondingly diminutive significance for his view of the individual.