This chapter provides a snapshot of Rwanda’s evolving political settlement and economic development trajectory. The chapter begins by highlighting significant structural vulnerabilities that shaped Rwanda’s domestic politics historically, including ethnicity-based inequalities and political contestation, historical divisions associated with the royal family and aristocracy, refugee issues, inadequate employment opportunities and regional inequalities. It then highlights the rapid growth that took place in Rwanda over the last three decades, which has also been accompanied by significant export diversification. It then provides a brief political settlement analysis of present-day Rwanda, highlighting how development is being contested transnationally, pointing to the key vulnerabilities characterising its hub-based strategy. In particular, it describes how increased elite vulnerability has meant that the government has been reluctant to support domestic capital. As a result, the Rwandan government has failed to develop effective state–business relations aimed at achieving structural transformation.

Ethics, for Emerson, begins in perceiving the “wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world” such that ethics, in thinking and in living, is a matter of being “allied to all.” In this view, the “infinitude of the private man” – often yoked to the concept of “self-reliance” – names a metaphysical and ontological fact at the heart of Emerson’s ethics: human existence within a web of interconnections. This chapter draws widely from Emerson’s oeuvre to show how he unites “severe science with a poetic vision,” seeing and seeking to express how “Our life is consentaneous and far-related.” His work teaches us to see kinships between ethics, aesthetics, religion, science, and politics, and to consider ethics a practice of observing the intimacies in which we exist and in which the ethical question “How shall I live?” begins living in us.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, America’s breathtaking economic and territorial expansion furnished the context for a Second Great Awakening, Romanticism, and electoral politicking. These accelerated the ascent of individualism and encouraged self-refashioning to pursue new ambitions. Individuals’ choices inspired stories that reveal how the evolving myth of self-made success both symbolized and widened the nation’s social and cultural chasms. High-profile self-fashionings of the period included Eliza Jumel’s rags-to-riches, Henry Clay’s feigned humble origins, and reformer Dorothea Dix’s discarding of traditional roles. Leading preachers, including Charles Grandison Finney, inspired thousands to take on individual spiritual choices and worldly service, while Romanticists beckoned men to accept heroic self-agency as their duty. Chief among the latter, Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted that American men exert their "self-reliance." Amid all this churning, antebellum storytellers shifted use of the phrase “self-made” from a rhetorical tool for moral judgments to one for increasingly secular accolades, preparing the way for a gradual turn to financial measures of success.

The South Asian region consisting of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka share a common history of British colonial rule for nearly 200 years. Most of these countries gained independence during the 1940s. Western European ideas of social medicine found considerable resonance. However, through the process of anti-colonial struggle, new ideas on the relationship between society, medicine, and health were brought to light by actors such as practitioners of indigenous systems of medicine, leadership of the nationalist movement, the communist movement, and radical elements within the medical community and society. This chapter explores the engagement of diverse sets of actors from differing ideological positions that engaged in the relationship between society and health in the Indian subcontinent. It further seeks to explore how the Non-Aligned Movement created by postcolonial societies provided a platform for South–South networks in the economy and social sectors to define inclusive development. In medicine and health, there were efforts to redress inequalities through various reform initiatives that had local importance and influenced global health policies.

The history of government presents six lessons. Government has been crucial to building a nation truer to our nation, but it has taken both government and markets to do this. Government is big and complex in response to changes that were occurring in the economy which sent the country in directions inconsistent with its national values. Fourth, despite its size and complexity, government undertakes the same three essential functions it has undertaken over the history of the country. Government has been necessary to create, sustain, and expand markets, to protect people from economic loss and physical injury, and to maintain a social safety net for people mired in poverty due to age, health, or market conditions not of their doing. Finally, the pathway towards achieving America’s fundamental political values has been littered with mistakes and regrets. What makes us a nation has changed to encompass those who have been excluded and marginalized.

This chapter focuses on the essays of Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller who used writing as a spiritual and philosophical tool. This special form of prose allowed them to write themselves, and thus Transcendentalism as a movement, into being, creating a flexible, open-ended, and experimental instrument for the radical self-fashioning of an emergent sensibility: the American individual as a freestanding soul, entire in (him)self, capable of encompassing all the potential of the cosmos. The resulting works forever stamped this most antinomian of genres with the Transcendentalist’s indelible signature. The chapter traces the movement back to Harvard College in the 1820s and ’30s, where students and faculty discussed spirituality, philosophy, and the art of writing. The chapter traces the influence of this convergence and of key figures like the Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing on the burgeoning movement. The chapter’s final pages highlight how central Transcendentalism has been to the American essay tradition, with writers today of greatly varying backgrounds absorbing its lessons and style into their own writing.

The chapter investigates how youth respondents of higher- and lower-income levels negotiate and contest everyday citizenship. In examining citizenship-from-below, the economic precarity that lower-income respondents face leads them to stress citizen actions that foster reliance on others and collective activities. In contrast, higher-income youth stress productivity and self-reliance as citizenship components, and survey findings reveal their limited engagement in community groups (except in Uganda). Upon examining acts of citizenship-from-above such as paying taxes, higher-income youth are more concerned about the legal compliance of others, while lower-income youth are more concerned about being accused of legal violations. Surveys indicate more lower-income youth vote in Ghana and Uganda, but income differences on other acts of state-targeted participation are negligible. Our respondents do not explicitly link income or poverty to political engagement, but Tanzania and Zambia case studies demonstrate that paternalism, derision, and envy within and across income groups can shape citizenship identities.

Increasing the defense industry’s efficiency and equipping the armed forces with the most suitable weapons to meet their missions is often the main goal behind a country’s efforts to enhance civil–military integration. This is not necessarily the case for India, though. Equally, or even more important, is the pursuit of military self-sufficiency and the acquisition of a world-level military R&D and production capacity. Arguably, civil–military integration serves both ends. The growing interest of the Indian military in emerging technologies and the existence of a relatively strong civilian IT industry in India reinforce this logic and clear the way to military–civil fusion. However, the dual demands of equipping the forces with suitable armaments and strengthening India’s military self-sufficiency can be contradictory. This reality, coupled with low and occasionally inefficient national investments in defense R&D, has confronted India’s MCF with multiple difficulties. Aware of this situation, India has taken various measures to expand private industries’ participation in military procurement. Yet, the forces that work in favor and against India’s MCF are still at odds.

Chapter 6 outlines how the existence of the Love Jones Cohort offers a fresh lens with which to explore the lifestyle characteristics of the Black middle class. Earlier research on the Black middle class – who have often been equated with married-couple families – asserts that they face the ongoing problem of having to stabilize their class position. This can take on one or more forms, including developing and exemplifying behavior patterns and lifestyles appropriate to the middle class. Chapter 6 unpacks the lifestyle strategies and attributes of the Love Jones Cohort and examines how the decision to not marry and instead continue to live alone may impact such attempts to stabilize their class position. Chapter 6 emphasizes that own space and life, freedom, and self-reliance emerge as central aspects of the Cohort lifestyle, as well as situational loneliness. The Cohort places a great emphasis on the human interaction and companionship provided by family, friends, and social networks and discusses how the pressures emanating from family and friends help shape their lifestyles and navigate the ebbs and flows that arise.

When considering the question of China’s external economic relations during the Mao era, the dominant narrative in the literature underscores the following view: Mao’s China pursued a foreign economic policy that was autarkic, isolated from the global economy, and locked into a Soviet-inspired planned economy that provided limited incentives for economic interdependence with the outside world. For some, China’s isolation from the global economy was the result of its position in the Soviet bloc, which was “heavily biased against foreign trade,” and from its adoption of a centrally planned, socialist economic model that prohibited private interests from pursuing foreign investment or trade. For others, Mao-era policies of autarky were inspired by a form of xenophobia that stemmed from the country’s experience of Western predations during the nineteenth century, resulting in fear of economic dependence on foreign powers. Finally, others emphasize the role of Mao’s revolutionary ideology in explaining China’s isolation from the global economy; Mao’s tendency to view major international economic institutions and norms as counterrevolutionary and “hostile” to the Chinese state led him to disengage from international trade and other economic opportunities.

How do aid agencies deliver protection and assistance in Uganda’s Kyaka II, and specifically seek to prevent and overcome gender-based violence? In what ways do they affect the women and men living there? Focusing on these questions, the chapter explores the overall camp structures and scope of aid via the humanitarian apparatus, power practices, and decision-making—as well as their effects on the refugees living in Kyaka II. Divided into four parts, the first addresses developments and aid in the camp alongside hierarchies, and argues that refugees are made ‘protection objects.’ The second part centers on projects tackling gender-based violence, and their links with global refugee policies. It reveals how preventive and protective projects against gender-based violence as well as those to support empowerment essentially draw on ‘vulnerability’ categorizations, which portray women primarily as ‘vulnerable protection objects.’ The third part addresses correlations between aid, the camp architecture, and the prevalence of gender-based violence, revealing the three issues of aid workers at times perpetrating violence, the structural effects of aid, and the risks resulting from the camp landscape. Before concluding, the fourth part considers whether the broad critique of aid provision and of the camp is reasonable in light of the challenges that aid agencies themselves face.

In Nakivale, the institutional context can be characterised as ‘co-optation’. Many refugees accuse UNHCR and its implementing partners (IPs) of ‘stealing’ their better ideas. Some IPs have justified independently pursuing ideas generated with refugees on the grounds of the limited capacity or competence of RCOs. UNHCR’s limited faith in the capacity of RCOs means that there are few opportunities for RCOs to work with them or their partners beyond being arbitrarily included in events or activities organised by formal providers. This chapter explores how the reaction of refugees to this distrust has been a mutual ‘scepticism’: they lack confidence in the formal organisational structures and thus often disengage. Many community leaders are reluctant to register their CBOs or to work collaboratively with UNHCR and its implementing partners when opportunities do arise. Where possible, RCOs prefer to retain their independence rather than risk their ideas being ‘stolen’ by IPs and used as evidence for their commitment to community-led development in order to attract further international funding.