What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

In-conflict state building generates unbalanced civil-military relations in the host state due to an inevitable civil-military gap. Building civilian institutions cannot match the trajectory of progress in building military institutions. The civil-military imbalance creates structural risks to the democratization of the state. This article explains the civil-military gap and its risks, examines Iraq and in particular Afghanistan, and presents steps on how to make unbalanced civil-military relations conducive to democratization by shaping the political role of the military.

This is a magisterial new account of the day-to-day practice of Russian criminal justice in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nancy Kollmann contrasts Russian written law with its pragmatic application by local judges, arguing that this combination of formal law and legal institutions with informal, flexible practice contributed to the country's social and political stability. She also places Russian developments in the broader context of early modern European state-building strategies of governance and legal practice. She compares Russia's rituals of execution to the 'spectacles of suffering' of contemporary European capital punishment and uncovers the dramatic ways in which even the tsar himself, complying with Moscow's ideologies of legitimacy, bent to the moral economy of the crowd in moments of uprising. Throughout, the book assesses how criminal legal practice used violence strategically, administering horrific punishments in some cases and in others accommodating with local communities and popular concepts of justice.

Media reports have not been kind to Afghanistan in recent weeks. The rising threat of insider violence, anti-U.S. demonstrations and high-profile attacks, the U.S. death toll surpassing two thousand and the appointment of a controversial intelligence chief have fuelled pessimism about the country’s fate. Recent setbacks must be taken seriously. But they should not lead to revived defeatism based on unbalanced assessments of developments.