With the consolidation of the new economy during the 1990s, the idea of the network quickly gained dominance in the global North as a metaphor for the morphological diagram of social life (Castells 1996). The network, with its suggestion of mobility, spatiality and connectedness, was central to the imagining of a post-Fordist spirit of capitalism. While relatively weak compared to the security that welfare-Fordism had offered, the promise was that freedom now lay in this new interconnected, non-hierarchical and meritocratic world. Set against the stifling prospect of a job for life, the new spirit promised creativity and authenticity through the possibility of self-knowledge and personal fulfilment. Rather than of social class, identity was now a matter of choice and self-affirmation. Whether based on location, leisure pursuits, sexual orientation, culture or religion, identity could be multiple and overlapping (Rose 1996). As a signifier, employment or profession came low on the list. During the 1980s and 1990s, when it appeared that capitalism had, indeed, regained some of its former dynamism, any reduction in future security guarantees could be weighed against the ‘freedom that has been won, and hopes that the excitement generated by greater autonomy will prove stronger than fears for the morrow’ (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005: 93).
In this optimism on the eve of the post-social world, boundaries were transgressed and the dynamism of the network unleashed through the organizational form of the ‘project’. Drawing on the management literature from the late 1980s and early 1990s, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) document how, in an ideal post-Fordist world, people would no longer have jobs for life or a defined career. Instead, the lives of the connected would consist in a series of ever-changing projects. Employment would be a succession of jobs, each of which provides opportunities for appreciation ‘and thus the chance of being called upon for some other project’. They call this new urban vision ‘the projective city’ (2005: 105). Within its environs, as a process of continually connecting and disconnecting monadic existence (Latour et al. 2012), personal freedom translates into a life of changing projects. Individuals meet new people and acquire fresh skills as they pass between different networks. As things change and evolve, some projects and their connections lapse, others are left as a fall-back to be reactivated at a later date. As reflected in this ideal managerial thinking, if, by the 1990s, the spatial metaphor for society was now the network, then, institutionally, the new spirit of capitalism envisaged ‘the general organisation of society in project form’ (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005: 105).
By the early 1980s, the proposition had already emerged within political ecology that the crisis within welfare-Fordism was pointing towards a world without work. Given this prospect, there was a need to explore a new vision of the future as a series of self-directed activities (Gorz 1982). In testing such a future, Sudan had a limited industrial history1 and the social state was weak and confined to urban areas. The fantastic invasion encountered a practical opportunity to trial by proxy projectized forms of post-industrial and post-social survival that, due to legacy social democratic constraints, would have been difficult to attempt in the global North. In many parts of Africa, NGOs were able to anticipate livelihood strategies that took for granted the absence of any social responsibility from the state or private sector.
The international aid’s livelihood regime (Jaspars 2015: 5–6) can be seen as an experimental projective city in the global South. In all essentials, it no longer exists. By the mid-2000s, it had all but given way to a focus on resilience. As with the previous chapter, here attention is drawn to what was anticipatory about the project form in relation to the cybernetic episteme, and where points of rupture exist between then and now. NGOs were early adopters of the project form. During the fantastic invasion, the project was the primary means whereby knowledge was transferred to the community in order to encourage an independent self-acting model of collective development. As with direct humanitarian action, human agency was still important. This time, however, it was vested in the realization of a self-managing community. Such an independent action-oriented approach regarding community no longer exists. As discussed in chapter 11, self-acting technologies are now supported by communities of users permanently enrolled in their endless prototyping. Underlying this rupture, however, there is an anticipatory continuity. This relates to the early understanding of the project as a feedback mechanism for engaging the poor in iterative forms of constructivist learning. This ‘learning like a child’ approach informed early programming and the design of the human–computer interface.
Speaking in the name of people, freedom and rights, during the 1970s and 1980s, the expanding international NGO movement was an important pioneer of postmodernist relations and governance structures. It played a significant role, for example, in criticizing the ‘top- down’ state-led modernization in the Third World, professional hierarchies and the demobilizing role of the ‘expert’. Its voluntaristic ethos echoed the May ’68 rejection of the alienation and inauthenticity of consumer society. Organizationally, NGOs were one or two decades ahead of the flat management structures that post-Fordism would come to extol. As an anticipation of the spirit of progressive neoliberalism, Ernst Schumacher’s influential Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (Schumacher 1974) is important. Schumacher’s work represents a rehearsal of the case for NGO direct action through the project form. While dated in terms of language and presentation, his embrace of the cybernetic episteme means that his work remains consistent with contemporary cognitive developmentalism (see chapter 12).
In terms of information flow, projects are a longitudinal or iterative series of feedback processes. They impart resources or knowledge to the participant or group while, in return, beneficiaries provide feedback regarding what works or not, thus starting the process all over again. The more projects an NGO manages, the more accumulated information it has; and the more connections and information it has, the more developmental help it can potentially feedback. Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, for Schumacher the state-led development then in vogue benefitted only elites. Its urban and industrial focus excluded the majority of the rural poor. At the same time, it eroded the social fabric of the countryside, leading to uncontrolled urbanization and the harmful proliferation of slums and shanty towns. Apart from wishing to moderate consumer desires among the poor, for Schumacher the aim of development was to get the excluded active, working and, especially, participating.
Reflecting then-current developmentalism, Schumacher argued that poverty was non-material in nature. That is, it had more to do with deficiencies in information than with money or resources and, as such, its existence did not warrant radical social change (compare World Bank 2015: 80). Acknowledging the arrival of Homo inscius, it lies ‘in certain deficiencies in education, organisation, and discipline’ (Schumacher 1974: 140). The key ingredient is information. Since the poor only have simple needs, all they require is ‘an upgrading by the input of new knowledge’ (1974: 167). Based on small catalytic project-based inputs of self-help guidance, simple tools and support, this non-material development ‘also has the advantage of being relatively cheap, that is to say, making money go a very long way’ (1974: 165). Since getting the poor active and participating was the main thing, for Schumacher it was unnecessary for projects to be economically viable or even of great practical use. Arguably anticipating contemporary precarity, it was more important that everyone was active and doing something, even if creating negligible value, rather than that ‘a few people should each produce a great deal’ (1974: 145).
In order to administer and oversee the small catalytic inputs required by this information-based developmental model, Schumacher envisaged the formation of international action groups that ideally should be outside of government, ‘in other words they should be non-governmental voluntary agencies’ (1974: 169). By the mid-1960s, as Schumacher notes, many such NGOs were already involved in this type of grass-roots development work. Prior to the roll-out of structural adjustment in the global South, the main obstacle in the path of this ‘bottom-up’ NGO development was state-led industrialization and the misguided Third World aim of economic catch-up with the West through centralized planning. The result of the latter was uncontrolled urbanization, increasing poverty and the growth of slums.
Meeting this developmental challenge not only would require NGOs, it would come to nothing unless there was a ‘systematic organisation of communications – in other words, unless there is something that might be called an “intellectual infrastructure”’ (1974: 169). Through mobilizing administrators, businessmen and communicators, Schumacher envisaged an international sans-frontières network of projects interconnecting countries, regions and continents. With international NGOs at the nodal points of such an information network, this matrix would operate as an iterative feedback loop, directing problems encountered in the field to experts who could provide a solution. In an analogue anticipation of cloud computing, it was a system that would not hold information in one centre, but was geared instead ‘to hold “information on information” or “know-how on know-how”’ (1974: 170).
The 1980s were a period of rapid expansion for the international NGO movement. This coincided with the emergence of network capitalism as a global logistical system and the beginnings of the transition to the new economy of personalized consumption in the global North. While the fantastic invasion played an anticipatory role in this movement, it also reflected its time. There are differences and breaks. Explored more fully in chapter 11, such a rupture occurs in relation to the action-orientation associated with both the ‘project’ and ‘community’. While Schumacher displayed a cybernetic sensibility in relation to the importance of information exchange and feedback, compared to his view of human reason and agency, both would be accorded a more subordinate status following the computational turn. For Schumacher, the best aid was intellectual rather than material, because the former required the effort of understanding and a will to make it work. Without that effort of appropriation, there is no gift. Material goods make people dependent; a gift of knowledge, however, ‘makes them free’ (1974: 165).
During the fantastic invasion, projects were the means – the pretext even – through which information was passed to communities in order to encourage them to become self-acting collectives. Direct humanitarian action, for example, favoured working through or in collaboration with community organizations or local institutions. Local leaders, elders or dignitaries were sought out by NGOs. If deemed too patriarchal or traditional, new groups were created and women encouraged to join. Realizing the ‘community’ was a creative enterprise. Such committees and representative groups were thought to provide local aid management with authenticity, especially if the group concerned could be encouraged to target assistance to the most vulnerable – or, at least, to ensure some degree of equity (Jaspars & Shoham 1999). Looking to a future of independent self-development, projects were imagined as building the administrative and management capacity of the participants.2 The installation of improved village wells or hand pumps was a typical community development project of the period (Redfield 2015). Villagers, for example, would be expected to provide the labour for the installation, together with making arrangements for long-term upkeep or management, in exchange for the NGO-supplied materials. Ideally, such projects should be ‘owned’ by the community. Ownership in this sense was measured in the extent to which members took collective responsibility for the project aims and outcomes.
This imagined realization of an independent self-acting community, fostered through project work, has little operational meaning for post-humanitarianism. Today, it is objects that are self-acting in the hands of their enrolled user communities. However, the progressive neoliberalism of the fantastic invasion also sought to make markets work for the poor, not by reforming or regulating them, but by providing communities with the knowledge and capacity to realize capitalism’s potential. The earlier anti-industrial position of NGOs blurred seamlessly into their 1980s role of preparing communities for the market. More specifically, projects helped to valorize community mutuality and social reproduction preparatory to the incorporation of these formally autonomous areas of subsistence and household production within a socially expansive capitalism.
The embrace of complexity-thinking and behaviourism undermined modernist notions of relief and development. Initially seen as distinct, relief denoted short-term emergency interventions, while development was a long-term commitment to economic modernization, state capacity-building and catch-up with the West (Rostow 1960). Three decades late, these terms had changed beyond recognition. Relief and development had been internalized within an individual country and, reflecting the ‘empiricist onslaught’, reduced to poles separated by a shared continuum of beneficiary behaviour (UNDP 1994). Below a certain threshold of behaviour, resources and opportunities, the result is growing food-insecurity and impoverishment. Should this cycle persist, the result is eventual social breakdown. Above this threshold, however, vulnerability is reduced as households embark on a self-reinforcing process of asset accumulation and development (EC 1996). Governors and feedback mechanisms interconnect the different behavioural cycles of decay or growth within their environmental milieu.
In terms of operationalizing the livelihood regime, as a way of promoting positive behavioural cycles, projects were a key form of intervention within the relief-to-development continuum. Varying in scale, the typical NGO project usually focused on the group, community or other local collective. In content, projects ranged widely, from educational interventions to improve health or farming practices, to activities encouraging thrift, prudent investment or, as in well construction or road maintenance, cooperative working. The focus on exclusion and gender was an important dimension of project work. Projects aimed to make markets work by, in effect, preparing or proofing groups and communities for the market. As a means of valorizing community mutuality and social reproduction, projects provided a bridgehead whereby capitalism was able to penetrate the formerly autonomous level of subsistence farming and household production3 – thus helping to extend capitalism ‘all the way down’ to the previously autonomous area of social reproduction (Fraser 2012).
Mozambique during the 1990s offers a case-study in this process of developmental inclusion and valorization (Duffield 2007: 82–110).4 Mozambique had seen its own fantastic invasion during the civil war (1977–92), with the numbers of international NGOs rising from 70 in 1985 to 180 by 1990 (2007: 87). As in Sudan, this was also a time of NGO autonomy, with a similar practice of arm’s-length subcontracting between NGOs and donor governments. Following the arrival of peace in 1992, this changed as donors began exerting increasing control over NGOs through closer monitoring and evaluation – in particular, through the introduction of ‘log frame analysis’ allowing progress to be measured against agreed bench marks (2007: 88–90). During this period, losing their prior independence, NGOs seamlessly morphed into the ‘implementing partners’ of donor governments. This transition saw a refocusing of NGO projects to target better the poor and the excluded, particularly regarding social and gender issues.
Given the absence of a social state, NGOs act to make communities and groups visible. Through their presence, social surveying and rapid appraisal techniques, they bring communities and groups into the light, making them knowable and thus amenable for governmental interventions (Bryant 2002). Like the mid-1980s famine in Sudan, the civil war in Mozambique was understood as having undermined and dissipated the essential self-reliance of rural communities, exposing them to the wild of an uncertain environment. The view that self-reliance was the natural condition of such communities was axiomatic among aid agencies. In the past, the internationalist New Left had problematized the notion of self-reproduction as encouraging regressive forms of exploitation (Wolpe 1972). Progressive neoliberalism, however, saw things differently.
Providing it could be revived, self-reliance provided an alternative to state-based social protection. Not only was such a protection unlikely to emerge, a resurrected self-reliance would also constitute a free system of social security ‘offering possibilities of adaption and strengthening in order to manage the risks of market integration’ (Duffield 2007: 93). For NGOs, self-reproduction was synonymous with community mutuality and high levels of social cohesion. Since the civil war was regarded as having significantly weakened traditional relations of self-help, an opportunity existed to resurrect community mutuality through appropriate project work. The intention was to recreate not the old forms of cohesion and reciprocity, however, but a new, more egalitarian system. At a time when the Washington consensus and its focus on economic adjustment was weakening, the renewed focus on the social and internal aspects of livelihood support continued the trend established in the previous decade.
An earlier focus of project work in Mozambique on rich peasants, merchants and commercial groups gave way to the privileging of the marginalized and excluded, especially women, in order to create egalitarian forms of collective empowerment. With gender as a symbol of everything that was backward in traditional society, by the end of the 1990s, rural projects aspired to new forms of social organization and collective ownership through improved self-reliance (2007: 103). Through concepts such as ‘structural poverty’, the position of excluded groups, such as the elderly or widowed, was seen in relation to a natural economy in which their access to land, labour and communal resources varied over the life-cycle of the household (Fleming & Barnes 1992). The operation of this natural economy compounded the challenge of environmental uncertainty. Domestic responsibilities like birthing and child care, food preparation and agricultural work hampered the market participation of women. Indeed, many women seldom left the homestead (Cuppens 1998: 8–11, 14).
Towards the end of the 1990s, donor-funded projects, including NGO-implemented community road construction, agricultural extension work and land registration projects, were redesigned to include the marginalized, encourage the participation of women and protect against the patriarchy of the traditional system (Duffield 2007: 108–9). The increase in productivity, it was believed, would lift the community as a whole without exacerbating economic differentiation. While largely aspirational, these projects reflected the widespread deployment of the project form as a means of valorizing and integrating social reproduction within a capitalist marketplace. Although the aims were different, in terms of their attempt to create an ideal homoeostatic future, they stand comparison with the colonial practice of native administration, or the creation of artificial systems of ‘tribal’ authority, even in situations where none had properly existed before (Duffield & Hewitt 2009). In the case of the social project, the vision was one of an idealized, cosmopolitan form of identity-sensitive progressive neoliberalism. This ethos, however, concealed the relations of exploitation inherent to the mobility differential underpinning the project form and the reduction of local knowledge to programmable information demanded by the cybernetic episteme.
Besides the anticipation of post-social survival strategies and the valorization of social reproduction, the fantastic invasion also introduced another aspect of the project form – namely, its function as a mechanism of exploitation. The project operates as an organizational interface between mobile international aid workers, able to move internationally, and immobile aid beneficiaries. The subsequent appearance of digital humanitarians, operating off-shore through technical volunteer networks (see chapter 10), does not eliminate this spatial effect. On the contrary, it is magnified. Digital humanitarians are even more mobile than their grounded colleagues. As for beneficiaries, not only are they entangled in their local communities, they are contained by an international system that, by the 1980s, had already been closed against autonomous circulation. Enhanced by the asymmetries of information and resources involved, the mobility differential inherent in Schumacher’s ‘intellectual infrastructure’ conveyed a clear spatial advantage to mobile NGOs.
Occupying nodal points in this global intellectual network, NGOs were able to trade their intelligence on local development problems or emergency needs in exchange for government funding, donor patronage or, through appeals and campaigns, public support and influence. The mobility of the exploiter is reflected in the immobility of the exploited (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005: 369–70). Organizationally, since the 1980s, NGOs have kept pace with the marked expansion of the global precariat, growing in numbers and size, widening their mandates and, not least, increasing their budgets. For several decades, it was a successful business model, combining the cosmopolitan high ground with an expanding organizational presence and influence. At the same time, the fantastic invasion launched the careers of innumerable expatriate aid workers who would find themselves climbing the UN ladder, joining government aid departments, going into business or becoming academics.5
Besides being a mechanism of exploitation, the mobility differential also devalues and transforms terrestrial knowledge. The connected world belongs to the mobile, the flexible and the fast. In such a world, there is little room for the detail of area studies, cultural specialism, historical accounts or knowledge patiently acquired through language – that is, knowledge that is entangled in or specific to local conditions. As a result, the whole corpus of academic area studies has been in decline for several decades (Pupavac 2012; Wiley 2012). It is too detailed, hard-won and idiosyncratic for immediate operational purposes. As with data behaviourism, for the practitioner, useful information has to be immediately comparable, non-specific, flexible and capable of being acted upon. Interestingly, however, in relation to indigenous knowledge, an apparent reversal takes place. To the extent that professional or structural knowledge is decried, indigenous knowledge is praised for its practical authenticity. On examination, however, such praise usually reduces to a machine-ready constructivist understanding of the nature of human learning.
When one examines the leading edge of current developmentalism – for example, Doing Development Differently6 or Thinking and Working Politically,7 or the well-received 2015 World Bank report on Mind, Society and Behaviour (see chapter 12), one is struck by how little the basic ontological claims made for an empiricist behaviourism have changed since the ground work of the fantastic invasion. Terminology has altered and the presentation may be different but, given the disavowal of theory and radical social change, there aren’t that many ways to skin a one-dimensional cat. If you start with a distracted and unthinking Homo inscius entangled by feedback loops with its immediate environment – similar to the behaviour of a child – learning is assumed to result from a participatory and iterative process of doing. As a place-holder for machine learning or artificial intelligence, ontologically, developmentalism resembles an automatic vacuum cleaner that eventually cleans a room after repeatedly crashing into every wall and piece of furniture along the way.
An anticipatory version of this is evident, for example, in Michael Edwards’ (1989) celebrated piece on ‘The Irrelevance of Development Studies’. Drawing on the work of Robert Chambers (1983), Edwards rehearses the already outlined criticism of hierarchical professional and structural knowledge on the grounds of the empirical diversity and complexity of the ‘real’ world. Development problems are specific to a given time and place. Livelihood and coping systems have evolved over hundreds of years through complex interactions between people and their ‘hostile environmental conditions’ (Edwards 1989: 120). Given this background, knowledge is not obtained through reason but by trial and error on the part of progressive neoliberalism’s Homo inscius. The intervention of development professionals short-circuits this process and prevents people thinking for themselves and solving problems their own way: ‘development results from a long process of experiment and innovation through which people build up the skills, knowledge and self-confidence necessary to shape their environment in ways which foster progress towards goals such as economic growth, equity in income distribution, and political freedom’ (1989: 119–20).
Development is about ‘enrichment’ and ‘empowerment’ through the iterative feedback loops made possible by participation. Acknowledging the arrival of Homo inscius, this NGO-led participatory process allows for and accommodates the constraints, imperfections, anxieties, fears and emotions that shape the actions ‘of real, living people’ (1989: 121). Genuine participation, mediated by external but attentive NGOs anxious to ‘put the last first’, allows these emotions to feed into the learning process.
In the mid-1970s, the architect and computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte, then head of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group,8 was writing about a similar but different problem. To encourage greater public participation, Negroponte was concerned to eliminate the professional from the process of architectural design (Negroponte 2003 [1975]). As suggested, the problem of the ‘professional’, or rule-based ‘technocratic knowledge’, was not confined to international development. The autonomy that came from professional knowledge and hierarchical expertise was a target for structural elimination in the transition from Fordism to network capitalism. The move against hierarchy, regulations and the professions was key to the translation of the revolutionary impulse of the May ’68 critique into the energy needed to create the computer-based new economy (Turner 2006). This energy, which was vital for tearing down the modernist organizational forms of Fordism, still finds a continuing reverberation in the disruptive strategies of Silicon Valley (Foer 2017; Taplin 2017).
For Negroponte, the issue was not international development, but the nature of human–machine interaction. For him, the elimination of the professional was through computer programming or the creation of ‘soft architectural machines’, whereby human imperfections, anxieties and emotions could be translated into rich and innovative architectural designs. Removing professionals, preventing them from getting in the way of users and computers, would allow the introduction of ‘a simply understood feedback concerning the potential consequences of individual decisions on the whole’. This would help release the ‘enormous variety of emotional (intuitive) solutions which can be invented by a large number of future users and might give an incredible richness to this new “redesigned” design process’ (Negroponte 2003 [1975]: 359).
Basically, the same constructivist approach of learning by doing that was being advocated by international development was also being applied to understanding human–machine interaction and early computer programming. In the mid-2000s, following the computational turn and the advent of the internet, Negroponte developed the underlying cybernetic episteme further in his One Laptop per Child programme (Negroponte 2006). Based on corporate sponsorship, the aim of this programme was to make a cheap, robust internet-ready portable computer widely available to children in the global South. Setting aside the organizational details (Negroponte 2007), the theory behind the programme was an inversion of the constructivist programming being explored two decades earlier. The laptop was a means of promoting self-learning among children in the global South through self-directed, iterative user–internet interaction. For Negroponte, this was an extension of the way that children learn naturally through doing: ‘we all in this room learnt how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk, or taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, by having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something, or being able to stand up and reach it’ (Negroponte 2006: 1: 53).
The process attenuates when children enter the formal teaching environment of the school. However, ‘one of the things in general that computers have provided to learning is that it now includes a kind of learning which is a little bit more like walking and talking, in the sense that a lot of it is driven by the learner himself or herself’ (2006: 1: 53).
This idea behind the One Laptop per Child initiative was that constructivist computer-based learning would allow beneficiaries to leapfrog the relative absence of a formal educational infrastructure in the global South. With a minimum of instruction, children would teach themselves. While this programme is now defunct, having been outmoded by the rapid spread of broadband and cheap mobile telephony, it is worth commenting on the curious inversion that is evident here.
In the mid-1970s, the problem was one of programming – that is, refining the computer interface to translate human desires, emotions and intuitions into machine code. Three decades later, with the maturing of the internet, the concern was reversed: using a screen interface to subject the internet to an intuitive and constructivist learning process in order to extract topic-specific information and design ideas. Whereas the New Left had hoped to transform the May ’68 movement’s rejection of alienation and hierarchy into world revolution, the counterculture and progressive neoliberalism have transformed and locked this emancipatory impulse into corporately owned computer technology. This absorption or locking-in is returned to in chapter 12. Computers, machine learning and cyberspace are now the source, originators and custodians of personal freedom and creativity. Rather than overcoming alienation, this is more a redoubling of it. The fantastic invasion’s early celebration of constructivist learning among the poor does more than infantilize the precariat. It anticipates that poverty, with increasing connectivity, would itself become programmable.
The livelihood regime has now disappeared and been replaced by that of resilience. Projects still exist but contend with other interventionary technologies and funding mechanisms. Moreover, as we shall see, the action-orientation of ‘community’ has changed its focus within current forms of technology-based humanitarian innovation. Regarding Sudan, rather than NGOs working themselves out of a job, the fantastic invasion initiated a series of back-to-back emergency operations that stretch from the mid-1980s to the present. Moreover, with the exception of Darfur in the mid-2000s, none of these operations achieved their stated aims (Jaspars 2015: 109). Instead, Sudan – or, rather, the Sudans – has entered a growing list of chronic emergencies. To focus on such issues, however, would miss the point. The ground work accomplished by the fantastic invasion explored in this and the previous chapter, including behaviour-based early warning systems, complexity-thinking, and the valorization of community mutuality and social reproduction, were important in anticipating the post-social new economy then taking shape. These activities were instrumental in the translation of knowledge into behavioural data in advance of the computational turn. At the same time, however, the present represents a break or discontinuity with this period. While extending the cybernetic episteme, the fantastic invasion was a period when information was still regarded as empowering self-acting individuals and communities. Since the fantastic invasion, resistance, political push-back and ground friction have increased as connectivity, or the absorption of this autonomy, has deepened. In the face of this resistance, the fantastic invasion is now exhausted and in retreat. The architectural and cultural forms of this retreat are examined in the next chapter.