Search results for ""ibidem-Verlag""

When Sophica was abruptly separated from her father as a toddler, she found a haven in Grandmother Gitté. But one sunny day in July, when she was six years old, gendarmes marching and shouting in the streets stopped her dreamy childhood and her hopes to go to school and to be a big girl like her sister. She was deported together with her mother and the whole of the Jewish community of Mihaileni, Romania. On foot, through icy fields, they arrived in eastern Ukraine, a strip of land called Transnistria. Death, illness, brutality, shame, became her daily scenes. Sophica suffered hunger and fear but kept her hopes and sanity, albeit losing her sister and her father and witnessing her mother being viciously attacked. She survived Typhus and starvation by being strong and quiet. Herman was a jolly little boy who didnt care much needing to wear the yellow star and being forbidden from school. He continued playing outside with his friends while his father and brother were sent to a labor camp. At the age of 14, when the Second World War ended, he joined a Jewish youth movement and embarked on a ship to the Promised Land. However, their journey was interrupted and they were taken to a British detention camp in Cyprus. Sophica and Herman were given new names, Shulamit and Tzvi. They met and made a home in Israel. Shulamit/Sophica never mentioned her sad childhood, but the essence of the past found its ways out. Sixty-five years after those events, her daughter comes across a family secret and starts asking questions, inducing Shulamit to break her silence and become again the frightened little Sophica. This book tells her moving childhood story.

Read more less

This wide-ranging collection of academic essays examines the various undertakings by modern intellectuals and ideologues in the process of propaganda and political debate. Matthew Feldman calls attention to the substantial role played in post-Great War Europe and the US by religionsboth familiar monotheisms like Christianity and secular political faiths -- over the last century of upheaval and revolutionary change. While the first part considers Ezra Pound as a case study in fascist ʼconversion in Mussolinis Italy, leading to extensive propaganda, the second half examines other fascist ideologues like Martin Heidegger to fascist murderer Anders Behring Breivik, before turning to other leading ideologies in modern Europe and the US, communism and liberalism, covering key figures from Thomas Merton and Albert Camus to the Russian Constructionists and Samuel Beckett, with especial focus on the subjects of modern warfare, political terrorism, and genocide, ranging from Stalinist gulags to the war in Iraq. With thought-provoking discussion of the interplay between belief and modern politics as understood by familiar intellectual voices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike.

Read more less

In The Artful Aussie Tax Dodger Lex Fullarton studies the impact of 100 years of taxation legislation in Australia 1915-2016. He finds that despite the lessons of a century of actions and reactions of taxpayers and administrators little changes -- despite entering a new century old habits are hard to break. At Federation on 1 January 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia was empowered to impose income tax on its citizens. However, it was not until 3 September 1915 that it began a century of tax reform when its first Income Tax Assessment Act was introduced. For 100 years, driven by the winds of various political and social interests, Australia reviewed and reformed its tax legislation. Fullarton studies that transformation. Fullartons examination considers the oldest of tax planning entities -- the British Trust (received in Australia at colonisation) -- the introduction of Australias reformed consumption tax -- its VAT, referred to as Goods and Services Tax (GST) in Australia -- an analysis of tax avoidance schemes, and finally government taxation reform activities over the century. Fullarton notes that, just one year into a new century of taxation, the Australian Federal Government put forward a proposal to go forward to the past by repealing certain sections of the Income Tax Assessment Act and transferring Income Taxing powers back to the Australian States, a position which existed prior to 1936. This book looks at how Australias tax legislation was grounded, added to, avoided, and evolved, until it went Back to the Future. It is a collection of studies compiled from a rich mosaic of experience and research conducted over 20 years of involvement in taxation law in rural and remote Australia.

Read more less

Religion and magic have often played important roles in Baltic, Eastern European, and post- USSR societies like those in Russia, Romania, Serbia, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, and Estonia. Taken together, the studies presented in this collection suggest that the idea that religion and magic are connected to each other in some consistent, universal way may be nothing more than a reminiscence from nineteenth century anthropology. Further, these studies challenge another part of anthropology's historical legacy: the idea that magic is something that modernity and modernization will transcend. Rather, these studies suggest instead that magic is a form of work that brings modernity into being and helps render it intelligible to those who find themselves engaged in its creation. This volume brings together historical (pre- and post-1989), ethnographic, and areal studies which look at the divergent roles of state, culture, society, tradition, and the individual in enactments of magic and religion. Assessing the role magic and religion have played in the countries of Eastern Europe and beyond before and after the Cold War, it is an absorbing read for scholars of anthropology and history as well as ethnology.

Read more less

From summer 1941 onwards, Romania actively pursued at its own initiative the mass killing of Jews in the territories it controlled. 1941 saw 13,000 Jewish residents of the Romanian city of Iaşi killed, the extermination of thousands of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia by Romanian armed forces and local people, large-scale deportations of Jews to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, and massacres in and around Odessa. Overall, over 300,000 Jews of Romanian and Soviet or Ukrainian origin were murdered in Romanian- controlled territories during the Second World War. In this volume, a number of renowned experts shed light on the events, the contexts, and the aftermath of this under-researched and lesser-known dimension of the Holocaust. 75 years on, this book gives much-needed impetus to research on the Holocaust in Romania and Romanian-controlled territories.

Read more less

"Aleksandr Prokhanov (born 1938) is a prizewinning novelist and also, as editor of the weekly newspaper Zavtra, a leading figure in Russian imperial patriotism. Ever since 1991, when he signed (and reputedly wrote) the manifesto for the failed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev, he has been an influential voice in Russian political culturehelping to turn the irreconcilable opposition of the 1990s towards Empire, grappling with the difficult question of whether to endorse Vladimir Putin as a savior or expose him as a fraud, and promulgating a bewildering series of conspiracy theories in which Russian and international affairs are explained in the most extravagant terms. He has also been a remarkably prolific writer, and the best of his novels are real works of literature, at once muck-raking and lyrical, with Moscow scandal interwoven so tightly with the mystical yearnings of cosmism that the reader can hardly prise them apart. The same themes flow backwards and forwards between Prokhanovs fiction and his non-fiction: World conspiracies, space exploration, the resurrection of the dead, Stalin as a supernatural redeemerthese and other preoccupations recur again and again in his leading articles as well as in his novels. This book does not seek either to justify Prokhanov or to denounce him: It seeks to understand him as perhaps the most eminent representative of a school of thought that is here defined as post-Soviet esotericism. Esotericist ideas, some of them strikingly reminiscent of beliefs that flourished in the early Christian centuries, have acquired wide resonance in Russia since the collapse of the USSR. Post-Soviet esotericism thus represents a rare and valuable opportunity to examine a belief system of this nature in the process of its emergence. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with modern Russian literature or politics, and also more broadly to descriptive logicians and students of negative esotericism. "

Read more less

This fascinating book analyzes the socialist past as represented in the national history museums of the majority of the former Yugoslav states. While traveling to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia, the study elucidates the strategies of constructing the national narratives that maintain and legitimize the particular vision of the common past. The cross-national comparison allows to extract the main tendencies in visual interpretation of the socialist past. The existence of the diverse opinions with the further possibility of displaying them in the public space has tremendous importance for the democratic development of the state and, consequently, the analysis of the exhibitions representing the socialist past in multiparadigmatic ways is the promising tool for the identification of both the memory politics in the region and the extent to which political actors are interfering in the given field.

Read more less

This innovative book offers a fresh perspective on the national work culture of Russia and the substantial role foreign institutional and cultural impact has had in shaping it. Russia's contemporary work culture is understood as a national system supplemented by new values and attitudes that have been adopted through the mediation of foreign individuals and corporations or in response to the challenges of Western competition. It is argued that the foreign factor triggers change in the landscape of Russia's work culture, the scope of which depends on the type of influence. However, there is a certain core of the work culture that remains resistant to any external impact.

Read more less

In the past, the European social sciences labelled and discredited knowledge that did not follow the definition for scientific knowledge as applied by the European social sciences as an alternative concept of knowledge, as indigenous knowledge. Perception has changed with time: Not only has indigenous knowledge become an entrance ticket to the European social science world, but the indigenisation of European theories is seen by some as the contribution of peripheral social sciences to join the theories of the centres. This book offers contributions to the discourses about alternative concepts of knowledge, inviting the reader to decide if they are alternative, indigenous, or European types of knowledge. However, in order to make this decision, the reader must know what the nature of the European concepts of science and of scientific knowledge is; this might be a motivation to read a book that presents thoughts claiming to be alternative concepts of knowledge, alternative to the European concept of science.

Read more less

The European social sciences tend to absorb criticism that has been passed on the European approach and re-label it as a part of what the critique opposes; criticism of European social sciences by subaltern social sciences, their talking back, has become a frequent line of reflection in European social sciences. The re-labelling of the critique of the European approach to social sciences towards a critique from Southern social sciences of Western social sciences has somehow turned Southern as well as Western social sciences into competing contributors to the same globalising social sciences. Both are no longer arguing about the European approach to social sciences but about which social thought from which part of the globe prevails. If the critique becomes a part of what it opposes, one might conclude that the European social sciences are very adaptable and capable of learning. One might, however, also raise the question whether there is anything wrong with the criticism of the European social sciences; or, for that matter, whether there is anything wrong with the European social sciences themselves. The contributions in this book discuss these questions from different angles: They revisit the mainstream critique of the European social sciences, and they suggest new arguments criticising social science theories that may be found as often in the Western as in the Southern discourse.

Read more less

At the beginning of the new millennium, the social sciences discover an epochal turn making it necessary to revolutionise their theory-building: As a response to what they call the globalisation of the social, they find the need to globalise their theorising as well. It is odd to discover after two centuries of colonialism and imperialism, after two world wars and several economic world crises that there is a world beyond the national socials; it is even more strange that the social sciences globalise their theorising by comparing theories about nationally confined socials and by creating all sorts of, preferably, local theories, just as if any national social was a secluded social biotope. Discussing how to globalise the social sciences, they argue that globalising social science theorising means finding a way of theorising that must, above all, be liberated from scientism in order to allow a provincialisation of thinking. Not surprisingly, the globalising social sciences also rediscover mythological and moral thinking as a means for a true scientific universalism. Michael Kuhns book presents many thought-provoking arguments on the oddities of the globalising social sciences and on how these oddities are not accidents, but a consequence of the nature of how the social sciences theorise about the social.

Read more less

The special issue offers an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the questions of agency of less mainstream groups in protest movements in patriarchal and authoritarian societies. The themes covered include the place of feminist and gender equality movements in democratically restricted environments, intersections between feminism and nationalism and citizenship, possibilities of right-wing feminism and pop-feminism, the role of gender in high politics and the relationship between nationality and sexuality in the context of protest movements. The journal features contributions by scholars, human rights and gender equality activists, and journalists, and facilitates a constructive and wide-ranging discussion of the recent and ongoing protest movements in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.

Read more less

As Germany and the Soviet Union engaged in colossal battles during World War II, a much smaller but vicious struggle broke out in the borderlands of south-eastern Poland, resurrecting longstanding ethnic and territorial conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians. During the war, both sides organised large partisan armies and sought to establish control over territory each deemed integral to their post-war national visions. The violence reached a fever pitch only in the years immediately following the war. This comprehensive study provides a unique overview to Polish-Ukrainian relations dating back to the tenth century. Examining the development of this long-standing feud as part of a longer historical process that has occurred between the Polish and Ukrainian ethnic groups in Europe, Rapawy takes into consideration centuries of ethnic strife, population shifts that resulted from ethnic conquests, and the formation of national states after the First World War on multi-ethnic territories as a pre-condition for the events that occurred on the years following World War II.

Read more less

How can the performing arts add value to peacebuilding programs? Is it possible to use participatory theatre to reconnect and reconcile enemies? What is the trauma-healing effect for those acting in a theatre troupe? Claus Schrowange has explored these questions and the opportunities of using forum theatre in peace work in Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda, and DR Congo. His conclusion is that forum theatre is more than mere entertainment. It is an aesthetic tool for social change. But the value of theatre is not generated automatically, the way it is done matters. If it is done in a participatory manner with an authentic, believable acting style, involving both the audience and stage actor in a vivid and touching experience, the impact is immediately felt. This book presents the approach Schrowange developed together with a team of African theatre practitioners in a variety of circumstances and environments. It is illustrated with case studies taken from the author s direct experience of using the approach he describes in Eastern DR Congo and Rwanda.

Read more less

Surrogate motherhood is expanding all over the world. Debates rage over how public policy should consider the signing away of the parental rights of birth mothers in favor of a 'commissioning' couple or an individual. In this book, Daniela Danna describes the situation in English-speaking countries and worldwide, from California to Greece, presenting the legal alternatives regulating (or not) these peculiar exchanges. Should surrogacy remain a private agreement? Should it be treated as an enforceable contract? Are surrogate mothers workers? What happens inside the countries that have chosen different ways of handling this new and controversial matter? And, the most important question of all: How can we live in this era of new techno-medical possibilities and try to stay human? Can we resist commodification in the field of human relations concerning procreation? Contract Children discusses the different ways available to obtain a child through surrogate motherhood. It is fundamental reading for anyone wanting to be involved in the surrogacy process. It gives prospective surrogate mothers and infertile couples the background information necessary for their own informed decision. It is also an essential instrument for policy makers and activists in the field of women's rights, social justice, and children's rights. The question of how to publicly deal with surrogate motherhood touches upon our social vision of motherhood, ultimately marking the position of women in contemporary society.

Read more less

Baers biography of the former Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Vladimír Clementis (19021952) is the first historical study on the Communist politician who was executed with Rudolf Slánský and other top Communist Party members after the show trial of 1952. Born in Tisovec, Central Slovakia, Clementis studied law at Charles University in Prague in the 1920s and had his own law firm in Bratislava in the 1930s. After the Munich Agreement of 1938, he went into exile to France and Great Britain, where he worked at the Czechoslovak broadcast at the BBC for the exile government of Edvard Bene. After the Second World War, Clementis political career at the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry blossomed: In 1945, he became Assistant Secretary of State under Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. After Masaryks mysterious death in 1948, Clementis was appointed Foreign Minister. This biography offers an unprecedented insight into the mind of a Slovak leftist intellectual of the interwar generation who died at the command of the comrade he had admired since his youth: Generalissimus Stalin.

Read more less

Text in German. Seit 1997 ist das FORUM fester Bestandteil der Zeitschriftenlandschaft der Osteuropaforschung. Neben Fakten der Zeitgeschichte bietet es tiefe Einblicke in die Ideengeschichte, spiegelt aktuelle Diskussionen wider und liefert Rezensionen zu Werken der mittel- und osteuropäischen Zeitgeschichte. Gerade in den Rubriken Ideengeschichte und Zeitgeschichte bietet es mehr als "nur" Geschichte fächerübergreifend kommen u.a. Politologen, Literatur-, Rechts- und Wirtschaftswissenschaftler sowie Philosophen zu Wort. Das FORUM versteht sich als Brücke zwischen Ost und West. Durch die Übersetzung und Veröffentlichung von Dokumenten und Beiträgen aus dem Russischen, Polnischen und Tschechischen bietet es dem westlichen Leser Einblicke in den wissenschaftlichen Diskurs Osteuropas. Heft 1/2014: Der lange Abschied vom totalitären Erbe Das Modell der bundesrepublikanischen Vergangenheitsbewältigung gilt als Vorbild für viele postautoritäre bzw. posttotalitäre Transformationsstaaten in Ost und West, ungeachtet mancher Schattenseiten des langwierigen Prozesses der deutschen Vergangenheitsbewältigung nach der "Stunde Null". Das aktuelle Forum-Heft vergleicht in seinem thematischen Schwerpunkt die Spezifika der deutschen Erinnerungskultur mit denjenigen der osteuropäischen Länder, vor allem Polens und Russlands, seit dem Beginn der Entstalinisierungsdebatten.

Read more less

The violent protests that shook Bulgaria in recent years were fueled by a widespread belief that, after 25 years of transition, a new base for the political process is required. In this important new study, Popivanov provides a critical re-assessment of the role of the Bulgarian Socialist Party - arguably, the single most important political entity in Bulgaria's post-communist history. Assessing its internal problems and the challenges it faces from a new and radical grassroots Left, Popivanov asks why and how Bulgaria's Socialist Party was the only one in the Eastern bloc to remain an important political organization, after the end of communism. This timely book skillfully analyzes the current societal and political situation in Bulgaria that threatens the Socialists and argues for a complete reformulation of the concept of the 'Bulgarian Left'.

Read more less

Global, local, glocal reflecting on the area of world social science seems to be above all a matter of space. In these spatial dichotomies the global has no location and locations seem beyond this world. Discourses about world social science thought not only distinguish social thought along spaces where they are created. Space has become an attribute of thinking when social scientists reflect on the world of social thought: Southern, Western and Northern knowledge, the location in which thoughts are created, is not only a hint about the address of a thinker, but about the theoretical perspective through which social science thinkers look at social reality. Social thoughts are imagined as imprisoned in the spatial context in which they are created, and social science thinkers are imagined as representatives of spaces, whether these are defined politically, culturally, or in any other context in which their thoughts must be rooted as if the product of human minds was nothing but a voicing of the nature of spaces. And should we imagine the world social science arena, the encounter of all these spatially bound thoughts, as the encounter of many parochial knowledges that never manage to arrive at shared thoughts unless they already share the same spatial context? Why should we then at all meet each other? This book discusses examples of spatially constructed knowledges and the struggles these knowledges encounter as they seek to meet one another and escape from the mind prison of their spatial contexts. Or does the world social science arena after all only prove that the 'Western' dogma of contextualising social thought is a dead end road for social thought -- everywhere?

Read more less

Text in German. Die Überwindung der europäischen Spaltung ruft bis heute Staunen hervor. Damit ist vor allem das Szenario gemeint, nach dem die Rückkehr nach Europa" der vergessenen" östlichen Hälfte des alten Kontinents 1989-1991 erfolgte. Seit der bolschewistischen Machtergreifung im Oktober 1917 betrachteten die Kommunisten jede Infragestellung ihres Machtmonopols als eine gegenrevolutionäre Verschwörung, die sie mit allen ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Machtmitteln zu ersticken suchten. Warum ließen sie sich dann in vielen Ländern des Ostblocks in den Jahren 1989-91 beinahe widerstandslos entmachten? Mit dieser Frage befassen sich mehrere Aufsätze der vorliegenden Sammlung, und zwar am Beispiel der Sowjetunion (der Metropole des Ostblocks) und Polens - der unruhigsten Provinz an der westlichen Peripherie des äußeren Sowjetimperiums". Andere Beiträge des Bandes sind dem dornigen Weg des postsowjetischen Russland zur offenen Gesellschaft und der autoritären Wende im Lande nach dem Machtantritt Vladimir Putins im Jahre 2000 gewidmet, wobei auch manche Parallelen zwischen der ungefestigten zweiten" russischen Demokratie und den früheren demokratischen Experimenten in Russland (Februar-Oktober 1917) und in Deutschland (Weimarer Republik) erörtert werden.

Read more less

This book brings together monumental voices in the social sciences -- such as Jean-René Ladmiral from Paris and Peter Caws from Washington DC -- to begin to address the Humanities' specific issues with and debt to translation. Calling for a re-examination of how translations are read, critiqued, and taught in Philosophy, History, Political Science and Sociology departments, this book provides tools for reflection, bases for reconsideration of given translations, and historical observations on how thought has been shaped across national borders. The volume ends with four case studies -- examples from auto-translation in postcolonial literature, cultural issues of translation in Chinese-language cinema, negotiating meaning between linguistically and culturally different audiences in the United States and Lebanon, to verbal-visual questions of translation in marketing to German and French clients. All in all, this book is a comprehensive, compact survey of the cultural and linguistic translation and transmission issues in the social sciences today. The book is illuminating and informative. A great tool for study or debate.

Read more less

This compilation of essays by scholars from the region, Western Europe, and the US, explores the intersection of international politics in the post-Yugoslav states with a focus on the influence and impact of the European Union, the United States, Russia, China, and Turkey. The implications of external actors policy in the region for its Euro-Atlantic integration, its security, and stability are examined and discussed. In assessing the importance of the post-Yugoslav states for the EU and US and the current trend of disengagement by these two democratic actors in the region, answers are revealed regarding the question whether we are seeing a new Eastern Question emerging in the post-Yugoslav states. Likewise, when looking at the role of Russia, China, and Turkey in the regionand in contrast to European and US policies, it becomes obvious to what extent the region, once again, is becoming the playground of Great Power games and wider geopolitical strategic interests. The analytical time frame covers the period 19912018. The changes in the foreign policies of great powers are explored as they relate to the institutional set-up of the region. For instance, do the changes affect the EUs hegemony in the region? Do Russia, China, and Turkey actively contribute to changing the rules of the game in the regionbe it the accession process or regional cooperation?

Read more less

This collection is a multi-author volume of essays examining the work of over twenty poets from South Western Ireland, who write in both English and Irish. Offering overviews of each of the poets work, the chapters also focus on significant features of their respective oeuvres. Among the poets studied are Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Seán Ó Tuama, John Montague, Gerry Murphy, Thomas McCarthy, Trevor Joyce, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa. The multifaceted volume addresses the different currents that are significant in the work of these poets, from the Modernism of MacGreevy to the politico-historical approach adopted by Thomas McCarthy. It places poetry in English and Irish side by side and creates a system of echoes that become apparent when the poets work is read in conjunction with that of their fellow writers. The contributors to the volume come from Ireland, the US, and Europe and include confirmed and emerging academics.

Read more less

This is an award-winning exploration of both the histories and personal stories of fourteen ethnic minority groups living within the boundaries of present-day Ukraine: Czechs and Slovaks, Meskhetian Turks, Swedes, Romanians, Hungarians, Roma, Jews, Liptaks, Gagauzes, Germans, Vlachs, Poles, Crimean Tatars, and Armenians. Based on a combination of academic research, fieldwork, and interviews, Olesya Yaremchuks literary reportages paint realistic, thoughtful, and historically informed depictions of how these various groups arrived in Ukraine and how they have fared within the countrys borders. Accompanied by vivid photographs that bring the reportages to life, Our Others is in some respects a chronicle of the myriad voluntary and forced migrations that have rolled through Ukraine for centuries. Simultaneously, the book offers a tender -- and timely -- study of the little islands of cultural diversity in Ukraine that have survived the Soviet steamroller of planned linguistic, cultural, and religious unification and that deserve acknowledgement in Ukraines broader cultural identity. The volumes contributors are: Marta Barnych (contributing co-author), Anton Semyzhenko (contributing co-author), Ostap Slyvynsky (foreword)

Read more less

This collection of texts by writers, historians, philosophers, political analysts, and opinion leaders combines reflections on Ukrainian history and analyses of the present with outlines of conceptual ideas and life stories. The authors present a multi-faceted image of Ukraines memory and reality touching upon topics from the Holodomor to Maidan, from the Russian aggression to cultural diversity, from the depth of the past to the complexity of the present. The contributors include Ola Hnatiuk, Irena Karpa, Haska Shyyan, Larysa Denysenko, Hanna Shelest, Andriy Kulakov, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Serhii Plokhy, Yuri Andrukhovych, Andriy Kurkov, Andrij Bondar, Vakhtang Kebuladze, Volodymyr Rafeenko, Alim Aliev, Leonid Finberg, and Andriy Portnov. The book was initially published by Internews Ukraine and UkraineWorld with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

Read more less

Lex Fullarton takes a closer look at the three pillars of the sustainable development framework known as the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). The concept of the TBL is that for a project to be sustainable it must not simply be profitable in economic terms, but it must also benefit society and enhance the natural environment. In the 21st century, the greatest threat to Earths natural environment and the population of the planet is the rise of greenhouse gas emissions caused from burning fossil fuel as an energy source. The rise of GHG emissions has resulted in a rise in the ambient air temperature of the Earths atmosphere and is resulting in a significant change in climatic conditions on Earth. Fullarton scrutinizes the problem of getting industry and governments to understand the significance of creating harmony within the TBL. One of the main problems is that partisan politics tends to fragment the factors of the TBL rather than bring them together. Fullarton takes a strong stand in suggesting that taxation systems, which have traditionally been viewed primarily as a means of raising government finance, can be effectively applied to influence industrial and consumer attitudes towards transiting away from polluting fossil-fuel energy sources towards non-polluting renewable energy use.

Read more less

The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

Read more less

This book details how Russia's February 2022 open invasion of Ukraine has led to the biggest military conflagration and refugee crisis in Europe since World War II-a development with global ramifications. Co-written by a leading Western political expert, with three decades of research on contemporary Ukraine, and a prolific British journalist, the book explains why Russian President Vladimir Putin has been long obsessed with Ukraine and how his reliance on dated nationalist myths as well as anti-Western xenophobia led him to miscalculate Ukrainian and Western reactions to his brazen aggression against a sovereign country and founding member of the United Nations since 1945. Taras Kuzio and Stefan Jajecznyk-Kelman analyze how Putin's blunders have led to the collapse of Russia's Eurasian sphere of influence, to the growth of China's presence in Russia's backyard in Central Asia, and to conditions for the toppling of Putin's regime.The book focuses on:- the roots of Putin's obsession with Ukraine and the genocidal policies his army is pursuing through war crimes, deportations of millions of Ukrainians as well as destruction of property and infrastructure,- why the supposed 'second biggest army in the world' is being defeated by Ukraine, a country Russian nationalists argue is fictitious, and by a Ukrainian people they claim does not exist,- how Ukraine is fighting a people's war with a nation-wide volunteer movement, civil society, and international supporters who are backing the Ukrainian army through fund raising, purchasing of supplies and military equipment, such as drones, and through an 'IT Army' fighting Russia's invasion in cyber space and the hacking of Russian media,- how the invasion is having profound negative implications for Russian-Ukrainian relations and why in breaking from Moscow, Ukraine is again the key actor-as it was in 1991-in the disintegration of the Soviet and Russian empires, and- how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to global crises in economic growth, trade, and finances, as well as to changing geopolitical alliances, with the decline of Russia creating a vacuum that allows for the rise of China.

Read more less

This book analyzes security developments in Lithuania since 1988, a period marked by liberation from nearly fifty years of Soviet occupation, the collapse of the USSR, and the integration of the country into NATO. Furmonavicius focuses on how Lithuania achieved liberation and how the country's integration into the European and Transatlantic security framework has influenced both its own and transatlantic security development.

Read more less

This book delves into the complex and often contradictory relations between the Southern Caucasus and European Union (EU). It covers the three periods of this relationship: the early contacts in the 1990s, the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), and the Eastern Partnership Programme (EaP) that started in 2009. The book employs Europeanization theory and uses a mixed rationalist-constructivist framework as a complementary analytical instrument to decipher the two sides' behavior.The study's findings show that the complex relationship between the EU and Caucasian states cannot be explained through either a purely constructivist or a purely rationalist theoretical framework. Both, material and social motives are discernible. Thus, rationalism and constructivism are complementary tools for explaining the relations between the EU and South Caucasus countries.The rationalist perspective explains actors' preferences towards maximizing material utility and calculations by EU policymakers as to which strategy is most likely to advance the immediate interests of the EU in a given situation. This argument needs to be supplemented, however, with insights from constructivism. This approach emphasizes the universal nature of the values of the EU which are linked to internal dynamics in the EU and manifest themselves in the Union's relations with neighboring countries. The book finally illustrates how rational considerations, related to Russia's political and economic activities in the region, have determined the stances of the South Caucasus countries towards the EU.

Read more less

This work is a contemporary historical, narrative analysis of events in and around Ukraine from 2013 to 2019. These years were almost as significant for Ukraine as the achievement of independence in 1991, because Ukraine was in danger of losing its independence again after the victory of the "Maidan". This popular uprising against the kleptocratic regime of President Yanukovych led to a takeover of power by the parliamentary opposition-and to the total loss of influence by Russia. Against the threat of Russian troops deploying along the border, Russian agents in eastern Ukraine tried to bring about a "Crimea scenario," i.e. the secession of the eastern part of the country.President Putin intended to resolve the "Ukraine conflict", which in truth is not a "civil war" but a Russian war of attrition against Ukraine, on his terms in the "Minsk process": namely, by creating an "autonomous" part of the Donbas within the Ukrainian state-as a lever for Russian influence over the whole of Ukraine.The author concludes by placing the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the context of the dawning "Chinese century".The book draws from academic literature, official publications, and a variety of current news in print and digital outlets. It is essential reading for everyone who wants to understand the current situation in Ukraine.

Read more less

Oleksandra Keudel proposes a novel explanation for why some local governments in hybrid regimes enable citizen participation while others restrict it. She argues that mechanisms for citizen participation are by-products of political dynamics of informal business-political (patronal) networks that seek domination over local governments. Against the backdrop of either competition or coordination between patronal networks in their localities, municipal leaders cherry-pick citizen participation mechanisms as a tactic to sustain their own access to resources and functions of local governments.This argument is based on an in-depth comparative analysis of patronal network arrangements and the adoption of citizen participation mechanisms in five urban municipalities in Ukraine during 2015–2019: Chernivtsi, Kharkiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Lviv, and Odesa. Fifty-seven interviews with citizen participation experts, local politicians and officials, representatives of civil society and the media, as well as utilization of secondary analytical sources, official government data, and media reports provide a rich basis for an investigation of context-specific choices of municipal leaders that result in varying mechanisms for citizen participation.

Read more less

Serhy Yekelchyk analyzes the uneasy post-Soviet transition in Ukrainian historical writing. He discusses the challenge of transcending not just Soviet ideological dogmas, but also the "Soviet" way of understanding historical processes and human actions. Two major factors have been influencing this transition: contacts with the Ukrainian diaspora and the "rediscovery," also facilitated by the diaspora, of long-suppressed Ukrainian historical scholarship from the early twentieth century. However, the diaspora was more than the keeper of pre-Soviet historical narratives. By the early 1990s, it had professional historians practicing modern historical approaches, which also made an impact on the Ukrainian historical scholarship. Yekelchyk explores the application of Post-Colonial theory to Ukrainian and diasporic writing on the central problem of Modern Ukrainian history, that of nation building. He also highlights new-transnational and cultural-history-approaches to the study of Ukrainian history.One of the book's most important conclusions concerns the global character of present-day Ukrainian historiography, with scholars originally from Ukraine and those of non-Ukrainian background playing an increasingly prominent role in the West, and Ukrainian-based historians actively participating in Western projects, publications, and debates.

Read more less

The pharmaceutical ecosystem in Basel, Switzerland, concentrates highly skilled professionals and their families into a small area, profoundly changing the local social landscape and transforming the lived experiences of those involved. Using a multidisciplinary approach to unpack the narratives of belonging at work and home, the author offers perspectives of self-discovery, personal growth, and corporate mobility. How can culture be understood, negotiated, and built through emotional capital and sensorial mobility? If you are looking to learn more about what to expect when moving as a family on international assignments or are keen to explore some typical aspects of life in Basel, the insights from this book will help you pick up strategies to start you on your journey.

Read more less

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative has produced a flurry of activities both in the countries of the South Caucasus and in Russia. While mostly analyzed through the lens of geo-politics and geo-economics, there is new research emerging that represents more sophisticated approaches from a variety of social science disciplines. This volume, based on the AESC Annual Convention in December 2020, collects a sample of critical voices to study the effects of infrastructure projects on local livelihoods, on sustainable and environmentally sound development, transparency, and inclusiveness.

Read more less

The right to be elected, although an important political right guaranteed in human rights documents on international and regional levels, is still an under-researched and undertheorized concept with many synonyms in use. While the right to vote is often correlated with democracy, the closely related right to be elected is often neglected, and the constitutions of most countries are silent about it.The 2009 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision in the case of Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina started the discussions concerning the discrimination in enjoyment of the right to be elected in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the right to be elected is not explicitly guaranteed in the Dayton Constitution but only in the Law on Election, the ECHR considered equal enjoyment of this right by everyone in Bosnia and Herzegovina of high importance and declared the relevant Dayton Constitution's provisions discriminatory. The book explains the conceptual relevance of the right to be elected, its interrelatedness with the right to vote and both these rights' significance for democratic systems. Through analyzing and explaining the regional human rights tribunal's decisions concerning the right to be elected, the importance of this political right is elucidated.

Read more less

This book is the essence of a scientific research endeavour aspired to tackle the challenges of ever-growing data traffic in mobile networks. The contemporary mobile communication systems offer efficient services to broadband applications. However, narrowband Machine-to-Machine (M2M) data traffic handling remains still a concern. This book advocates a set of protocols for aggregation and multiplexing of M2M data traffic at an intermediate node before transmission to the core network. The devised framework is realised by two independent methods: the simulation approach and the analytical approach. The outcomes obtained through both methods are compared to validate the results. The statistical significance of simulation results is established by the determination of confidence intervals. The findings suggest significant improvements in radio resource utilisation when serving M2M traffic.

Read more less

The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022. It began eight years earlier in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region. In his new book, Jakob Hauter investigates the escalation of violence in the spring and summer of 2014. He demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, the pre-2022 conflict was not a civil war. Ukraine has been fighting a Russian invasion since the armed conflict's very beginning. Hauter arrives at this conclusion based on a thorough review of the digital open source information (DOSI) available on the Internet. He argues that social science research needs theoretical and methodological innovation to operate in the abundant but murky information environment surrounding the Donbas War and other conflicts of the social media age. To address this challenge, he develops an escalation sequence model which divides the formative phase of the Donbas War into six critical junctures. He then combines the social science methodology of process tracing with DOSI analysis to investigate the causes of these critical junctures. For each juncture, Hauter assesses the available evidence of domestic causes and Russian interference, reaching the conclusion that, in most cases, there is convincing evidence that Russian involvement was the primary cause of armed escalation.

Read more less

After their Shreds of War: Fates from the Donbas Frontline 2015–2019, Eperjesi and Kachura uncover in this second volume effects of the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia. Oleksandr managed to visit the peninsula not long after its occupation by Russian troops. While doing interviews with local people, he was threatened by the authorities yet managed to escape with his exclusive stories of teachers and students, pensioners, children and their parents, market vendors and businessmen, homeless people, health care employees and their patients, the so called "cotton wool people," and Ukrainian patriots. Many of them told him about how hopeful they were in early 2014, and how disappointed they have become as their expectations were not met by the "Russian world." This concerns the banking system of Crimea, propaganda and censorship of the Russian state, and failed tourist seasons.People still living or somehow related to Crimea tell us about the dramatic days of the illegal annexation. They explain what led to the tragedy and what mistakes were made by the Ukrainian authorities. Ordinary people, soldiers, journalists, heroes and traitors, emigrants, Crimean Tatars, Russian soldiers, Cossacks and the members of the so called "Crimean Self-Defense" disclose how they contributed to the historic events on the peninsula. Finally, the famous Crimean film director Oleh Sentsov shares with us how he managed to survive his illegal imprisonment by Russia and what impact it has had on his life.

Read more less

This edited volume critically assesses different aspects of five literary genres novels, poetry, short-stories, drama, and non-fictional prose contributed to by the Indian diasporic writers settled principally in North America and Europe. Films made by or on members of the Indian diaspora have been also checked out. The predominant approach in the anthology is not only a feminist one, although special emphasis is given on assessing the writings by females. The emphasis of the anthology is on: (a) critical analyses of themes, styles, diction, and relevance of the writings; (b) assessment of the research potentialities of these writings; (c) examining how literary theories could be used for explaining and assessing the writings; (d) proper contextualization of the writings; and (e) finding out the historical roots and suggesting the future prospects of such writings. The essays included in the book re-read Indian diasporic writings for their appreciable points as well as those which need development. The collection fills in lacuna of critical approaches to Indian diasporic writings presently available in the market. In fact, there is scarcely any book presently available that covers critical approaches to all the five literary genres of Indian diasporic writings.

Read more less

This book engages critically with some of the major assumptions of prominent Transhumanists such as Nick Bostrom of Oxford University and Stefan Sorgner of John Cabot University at Rome. More broadly, questions concerning the complex relationships between society, technology, and ethics are widely explored. Major thinkers such as St. Augustine, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and C. S. Lewis are enlisted to highlight and support the major arguments presented by the author. The book aims at a general readership interested in the current claims and possible outcomes of the Transhumanist and Posthumanist movement. It strikes a cautionary note about humanity's reliance on emerging technologies, particularly their potential to enhance and, eventually transform, human life span, cognition, and emotion.

Read more less

The war separated families, took lives, broke fates ... It is very important to know and remember it at any time. Even many decades later, new details, memories, and testimonies appear. This book gathers several fascinating, true family stories written from accounts of parents, grandparents, etc. The authors, whose articles were collected with the help of the popular scientific publication Historical Truth, tell us about the worst war of the 20th century, about the fate of those people whose lives were divided forever into "before" and "after." Here we can find first-hand accounts about Ukrainians who fought in various armies, about the lives of deported people, about the fate of people taken to compulsory labour camps, and about the men and women who remain in our memories forever.

Read more less

Every major socio-political change starts with some discarding. Suffice it to think about the heaps of rubbish consisting of old furniture, cars, busts of famous communist leaders, badges, and books on the streets of Eastern Europe in the fall/winter of 1989/1990. Among the institutions which have the greatest amount of experience with discarding are libraries: Counterintuitive as it may seem, libraries (but also museums and archives) regularly discard books as part of their job. In the wake of the collapse of communism in Europe, stock revision was needed in libraries, but did it unfold in a business as usual fashion or was it a bibliocide (as it was labelled by some media in Croatia) or even the biggest destruction of books in the post-war period (as it was characterized by a German journalist)? When does a standard library practice start attracting public attention? What happened in Croatia that there is even a Wikipedia page about bookicide in the 1990s? This book approaches the issue on at least three levels (phenomenological, discursive, and theoretical) and from three angles (from the point of view of librarians, non-professionals, and, metaphorically, discarded books themselves). The aim is to offer an innovative and original interpretation of post-socialist transition and post-Yugoslav memory while at the same time providing an empirically founded case study of the inconsistencies and lack of implementation of regulations in the field of librarianship in Croatia as opposed to a seemingly more synchronized environment in Slovenia.

Read more less

Anastasia Lysyvets's memoir Tell us about a happy life... (Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia...), published in Kyiv in 2009 and now available for the first time in an English translation, is one of the most powerful testimonies of a victim of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. This mass starvation was organized by the Soviet regime and resulted in millions of deaths by hunger. The simple village teacher Lysyvets's testimony, written during the 1970s and 1980s without hope of publication, depicts pain, death, and hunger as few others do. In his commentary, Vitalii Ogiienko explains how traumatic traces found their way into Lysyvets's text. He proposes that the reader develops an alternative method of reading that replaces the usual ways of imagining with a focus on the body and that detects mechanisms of transmission of the original Holodomor experience through generations.

Read more less

Since the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis, ourlives have completely changed: Shutdowns, working in home offices, contact restrictions, daily bulletins from virologists, protest movements, and conspiracy fantasies seem to have become part of our new everyday life. Could we have been prepared for this? Totally. It's all been there before: in the movies. Science fiction films and series have always dealt with the future and its possible course, social changes, and conflicts in a speculative way. Denis Newiak searches through the scenes of pandemic movies and series to bring out ideas for how to cope with the social, political, and economic challenges of the crisis. Can the scenarios developed in film help us to pass this test-and to emerge from it with greater strength?

Read more less

The scope of multilingualism and multiculturalism within societies is increasing on a global scale. As this is happening, discussions are emerging concerning the significance of including a variety of perspectives in classroom discourse as well as the imperative of ridding it of a prevailing monocultural straitjacket. Against the backdrop of these changing realities, authors have advocated for a revision and adaptation of current teaching methodology and classroom materials in order to do greater justice to an increasingly diverse student population. This book presents the findings from a qualitative research project conducted in Australia, a country acclaimed for its linguistic and cultural diversity. Specifically, the study investigated the educational context of Indigenous Australian learners by shedding light on the incorporation of First Nations perspectives in teaching materials and methodology. Additionally, the project identified therewith-related challenges and possibilities for improvement. The results provide insights into the multifacetedness of language- as well as culture-related factors, which prove vital for learning processes. Moreover, the results reveal the complexities arising in connection with the incorporation of First Nations perspectives in classroom discourse. The data also point towards dimensions for improvement and recommendations for action for educators working in diverse classroom settings. As growing linguistic and cultural diversity has become a global reality, this volume, addressing Australian First Nations perspectives, offers an important contribution to the field of contemporary education.

Read more less