Search results for ""ibidem-Verlag, Jessica Haunschild u Christian Schon""

"Memory is Our Home" is a powerful biographical memoir based on the diaries of Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc, who was born in Warsaw before the end of World War I, grew up during the interwar period and who, after escaping the atrocities of World War II, was able to survive in the vast territories of Soviet Russia and Uzbekistan. Translated by her own daughter, interweaving her own recollections as her family made a new life in the shadows of the Holocaust in Communist Poland after the war and into the late 1960s, this book is a rich, living document, a riveting account of a vibrant young woman's courage and endurance. A forty-year recollection of love and loss, of hopes and dreams for a better world, it provides richly-textured accounts of the physical and emotional lives of Jews in Warsaw and of survival during World War II throughout Russia. This book, narrated in a compelling, unique voice through two generations, is the proverbial candle needed to keep memory alive.

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More than 20 years have passed since the introduction of the Universal Character Set. However, legacy applications still cannot even render German umlauts correctly. Part of this problem is a hidden political agenda: Consciously or unconsciously, patterns of the Cold War are continued in the interaction between Western and Eastern European languages. This book examines the current use of diacritical marks in Western Europe, such as the use of names from Slavic languages in electronic data processing systems. The role of the media as multiplier receives particular attention, with most error examples taken from actual media coverage. Considering international, EU, and national law and referring to landmark court decisions, Kappenberg answers the question: 'Is there a right to diacritical marks in people's names?' This is followed by a description of current practice in several European countries. Finally, Setting Signs for Europe answers the question how in the framework of the EU's multilingualism policy, effective approaches can be created to raise awareness among software vendors, the media, government agencies, and individuals regarding the correct handling of diacritics. Kappenberg also assesses the use of diacritics as a style element and offers an improved input method for diacritics.

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Serbia is still widely thought of as an unfinished state, whose people struggle to establish a compelling identity narrative in answer to the question 'who are we?'. While existing literature has over-analyzed Serbian nationalism, the Serbian public sphere remains largely ignored. This engaging and timely book fills this gap by giving context to the persistent and overwhelming dialogue between opposing factions on the identity spectrum in Serbia. Russell-Omaljev's focus on elite discourses provides a fresh perspective on this contentious subject. It offers an original understanding of the competing arguments surrounding 'First' and 'Other' Serbia and of the contested visions of Serbian national identity and broader European identity. By closely examining the identity vocabulary of Serbian elites and the opposing ways in which these elites view the use of labels such as 'anti-Serbian', 'patriot', and 'traitor', this book provides a vital lesson in post-conflict nation-building and raises important questions about the symbolic representations of political and cultural identities. A much-needed and compelling intervention in the Serbian identity discourse, Russell-Omaljev's work is a must-read for any researcher on the Western Balkans.

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"This collection of essays, most of which return to or renew something of an empirical or archival approach to the issues, represents the most comprehensive analysis of Beckett's relationship to philosophy in print, how philosophical issues, conundrums, and themes play out amid narrative intricacies. The volume is thus both an astonishingly comprehensive overview and a series of detailed readings of the intersection between philosophical texts and Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, offered by a plurality of voices and bookended by an historical introduction and a thematic conclusion." - S.E.Gontarski, Journal of Beckett Studies. "This is an important contribution to ongoing attempts to understand the relationship of Beckett's work to philosophy. It breaks some new ground, and helps us to consider not only how Beckett made use of philosophy but how his own thought might be understood philosophical." - Anthony Uhlmann, University of Western Sydney.

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The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualise and exemplify the recent "empirical turn" in Beckett studies. Characterised, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyse his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. The book thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as "historicist" scholars and critics of modernism more generally.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the Cold War's most iconic writers. This book offers an in-depth analysis of his reception in the US, UK, and Germany before and after 1991. Elisa Kriza skilfully explores how Solzhenitsyn's work can be understood with the paradigm of witness literature and uncovers the dynamics behind the politicised reception of his writing. From the mid-1980s onwards, Solzhenitsyn's popularity dwindled -- was this for ideological reasons? What about the rumours linking him with Russian nationalism? This study does not shy away from stretching beyond anti-communism and touching more contentious subjects -- such as anti-feminism, anti-Semitism, and revisionism -- in Solzhenitsyn's work and reception. Bringing Solzhenitsyn back from his 'critical exile' and redefining his work as memory culture, Kriza's book is a crucial scholarly intervention, unveiling the mechanism that can transform a controversial figure into a moral icon.

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This book offers a long overdue account of the wide range of corruption and cheating practices in Russian higher education, including bribery, financial fraud, clientelism, plagiarism, exam cheating, and much more. Serghei Golunov ruthlessly uncovers the recent social trends that have created a favourable ground for such malpractices and evaluates the efficiency of measures taken against corruption and fraud by various actors. Although corruption and cheating are so wide-spread in most Russian universities that the real value of their diplomas is very questionable, these problems are prioritised neither by higher education managers nor by foreign actors such as partner universities, participants of the Bologna process, or the authors of global university rankings.

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The European Union has developed a range of instruments to promote democracy and human rights worldwide. However, the success of its democratisation efforts remains questionable in countries that lack an EU membership perspective. The case of post-soviet Central Asia, where the EU declares democracy promotion among its key priorities yet is confronted with unfavourable domestic conditions for democratisation and often fails to follow through, is an eye-opening example. Vera Axyonova's study offers the first comprehensive evaluation of the micro-level effects of the EU engagement in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and examines the factors that have made the EU efforts more or less successful in Central Asia.

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To the public's eye, lobbying is still a highly obscure trade. Lobbyists are generally perceived to work behind closed doors in order to influence legislation -- what really happens is unknown to the public. To make interest representatives more visible, both the European Union and the United States have developed mechanisms to register lobbyists. However, while US legislation now forces lobbyists to register and report their influential work by fixed deadlines, the EU's registration remains voluntary due to the lack of a legal basis. This book takes the reader closer to today's concept of lobbying, especially in regard to the EU's registration mechanism. Lisa Moessing compares both the US and the EU registration systems by their technical composition, accessibility, and handling and contrasts their efficiency and effectiveness. Providing a forum for 17 lobbyists, watch dog members, and political representatives to discuss lobbying registration, this book defines starting points for improvement and emphasises the importance of listening to those who deal with the registers in everyday practice.

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This book offers an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach to fiction, reality, and narrativity applied to television series from all over the world. Dissecting the almost invisible barrier between fiction and reality in TV series from various perspectives, the chapters cover a wide range of contemporary classics from the post-network age. From "The X-Files" and "Desperate Housewives" to "The Wire" and "Breaking Bad", the chapters sketch TV series' development from the lowest form of mass entertainment to the sophisticated vehicle of highbrow intertextuality on a global scale. Also covering many international cases from Brazil, Serbia, Romania, and Turkey and locating them in the global web of puzzle narratives, the unique contributions draw connections between the most diverse audiences and the way they receive modern storytelling in a culturally globalised world. This timely volume is a great resource for anyone interested in contemporary mass culture.

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This innovative book provides new perspectives on the globalization of knowledge and the notion of hegemonic sciences. Tying together contributions of authors from all across the world, it challenges existing theories of hegemonic sciences and sheds new light on how they have been and are being constructed. Examining more closely the notions of 'human rights' and 'individualization', this much-needed volume offers new and alternative ideas on how to transform the universalization of the Western model of science and can serve as an eye-opener for all those interested in non-hegemonic scientific discourse. This book is published within the Series 'Beyond the Social Sciences'.

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Christina Rossetti's poetry and prose, written in 19th-century England, deals with the human fixation on appearance. Her belief in the Tractarian precepts of the Oxford Movement, primarily expostulated by John Keble and John Newman, transformed Rossetti's outlook on perception. Her association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood also influenced her obsession with sight and insight. The focus of Melanie Hanson's study is the re-envisionment of Christina Rossetti's poetry and prose from three theoretical perspectives: deconstructionist theory, feminist literary theory, and Marxist literary criticism. The first part of her book explores Christina Rossetti's fascination with Plato's eye of the mind in The Allegory of the Cave. Rossetti believed that the physical eyes must be shut so that the eye of the mind could be wide open, creating in-sight. She connected the eye of the mind to her Tractarian religious beliefs. In her writings, the 'eye of the mind also relates to Eastern religious philosophy. The 'eye of the mind sees an alternate perception of reality. Rossetti was not only obsessed with the gaze and the object of the gaze in her writing, but she also re-fashioned John Milton's Eve from Paradise Lost into her own vision of Eve and the creation cycle in Rossetti's poetry and prose. Part 2 asserts that the author, Melanie Hanson, believes Rossetti's re-envisionment of the figure of Eve in Rossetti's writing contributes to the emergence of feminist literary criticism in the 20th century. Although Christina Rossetti was not a feminist, her poetry and prose have been examined by post-modern feminists concerning psychoanalytic and historic issues. Rossetti's envisionment of the consumed consumer is the subject of part 3, in which Marxist literary theory is used to examine Rossetti's epic poem Goblin Market. Previous literary criticism discussions concerning Rossetti's poetic and prose observations on the eye lack a concentrated examination of Rossetti's interest in Plato, especially Plato's eye of the mind, and Plato's influence on Rossetti. Hanson's book addresses this ground-breaking area of study. Her book is aimed at Christina Rossetti scholars and English Victorian literature aficionados who wish to explore Rossetti's contribution to the literary canon from new angles in literary criticism.

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The collection at hand is a subjective, but representative selection of articles in German and English on the representation of bellicose acts in modern times. The wide range of wars treated in these essays begins with the Canudos Civil War in the Brazilian state of Bahia in 1896-97. The various articles include new perceptions and interpretations of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, the Holocaust, the Second World War, the Korean War, the wars in the former Portuguese colonies of Africa, and the Balkan Wars of the last decade of the 20th century, and close with the current war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001. The wars discussed, although having different origins, such as national pride, territorial expansion, fanatic religiousness, ethnic and racial conflicts, great social differences, the process of decolonization, and terrorism, have one thing in common: their significant and constant repercussion in the print and broadcast media over a long period of time. These modern wars have therefore often been the object of new readings and reinterpretations until today. The history of these wars could not have been written without the development of journalism, the mass media, and new technologies of war reporting in the 20th century.

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Emily Hobhouse, 1860-1926, was one of the first great women of the twentieth century. She was a feminist, a pacifist and an internationalist, and above all a humanitarian. She worked tirelessly for the disadvantaged and, in the case of the South African women and children who were herded into concentration camps by Lord Kitchener, was relentless in expounding their cause. This took great courage. She was deported from Cape Town, and was unable to get legal redress. Emily Hobhouse's young life was spent in a tiny village in east Cornwall where her father was Rector and it was only when he died that she was able to expand her horizons. She was 35 and untrained. She went to Minnesota, U.S.A., to do welfare work for Cornish miners and formed an unfortunate relationship with a man who became Mayor of the town. They planned to marry and live in Mexico. Emily spent a trying time until the engagement was broken off just before the Boer War started. After the war she travelled through the ravaged areas of South Africa and devised a successful scheme of home industries for young girls on isolated farms. Illness forced her to seek refuge in Italy where she remained almost to the beginning of World War I, and began her famous correspondence first with J C Smuts and then with Isabel Steyn. Her comments on the events of the day show unusual foresight. She was loved by the people of South Africa and admired by those like Mahatma Gandhi who asked for her help. She was a bit of a painter, a writer and an entertainer, and in spite of ill-health travelled easily between countries, even in the midst of the first World War when she went to Germany, and hoped to obtain peace. Returning to Europe after that war Emily Hobhouse put into a place a number of schemes to help the impoverished, but the cry of the children of Leipzig won her particular sympathy, and with the help of the Save the Children Fund and later the South Africans she devised a feeding scheme for them. The South Africans so admired her that they clubbed together to buy her a little house in Cornwall, at St. Ives. Later Emily moved to London where she died, 8th June 1926. Her remains were cremated and the ashes buried at the foot of the memorial for the women and children who died in the Anglo Boer War for whom she had worked so hard. This book contains an outline of Emily Hobhouse's life and work including much new material; official and unofficial records of the Concentration Camps set up by Lord Kitchener in the Anglo Boer War; many letters, and correspondence with J C Smuts and Isabel Steyn, wife of the ex-President of the Orange Free State.

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Inci Bilgin Tekin's study offers a comparative perspective on two very challenging contemporary female playwrights, Liz Lochhead and Cherrie Moraga, and their Scottish and Chicanese adaptations of myths -- such as the Greek Medea and Oedipus or the Mayan Popul Vuh -- which address ethnic, racial, gender, and hierarchical oppression. Her book incorporates postcolonial and feminist readings of Lochhead's and Moraga's plays while it also explores different mythologies on the background. Bilgin Tekin not only introduces an original point of view on Liz Lochhead's and Cherrie Moraga's plays as adaptations or rewrites, but also calls attention to the non-canonized Scottish, Aztec, and Mayan mythologies. Following an innovative approach, she discusses the question in which ways Lochhead's and Moraga's adaptations of myths are challenges to the canon and further suggests a feminist version of Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed". The study appeals to readers of mythology, drama, and comparative literature. Those interested in postcolonial and feminist theories will also gain valuable new insights.

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Landscape is the impression given by a place. The five senses construct five landscapes: there is not only the visual landscape but also non-visual landscapes such as smell, touch, sound ("sound-scape"), and taste landscapes. The visual landscape is experienced by most people, while the remaining four non-visual landscapes mainly construct the non-visual world of the blind. In their innovative study, Angeliki Koskina and Nikolas Hasanagas explore this non-visual world on an empirical basis. What land-scapes do blind people prefer? Is the natural or built environment most attractive for them? How differently do blind people perceive the landscape" compared to sighted people? Which feelings does the landscape evoke in blind people, and which values do they attach to these feelings? How satisfied do they feel with the urban or natural landscapes where they live? Spatial Planning and Land-scape Design for handicapped people constitute a much-discussed academic and social issue. Koskina's and Hasanagas' study in the Anthropology of Senses and in Landscape Sociology can be used as an aid tool for planners and designers as well as researchers in various areas such as Architecture, Medicine, Social Sciences, or Psychology.

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How are youth cultural identities rooted in gender, ethnicity and place? What resources do young people from ethnic minorities use in creating their cultural identities? Drawing upon interdisciplinary research, Ulrike Ziemer's case study demonstrates the different ways in which young people from ethnic minorities respond to the social, political, and cultural transformations of post-Soviet Russia and provides a detailed analysis of how local vs. global relations are experienced outside the West. Relying on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Ziemer explores the complex processes of identity formation and cultural experiences among young Armenians in Krasnodar krai and young Adyghs in the Republic of Adyghea. Both ethnic groups, Armenians and Adyghs, have a minority status in Russia, yet Adyghs are indigenous to the region while Armenians constitute a diaspora people. Ulrike Ziemer is the first to examine specifically Armenian and Adygh youth identities in the context of everyday life experiences in post-Soviet Russia.

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In this amply illustrated book, Hellman and Rogachevskii tell the fascinating story behind the screen adaptation of one of the most impactful novels of all times. Despite its huge global success, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn refused all offers to have his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich turned into a movie for many years for artistic reasons. It took the full resolve and commitment of the Finnish director Caspar Wrede to bring this challenging project to fruition, eight years after the novel had been published. This second, expanded edition offers an all-encompassing account of the movie's production, reception and impact. Filled with little-known facts, it also gives unique and valuable insights into Solzhenitsyn's complex relationship with the art of film-making.

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This volume of collected papers takes stock of what has become known about the war in eastern Ukraines Donets Basin (Donbas) between April 2014 and mid-2020. It provides an introduction to the conflict and illustrates the key point of contention in the academic debate surrounding it -- the question whether this war is primarily an internal Ukrainian phenomenon or the result of a covert Russian invasion. The contributions by recognized specialists from Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and Japan offer multifaceted views and insights into this long-lasting conflict for both expert readers and those who are new to the topic. The volumes contributors are Tymofii Brik, Jakob Hauter, Sanshiro Hosaka, Yuriy Matsiyevsky, Nikolay Mitrokhin, Maximilian Kranich, and Ulrich Schneckener.

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Religion and magic have often played important roles in Baltic, Eastern European, and post-Soviet 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 remnant 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 area studies that 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.

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This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art-he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The volume explores Beckett's formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernism's theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like minimalism and conceptual art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Beckett's work. Perceiving Beckett's ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Beckett's remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.

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This book highlights current debates about concepts, methods, and policies related to poverty in Latin America. It focuses on child and adolescent well-being and the issue of inclusive societies. Its goal is to promote new and critical thinking about these issues globally and in Latin America. The authors emphasize the need to develop new conceptual and practical avenues that can address the issues of poverty, marginalization, exclusion, and old and new inequalities in post-neoliberal times. The objective is to advance the rights of all children and adolescents in the region. This urgent book represents a unique opportunity for practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and students to get access to the most up-to-date perspectives on child poverty and inequality from a conceptual and practical point of view.

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Simon Kordonsky divides the social structure of contemporary Russia into distinct estates or social groups and describes each organization's unique resource-based political and economic nature. As he guides readers through Russia's peculiar service and support estate system, Kordonsky reveals how remarkably effective inventing and institutionalizing threats can be in the distribution of scarce resources in a social system of this kind. His book emphasizes the fundamental differences between resource-based economies and traditional risk-based economies and their role in Russia's future.

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Nadia Anwar analyzes select post-independence Nigerian dramas through the conceptual framework of metatheater, a strategy that breaks dramatic illusion to foreground the process of play making. Anwar argues that distancing, as a function of metatheater, fosters a balanced theatrical environment by allowing the emotive and cognitive aspects of reception to dominate the theatergoing experience. She draws on Bertolt Brecht, Thomas J. Scheff, and other theoreticians to critique plays by Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Femi Osofisan, Esiaba Irobi, and Stella 'Dia Oyedepo.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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