Looking for a gripping and thought-provoking read? Look no further than this captivating book about two journalists, a Tanzanian, Agnes and Jon, an Englishman, who embark on a dangerous journey to report on the trafficking of West African migrants. As they travel from Senegal and Mali through Mauritania, Morocco, Spain, France and eventually to England, Agnes and Jon encounter heart-wrenching tales of hardship and loss. But their own lives are also at risk, as Agnes is kidnapped by traffickers and Jon sets out to rescue her. Along the way, they meet Ana, a journalist from Spain, and later a daring romance develops involving the three of them. Their journey takes them to the slums of Paris and London, where they inspire the BBC to film their story. But their quest for truth comes at a high price, as they are captured by a guerrilla movement in Morocco and ultimately meet a disastrous end in Libya. This fast-paced and gripping story sheds light on the harsh realities of trafficking and the bravery of journalists who risk everything to uncover the truth. Full of danger, excitement, and humanity, this is a book you won¿t be able to put down.
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.¿This excellent, meticulously researched book is important. Not only does it provide fresh insights based on forensic analysis into the escalation of violence in Ukraine¿s Donbas region in 2014, it breaks new methodological ground: It shows how process tracing and the use of digital open source information can be combined in a rigorous way to deal with the informational challenges associated with conflict. Russiäs Overlooked Invasion brings much-needed transparency to an opaque but vital subject.¿¿Ben Noble, Associate Professor of Russian Politics, UCL SSEES¿Most previous accounts of the war in Eastern Ukraine have not gone beyond generalities. Hauter uses open source Intelligence for a forensic analysis, breaking down the events leading to war into six critical junctures, in four of which Russia is shown to have been the primary actor. Without Russia, moreover, there would have been no necessary progression through the six phases, and a containable conflict would not have become a hot war.¿¿Andrew Wilson, Professor of Ukrainian Studies, UCL SSEES
This book is a contribution to European comparative history involving Portugal and Slovakia, but also the larger geographic units of Iberia and Slavic Central Europe. While developments in Portugal and Slovakia predominate, Spain, the Czech lands, and other regions are discussed as well. The subjects investigated include the position of women and the activities of messianic thinkers in the seventeenth century as well as semi-fascist Catholic political movements in the twentieth century. The authors look at the subject matter from the viewpoint of politics, social phenomena, and culture. The cultural dimension includes religion and ideology, both of which have clearly been of critical importance in Portuguese and Slovak history. It also includes problems of ethno-linguistic and national identity and the more recent phenomenon of multiculturalism, whose social promotion is controversial and uncertain."This comparative study by Zuzana Polá¿ková and Peter C. van Duin, a collection of essays, is a revelation, especially for students of European authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, and, furthermore, anybody interested in European history."¿Josette Baer, Professor, UZH University of Zurich"This book gives proof to Cicerös dictum: "Historia magistra vitae est"¿without knowledge of the past we cannot build a sustainable future. Thanks to the authors for this great contribution to knowledge!"¿Lucia Mokrá, Professor of International Law, Comenius University, Bratislava"This collection of essays provides not only fascinating insights into the political workings of these two small states, but of the workings of politics in the larger Iberian / Slavic context. Highly recommended."¿Dr. David Reichardt, International Relations, Webster University, Saint-Louis, Missouri "A very important contribution to the study of the comparative history of Europe, and therefore I fully recommend its publication."¿Mgr. Juraj Marüiak, PhD. Institute of Political Science, public research institution, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovak Republic
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."The volume greatly enhances our knowledge of Irish poetry. It offers a comprehensive vision of poetic writing from the South-West of Ireland, both in Irish and in English."¿Munira Hamud Mutran, professor of Irish Studies, University of São Paulo, Brazil¿The south of Ireland has been blessed with several excellent, albeit underestimated poets. While readers who are aware of the accomplishments with figures such as John Montague, Elaine Ní Chuillianáin, Thomas McGreevy, and Seán Dunne will welcome Poets of Munster with pleasure, readers unfamiliar with these writers will be grateful to learn of the hidden riches revealed in this book.¿¿Charles Armstrong, professor of English literature, University of Agder, Norway
Youth language data provides interesting perspectives on gender dynamics and gendered usage in society. However, the gender perspective has not received the deserved focus in youth language studies in Africa. This is partly due to the general perception that youth languages and classic youth language practices, such as slang and anti-language, are male-oriented. This collected volume focuses on gender dynamics and gendered usage in African youth languages and youth language practices, against the backdrop of urbanity as well as rurality. With representations from different parts of Africa, the volume examines sundry youth usage in different contexts and domains. While avoiding strict binarizations and potentially flawed dichotomies, the contributing scholars observe some of the motivations for different gender performatives and how these manifest in a variety of language forms and through predominated categories of use. Data samples were obtained through sociolinguistic and anthropological instruments, ranging from questionnaires and structured interviews to street-based observations and corpus analyses. On the whole, the volume engages the literature and debate on language, youth, and especially on gendering dynamics in African youth language practices.
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.
When Megan Buskey¿s grandmother Anna dies in Cleveland in 2013, Megan is compelled in her grief to uncover and document her grandmother¿s life as a native of Ukraine. A Ukrainian American, Buskey returns to her family¿s homeland and enlists her relatives there to help her in her quest¿and discovers much more than she expected. The result is an extraordinary journey that traces one woman¿s story across Ukraine¿s difficult twentieth century, from a Galician village emerging from serfdom, to the ¿bloodlands¿ of Eastern Europe during World War II, to the Siberian hinterlands where Anna spent almost two decades in exile before receiving the rare opportunity to emigrate from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. In the course of her research, Megan encounters essential and sometimes disturbing aspects of recent Ukrainian history, such as Nazi collaboration, the rise and persistence of Ukrainian nationalism, and the shattering impact of Russiäs full-scale invasion in 2022. Yet her wide-ranging inquiries keep leading her back to universal questions: What does family mean? How can you forge connections between generations that span different cultures, times, and places? And, perhaps most hauntingly, how can you best remember a complicated past that is at once foreign and personal?"A painfully honest and carefully researched journey of a Ukrainian American into her family¿s complicated and difficult past. Anchored in the catastrophe of the Second World War and the subsequent Stalinist repression of the Ukrainian peasantry, the story flows, unexpectedly to the author herself, into the unfolding drama of the current Russian invasion. Thoughtful and beautifully written." ¿Jan Gross, Princeton University, author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland"This book is not only important, but captivating and instructive." ¿John-Paul Himka, University of Alberta"Megan Buskey¿s blend of tireless investigation with thoughtful analysis and careful prose make this book an exemplar of the best traditions in historical writing."¿Wil S. Hylton, author of Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II
This book is directed at both researchers and teachers with an interest to establish a multilingual and cosmopolitan culture within classrooms; it contributes to research in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on multiple levels. The theoretical part sketches a conceptual framework with a competence model for the promotion of global discourse competence as the center of gravity for multilingual CLIL in the social sciences. Along the leitmotif of climate change, the construction of 'cosmopolitan classroom glocalities' for supporting learners' 21st century skills is suggested. Besides defending design-based action research as a research method for bridging the gap between theory and practice, two empirical contributions from a German 10th grade CLIL classroom with English as target language make the preceding theoretical framework tangible. One chapter deals with more language-related issues, whereas the subsequent chapter takes a subject turn. At first, a comprehensive model for multilingual CLIL is presented. It builds on the novel concept of translanguaging, adapted to 'trans-foreign-languaging' for facilitating multilingualism as a daily norm. Thereafter, the model's effect on political judgments is investigated. This chapter concludes in proposing the genesis of a 'perfect equilibrium of emotional and rational learning' for promoting empathy, solidarity, and justice within a democratic and transnational civil society.
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.
This revised and updated version of Chris Webb¿s comprehensive 2016 book covers the development and history of the first death camp in Poland within the Aktion Reinhardt mass murder program. Webb outlines the construction of the death camp in Poland by the National Socialists and provides a comprehensive account of who built the death camp and how the mass murder was perfected by Christian Wirth, the first Commandant, who was well versed in the mass murder by gas, from his days in the T4 Organization. The history of the death camp is retold with eyewitness testimony of some of the Jewish survivors, the Poles who helped build the death camp, and former SS members of the Garrison and German visitors to the camp. The book includes an updated and revised Jewish Roll of Remembrance, with sources provided to verify each entry. This includes the handful of survivors as well as a comprehensive record of the victims, Polish and Czech Jews, and those deported from the Reich to Belzec.The book also provides a detailed record of the leading figures of Aktion Reinhardt, including Odilo Globocnik, Christian Wirth, and Hermann Hofle, and members of the SS Garrison who served in Belzec. The biographies record their histories, what they did at Belzec, and their fates, where known.Also covered are the post-war testimonies, trials, and excavations. A number of historic and contemporary photographs, some of which have never been published before, and documents and drawings enhance this edition.
Berthold M. Kuhn and Dimitrios L. Margellos present a thoroughly reflected analysis of future global trends by drawing on insights and expertise from leading researchers, think tanks, and activists. Climate change and sustainability transformation, digitalization, growing inequalities, urbanization and smart cities, green economy, and sustainable finance are among the key megatrends. Addressing geopolitical shifts and the future of multilateralism, the authors also discuss new trends in democracy and governance, migration, the futures of health and nutrition, and civilizational developments: demography, diversity, identity politics, individualization, and gender shift. Based on their own research and a series of future talks with leading analysts and researchers from different world regions, they present cutting-edge content of future studies.
Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South scrutinizes current debates to bring historical and contemporary South-South entanglements to the fore and to develop a new understanding of world literature in a multipolar world of globalized modernity. The volume challenges established ideas of world literature by rethinking the concept along the notion of ¿entanglements¿: as a field of variously criss-crossing relations of literary activity beyond the confines of literary canons, cultural containers, or national borders.The collection presents individual case studies from a variety of language traditions that focus on particular literary relationships and practices across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe as well as new fictional, poetical, and theoretical conceptions of world literature in order to broaden our understanding of the multilateral entanglements within a widening communicative network that shape our globalized world.
Most studies of consciousness proceed from a standpoint where external reality already pre-exists. As such, these studies would be inherently unable to recognize it if consciousness in fact arose at the same level where reality itself takes its source¿at the level where wave functions collapse and thereby generate the fabric of material reality.At the same time, a number of compelling contemporary interpretations of physics strongly hint that consciousness must most likely be a fundamental constituent of reality, that it cannot be emergent, and that the role of the brain is limited to the harnessing, optimization, and deployment of consciousness within material reality¿aka the realm of collapsed wave functions. This view seems to be also supported by a range of credible observations made by a number of credible professionals who operate at the margins of studies of consciousness, such as psychiatrists, who occasionally observe puzzling cases involving unusual phenomena related to consciousness. If we back-engineer the inevitable macroscopic consequences of a consciousness born at the same level as the building blocks of physical reality itself, we discover that such marginal phenomena become then fully explainable. The book offers readers new insights into interpretations of current research in physics and enables readers without a background in physics to understand the implications and their relevance to our understanding of consciousness.
The contributors to this volume show that the themes of empire, colony, and national liberation movements can be addressed in a European continental as much as in Asian, Latin American, or African contexts. There is a further benefit from a within-Europe comparison: It calls into question the tendency to assume fundamental differences between "western" and "eastern" Europe, including the now largely abandoned distinction between a "western" nationalism, defined as a civil nationalism, and an "eastern" one, defined as ethnic. It also answers the question whether intra-European comparison of this kind is possible, in a context where post-Soviet scholarship is often invisible in Anglo-American scholarship. As Norman Davies reminds us, low public awareness of Europe's smaller and, in west-European minds, "more distant" nations, underlies the persistence of false generalizations about them, including assumptions like "that the whole of the west was advanced while the whole of the east was backward."
This comparative study harks back to the revolutionary year of 1989 and asks two critical questions about the resulting reconfiguration of Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of communism: Why did Central and East European states display such divergent outcomes of their socio-political transitions? Why did three of those states-Poland, Bulgaria, and Russia-differ so starkly in terms of the pace and extent of their integration into Europe? Rumena Filipova argues that Poland's, Bulgaria's, and Russia's dominating conceptions of national identity have principally shaped these countries' foreign policy behavior after 1989. Such an explanation of these three nations' diverging degrees of Europeanization stands in contrast to institutionalist-rationalist, interest-based accounts of democratic transition and international integration in post-communist Europe.She thereby makes a case for the need to include ideational factors into the study of International Relations and demonstrates that identities are not easily malleable and may not be as fluid as often assumed. She proposes a theoretical "middle-ground" argument that calls for "qualified post-positivism" as an integrated perspective that combines positivist and post-positivist orientations in the study of IR.
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 makes the Croatian case stand out?
Following Einstein¿s sentence: ¿Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. If you can¿t explain it simply, you don¿t understand it well enough,¿ this book puts a spotlight on the complex marketing ecosystem from a physicist¿s point of view. Today¿s marketing world is overcomplex; CMOs face the challenge to transform their current target operating models towards a 100% customer-centric and data-driven way of working. A journey from good old mad-men toward math-men marketing.This book consists of three parts: The first part strips down the complexity of the marketing universe to the leanest frame of reference and then brings back the complexity, step by step, in single dimensions. Part two and three just follow these thoughts and provide a detailed description of 56 small atoms that can be used in a maturity assessment of your marketing. How to use them in a broader transformation concludes the book.In summary: An end-2-end guideline how to pursue and master the transformation from mad-men towards a math-men marketing operating model.
The "Joint Declaration of Twenty-two States," signed in Paris on November 19, 1990 by the Chiefs of State or Government of all the countries which participated in World War Two in Europe, is the closest document we will ever have to a true "peace treaty" concluding World War II in Europe. In his new book, retired United States Ambassador John Maresca, who led the American participation in the negotiations, explains how this document was quietly negotiated following the reunification of Germany and in view of Soviet interest in normalizing their relations with Europe. With the reunification of Germany which had just taken place it was, for the first time since the end of the war, possible to have a formal agreement that the war was over, and the countries concerned were all gathering for a summit-level signing ceremony in Paris. With Gorbachev interested in more positive relations with Europe, and with the formal reunification of Germany, such an agreement was - for the first time - possible. All the leaders coming to the Paris summit had an interest in a formal conclusion to the War, and this gave impetus for the negotiators in Vienna to draft a document intended to normalize relations among them. The Joint Declaration was negotiated carefully, and privately, among the Ambassadors representing the countries which had participated, in one way or another, in World War Two in Europe, and the resulting document -- the "Joint Declaration" - was signed, at the summit level, at the Elysée Palace in Paris. But it was overshadowed at the time by the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe - signed at the same signature event - and has remained un-noticed since then.No one could possibly have foreseen that the USSR would be dissolved about one year later, making it impossible to negotiate a more formal treaty to close World War II in Europe. The "Joint Declaration" thus remains the closest document the world will ever see to a formal "Peace Treaty" concluding World War Two in Europe. It was signed by all the Chiefs of State or Government of all the countries which participated in World War II in Europe.
The recent history of post-Soviet societies is heavily shaped by the successor nations¿ efforts to geopolitically re-identify themselves and to reify certain majorities in them. As a result of these fascinating processes, various new ideologies have appeared. Some are specific to the post-Soviet space while others are comparable to ideational processes in other parts of the world. In this collected volume, an international group of contributors delves deeper into recent theoretical constructions of various post-Soviet majorities, the ideologies that justify them, and some respectively formulated policy prescriptions. The first part analyzes post-Soviet state-builders¿ fixation on certain constructed majorities as well as on these imagined communities¿ symbolic self-identifications, in- or outward othering, and national languages. The second part deals specifically with post-Soviet ideas of sovereigntism and the way they define majorities as well as imply changes in internal and external policies and legal systems. These processes are analyzed in comparison to similar phenomena in Western societies. The book¿s contributors include (in the order of their appearance): Natalia Kudriavtseva, Petra Colmorgen, Nadiia Koval, Ivan Gomza, Augusto Dala Costa, Roman Horbyk, Yana Prymachenko, Yuliya Yurchuk, Oleksandr Fisun, Nataliya Vinnykova, Ruslan Zaporozhchenko, Mikhail Minakov, Gulnara Shaikhutdinova, and Yurii Mielkov.
Martina Napolitano explores the poetics of one of the most significant Russian authors of the 20th century. Sasha Sokolov¿s oeuvre represents a milestone in the development of Russian literature; his legacy can be traced in most prose and poetry appearing in post-Soviet Russia. Taking as point of departure the studies and analyses written so far and considering the new suggestions contained in Sokolov¿s last published book Triptych (2011), Napolitano further examines the keystones and the theoretical framework that arise from a close reading of Sokolov¿s works, trying to systematize the findings into what can be considered as a structured authorial theory of literary creation.The study demonstrates how Sokolov¿s oeuvre cannot be fully understood but within the widened perspective of inter-artistic creation: in fact, the writer, a ¿failed composer¿, as he admits, in his literary work has tried to draw natural and spontaneous connecting lines between the artificially categorized realms of art (word, sound, painting, performance). Finally, the book sets forth the first solid analysis of Sokolov¿s concept of proeziia, not merely a genre nor style of his own invention, but a more significant theoretical reflection of the writer about the role and value of literature, art, creation, and finally beauty.
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