Search results

How have the Jews survived? For millennia, they have defied odds by overcoming the travails of exile, persecution, and recurring plans for their annihilation. This book charts the long journey of the Jews through history. At the same time, it points to two unlikely factors to explain the survival of the Jews: antisemitism and assimilation.

The Industrial Revolution was one of the great, transforming events of world history. Robert C. Allen explains what happened during this period, and why. He asks why the revolution occured in Britain rather than other countries, and looks at the impact of changing technology and business organizations on contemporary social structures.

Michael Beaney introduces analytic philosophy by exploring some of the key ideas of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Susan Stebbing. He also considers how analytic philosophy has developed and spread to become the dominant philosophical tradition across the world.

Utilitarianism is one of the most important and influential secular philosophies of modern times, and has drawn considerable debate and controversy. This book considers its origins, its relevance to modern moral challenges, and the arguments and discussions around utilitarian approaches

Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but kids don't learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It starts by providing evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, showing that many governments lack basic capacities even after decades of reforms and capacity-building efforts. The book then analyzes this evidence, identifying capability traps that hold many governments back—particularly related to isomorphic mimicry (where governments copy best practice solutions from other countries that make them look more capable even if they are not more capable) and premature load bearing (where governments adopt new mechanisms that they cannot actually make work, given weak extant capacities). The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (problem-driven iterative adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. The discussion about this process is structured in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers devise policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.

This book is the first targeted work in the legal literature that investigates environmental challenges in the aftermath of conflict. The volume brings together academics, policy-makers, and practitioners from different disciplines to clarify policies and practices of environmental protection and key legal considerations related to normative frameworks (e.g. international environmental law, international humanitarian law, transitional justice, and human rights), the treatment of substantive principles (e.g. proportionality under jus in bello and jus post bellum, environmental integrity), 'shared responsibility', and accountability mechanisms for environmental damage. By providing a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of environmental protection and natural resource management during the transition to peace, the volume reveals strong links between the peace-orientation of jus post bellum and environmental principles, such as intergenerational equity and precaution. There is a great deal of work to do to ensure greater protection of the environment before, during, and after conflict. It remains a challenge to align protection with the political interest of states, and the increasing involvement of non-state actors in armed conflict. This volume marks a starting point for an urgently needed space for states, international organizations, and civil society to discuss, and debate conflict and the environment. By engaging with the International Law Commission's 2016 Draft Principles on the Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflicts, the volume adds clarity to the law and momentum to the development of the law in this important area.

This book provides an analysis of the global monetary system and the necessary reforms that it should undergo to play an active role in the twenty-first century. As its title indicates, its basic diagnosis is that it is an ad hoc framework rather than a coherent system—a 'non-system'—which evolved after the breakdown of the original Bretton Woods arrangement in the early 1970s. The book places a special focus on the asymmetries that emerging and developing countries face within the current system, and therefore on the development dimensions of the global monetary system and of global monetary reform. The book proposes a comprehensive yet evolutionary reform of the system that includes: (i) provision of international liquidity through a system that mixes the multi-currency arrangement with a more active use of the IMF's Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), the only true global currency that has been created; (ii) stronger mechanisms of macroeconomic policy cooperation, including greater cooperation in exchange rate management, and freedom to manage capital flows as a complement to counter-cyclical macroeconomic policy and other instruments of financial regulation; (iii) additional automatic balance-of-payments financing facilities, and the complementary use of swap and regional arrangements; (iv) a multilateral sovereign debt workout mechanism; and (v) major reforms of the system's governance, based on a more representative apex organization, more equitable participation of emerging and developing countries in decision-making, and a network of global, regional, inter-regional, and sub-regional organizations.

This book examines the links between economic growth, changing employment conditions, and the reduction of poverty in Latin America in the 2000s. Our analysis answers the following broad questions: Has economic growth resulted in gains in standards of living and reductions in poverty via improved labour market conditions in Latin America in the 2000s, and have these improvements halted or been reversed since the international crisis of 2008? How do the rate and character of economic growth, changes in the various employment and earnings indicators, and changes in poverty and inequality indicators relate to each other? Our contribution is an in-depth study of the multi-pronged growth-employment-poverty nexus based on a large number of labour market indicators (twelve employment and earnings indicators and four poverty and inequality indicators) for a large number of Latin American countries (sixteen of them). The book presents a positive and hopeful set of findings for the period 2000 to 2012/13. Economic growth took place and brought about improvements in almost all labour market indicators and consequent reductions in poverty rates. But not all improvements were equal in size or caused by the same things. Some macroeconomic factors were associated with changes in labour market conditions, some of them always in the welfare-improving direction and some others always in the welfare-reducing direction. Most countries in the region suffered a deterioration in at least some labour market indicators as a consequence of the international crisis of 2008, but the negative effects were reversed very quickly in most countries.

Many developing countries—Viet Nam included—continue to struggle to raise incomes per capita. A common feature of the growth and development process is a fundamental change in the pattern of economic activity, as households reallocate labour from traditional agriculture to more productive forms of agriculture and modern industrial and service sectors. Broad structural transformation and widespread poverty reduction is the combined result of these large-scale shifts in work and labour allocation when they realize desired development goals. The roots of this book grow from when the first pilot Viet Nam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) was carried out in 2002. The success of this inspired the Central Institute of Economic Management (CIEM) in Hanoi, the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development (CAP-IPSARD), the Institute of Labour Science and Social Affairs (ILSSA), and the Development Economics Research Group (DERG) of the University of Copenhagen, together with Danida and, later on, UNU-WIDER, to plan and carry out a more ambitious VARHS from 2006, increasing coverage and representativeness to more than 2,150 families and 12 provinces across the various regions of Viet Nam. The VARHS covering these very same households had, by 2014, been carried out five times, that is, every two years. It is on this high-quality panel data foundation and almost fifteen years of study and policy work using the VARHS data that the present volume builds, in its effort to bring out the essential rural microeconomic characteristics and insights of a dynamic South-East Asian economy in transition from a centrally planned towards a more market-based economy.

The 21st Conference of the Parties (CoP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) shifted the nature of the political economy challenge associated with achieving a global emissions trajectory that is consistent with a climate. The shifts generated by CoP21 place country decision-making and country policies at centre stage. Under moderately optimistic assumptions concerning the vigour with which CoP21 objectives are pursued, nearly every country in the world will set about to design and implement the most promising and locally relevant policies for achieving their agreed contribution to global mitigation. These policies are virtually certain to vary dramatically across countries. In short, the world stands at the cusp of an unprecedented era of policy experimentation in driving a clean energy transition. This book steps into this new world of broad-scale and locally relevant policy experimentation. The chapters focus on the political economy of clean energy transition with an emphasis on specific issues encountered in both developed and developing countries. Lead authors contribute a broad diversity of experience drawn from all major regions of the world, representing a compendium of what has been learned from recent initiatives, mostly (but not exclusively) at country level, to reduce GHG emissions. As this new era of experimentation dawns, their contributions are both relevant and timely.

In June 2013, Edward Snowden revealed a secret US government program that collected records on every phone call made in the country. Further disclosures followed, detailing mass surveillance by the UK as well. Journalists and policymakers soon began discussing large-scale programs in other countries. Over two years before the Snowden leaks began, Cate and Dempsey had started researching systematic collection. Leading an initiative sponsored by The Privacy Projects, they commissioned a series of country reports, asking national experts to uncover what they could about government demands that telecommunications providers and other private-sector companies disclose information about their customers in bulk. Their initial research found disturbing indications of systematic access in countries around the world. These programs, often undertaken in the name of national security, were cloaked in secrecy and largely immune from oversight, posing serious threats to personal privacy. After the Snowden leaks, the project morphed into something more ambitious: an effort to explore what should be the rules for government access to data and how companies should respond to those demands within the framework of corporate responsibility. This volume concludes the nearly six-year project. It assembles 12 country reports, updated to reflect recent developments. One chapter presents both descriptive and normative frameworks for analyzing national surveillance laws. Others examine international law, human rights law, and oversight mechanisms. Still others explore the concept of accountability and the role of encryption in shaping the surveillance debate. In their conclusion, Cate and Dempsey offer recommendations for both government and industry.

This is an evidence-based review of diagnostic and treatment strategies for successfully managing alcohol and substance use disorders in older adults. With contributions from leaders in the field of addiction treatment, this volume offers the most current clinical recommendations and describes best practices for implementing effective treatments in this growing patient population

"This lavishly illustrated volume explores the history of China during a period of dramatic shifts and surprising transformations, from the founding of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) through to the present day. The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China promises to be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this rising superpower on the verge of what promises to be the 'Chinese century,' introducing readers to important but often overlooked events in China's past, such as the bloody Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), which had a death toll far higher than the roughly contemporaneous American Civil War. It also helps readers see more familiar landmarks in Chinese history in new ways, such as the Opium War (1839-1842), the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and the Tiananmen protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989. This is one of the first major efforts--and in many ways the most ambitious to date--to come to terms with the broad sweep of modern Chinese history, taking readers from the origins of modern China right up through the dramatic events of the last few years (the Beijing Games, the financial crisis, and China's rise to global economic pre-eminence) which have so fundamentally altered Western views of China and China's place in the world"--Publisher description