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This book revisits key social issues and controversies in education. There are many social issues currently on political and governmental agendas, both in the UK and other countries—from safeguarding, childhood obesity, bullying and mental health, through to widening participation. Some of these issues relate to children and young people and are of concern to those working and researching in education, while others relate to Higher Education. The boundaries between the academic disciplines of politics, sociology, economics, psychology and education are porous. The contributions here illustrate how common interests and collaboration can assist in our understanding of complex social issues, the evaluation of current governmental responses, and the promotion of ideas about the way forward into the 21st century.

Climate change, which nowadays is frequently framed as climate crisis in order to highlight the urgent need to take action to tackle it, has been studied extensively both in communication and political science disciplines. This contribution uses as an example the International Maritime Organization to highlight the utilization of its social media, and in particular its Twitter/X account, to frame that it supports climate action in the shipping sector and to brand itself as a green organization. The article offers an analytical framework which illustrates that policy branding is one of the most accurate tools to perform policy framing. It continues by showcasing that this is a procedure that governance institutions use to promote a deliberate message, even if this is not on track with what the institution is expected to do. The empirical data gathered, and processed through content analysis, paints a clear image of how this happens in the era of social media and leads to the conclusion that it is necessary to study policy framing and policy branding within the context they take place; otherwise, wrong conclusions might be drawn.

This paper studies the concept of a 'fragile state,' its origins, uniqueness, and the circumstances determining the changing dynamics of the presented subject, as well as the possibility of its application in the practice of International Relations (IR). The analysis of the conceptualization process, as well as the instrumental treatment of the idea of state's fragility structures by decision-makers responsible for shaping foreign policy - especially in the context of the global development and security strategy - underlines the complexity and incoherence of the fragile state's concept, which is currently considered as one of the most 'wicked problems' of the modern world, often torn by numerous brutal military conflicts. The author of the piece uses the term 'fragile state' to describe not only the form and conditions of disintegration of the state's political and social ties and the dismantling of its state-legal infrastructure, but also analyzes issues related to the economic collapse, poverty, hunger, humanitarian disasters, armed conflicts, as well as numerous cases of elementary civil liberties and human rights violations. The article argues that deepening the comprehending of the fragile state's idea, along with emphasizing its conceptual vagueness and complexity, concerning the 'politically correct' discourse on the problems of 'fragility' and states' weakness, is necessary for a better awareness of the ambiguous and the perplexing nature of state power operating within the most politically unstable and insecure regions of the so-called 'Third World.'

The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has impacted practically every aspect of life worldwide, particularly Asia. Governments from various States work hard to prevent and mitigate the spread by instituting multiple social distancing and lockdown measures. While those measures have been effective in containing the spread, there are other negative consequences, including the risks associated with domestic violence in the family home, whether physical, psychological, verbal, sexual, or economic violence. Subsequently, there has been a significant increase in online searches for help from intimate partner violence, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Moreover, the UN Women also reported that essential services, such as shelters and helplines, have exceeded their capacity. Using a normative legal research methodology that sources are obtained from secondary data, the finding shows that thousands of women living in several Asian States experienced more abuse in domestic violence and had less resilience during the pandemic. Whether national or international, the existing regulations are insufficient to prevent violence and protect victims. Thus, remote services in various sectors, including social, health, and justice, must be further developed and institutionalized by the States to overcome such issues.

Objective: To analyze efficiency contracts, a contractual modality whose use was expanded by Law no. 14,133/2021, in its conceptual perspective and based on international experiences.
Methodology: Qualitative post-positivist research, exploratory-descriptive, carried out from the analysis of Brazilian, French and American legislative texts and dogmatic bibliographic review of national and foreign doctrine that comment on similar legal figures in other legal systems.
Originality or value: The work is original because it presents a proposal for a conceptual understanding of an institute that has been little applied in the Brazilian legal experience, whose possibility of use was expanded by the new public procurement law (Law no. 14,133/2021), and based on similar figures widely applied in countries like the United States and France.
Conclusions: Efficiency contracts are an important tool used by public authorities internationally and its provision in the new public procurement law can help to mitigate the resistance of control authorities with their use in Brazil.

We translate the structuralist center-periphery approach to international currency relations and analyze the implications for macroeconomic policies of emerging market countries. While the Post Keynesian literature offers a rather clear concept for growthoriented policies, it is necessary to adapt them for peripheral emerging economies. We base our analysis of an appropriate Keynesian policy mix for these countries on the concept of currency hierarchy, where the currencies of peripheral emerging economies have a lower liquidity premium than the currencies of advanced economies. Under these conditions, we argue that domestic economic policy coordination should lay a major focus on a low policy rate and, especially, a competitive exchange rate for obtaining, at least, a balanced current account, in order to prevent boom-bust-cycles in capital flows with subsequent financial crises and their damaging effects on employment and growth. We conclude that it is a rather ambitious and long term goal to climb up the currency hierarchy, especially under the current conditions of financial globalization.

In this study, the author intends to investigate the possible threats that affect the national security of the Republic of Moldova in the context of the Russian Federation's ignorance of the state neutrality status, as explained by the delay in the process of political Regulation of the Transnistrian conflict, caused by the illegal existence of Russian military forces, funding of illegitimate institutions and separatist military structures on the left bank of the Dniester, including providing weapons and military equipment. Looking into these issues, the author particularly stresses that the process of strengthening the stability and security of a vulnerable state on the inside is painstaking and requires efforts both from state institutions, the whole society and international support. In this regard, the Republic of Moldova has undertaken to deepen its relations with the European Union by signing the Association Agreement in June 2014, which provides inter alia for the enhancement of forms of cooperation focused on common interests in the field of security promotion, defense cooperation and crisis management. By this, Moldova has accepted the challenges of aligning to the standards of development of the Community, while also benefiting from the support on behalf of development partners in a variety of domains: political, economic, social, etc. In conclusion, the author notes that in the course of cooperation, it is relevant for the European Union to ensure its security. Thus, the national interests of the Republic of Moldova in relation to certain risks and threats to national security converge with those of the Union. The European Union is politically and financially supportive of the actions that are undertaken to clarify them, but the institutions of the Moldovan State are exclusively responsible for the results of these actions/inactions.

This paper examines the effects of political pressure groups (lobbies) on the emissions abatement decisions of countries and on the stability of international environmental agreements. We consider two types of lobbies, industry and environmentalists. We determine the influence of lobby-groups on the abatement decisions of countries. This influence affects members of an international environmental agreement as well as outsiders. However, in the case of agreement members, the effects of lobbying are not restricted to the lobby's host-country but spill over to other member countries and have ambiguous effects on the agreement stability.