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"A warm, personal guide to building a strong ethical and moral compass in the midst of today's confusing, scary, global problems. The moral challenges of today are unfamiliar in the history of philosophy. Climate change is the paradigm example of what Travis Rieder calls "The Puzzle" in the way your choices can seem at odds with what the planet urgently needs. How do we decide the right thing to do in the face of a massive collective challenge? Should you drink water from a plastic bottle or not? Drive a Tesla? Or is that just what Elon and all the other corporations want you to think? What makes individual ethics difficult to think about in the case of catastrophic climate change makes ethics difficult to think about in many other contexts as well. The Puzzle, as he explains, is everywhere now. The chapters include a lively, meaningful tour of traditional moral reasoning looking at the contributions of Plato, Hegel, and Kant among others. But they could not grasp The Puzzle we now face. Old fashioned exercises like trolley problems involving sacrificing one person on this track for a bunch of people on the other don't address the huge consequential and complex crises our global community faces today. The tools most of us unthinkingly rely on when we try to do the right thing don't help when it comes to reasoning about individual responsibility for large collective problems. Expanding our suite of ethical concepts is now urgently required. Rieder defines exactly how to change our thinking, addressing mundane issues like bottled water to the biggies like whether to have children. This is a way to live a morally decent life in the scary, always complicated world we and our children live in. It's how to build your own Catastrophe Ethics"--

World history suffers from a paucity of clearly articulated, convincing explanations. While the rise of postmodernism and challenges to Eurocentrism did lead to some important correctives, the pendulum has swung too far the other direction, with a corresponding danger of 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'. We need careful, theoretically informed debates about ways of organizing world history. What constitutes a good historical explanation? What should guide historians to choose relevant facts? Which theoretical schools could be made useful, and to what ends? These questions are especially relevant to the main topic of this book: the 'great divergence' between the west and the rest of the world, and how this historical rupture is to be explained. The book provides extensive critical analyses of some of the key claims in world history, analyzing their strengths as well as their major weaknesses-too often rooted in insufficient familiarity of historians with theories they discard. It also historicizes the field and the debates to partly account for what caused some theories to become more influential and others to fall into oblivion-despite the fact that the more influential frameworks are seriously flawed and some of the more marginalized ideas are more coherent and plausible. The book offers insights regarding the theoretical and political relevance of older debates about the transition to capitalism and historical materialism. Three major schools of thought in world history are critically examined through an in-depth theoretical and comparative analysis that has not been undertaken elsewhere: the so-called 'California School', World Systems Analysis, and Marxist theories of history, capitalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Murphy argues that, despite some of the more recent criticisms of older approaches to world history, the older theories remain indispensable for the writing of world history and for coming to terms with issues of global poverty, inequality and eco-catastrophe

"Despite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the decline due to war and the ideological hardening that results from societies in conflict. However, in Sufi Civilities, Annika Schmeding argues that this is far from a truthful depiction. Sufi communities have worked as resistance fighters, aid workers, businessmen, actors, professors and daily workers in creative and ingenious ways to keep and renew their networks of community support. Based on long-term ethnographic field research among multiple Sufi communities in different urban areas of Afghanistan, Schmeding examines navigational strategies employed by Sufi leaders over the past four decades to weather periods of instability and persecution, showing how they adapted to changing conditions in novel ways that crafted Sufism as a force in the civil sphere. This book offers a rare on-the-ground view into how Sufi leaders react to moments of transition within a highly insecure environment, and how humanity shines through the darkness during times of turmoil"--

"The book surveys processes of party development in the context of the ten years of democratic change in post-communist eastern Europe. It examines the capacity of the former ruling parties to attract contemporary voters and their role in contributing to the consolidation of the new democratic regimes. Attention is paid to key comparative processes of party development in terms of the professionalization of party activity, aspects of party system institutionalization, major dimensions of institutional and electoral development, and party finances.

The Soviet Union (1989) examines the state of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. The Soviet Union claimed to offer a new social, economic and political order - a planned socialist system - and this book looks at the Soviet alternative and the extent of its success. It surveys the major components of Soviet society and examines the principal issues and debates that surround its assessment.

Das Massaker der Hamas am 7. Oktober 2023 in Israel verschärft die Situation im Nahen Osten und befeuert den Judenhass weltweit. Die Anschläge in Brüssel und Paris, der Synagogenanschlag in Halle, die aggressive Gewalt gegen alles Jüdische in der islamischen Welt und die antisemitischen Ausschreitungen in Europa, nicht zuletzt in Deutschland, sind weitere Beispiele der letzten Jahre dafür. Der Judenhass ist alt, groß, stark und geht oft von der Mitte der Gesellschaft aus. Der Hass beginnt vor 2.500 Jahren. Der christliche Antijudaismus und der Ausschluss der Juden im Mittelalter spitzen sich zu mit dem bürgerlich-politischen Antisemitismus im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Er kulminiert ideologisch in der Wannsee-konferenz, wird mörderisch in Auschwitz. Der Historiker Sebastian Voigt entwickelt mit diesem Buch eine dichte Geschichte des Judenhasses und verbindet sie mit einem leidenschaftlichen Aufruf zum couragierten Widerstand gegen den heutigen Antisemitismus

This book provides a rare account of China's market reform in the own words of the Chinese: politicians, intellectuals, the media, and journalists. The Chinese rhetoric –complex, ironic, argumentative, and abstruse – may hold the key to understanding China's unique style of elite politics, state-citizen relationship, and institutional development. Topics include the establishment and change of the stock market and the recent institutionalization of the private equity industry. Rhetoricizing the Chinese capitalist transformation provides a glimpse into how the Chinese minds work as Chinese people participate in the process of changing the country and themselves. Adopting both an indigenous perspective and an outsider view on China, this book serves as a guide for anyone interested in learning how Chinese reason, persuade, debate, and resist.

State responses to terrorism have shaped politics and society globally. But how far, and in what precise ways, has counter-terrorism actually succeeded? Based on the author's experience of studying terrorism and counter-terrorism for over three decades, Does Counter-Terrorism Work? offers an historically-grounded, systematic, and expert interrogation of the effectiveness of state responses to terrorist violence. Previous analyses have too often tended to be polarized, simplistic, and short-termist; they have also lacked a comprehensive framework against which properly to assess the (in)efficacy of counter-terrorist efforts over time. Richard English's pioneering book carefully defines what effective counter-terrorism would involve, and then tests that layered framework through cross-case, balanced, historically-focused comparison of important counter-terrorist campaigns. Drawing on a vast range of source material, Does Counter-Terrorism Work? assesses in detail the strategic, tactical, and personal or political achievements and failures evident this blood-stained field of work.