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Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans covers civil society engagements with transitional justice processes in the Balkans. The Balkans, whose physical geography is generally considered to be the former Yugoslavia, as well as Albania, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, is a region marked by the post-communist and post-conflict transitional turmoil in which its countries are entangled. With contributions coming from localized and international scholars, this volume provide a comprehensive look at the research in transitional justice in this part of the world, Transitional justice is an ever-growing field which responds to dilemmas over how successor regimes should deal with past human rights abuses of their authoritarian predecessors. This volume explores the ways in which civil society-lay citizens who participate in government and non-government organization without seeking monetary compensation-affect and drive the transitional justice process. The editors and author emphasize the relatively unexplored and under-researched role of civil society groups and social movements, such as local women's groups, the role of art and community media and other grass-roots transitional justice mechanisms and initiatives, in the Balkans' movement towards making peace with the past. Through specific case-studies, the unique contribution of Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans is not only that it covers a part of the world that is not adequately represented in the transitional justice field, but also that it is one of the first projects originally researched and written by experts and scholars from the region or in collaboration with international scholars. By taking a more critical look at national strategies, local practices and priorities, and by closely examining international transitional justice agendas, the authors explore the complex and unpredictable justice processes currently underway in the Balkans. They suggest lessons to be learned from those engagements and identify future directions that may be taken in order to bring a sustainable peace to the region. With its effective combination of empirical studies and theoretical grounding, Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans serves as an excellent resources for scholars of peace studies, the Balkans, historians, peace psychology, transitional justice, political science, civil society, sociologists, criminologists, and anybody interested in the process by which nations and peoples heal themselves.

Examines the exercise of power in the Stalinist music world as well as the ways in which composers and ordinary people responded to it. A comparative inquiry into the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland from the aftermath of World War II through Stalin's death in 1953, concluding with the slow process of de-Stalinization in the mid-to-late 1990s.This book examines the exercise of power in the Stalinist music world as well as the ways in which composers and ordinary people responded to it. It presents a comparative inquiry into the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland from the aftermath of World War II through Stalin's death in 1953, concluding with the slow process of de-Stalinization in the mid- to late-1950s. The author explores how the Communist parties in both countries expressed their attitudes to music of all kinds, and how composers, performers, and audiences cooperated with, resisted, and negotiated these suggestions and demands.Based on a deep analysis of the archival and contemporary published sources on state, party, and professional organizations concerned with musical life, Tompkins argues that music, as a significant part of cultural production in these countries, played a key role in instituting and maintaining the regimes of East Central Europe. As part of the Stalinist project to create and control a new socialist identity at the personal as well as collective level, the ruling parties in East Germany and Poland sought to saturate public space through the production of music. Politically effective ideas and symbols were introduced that furthered their attempts to, in the parlance of the day, "engineer the human soul."Music also helped the Communist parties establish legitimacy. Extensive state support for musical life encouraged musical elites and audiences to accept the dominant position and political missions of these regimes. Party leaders invested considerable resources in the attempt to create an authorized musical language that would secure and maintain hegemony over the cultural and wider social worlds. The responses of composers and audiences ran the gamut from enthusiasm to suspicion, but indifference was not an option. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched

Examines the exercise of power in the Stalinist music world as well as the ways in which composers and ordinary people responded to it. A comparative inquiry into the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland from the aftermath of World War II through Stalin's death in 1953, concluding with the slow process of de-Stalinization in the mid-to-late 1990s. This book examines the exercise of power in the Stalinist music world as well as the ways in which composers and ordinary people responded to it. It presents a comparative inquiry into the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland from the aftermath of World War II through Stalin's death in 1953, concluding with the slow process of de-Stalinization in the mid- to late-1950s. The author explores how the Communist parties in both countries expressed their attitudes to music of all kinds, and how composers, performers, and audiences cooperated with, resisted, and negotiated these suggestions and demands.

Based on a deep analysis of the archival and contemporary published sources on state, party, and professional organizations concerned with musical life, Tompkins argues that music, as a significant part of cultural production in these countries, played a key role in instituting and maintaining the regimes of East Central Europe. As part of the Stalinist project to create and control a new socialist identity at the personal as well as collective level, the ruling parties in East Germany and Poland sought to saturate public space through the production of music. Politically effective ideas and symbols were introduced that furthered their attempts to, in the parlance of the day, "engineer the human soul."

Music also helped the Communist parties establish legitimacy. Extensive state support for musical life encouraged musical elites and audiences to accept the dominant position and political missions of these regimes. Party leaders invested considerable resources in the attempt to create an authorized musical language that would secure and maintain hegemony over the cultural and wider social worlds. The responses of composers and audiences ran the gamut from enthusiasm to suspicion, but indifference was not an option.

This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans covers civil society engagements with transitional justice processes in the Balkans. The Balkans, whose physical geography is generally considered to be the former Yugoslavia, as well as Albania, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, is a region marked by the post-communist and post-conflict transitional turmoil in which its countries are entangled. With contributions coming from localized and international scholars, this volume provide a comprehensive look at the research in transitional justice in this part of the world, Transitional justice is an ever-growing field which responds to dilemmas over how successor regimes should deal with past human rights abuses of their authoritarian predecessors. This volume explores the ways in which civil society--lay citizens who participate in government and non-government organization without seeking monetary compensation--affect and drive the transitional justice process. The editors and author emphasize the relatively unexplored and under-researched role of civil society groups and social movements, such as local women's groups, the role of art and community media and other grass-roots transitional justice mechanisms and initiatives, in the Balkans' movement towards making peace with the past. Through specific case-studies, the unique contribution of Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans is not only that it covers a part of the world that is not adequately represented in the transitional justice field, but also that it is one of the first projects originally researched and written by experts and scholars from the region or in collaboration with international scholars. By taking a more critical look at national strategies, local practices and priorities, and by closely examining international transitional justice agendas, the authors explore the complex and unpredictable justice processes currently underway in the Balkans. They suggest lessons to be learned from those engagements and identify future directions that may be taken in order to bring a sustainable peace to the region. With its effective combination of empirical studies and theoretical grounding, Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans serves as an excellent resources for scholars of peace studies, the Balkans, historians, peace psychology, transitional justice, political science, civil society, sociologists, criminologists, and anybody interested in the process by which nations and peoples heal themselves.

"Corporations have found a new resource to be mined for profit: our children. In this shocking and indelible behind-the-scenes journey, Joel Bakan, acclaimed author and award-winning maker of the renowned film and international bestselling book The Corporation, uncovers the astonishing degree to which companies exploit the special vulnerabilities of children, manipulate parents' fears, and operate with callous disregard for children's health and well-being. The number of children taking dangerous psychotropic drugs has skyrocketed as pharmaceutical companies employ insidious, often illegal tactics to inflate diagnoses of disorders and convince parents their children require medication. A highly sophisticated marketing industry deploys increasingly subtle and powerful tactics to play on children's intense emotions and desires and to lure them into obsessive consumerism. Computer game designers craft techniques to titillate children with sex and violence, while social media developers infiltrate and shape children's social and emotional worlds to compel them to spend more and more monetizable time online. America's schools are being transformed into profit centers while children are subjected to increasingly regimented teaching that thwarts curiosity and creativity, numbing the joy of learning. And children's chronic health problems, from asthma to cancer, autism, and birth defects, steadily escalate as thousands of new industrial chemicals are dumped into their environments. Nelson Mandela once sagely remarked that "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way it treats its children." The problem today, as Joel Bakan reveals, is that business interests have made protecting children extremely difficult. Corporations pump billions into rendering parents and governments powerless to shield children from an unrelenting commercial assault, with the result that after a century of progress, during which protective laws and regulations were widely promulgated, children are once again exposed to substantial harms at the hands of economic actors. Childhood Under Siege leaves no room for doubt that this assault on childhood is a major crisis of our time. A powerful manifesto for urgent change, it empowers us to shield our own children while offering concrete and realistic proposals for legal reforms that would protect all children from these predatory practices. "--Publisher's description

The Social Media Handbook is a comprehensive risk and compliance management toolkit that walks employers step-by-step through the process of developing and implementing effective social media policy and compliance management programs that are designed to minimize—and in some cases prevent—social networking and web 2.0 risks and other electronic disasters.Throughout this important resource Nancy Flynn (an internationally recognized expert on workplace social media) offers a guide to best practices for creating safe, effective, and compliant electronic business communications. The book contains a thorough review of the risks inherent in employees' social media use and content and explores how organizations can help manage behavior, mitigate risks, and maximize compliance through the implementation of strategic social media compliance management programs. These programs combine written policies, supported by comprehensive employee education and are enforced by proven-effective technology tools. Once these policies and programs are in place employers can safely take advantage of the marketing and communications benefits offered by social media.Covering a wealth of material, the book includes vital information on topics such as social media and the law; managing records and e-discovery compliantly; regulatory compliance; privacy and security; blog risks and compliance rules; mobile devices drive social media risks; a seven-step plan for social media policy and compliance management; conducting a social media audit; creating social media policies; content rules and compliance; policy compliance and education; reputation management; and more.In addition to addressing pertinent topics on risk management, the book contains cautionary, real-life social networking disaster stories that show how organizations can lose revenue and reputations, reveals how employees can lose jobs, and explains how individuals can face public humiliation.The Social Media Handbook is a hands-on guide written for human resource professionals, information technology managers, legal professionals, compliance officers, records managers, and others who need to manage today's technology tools with up-to-date employment rules. Nancy Flynn is the founder and executive director of The ePolicy Institute. She is an internationally recognized expert on workplace social media, e-mail, and Internet policy, compliance, and communications. She is the author of 12 books including The e-Policy Handbook and The ePolicy Toolkit.

This widely researched study demonstrates convincingly that neither grandiose promises nor nightmare scenarios have much to do with actual care practices employing telecare. Combining detailed ethnographic studies of nurses and patients involved in telecare with a broad theoretical frameworky from various disciplines, the author concludes that these practices leads to more rather than less intense caring relations, resulting from a spectacular raise in the frequency of contacts between nurses and patients. Patients are much taken with this, not because they feel they are finally able to manage themselves, but because they can 'leave things to the experts'. The patients find that caring is something that is best done for others. The book frames urgent questions about the future of telecare and the ways in which innovative care practices can be built on facts rather than hopes, hypes or nightmares. - Politici promoten telezorg als de meest efficiënte oplossing van het probleem van de vergrijzing en ontgroening. Met behulp van telezorg, zo beweren ze, gaan chronisch zieke ouderen 'zichzelf managen' en zullen er minder professionals nodig zijn. Aan de andere kant stellen technologie-pessimisten dat er een verschraling en verkilling in de zorg zal optreden als professionals telezorg grootschalig gaan invoeren. Zieke ouderen zullen hun laatste adem uitblazen onder toezicht van camera's en sensoren, ver van menselijk contact.Grootse beloften noch inktzwarte nachtmerries hebben veel te maken met de praktijk waarin professionals en patiënten daadwerkelijk met telezorg werken. Dat blijkt uit dit boek, waarin de auteur gedetailleerd en uiterst leesbaar verslag doet van de wederwaardigheden van patiënten en verpleegkundigen in een aantal pioniersprojecten van telezorg. De combinatie van etnografisch onderzoek en theoretische inzichten uit onder andere wetenschaps- en techniekstudies en ethiek levert verrassende inzichten op. Zo blijkt telezorg de zorg intensiever te maken omdat het contact tussen patiënten en professionals vaak spectaculair toeneemt. De ouderen zijn hier doorgaans erg tevreden over, niet omdat ze zichzelf nu eindelijk kunnen managen, maar juist omdat ze zich veilig en gekoesterd voelen door al die extra zorg die via apparatuur mogelijk wordt gemaakt. Het boek stelt een aantal prikkelende vragen over de toekomst van telezorg en de manier waarop we innovaties in de zorg zouden kunnen baseren op feiten in plaats van dromen, hypes of nachtmerries.

"No person, no country in the world, irrespective of its stage of development, is fully self-sufficient. Cooperation brings together peoples and nations and facilitates peaceful co-existence." So begins Rural Cooperation In The Cooperative Movement In Tanzania, what will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal work in the field. The author has lectured a course on Rural Cooperation in Tanzania at the University of Dar es Salaam for seven consecutive years, but lack of appropriate books with adequate coverage of the course content obliged him to conduct extensive research on cooperation and cooperatives. The resulting book covers the entire field and addresses the subject by providing a foundation on which wider study can be based. It is intended to make its readers aware of the strategies and challenges of cooperation and has a wider relevance, as it will be useful to policy makers in the cooperative sector, which is a significant part of the private sector in Tanzania, and indeed in most African countries. By June 2008, there were 2614 agricultural marketing cooperative societies, 4780 savings and credits cooperative societies, 71 livestock cooperative societies, 129 fishing cooperative societies, 11 housing cooperative societies, 3 mining cooperative societies, 185 industrial cooperative societies, 98 water irrigation cooperative societies, 4 transport cooperative societies, 103 consumer cooperative societies, and 553 service and other cooperative societies; perfectly illustrative of the movement's scope and the need to pay it careful attention. The topics included make it appropriate for use in Sociology, Rural Development, Marketing, Development Studies and studies in other specialties in the Social Sciences. From an exploration of the cooperative movement's various international iterations to a perspicacious survey of the history of cooperatives in Tanzania, Dr. Lyimo highlights the issues facing farmers and business people and illustrates the way in which cooperative effort- enterprises that put people, and not capital, at the center of their business- can not only improve members' economic power in bargaining for better marketing conditions and prices, but also to increase employment opportunities, thereby improving the standard of living for a large number of people. In these times of penury and economic disenfranchisement, this book not only fills the information gap, but provides, in the ultimate chapters, "Procedures for Organizing a Cooperative Society", and "Managing Rural Cooperative Societies", the basic principles and advice for those considering the cooperative model as the best means of improving their economic viability.

Congress For Dummieshelps you sort out what Congress does on a daily basis and what it all means to you, the citizen. It shows you how to get organized, make your voice heard, and influence legislation that might affect you. Full of helpful resources such as contact information for House and Senate offices, and smart, straightforward explanations of the legislative process, this book is everything you need to understand Congress and get involved in your government.Whether you just want to know how government works, or you want to get involved to change your country, this simple guide covers all the ins and outs of Congress. It's a nonpartisan look at Congress that includes forewords by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Inside you'll find easy explanations and helpful tips on how to:Get involved in the democratic processInfluence legislation that's important to youUndersta nd Congress and the mediaContact your senators and representativesCheck out Congress in action, in personDeal with congressional staffExpert author David Silverberg — Managing Editor and a columnist at the Washington weekly The Hill— takes the mystery out of getting something done in Congress, introducing you to the players and explaining everything from legislation and lobbying to caucuses and coalitions. Written with the citizen advocate in mind, this helpful guide gives regular people the tools and knowledge they need to achieve their aims. Inside, you'll discover:How the three branches of government work togetherHow to register your opinion with your elected officialsHow the legislative process works — from idea to lawHow debates, conferences, and vetoes workHow budgeting and appropriations workHow to get the most effect from your political contributionsHow the lobbying process worksHow to advocate for legislationHow to deal with congressional staffersHow to make use of congressional servicesGetting something done in the messy confusion of democracy and bureaucracy is no easy task. Full of the kind of information and knowledge that Washington insiders take for granted, Congress For Dummieslevels the playing field so that regular people — just like you — can make a difference, too. David Silverberg is Managing Editor and a columnist at The Hill, a weekly newspaper that covers Congress.

Freedom and Law offers a provocative new view of the relationship between human desire, the production of knowledge, and conceptions of power by developing a nonpolemical account of divine law. Where recent trends in political theology have insisted upon the antagonistic nature of the law, this book presents the paradigm-altering power of a discourse in the nexus between law and freedom. It demonstrates how this nexus catapults religious thought into a free and powerful engagement with nonreligious political, ethical, and social positions.Freedom and Law challenges a contemporary wave of scholarship, including the work of Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek, that identifies Jewish law as the originary soucre of polemic between nations and therefore as historically responsible for the exceptionalism that undergirds contemporary conflict. By contrast, Freedom and Law argues that only in an account of revelatory law can divine freedom and human freedom be thought of without contradiction.The first part analyzes the logic of exceptionalism. In the second part, the author argues that one cannot invoke a doctrine of election without rigorous scrutiny of texts that portray an electing God and an elected people. Once we scrutinize these texts, the character of freedom and law within the divine-human relationship shows itself to be different from that found in exceptionalist logics.The third and final part examines the impact of the logic of the law on Jewish-Christian apologetics. Rather than require that one defend one's position to a nonbeliever, this logic situates all epistemological justification within the order or freedom of God. If the condition of the possibility of my claim is the reality of divine freedom, such freedom also justifies the possibility of another's claim.In a significant contribution to the post-ecclesiastical reengagement between religion, critical theory, and the political, Freedom and Law introduces new categories of knowledge and action into Jewish and Christian thinking, unbound by the dialectics of desire that has dominated the discourse of both traditions for centuries. It shows how thinking of law and freedom together may now enable Judaism and Christianity to engage in a historically self-conscious and nonrelativistic relation to each other and to nonbelievers

"Carr's concern is that development and globalization, as currently pursued, are creating more poverty than they solve, needlessly producing economic and environmental challenges that put everyone on Earth at risk. Confronting this paradoxical outcome head-on, Carr questions the "wisdom" of the traditional development-via-globalization strategy, a sort of connect-the-development-dots, by arguing that in order to connect the dots one must first see the dots. By failing to do so, agencies do not understand what they are connecting and why. This fundamental questioning of Post WWII development strategies, grounded in life along "Globalization's Shoreline," sets his approach to development in the age of globalization apart from much of the contemporary development literature."--Michael H. Glantz, Director, CCB (Consortium for Capacity Building), INSTAAR, University of Colorado "Over the fifty years since the end of the colonial era, rich nations have granted Africa billions of dollars in development aid - the equivalent of six Marshall Plans - and yet, today, much of the continent is as desperate as ever for help. In Delivering Development, Edward Carr delves into the question of why the aid system has failed to deliver on its promises, and offers a provocative thesis: that economic development, at least as international donors define it, is not necessarily equal to advancement. Unlike many combatants in the debate over the causes of global poverty, who jet in and out of these countries and offer the view from 10,000 feet, Carr takes a novel approach to the problem. He examines the aid system as it is actually experienced by poor Africans. Delivering Development focuses on a pair of Ghanaian villages, which despite their poverty by statistical measures have nonetheless managed to construct sophisticated systems of agricultural cultivation and risk management. Carr doesn't argue that these places hold the secret to ending poverty. On the contrary, his point is that there are no overarching solutions, that each community holds a unique set of keys to its own future. By delving into development at the grassroots, Carr reveals the rich and bedeviling complexity of a problem that, all too often, is reduced to simplistic ideological platitudes."--Andrew Rice, author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda.

Out of Bounds focuses on the crucial role that conceptions of iconic colonial Indian spaces--jungles, cantonments, cities, hill stations, bazaars, clubs--played in the literary and social production of British India. Author Alan Johnson illuminates the geographical, rhetorical, and ideological underpinnings of such depictions and, from this, argues that these spaces operated as powerful motifs in the acculturation of Anglo-India. He shows that the bicultural, intrinsically ambivalent outlook of Anglo-Indian writers is acutely sensitive to spatial motifs that, insofar as these condition the idea of home and homelessness, alternately support and subvert conventional colonial perspectives. Colonial spatial motifs not only informed European representations of India, but also shaped important aesthetic notions of the period, such as the sublime. This book also explains how and why Europeans' rhetorical and visual depictions of the Indian subcontinent, whether ostensibly administrative, scientific, or aesthetic, constituted a primary means of memorializing Empire, creating an idiom that postcolonial India continues to use in certain ways. Consequently, Johnson examines specific motifs of Anglo-Indian cultural remembrance, such as the hunting memoir, hill station life, and the Mutiny, all of which facilitated the mythic iconography of the Raj. He bases his work on the premise that spatiality (the physical as well as social conceptualization of space) is a vital component of the mythos of colonial life and that the study of spatiality is too often a subset of a focus on temporality. Johnson reads canonical and lesser-known fiction, memoirs, and travelogues alongside colonial archival documents to identify shared spatial motifs and idioms that were common to the period. Although he discusses colonial works, he focuses primarily on the writings of Anglo-Indians such as Rudyard Kipling, John Masters, Jim Corbett, and Flora Annie Steel to demonstrate how conventions of spatial identity were rhetorically maintained--and continually compromised. All of these considerations amplify this book's focus on the porosity of boundaries in literatures of the colony and of the nation. Out of Bounds will be of interest to not only postcolonial literary scholars, but also scholars and students in interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, South Asian cultural history, cultural anthropology, women's studies, and sociology.

This book develops a debate around responsible social inquiry into new racism. A variety of ways of researching new forms of racism (for example, aversive, modern, cultural, purportedly color-blind, and new racism) are addressed. Experiments that have been undertaken to inquire into group identity and people`s implicit bias in relation to those perceived as "other" are critically explored and their potential consequences reconsidered. The book also critically explores survey research, which, it is argued, can serve to reinforce the notion of the existence of ethnoracial groups with defined boundaries that inhere in social life. The book considers interviewing (including focus group interviewing) and case study research (including participant observation/ethnography) in terms of possibilities for moving beyond new forms of racism. Action research (defined by the understanding of an inextricable link between knowing and acting) is examined in-depth in terms of the hopes to "make a difference" at the moment of inquiry. Types of retroductive logic that are used to examine underlying structures that arguably unduly constrain people`s life chances and render human relationships inhumane are also explored. The book draws together the different arguments, and it proposes ways in which the design of research into new racism can better approached as well as ways in which dialogue around processes of inquiry and the products thereof can be better fostered. Suggestions for nurturing humane social relationships that provide for transcultural meaning-making are threaded through the text. TOC:Chapter 1:General Introduction Chapter 2: Conceptualizing New Racism in Relation to Old-fashioned Racism: Concepts and Research Approaches Chapter 3: Experimental Research: Studying Variables to Examine Causal Effects in terms of Mitigating against the Potential of Racism Chapter 4: Survey Research: Examining Expressed Feelings and Views on Racial(ized) Issues as Variables along with Other Variables Chapter 5: Intensive Interviewing as Research: Generating In-depth Talk to Explore Experiences/Cognitions of Racism Chapter 6: Ethnographic Research: Exploring the Quality of Social Life in Social Settings Chapter 7: Action Research: Exploring in Action the Meaning of Research as Change in Complex Living Systems Chapter 8:Research Conducted in Terms of Retroductive Processes: Rethinking the Theorization of Racism Chapter 9: General Conclusion: Reviewing Research Approaches, Conceptualizing Mixed-research Designs, and Writing into One Another`s Stories References Author Index Subject Index

The New START Treaty, signed by presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in April 2010, was an important achievement. A follow-on to the 1991 START treaty, New START commits both countries to substantial reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Pending ratification, New START limits both countries to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads, far below the Cold War peak of 31,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons in the United States alone. Moreover, the New START treaty furthers Obama's goal of "resetting" U.S.-Russia relations. In just the past two years, the former adversaries also finalized an agreement on plutonium disposition, imposed UN sanctions against Iran in reaction to its nuclear program, and enhanced security for non-deployed tactical nuclear weapons. Despite these signs of progress, it is unwise to be complacent. Even after the implementation of the New START Treaty, Obama's goal of a "world free of nuclear weapons" will remain elusive: the United States and Russia will still command enough nuclear weapons to annihilate each other several times over. In this report, the author argues that reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles even further than New START treaty levels -- to one thousand warheads, including tactical nuclear weapons -- would be both strategically and politically advantageous. It would decrease the risk of nuclear weapons theft and nuclear attack and increase international political support for future U.S. initiatives to reduce or control nuclear warheads, all while maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent. To achieve such a significant reduction in a follow-on to the New START treaty, the United States and Russia would need to reach agreement on three long-standing and contentious issues. Tactical nuclear weapons deployments will be the most difficult of these challenges, since Russia has a much larger arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons than does the United States and will therefore bear the brunt of the tactical nuclear weapons cuts. Missile defense is the second obstacle toward further significant nuclear reductions. Much work remains to secure Moscow's cooperation on, or acceptance of, the project. Finally, the United States and Russia must reach agreement on the use of nuclear vehicles for conventional weapons. It is difficult to overstate the potential danger if either country mistook a conventional missile for a nuclear one

Singapore had been one of the nations severely affected by the 2008-09 global financial and economic crisis. The city state came under pressure through the financial, trade, and confidence channels. To counter these shocks, Singapore policymakers undertook unprecedented monetary and fiscal policy measures. They subsequently charted a revival strategy that would help the country emerge stronger after the crisis. These all-encompassing policies together with the global economic recovery in 2009 helped the city state bounce back faster and stronger than many other regional economies. This book provides an insight into the events that occurred during the crisis and Singapore's successful navigation to economic recovery. "Although much has been written about the global financial crisis of 2008-09, not enough has been said about how it affected Singapore and the policy response. In this highly readable book, Sanchita Basu Das fills this gap, explaining how the crisis rippled through the Singapore economy via trade channels, the financial sector, and asset markets. But the greatest strength of this volume is its comprehensive account of the extraordinary measures Singapore put in place to deal pre-emptively with what could have been huge declines in output and employment in the face of the collapse of trade and credit flows. Singapore's multi-pronged approach, and especially the fiscal support and loan guarantees contained in the 2009 budget, must go down as one of the boldest and most creative policy responses to a crisis. It is a valuable lesson to economics students and practitioners alike. This book gives you the full story." - Vikram Khanna, Associate Editor, The Business Times "Sanchita Basu Das is to be congratulated for providing a fascinating, accessible, and forward-looking analysis of Singapore's response to the global economic crisis of 2008-09. As a highly trade-dependent economy, Singapore was hit hard by these events. But the government was nimble and quick to react. The author describes and evaluates this response, and draws out general lessons for crisis management and mitigation in small open economies. Highly recommended." - Hal Hill, H.W. Arndt Professor of Southeast Asian Economies, Australian National University. "This is a comprehensive account of the impact of the global financial crisis on Singapore -- one of the most open economies in the world -- and policy responses by the government and central bank. The book identifies ...