Books on the topic 'Back­end development'

This chapter begins with the economic crisis of the 1970s, OPEC 1 and Labour’s responses, and the broader ideological challenge presented to social democracy by the economic problems of the mid 1970s. The chapter’s second section looks at the broad growth of anti-state notions amongst a variety of elements in 1970s Britain, including academics, journalists, and think tanks, and how these notions related to the Conservative Party’s developing positions. The third section looks in a more focused fashion at the development of the ‘rolling back the state’ policy agenda as applied to public spending after 1979. The fourth section looks more broadly at the successes and failures of the attempt to roll back the state down to the end of the Conservative government in 1997. The final section looks at how far the state-shrinking agenda reflected or shaped public opinion.

Every year. 15 million girls are married before they turn 18. This chapter touches on how child marriage is a violation of human rights and holds back international development efforts; it reflects on progress over the past 5 years. Discussed is what it will take to end child marriage and support married girls effectively, and that there are no “silver bullets.” Efforts to end child marriage must be holistic and comprehensive and bring in a range of different actors. There are four overarching strategies needed: empowering girls; mobilizing families and communities; providing appropriate services; and ensuring a supportive legal and policy framework. The chapter concludes with recommendations on what needs to be done now if we want to accelerate progress toward a world free of child marriage, where girls and women are equal to boys and men and can achieve their potential in all aspects of their lives.

This document describes the proof-of-concept (PoC) developed by the Inter-American Development Bank, the IDB Lab, LACChain, the Citi Bank Innovations Labs, and ioBuilders to demonstrate cross-border payments between entities in different countries that involve currency exchange, using digital money represented by tokens -tokenized money- in the LACChain Besu Blockchain Network. For this PoC, Citi Bank played the role of the bank holding the funds; the IDBs headquarters in the U.S. played the role of the sender of tokenized dollars; an individual in Dominican Republic played the role of recipient of tokenized Dominican pesos; LACChain provided the blockchain infrastructure and developed the back end, the smart contracts and the integrations; and ioBuilders provided technical advice and developed the front end.

This chapter focuses on the rise of the participation paradigm from the early 1980s through the end of the 1990s, noting that it is still the dominant discourse within the field of communication for development (c4d) today. The idea of people participating in their own development goes back to the beginning of communication for development and social change. This approach refocused the effort of c4d on people as the engines of change, and trusting them to be up to the challenge. This chapter first considers different kinds of participation and what they might mean, along with the context for participatory communication in c4d during the period 1970–1990s. It then turns to pioneers of participatory communication in development and goes on to address the question of whether the approach deserves the title of paradigm, much less that of a dominant one. It also examines a case that illustrates both the problems and the successes of the application of the participation paradigm: Canada's Challenge for Change initiative, implemented by the National Film Board in Fogo Island.

Regional development banks (RDB) have become increasingly important in the world economy, but have also been relatively under-researched to date. This timely volume addresses this lack of attention by providing a comprehensive, comparative, and empirically informed analysis of their origins, evolution, and contemporary role in the world economy through to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The editors provide an analytical framework that includes a revised categorization of RDB by geographic operation and function. In part one, the chapter authors offer detailed analyses of the origins, evolution, and contemporary role of the major RDB, including the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the Central American Bank, the Andean Development Corporation, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. In part two, the authors engage in comparative analyses of key topics on RDB, examining their initial design and their changing business models, their shifting role in promoting policies supported by the United States as hegemon and the private sector. The volume ends with a critical reflection on the role played by RDB to date and a strong defence of the need for these banks in an increasingly complex world economy.

This chapter familiarizes readers with the ancient back-story of the Julian calendar and describes how one of the central problems inherent in this calendar—the drift of the equinoxes and solstices caused by an overestimation of the length of the tropical year—manifested itself in medieval literature until the end of the eleventh century. It also explores how the development of the computus genre in seventh-century Ireland was instrumental in preserving knowledge of the Western calendar’s Roman-pagan roots. The final two sections show how the existence of diverging traditions for the dates of the equinoxes and solstices in the Julian calendar created an important context for the practice of solar astronomy in early medieval Europe, which included the use of observational methods.

The central nervous system develops from a proliferating tube of cells and retains a tubular organization in the adult spinal cord and brain, including the forebrain. Failure of the neural tube to close at the front is lethal, whereas failure to close the tube at the back end produces spina bifida, a serious neural tube defect. Swellings in the neural tube develop into the hindbrain, midbrain, diencephalon, and telencephalon. The diencephalon sends an outpouching out of the cranium to form the retina, providing an accessible window onto the brain. The dorsal telencephalon forms the cerebral cortex, which in humans is enormously expanded by growth in every direction. Running through the embryonic neural tube is an internal lumen that becomes the cerebrospinal fluid–containing ventricular system. The effects of damage to the spinal cord and forebrain are compared with respect to impact on self and potential for improvement.

This introductory chapter provides brief descriptions of the World Bank Group of intergovernmental organizations, including the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes itself, as of June 30, 2010 (the end of the organizations’ 2010 fiscal year). It covers the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Finance Corporation, International Development Association and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Peritoneal dialysis (PD) requires the periodic instillation of dialysate into the peritoneal cavity and induces the movement of solutes and fluid across the semipermeable peritoneal membrane that allows for the successful management of the uraemic syndrome. Even though this was recognized as far back as 1923, technical limitations precluded the large-scale use of PD for the long-term treatment of end-stage renal disease for 50 years. This changed with the development of an indwelling catheter for PD by Henry Tenckhoff in the late 1960s, the description of the technique of continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis by Popovich and colleagues in 1976, and the introduction of plastic bags in lieu of glass bottles in the mid 1970s. It is estimated that over 200,000 patients are undergoing treatment with PD worldwide, accounting for about 15% of the international dialysis population.

Adolescents on Music foregrounds the voices of 30 American adolescent musicians, ages 12–18. Adolescent singer-songwriters, studio and solo musicians, rappers, composers and arrangers, and band, choir, and orchestra members tell about their musical development and what it is like to make music by themselves and others. Situated in these 30 adolescents’ experiences is a theory of adolescent musical development—a theory that will help music educators support adolescents in their lives. The book is structured in three parts: Part I focuses on “who I am” with an in-depth look at musical identities; Part II explores “the social self” by investigating adolescent experiences of belonging, community, and social identity; Part III looks toward “a future vision” focusing on adolescent perspectives on their future and their advice for music educators. In the last chapter, Parker proposes one philosophy of adolescent music-making. Throughout the book, research from the arts, social and natural sciences, humanities, and education dimensionalize adolescent perspectives. Special features of this book include “Step Back” locations, reflective spaces for the reader to draw connections with adolescents’ experience and their own experiences. At the end of each chapter, the “Wrap Up” allows additional spaces for topics, questions, and possibilities for effective teaching interactions. Between each chapter are “Interludes” written by one or more of the 30 adolescent contributors.

From the end of the eighteenth century, two global processes began to transform livelihoods and living conditions in the South Asia region. These were the rise of British colonial rule, and the integration of the region in the emerging world markets for goods, capital, and labour services, or globalization. Two hundred years later, India was the home to many of the world’s poorest people. India was also one of the fastest-growing emerging market economies of the world. Does a study of the past help to explain the paradox of growth amidst poverty? The book claims that the roots of the paradox did go back to India’s colonial past, when internal factors like geography and external forces like globalization and imperial rule created prosperity in some areas and poverty in others. This revised edition of a popular textbook sets out the key questions that a study of long-run economic change in India should begin with, shows how historians have answered these questions, and where the gaps remain. An essential guide for students of economics, history, and development studies, and a profitable read for anyone interested in India’s economic past.

This book presents a theoretical, historical, and empirical account of the relationship between intellectual property (IP) rights, organizational type, and market structure. Patents expand transactional choice by enabling smaller research-and-development (R&D)-intensive firms to compete against larger firms that wield difficult-to-replicate financing, production, and distribution capacities. In particular, patents enable upstream firms that specialize in innovation to exchange informational assets with downstream firms that specialize in commercialization, lowering capital and technical requirements that might otherwise impede entry. These theoretical expectations track a novel organizational history of the U.S. patent system during 1890–2006. Periods of strong patent protection tend to support innovation ecosystems in which smaller innovators can monetize R&D through financing, licensing, and other relationships with funding and commercialization partners. Periods of weak patent protection tend to support innovation ecosystems in which innovation and commercialization mostly take place within the end-to-end structures of large integrated firms. The proposed link between IP rights and organizational type tracks evidence on historical and contemporary patterns in IP lobbying and advocacy activities. In general, larger and more integrated firms (outside pharmaceuticals) tend to advocate for weaker patents, while smaller and less integrated firms (and venture capitalists who back those firms) tend to advocate for stronger patents. Contrary to conventional assumptions, the economics, history, and politics of the U.S. patent system suggest that weak IP rights often shelter large incumbents from the entry threat posed by smaller R&D-specialist entities.

This book is concerned with the history of the idea of human rights. It puts aside familiar questions such as ‘Where do human rights come from?’ and ‘When did human rights begin?’, for the sake of looking into connections between debates about the rights of man and developments within the history of capitalism. The focus is on England, where, at the end of the eighteenth century, a heated controversy over the rights of man coincided with the final enclosure of common lands and the momentous changes associated with early industrialisation. Tracking back still further to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing about dispossession, resistance and rights, the book reveals a forgotten tradition of thought about central issues in human rights, with implications for their prospects in the world today.

This book explores urban public life through the microcosm of the Chengdu teahouse. Like most public spaces, the teahouse was and still is an enduring symbol of Chinese popular culture, stemming back centuries and prevailing through political transformations, modernization, and globalization. The time period covered begins basically with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949-50, goes through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era. We see clearly that the role and importance of the teahouse changed abruptly, going from severe constriction in its operations to a time when public spaces flourished unrestricted. During the Mao era, the state achieved tight control over society generally, and it was able to penetrate to the very core of society in order to control almost all its resources. Thus, the spaces usually available for sociality and for the natural development of social activities were sharply limited. The post-Mao economic reforms were a turning point in public life because everyday life was dominated by sweeping “open-market” economic reforms that were structured within a unique type of socialist political system, and to a significant degree public life moved away from state control. This book can enhance our understanding of public life and political culture in Chengdu under the Communist state, with its political needs and agendas; from there we may reflect on the situation of other Chinese cities.

Should a writer work in former colonial language, or in a vernacular? The language question was once one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation for being a dead end of narrow nationalism. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, this book studies the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, the chapters follow the emergence of a politics of language from colonization into the early independence decades and through to the era of neoliberal development. Chapters explore the works of well-known francophone authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked vernacular artists with whom they are in dialogue. Pushing back against a prevailing view of postcolonial language debates as a terrain of nativism, this book argues for the language question as a struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they produce literary commensurability by suturing vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, this book models both a new understanding of translation and a different approach to literary comparison.

Chapter 2, ‘After the Institutionalization of Bildung: The Potsdam Antigone of 1841’, traces the successful production of Antigone in Potsdam back to developments that began in Prussia after the devastating Napoleonic Wars—particularly to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reform of the school system and his foundation of Berlin University. Both contributed to Philhellenism by focusing on the study of the Greek language at the Gymnasium and on Altertumswissenschaften (Classics) at the university. The emergence of historicism is identified and discussed as another important precondition that allowed for a new attitude towards the ‘foreignness’ of ancient Greek theatre, resulting in a new theatre aesthetics that maintained the idea of the ‘foreign’ but without alienating the spectator. The Potsdam Antigone created a model for performances of Greek tragedies not only in Prussia but also in other German states, and beyond. This model proved successful almost until the end of the nineteenth century.

The volume provides a distinctive new account of British economic life since the Second World War, focusing upon the ways in which successive governments, in seeking to manage the economy, have sought simultaneously to ‘manage the people’: to try and manage popular understanding of economic issues. In doing so, governments have sought not only to shape expectations for electoral purposes but to construct broader narratives about how ‘the economy’ should be understood. The starting point is to ask what goals have been focused upon; how these have been constructed to appeal to the population; and how far the population has accepted these narratives. In its first part, the volume analyses the development of the major narratives from the 1940s onwards. This part covers the notion of ‘austerity’ and its particular meaning in the 1940s; the rise of a narrative of ‘economic decline’ from the late 1950s, and the subsequent attempts to ‘modernize’ the economy; the attempts to ‘roll back the state’ from the 1970s; the impact of ideas of ‘globalization’ in the 1980s and 1990s; and, finally, the way the crisis of 2008/9 onwards was constructed as a problem of ‘debts and deficits’. The second part of the volume then focuses in on four key issues in attempts to ‘manage the people’: productivity, the balance of payments, inflation, and unemployment. It shows how in each case governments have sought to get the populace to understand these issues in a particular light, and have shaped strategies to that end.

Something remarkable has occurred in Asia with little fanfare over the past twenty-five years. Considered severely underinstitutionalized at the end of the Cold War, Asia’s regional architecture is now characterized by a complex patchwork of overlapping alliances and multilateral institutions. How did this happen? Why should we care? And what does this mean for the future of regional order and Asian security? Adopting a new framework grounded in historical institutionalism, this book examines the transformation of Asia’s regional architecture from 1945 to the present. The book traces institutional and political developments in Asia beginning with the emergence of the postwar US bilateral alliance system and covers the debate and contention behind the rise of several post–Cold War multilateral initiatives. These include the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asian Summit, Trans-Pacific Partnership, China-Japan-Korea Trilateral Summit, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative, among others. Asian policy makers have endeavored to create a set of rules, norms, and institutions to build confidence, facilitate cooperation, improve governance, and ultimately bring peace and order to a region fraught with underlying historical and political tensions. Although Asia’s complex patchwork of institutions may exacerbate regional rivalries, the book demonstrates how overlapping institutions may ultimately bring greater stability to the region.

The European Union Space Policy (EUSP) is one of the lesser known and, consequently, little understood policies of the European Union (EU). Although the EU added outer space as one of its competences in 2009 with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the EUSP roots go back decades earlier.Officially at least, there is no EUSP as such, but rather a European Space Policy (ESP). The ESP combines in principle space programs and competences that cut across three levels of governance: the supranational (EU), the international (intergovernmental), and the national. However, since the EU acquired treaty competences on outer space, it is clear that a nascent EUSP has emerged, even if no one yet dares calling it by its name.Currently, three EU space programs stand out: Galileo, Copernicus, and EGNOS. Galileo is probably the better known and more controversial of the three. Meant to secure European independence from the U.S. global positioning system by putting in orbit a constellation of European satellites, Galileo has been plagued by several problems. One of them was the collapse of the public–private partnership funding scheme in 2006, which nearly killed it. However, instead of marking the end of EUSP, the termination of the public–private partnership served as a catalyst in its favor. Furthermore, research findings indicate that the European Parliament envisioned an EUSP long before the European Commission published its first communication in this regard. This is a surprising yet highly interesting finding because it highlights the fact that in addition to the Commission or the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament is a thus far neglected policy entrepreneur. Overall, the development of the EUSP is an almost ideal case study of European integration by stealth, largely in line with the main principles of two related European integration theories: neofunctionalism and historical institutionalism.Since EUSP is a relatively new policy, the existing academic literature on this policy is also limited. This has also to do with the degree of public interest in outer space in general. Outer space’s popularity reached its heyday during the Cold War era. Today space, in Europe and in other continents, has to compete harder than ever for public attention and investment. Still, research on European space cooperation is growing, and there are reasons to be optimistic about its future.

This book discusses just how diverse a peptide corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF) is, as demonstrated by its presence in various tissues in the body, including the skin, the placenta, and various regions of the brain. As Dobzhansky (1962) noted, in light of Darwin (1874), and beyond, CRF must be placed in the larger world of regulatory biology. Evolutionary trends do not proceed in a continuous one-dimensional direction; there are starts, turns, and abrupt ends. The study of CRF is mostly about diverse functions in physiological and behavioral regulation of the internal milieu and adapting to an ecological and or social context. The book begins with a depiction of the evolutionary origins of CRF in living things, dating back hundreds of millions of years. The book pushes the conception of CRF beyond the HPA axis and common knowledge. We study the role of CRF in metamorphosis and parturition. Further, CRF is a contributor to fear and anxiety, and the book explains how excessive fear is tied to anxiety disorders and vulnerability to the breakdown of mental and physical health. Also discussed is CRF in approach/avoidance behaviors across pre- and postnatal events. CRF is intimately involved in organ development, but it is also linked to devolution of function and conditions of danger. Cravings, addictions, and how CRF is tied both to the ingestion of diverse drugs and to withdrawal are explored. CRF is considered as an epistemic object, addressing what constitutes an information molecule, in general, and CRF, in particular.

This GSoD In Focus provides a brief overview of the global state of democracy at the end of 2019, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, and assesses some of the preliminary impacts that the pandemic has had on democracy globally in 2020. Key findings include: • To address the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in March 2020, more than half the countries in the world (59 per cent) had declared a national state of emergency (SoE), enabling them to take drastic temporary (and in most cases necessary) measures to fight the pandemic. These measures have included in most cases temporarily curbing basic civil liberties, such as freedom of assembly and movement, and in some cases postponing elections. • International IDEA’s Global Monitor of COVID-19’s Impact on Democracy and Human Rights finds that more than half the countries in the world (61 per cent) had, by the end of November 2020, implemented measures to curb COVID-19 that were concerning from a democracy and human rights perspective. These violated democratic standards because they were either disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unnecessary in relation to the health threat. • Concerning developments have been more common in countries that were already non-democratic prior to the pandemic (90 per cent) and less common, although still quite widespread, in democracies (43 per cent). • The democracies that have implemented democratically concerning measures are those that were already ailing before the pandemic. More than two-thirds were democracies that were either backsliding, eroding or weak prior to the pandemic. • Almost a year since the first outbreak of COVID-19, the pandemic seems to have deepened autocratization in most of the countries that were already non-democratic. However, in at least 3 of those countries (Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand), the pandemic has also tapped into existing simmering citizen discontent and may have been the tipping point in unleashing massive protest waves demanding democratic reform. The pandemic has also seemingly deepened democratic backsliding processes and exposed the democratic weakness and fragility of new or re-transitioned democracies (Malaysia, Mali, Myanmar, Sri Lanka). In a few cases, the pandemic has also exposed countries that showed no apparent sign of democratically ailing prior to the pandemic, but where concerning democratic developments have occurred during the pandemic and which risk seeing a significant deterioration in their democratic quality as a result (i.e. Argentina, El Salvador). • The aspects of democracy that have seen the most concerning developments during the pandemic are freedom of expression, media integrity, and personal integrity and security. However, the freedoms that have been restricted across most countries are freedom of movement and assembly. Another core democratic process that has been heavily affected by the pandemic is the electoral, with half the elections scheduled between February and December 2020 postponed due to the pandemic. • The pandemic has also shown democracy’s resilience and capacity for renovation. Innovation through accelerated digitalization has occurred across most regions of the world. And democratic institutions, such as parliaments, courts, electoral commissions, political parties, media and civil society actors, have fought back against attempts at executive overreach and democratic trampling or collaborated to ensure effective responses to the pandemic. The review of the state of democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 uses qualitative analysis and data of events and trends in the region collected through International IDEA’s Global Monitor of COVID-19’s Impact on Democracy and Human Rights, an initiative co-funded by the European Union.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.