Książki na temat „COLLAPSE ASSESSMENT”

This chapter examines the connection between German unification and the economic and monetary union (EMU), with particular emphasis on the relationship between the acceleration of European integration in the late 1980s and the seismic geopolitical shifts in Central and Eastern Europe, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Following a review of relations between the European Community (EC) and the Soviet Union on the eve of those momentous events, the chapter explains how the rapid integration in Western Europe became intertwined with disintegration in Central and Eastern Europe. It shows that the collapse of the Soviet bloc had a profound impact on the European Union as ten newly-independent Central and Eastern European states clamoured for membership. The chapter concludes with an assessment of EU enlargement in the post-Cold War period.

This chapter discusses Robert Putnam’s 2000 book,Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, in which he documents the decline in civic engagement, social connectedness and social capital, and sense of community among Americans. Putnam illustrates the devastating effects of these trends for America and Americans by focusing on five “illustrative” fields: child welfare and education, public safety and neighborhood organization, labor- market outcomes and economic performance, health and happiness, and democracy and democracy values. The chapter explains what social capital is and how it works before concluding with an assessment of several areas where scholars have fruitfully engaged or challenged Putnam’s theoretical contribution.

The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

The use of ultrasound in obstetric anaesthesia practice has accelerated in the past decade, following a typical pattern of a small number of enthusiastic early adopters, to a current phase of more widespread use. The use of ultrasound in everyday practice has yet to include the majority of practitioners. However, more widespread availability of equipment and also training opportunities will ensure that it may be a future standard in obstetric units. The most obvious and current application for ultrasound for obstetric anaesthetists is in the improvement of the safety, quality, and success of neuraxial anaesthesia. This chapter sets out a description of current technique and knowledge of this application of ultrasound by obstetric anaesthetists and will give the reader a good overview of this topic. There are other applications of ultrasound in obstetric anaesthesia practice including vascular access, cardiac assessment in patients with cardiovascular collapse, and possibly even gastric volume assessment. Future equipment modifications may enhance the technique with smaller ultrasound probes for more accurate skin marking and also with enhanced image quality.

The book provides rule-by-rule commentaries on European contract law (general contract law, consumer contract law, the law of sale and related services), dealing with its modern manifestations as well as its historical and comparative foundations. After the collapse of the European Commission's plans to codify European contract law it is timely to reflect on what has been achieved over the past three to four decades, and for an assessment of the current situation. In particular, the production of a bewildering number of reference texts has contributed to a complex picture of European contract laws rather than a European contract law. The present book adopts a broad perspective and an integrative approach. All relevant reference texts (from the CISG to the Draft Common European Sales Law) are critically examined and compared with each other. As far as the acquis commun (ie the traditional private law as laid down in the national codifications) is concerned, the Principles of European Contract Law have been chosen as a point of departure. The rules contained in that document have, however, been complemented with some chapters, sections, and individual provisions drawn from other sources, primarily in order to account for the quickly growing acquis communautaire in the field of consumer contract law. In addition, the book ties the discussion concerning the reference texts back to the pertinent historical and comparative background; and it thus investigates whether, and to what extent, these texts can be taken to be genuinely European in nature, ie to constitute a manifestation of a common core of European contract law. Where this is not the case, the question is asked whether, and for what reasons, they should be seen as points of departure for the further development of European contract law.

After more than 15 years of research and writing, the Landsat Legacy Project Team, in collaboration with the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS), published an account of monitoring the Earth’s lands for a half-century with Landsat. Born of technologies that evolved from the Second World War, Landsat not only pioneered global land monitoring but in the process, drove innovation in digital imaging technologies and encouraged the development of global imagery archives. Access to this imagery led to early breakthroughs in natural resources assessments, particularly for agriculture, forestry, and geology. The technical Landsat remote sensing revolution was not simple or straightforward. Early conflicts between civilian and defense satellite remote sensing users gave way to disagreements over whether the Landsat system should be a public service or a private enterprise. The failed attempts to privatize Landsat nearly led to its demise. Only the combined engagement of civilian and defense organizations ultimately saved the Landsat program from the brink of collapse. With the emergence of 21st century Earth system science research, the full value of the Landsat concept and its continuous 50-year global archive has been recognized and embraced. Discussion of Landsat’s future continues but its heritage will not be forgotten. This innovative satellite system’s vital history is captured in this notable volume on Landsat’s Enduring Legacy.

The armed forces of Europe have undergone a dramatic transformation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Handbook of European Defence Policies and Armed Forces provides the first comprehensive analysis of national security and defence policies, strategies, doctrines, capabilities, and military operations, as well as the alliances and partnerships of European armed forces in response to the security challenges Europe has faced since the end of the cold war. A truly cross-European comparison of the evolution of national defence policies and armed forces remains a notable blind spot in the existing literature. This Handbook aims to fill this gap with fifty-one contributions on European defence and international security from around the world. The six parts focus on: country-based assessments of the evolution of the national defence policies of Europe’s major, medium, and lesser powers since the end of the cold war; the alliances and security partnerships developed by European states to cooperate in the provision of national security; the security challenges faced by European states and their armed forces, ranging from interstate through intra-state and transnational; the national security strategies and doctrines developed in response to these challenges; the military capabilities, and the underlying defence and technological industrial base, brought to bear to support national strategies and doctrines; and, finally, the national or multilateral military operations by European armed forces. The contributions to The Handbook collectively demonstrate the fruitfulness of giving analytical precedence back to the comparative study of national defence policies and armed forces across Europe.

This book is the real story of how George W. Bush came to double-down on Iraq in the highest stakes gamble of his entire presidency. It offers an unprecedented look into the process by which Bush overruled much of the military leadership and many of his trusted advisors to authorize the deployment of roughly 30,000 additional troops to the warzone in a bid to save Iraq from collapse in 2007. The adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy and surge of new troops into Iraq altered the American posture in the Middle East for a decade to come. The book provides access to the deliberations among the decision-makers on Bush's national security team as they embarked on that course. In their own words, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice, Joshua Bolten, Robert Gates, and others, recount the debates and disputes that informed the process as Bush weighed the historical lessons of Vietnam against the perceived strategic imperatives in the Middle East. For a president who had earlier vowed never to dictate military strategy to generals, the deliberations in the Oval Office and Situation Room in 2006 constituted a trying and fateful moment. Bush risked losing public esteem and courted political ruin by refusing to disengage from the costly war in Iraq. The book is a portrait of leadership in the Bush White House. The personal perspectives are complemented by critical assessments. Taken together, they are a first draft of the history of the surge and new chapter in the history of the American presidency.

This book provides authoritative analysis of current practice in international banking and the law that applies to it. Topics covered include: syndicated loans, security structures, derivative products, and mis-selling claims. The book tackles areas which have particular relevance to current practice. Amongst these are cross-border matters such as worldwide freezing injunctions, foreign disclosure orders, the bankers' duty of confidentiality, and the impact of sanctions on banking transactions. In particular, the book provides examination of various matters arising out of the Lehman collapse and the failure of the Icelandic banking system. This second edition reviews a significant accumulation of case law in these areas. Reflecting the continued growth of the Islamic finance market, there is also a section on this highly specialized but increasingly important area. The new edition provides consideration of the new UK and EU regulatory regimes, analysing the respective responsibilities of the UK Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and the establishment of new banking authorities in the EU. A separate chapter examines the new capital adequacy and liquidity regimes that will apply to banks in the wake of Basel 3. It also reflects on the impact of the crisis following on from the initial assessments made in the first edition. The book examines the new regimes for ‘ring-fencing’ of retail banking business and for the resolution of failing banks, introduced at both the UK and EU levels. The text also includes a new chapter examining the challenges that the banking system would face in the event that a Member State elected to withdraw from the Eurozone — a fate which appeared to hang over Greece during the crisis and which could recur if the single currency zone faces renewed strains.

Introduction During the Covid-19 pandemic, non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) aimed to minimise the spread of the virus as much as possible to avoid the most severe cases and the collapse of health systems. These measures included mobility restrictions in several countries, including Spain. Objective To assess the impact of mobility constraints on incidence, transmission, severe cases and mortality in the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. These constraints include: • Mandatory home confinement. • - Recommendation to stay at home. • - Perimeter closures for entry and/or exit from established areas. • - Restriction of night-time mobility (curfew). Methodology Systematic literature review, including documents from official bodies, systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The following reference databases were consulted until October 2021 (free and controlled language): Medline, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, TripDB, Epistemonikos, Royal college of London, COVID-end, COVID-19 Evidence Reviews, WHO, ECDC and CDC. Study selection and quality analysis were performed by two independent researchers. References were filtered firstly by title and abstract and secondly by full text in the Covidence tool using a priori inclusion and exclusion criteria. Synthesis of the results was done qualitatively. The quality of the included studies was assessed using the AMSTAR-II tool. Results The literature search identified 642 studies, of which 38 were excluded as duplicates. Of the 604 potentially relevant studies, 12 studies (10 systematic reviews and 2 official agency papers) were included in the analysis after filtering. One of the official agency papers was from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the other paper was from the Ontario Agency for Health Promotion and Protection (OHP). The result of the quality assessment with the AMSTAR-II tool of the included systematic reviews was: 3 reviews of moderate quality, 6 reviews of low quality and 1 review of critically low quality. The interventions analysed in the included studies were divided into 2 categories: the first category comprised mandatory home confinement, recommendation to stay at home and curfew, and the second category comprised perimeter blocking of entry and/or exit (local, cross-community, national or international). This division is because the included reviews analysed the measures of mandatory home confinement, advice to stay at home and curfew together without being able to carry out a disaggregated analysis. The included systematic reviews for the evaluation of home confinement, stay-at-home advice and curfew express a decrease in incidence levels, transmission and severe cases following the implementation of mobility limitation interventions compared to the no measure comparator. These conclusions are supported by the quantitative or qualitative results of the studies they include. All reviews also emphasise that to increase the effectiveness of these restrictions it is necessary to combine them with other public health measures. In the systematic reviews included for the assessment of entry and/or exit perimeter closure, most of the studies included in the reviews were found to be modelling studies based on mathematical models. All systematic reviews report a decrease in incidence, transmission and severe case levels following the implementation of travel restriction interventions. The great heterogeneity of travel restrictions applied, such as travel bans, border closures, passenger testing or screening, mandatory quarantine of travellers or optional recommendations for travellers to stay at home, makes data analysis and evaluation of interventions difficult. Conclusions Mobility restrictions in the development of the Covid-19 pandemic were one of the main NPI measures implemented. It can be concluded from the review that there is evidence for a positive impact of NPIs on the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. The heterogeneity of the data from the included studies and their low quality make it difficult to assess the effectiveness of mobility limitations in a disaggregated manner. Despite this, all the included reviews show a decrease in incidence, transmission, hospitalisations and deaths following the application of the measures under study. These measures are more effective when the restrictions were implemented earlier in the pandemic, were applied for a longer period and were more rigorous in their application.

The turn of the 20th and 21st centuries has been a very dynamic period of change in Poland and around the world; also a period of change in thinking about the economy and agriculture. The present work is a study of the decline, divestments and development of agriculture in the areas of fragmented farming structure. The reflections presented herein, upon the processes of the remodelling of agrarian structures, of divestments in farming, and disagrarisation, are mostly anchored in the achievements of the theory of spatial economy (land management), and the microeconomic theories of choice, including the theory of an agricultural holding (farm) and land rent theories. The work focuses on the economic issues of remodelling the agrarian structure, but due to the nature of the issues discussed herein, specifically in relation to family-owned farms, the social and environmental aspects also needed to be taken into account – in response to the need for a heterogeneous approach, which is increasingly stressed in economic sciences today. The main objective of the research was to diagnose and assess the scale and scope of the mechanisms and processes that inform the decline and growth of agricultural holdings in the areas with fragmented farming structure. The study covered the area comprising four regions (provinces) of south-eastern Poland, which – according to the FADN nomenclature – form the macro region of Małopolska and Pogórze. The study of subject literature has been enriched with an analysis of available statistics; data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN); information obtained from the Department of Programming and Reporting at the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture; and author’s own research conducted among farm owners. The information thus obtained made it possible to: • Determine the theoretical premises for the spatial diversity of agriculture, and the role of small farms in the shaping of agrarian structure. • Adapt the concept of “divestment” for the description and analysis of the phenomena occurring in agriculture. • Indicate the role and importance of the processes of divestment and disagrarisation in the restructuring of agriculture. • Assess the natural, social and economic determinants of the process of restructuring agriculture in areas with fragmented farming structure. • Assess selected aspects of economic efficiency of agriculture in areas with fragmented farming structure, with the focus on small and micro farms. • Carry out an ex ante evaluation of the impact of agricultural policy instruments on the process of restructuring of agriculture in the macro region of Małopolska and Pogórze. • Identify the indicators of decline and fall, and barriers to the liquidation of farms. • Assess the relationship between the level of socio-economic development, the structure of farming, and the quality of agricultural production space in a given territorial unit, versus the intensity of the economic and production disagrarisation processes in agricultural holdings. • Propose targeted solutions conducive to the improvement of the farming structure in areas with a high framentation of agriculture. Observation of the processes occurring in agriculture, and the scientific theories created on the basis thereof, have shown that even the smallest farms have a chance to continue in existence, provided that we are able to positively verify their adaptation to the changing conditions in the environment. Carrying out farming activity is a prerequisite for implementing the economic, social and environmental functions associated with family farms. At the same time, based on the analyses performed, we need to assume that the advanced processes of the production and economic disagrarisation of agricultural holdings are to a greater extent determined by the anatomical features of agriculture, and by the natural conditions, than by the level of socio-economic development of the given territorial unit. In the current economic climate, the remodelling of the agrarian structure is only possible with the active participation of the institutions responsible for the creation of economic growth and agricultural policy development. It is extremely important from the point of view of environmental protection, and the viability of rural areas, to support small farms engaged in agricultural activities, and to introduce such instruments that will enable the replacement of an economic collapse with divestments, carried out in a planned manner, and allowing for thus released agricultural resources to find alternative application in units with a higher development potential. The area of theoretical research requiring further exploration includes the issues such as transactional costs of the liquidation of agricultural holdings, and the assessment of the economic effectiveness of conducting divestments.

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.