Книги з теми "Corruption – Economic models"

This chapter aims to provide a review and analysis of skill development in China and India that do not neatly fit any skill formation model found in the literature. Although both China and India have made some impressive achievements in skill formation in the past two decades, great challenges remain on their way toward high-skill equilibrium including providing a strong educational foundation for vulnerable groups, corruption and rising inequality, skills mismatch, and raising employer skill demands. Despite many similar goals and challenges, the trajectories of skill development of the two countries are shaped by different sets of political, socioeconomic, institutional, cultural, demographic, and organizational factors, leading to two different skill formation and demand models with some complementary strengths and weaknesses.

Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the “path to Denmark”—a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subjects of corruption and anticorruption have captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country’s image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. A wide range of historical contexts are addressed, ranging from the ancient to the modern period, with specific insights for policy makers offered throughout.

A critical variable determining the future relationship between China and the United States is the change in the relative balance of power, which depends on the sustainability of China’s economic growth. While China has produced three decades of double-digit growth, this paper argues that China’s rise has peaked. The factors that have contributed to China’s rapid growth, such as efficiency gains produced by market-oriented reforms, practically unlimited access to global markets, and the demographic dividend, are either disappearing or dissipating. Simultaneously, obstacles to future growth, such as systemic corruption, environmental degradation, and demographic ageing, are becoming more salient. Economic slowdown will threaten the survival strategy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, the CCP has followed a sophisticated strategy to maintain power. An economic slowdown will likely cause an unravelling of this strategy, which depends on revenues generated by growth for its sustainability.

This article discusses recent empirical and theoretical research on the electoral rule, which is one feature of modern democracies. It determines that the electoral rule systematically shapes economic policy. An outline of some key objectives of electoral rules is presented in the first section; it further notes the stability and systematic selection that characterize real-world constitutions. It then introduces the main concepts that categorize different electoral rules, and explains how these elements help shape the accountability of government and the size of political rents and corruption. Finally, the article deals with representation in government and a variety of fiscal policy choices.

Over the past two decades, bazaars mushroomed in the new Central Asian states, where rule-of-law institutions are weak and corruption high. How did bazaars grow and thrive in such an inhospitable context? Order at the Bazaar answers this question through an analysis of bazaars in Kyrgyzstan. They are conceptualized as islands of order within a chaotic national context. The findings demonstrate that those at the bazaar, including traders, private land owners, and municipal officials, create order themselves in the absence of a coherent national government apparatus and bureaucratic state. Drawing on original interviews, archival sources, and participant observation, the book illuminates the changing meanings and practices of older traders at bazaars, including the ways in which they adapted Soviet and pre-Soviet institutions and organizational forms to a new market setting. In these settings, they deliberated and advocated for favorable policies and conditions, mediated disputes, channelled information, and served as role models for traders. The findings have relevance beyond the bazaars and borders of this small country; they illuminate how economic activity can operate in weak rule-of-law contexts, and more specifically how a variety of organizational forms come to constitute the order that underpins new market economies.

Brazil is one of the most important but puzzling countries in the world. A nation of 200 million people, it has vast natural resource reserves, rich cultural traditions, a middle class undergoing explosive growth, and social welfare policies that are models for much of the world (‘la bolsa familia,’ which provides a guaranteed income to poor families). And, after decades of authoritarian rule, it is a stable democracy. Yet it is beset by problems that no other advanced economy suffers from: staggeringly high crime rates, sky-high inequality levels, and endemic political corruption. Emblematic of these two sides of Brazil is the selection of Rio as site of both the next Summer Olympics and the next World Cup. While the choice of Rio for these events points to Brazil’s expanding presence on the world stage, so far the construction and planning for the events have been disastrous, threatening to deeply embarrass the nation. In Brazil: What Everyone Needs to Know, Riordan Roett, an eminent scholar of Brazil and Latin America, will provide a rich overview of Brazil, covering Brazilian society, politics, culture, and the economy. The book begins with a series of chapters on Brazilian history, beginning with the pre-colonial period and moving on, in succession, to the long era of Portuguese rule, the birth of independent Brazil, the emergence of modern Brazil in the 1930s, the era of the dictators, and - finally - to the democratic regime that came into being in the 1980s. Throughout the book, Roett will focus sharply on the fault lines -- racial, economic, political, and cultural - that have plagued Brazil from its beginnings to this day. As the 2016 World Cup and Summer Olympics approach, interest in Brazil is sure to rise. Roett’s synthesis will provide interested readers with an accessible, authoritative overview of this troubled yet fascinating giant.

The last twenty years have been a time of intense public debates on social policy in India. There have also been major initiatives, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, as well as resilient inertia in some fields. This book brings together some of Jean Drèze's contributions to these debates, along with other short essays on social development. The essays span the gamut of critical social policies, from education and health to poverty, nutrition, child care, corruption, employment, and social security. There are also less predictable topics such as the caste system, corporate power, nuclear disarmament, the Gujarat model, the Kashmir conflict, and universal basic income. The book aims at enlarging the boundaries of social development, towards a broad concern with the sort of society we want to create. The concluding essay, on public-spiritedness and solidarity, argues that the cultivation of enlightened social norms is an integral part of development. "Jholawala" has become a disparaging term for activists in the Indian business media. This book affirms the learning value of collective action combined with sound economic analysis. In his detailed introduction, the author argues for an approach to development economics where research and action are complementary and interconnected.

This chapter establishes the broad parameters for oil management. It considers the threat of the Resource Curse, and what can be done to address the challenges of corruption, and the imbalance of power between states, international oil companies, and domestic interests (including national oil companies). In particular, the chapter begins by discussing the relationship between politics and economics and between states and firms (including the Obsolescing Bargaining Mechanism), and the utility of separating responsibility for policymaking, regulation, and operational or commercial activities. The latter part of the chapter introduces Norway’s unique institutional solutions to these challenges, that is, the three-part division of administrative responsibility that is central to the Norwegian model, and the institutions where they reside (e.g., the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, and Statoil).

Muhammad bin Salman Al-Saud and Muhammad bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the respective princely strongmen of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have torn up the old rules. They have spurred game-changing economic master plans, presided over vast anti-corruption crackdowns, tackled entrenched religious forces, and overseen the mass arrest of critics. In parallel, they also appear to have replaced the old ‘sheikhly’ consensus systems of their predecessors with something more autocratic, more personalistic, and perhaps even analytically distinct. Moreover, ‘MBS’ and ‘MBZ’, as they are known, are now effectively in command of the two wealthiest and most populous Gulf monarchies, and increasingly important global actors--Saudi Arabia is a G20 member, and the UAE will be the host of the World Expo in 2021–2022. Such sweeping changes to the two countries’ statecraft and authority structures could thus end up having a direct impact--for better or worse--on policies, economies, and individual lives all around the world. This study tests the hypothesis that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now effectively contemporary or even ‘advanced’ sultanates, and situates these influential states within an international model of autocratic authoritarianism. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including new interviews and surveys, the book puts forward an original, empirically grounded interpretation of the rise of both de facto rulers.

Since Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia on December 17, 2010, galvanizing the Arab uprisings that continue today, the entire Middle East landscape has changed in ways that were unimaginable years before. In spite of the early hype about a so-called "Arab Spring" and the prominence observers gave to calls for the downfall of regimes and an end to their abuses, most of the protests and uprisings born of Bouazizi's self-immolation have had disastrous results across the whole Middle East. While the old powers reasserted their control with violence in Egypt and Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria have virtually ceased to exist as states, torn apart by civil wars. In other states, namely Morocco and Algeria, the forces of reaction were able to maintain their hold on power, while in the "hybrid democracies" of Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, protests against government inefficiency, corruption, and arrogance have done little to bring about the sort of changes protesters have demanded. Simultaneously, ISIS, along with other jihadi groups (al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda affiliates, Ansar al-Shariahs, etc.) has thrived in an environment marked by state breakdown. This book explains these changes, outlining the social, political, and economic contours of what some have termed "the new Middle East." One of the leading scholars of modern Middle Eastern history, James L. Gelvin lucidly distills the political and economic reasons behind the dramatic news arriving each day from Syria and the rest of the Middle East. He shows how and why bad governance, stagnant economies, poor healthcare, climate change, population growth, refugee crises, food and water insecurity, and war increasingly threaten human security in the region.

Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? This book examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world—from the late eighteenth century to today—to provide important new answers to these critical questions. From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, the book finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. From Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Algeria, Angola, Haiti, and Romania, the book explains why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, why it didn't in some others, and what the long-term prospects for major social change are if liberals can't deliver needed reforms. A powerful account of the unintended consequences of revolutionary change, the book is filled with critically important lessons for today's liberal democracies struggling with new forms of extremism.

Stirring the Pot of Haitian History is an original translation of Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti (1977), the first book written by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Challenging understandings of Haitian history, Trouillot analyzes the pivotal role of self-emancipated revolutionaries in the Haitian Revolution and War of Independence (1791-1804), a generation of people who founded the modern Haitian state and advanced Haiti’s vibrant contemporary cultures. This book confronts the problems of self-serving politicians and the racial mythologizing of historical figures like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture and André Rigaud. The author denounces corruption and racism as hereditary maladies received from the hyper-racist slave society of the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Trouillot also examines the socio-economic and political contradictions and inequalities of Saint-Domingue, traces the unravelling of the colony’s racist economic system after the revolts of 1791, and argues that Haitian Creole language and Haitian Vodou religion provided the bedrock cultural cohesion needed to fuel the resistance, revolt and warfare that led to Haitian independence on January 1, 1804. Trouillot blends Marxist criticism, deep readings in Haitian historiography, anthropological insights, and skilful handling of Haiti's rich oral traditions of storytelling, proverbs and wisdom sayings to provide a sharp and earthy account of Haitian social and political thought rooted in the style and culture of Haitian Creole speakers. Each chapter opens with a line of verse, song or a proverb that pulls readers into a historical oral performance. Haitian oral tradition from popular culture and Vodou religion mingle with explorations of complex social and political realities and historical hypotheses. Although the Haitian Creole majority language still plays second fiddle to French in government and education, Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti is a major contribution in the effort to demonstrate the power of Haitian Creole scholarship. Stirring the Pot of Haitian History holds a preeminent place in the expanding canon of Haitian Creole and Caribbean literature, especially as it shows how historical problems continue to insinuate themselves within the contemporary moment.

This chapter addresses a persistent tension in current debates over food security, with illustrative data from India. The case allows us to disaggregate concepts in food policy that are often lumped together, so as to better understand what is at stake in rapidly changing economies more generally. Despite rising incomes, there has been sustained decline in per capita nutrient intake in India in recent years. The assertion by Deaton and Dreze (2009) that poverty and undernutrition are unrelated is critically examined. A demand-based model in which food prices and expenditure played significant roles proved robust, while allowing for lower calorie “requirements” due to less strenuous activity patterns, life-style changes, and improvements in the epidemiological environment. This analysis provides reasons for not delinking nutrition and poverty; it confirms the existence of poverty-nutrition traps in which undernutrition perpetuates poverty. A new measure of child undernutrition that allows for multiple anthropometric failures (e.g., wasting, underweight, and stunting) points to much higher levels of undernutrition than conventional ones. Dietary changes over time, and their nutritional implications, have welfare implications at both ends of the income and social-status pyramids. Since poverty is multidimensional, money-metric indicators such as minimum income or expenditure are not reliable, because these cannot adequately capture all the dimensions. The emergent shift of the disease burden toward predominately food-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) poses an additional challenge. Finally, the complexity of normative issues in food policy is explored. Current approaches to food security have veered toward a “right-to-food” approach. There are, however, considerable problems with creating appropriate mechanisms for effectuating that right; these are explored briefly. Cash transfers touted to avoid administrative costs and corruption involved in rural employment guarantee and targeted food-distribution programs are likely to be much less effective if the objective is to enable large segments of the rural population to break out of nutrition-poverty traps. The chapter ends by exploring an alternative model, based on the same normative principle: a “right to policies,” or a “right to a right.”

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.