This book provides a timely and in-depth examination of end-of-life care in Malaysia, focusing on the ethical and legal dimensions that underpin one of the most sensitive areas of modern medical practice. As medical technology advances and the use of life-sustaining treatments become more widespread, the boundaries between life and death grow increasingly complex ? raising profound questions about how such decisions should be made and regulated. In Malaysia, end-of-life care remains a sensitive area of public discourse, as the nation faces the realities of an aging population in transition. This book explores the ethical tensions that arise when determining the appropriate course of care at the final stages of life, especially when balancing professional judgment, religious values, and the wishes of patients and families. It also critically examines the current legal landscape, highlighting the absence of a dedicated statutory framework to govern end-of-life decisions and the resulting implications for medical practitioners and patients alike. The discussion on patients’ rights brings to light the need for clear legal recognition of the right to refuse treatment, the validity of advance medical directives, and the importance of shared decision-making in end-of-life scenarios. Structured around five key chapters, and drawing on Malaysian law and comparative common law perspectives, the book presents a comprehensive and contextualised analysis of the challenges at hand. It concludes with recommendations aimed at guiding the development of a coherent, culturally sensitive, and ethically sound regulatory framework for end-of-life care in Malaysia. This book is essential reading for legal professionals, healthcare providers, policymakers, bioethicists, and scholars interested in medical law and ethics in the Malaysian context.

From fistfights to scandals, Unparliamentary provides a sourced account of unexpected events that have marked the history of Canada’s Parliament. It offers an intriguing look into surprising moments that occurred on Parliament Hill, highlighting the unpredictable nature of human behaviour ? especially among legislators.

Moving from Confederation to the present day, Charlie Feldman explores moments from the less formal side of national politics, including conflicts between parliamentarians and acts of disorder, as well as instances of controversy and error in both the Senate and House of Commons. Many of the episodes discussed once attracted public attention but have since faded from memory, even among parliamentarians themselves. Unparliamentary draws on a wide range of historical and archival materials to document these incidents and bring them to life.

Demonstrating how parliamentary truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, this book is written in a direct and accessible style and functions as both a reference work and as a readable account of the Parliament’s unconventional history.

Modernizing the Crown outlines the reform of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) from the mid-1980s to the present day. Showing how it went from a stodgy distributor set on “controlling” beverage alcohol consumption to the efficient, dynamic retailer we see today, and illuminating both the process and the rationale for this shift.

As the central actor in Ontario’s alcoholic beverage market, the LCBO’s transformation challenges several common assumptions: that privatization is the only option to improve state-owned firms or that partisanship is a predictor of a government’s behaviour ? it was the Mike Harris Tories, after all, who kicked its modernization drive into high gear in the 1990s. Like other firms owned by states, the LCBO must manage a host of demands from a variety of stakeholders, including its state owner, various powerful interests, and the citizen public, among others, and thus must juggle complex and competing commercial and policy imperatives.

Drawing from primary and secondary empirical sources, Malcolm G. Bird articulates the corporate, institutional, and political dynamics that both explain the board’s evolution and that underpin the province’s unique alcohol retail marketplace, including the recent drastic expansion of the retail landscape.

Accompanying the translations is an extensive introductory essay that analyses the juridical significance of Soto’s reflections on rights, poverty, and property. Among other matters, the introductory essay elucidates Soto’s notion of the right to beg, as well as the different ways to conceptualize the relationship between extreme necessity and private property. Throughout, Soto’s views are presented in the light of other scholastic thinkers from whom he drew, or with whom he disagreed, or who explicated his ideas. The essay also notes connections to the thought of the great Dutch jurist of the next century, Hugo Grotius.

Legal theorist and classicist Ernest Weinrib brings together the disciplines to illuminate Soto’s role in the intellectual history of poverty and of its relation to private property.

Undocumented immigrants are generally assumed to exhibit clear signs of their so-called outsider status. In the absence of such signs, however, how is the “illegal immigrant” made legible or policed? How might migrants negotiate their statuses as objects of state surveillance by exploiting their similarities or affinities with those who seek them out? Spectres of Affinity explores these issues in the east Malaysian state of Sabah, a scene of some of the largest clandestine cross-border flows in the world, and a place where migrants are widely assumed to look, talk, and otherwise behave like locals.

In Sabah, the ability of outsiders to pass as insiders has long animated public anxieties about the boundaries of citizenship, ethnicity, race, religion, labour, and language. Against this backdrop of social indeterminacy and political uncertainty, migrants and Malaysians are now jointly evaluating and adjudicating the ways they are sama, tapi berbeza ? “the same, but different” ? to sometimes devastating effect. In exploring the social life of comparison in the shadow of a notoriously porous Southeast Asian border, Spectres of Affinity calls for renewed attention to comparison not merely as a rarefied social scientific method or mode of inquiry, but as part of people’s everyday equipment for living in increasingly uncertain and unsettling times.

This timely book explores the rocky trajectory of US environmental history and policy from pre-European settlement to the present. It includes underreported aspects of early history, and the first in-depth synthesis of the framing and outcomes of the groundbreaking environmental laws of the 1970s.

While effective against pollution, the new regulatory system led to economic decline, antagonism in the business community and political division. The book traces and compares US policies with more successful policies adopted by the EU in the 1990s. With an afterword reviewing the dramatic events of the second Trump administration, the book suggests future pathways for reducing polarization and promoting reform.

This open access book examines deliberative and anti-deliberative practices in post-conflict contexts marked by democratic backsliding. It compares how deliberative ideals are upheld and violated across different deliberative domains, including parliaments, citizens’ assemblies, social media and interactions between local and international actors. The authors identify anti-deliberation as the active violation of deliberative norms through exclusion, manipulation and domination, along with weaponisation of difference. The expansion of anti-deliberation restricts the space for good-quality deliberation and accelerates democratic backsliding.

This edited collection is useful to scholars of democracy, deliberation and communication with its novel comparative perspective on the quality of deliberation, to policy-makers and civil society with its?lessons for?supporting deliberation, and to international peace-builders working on democratisation and reversing democratic backsliding.

Have you ever found yourself considering what your life would be like in the absence of work? Would you feel a sense of loss past the finances? More people than ever before believe that a job is just a way of earning money - nothing more. While the popularity of this transactional mindset is understandable, I Want M.O.R.E. argues that it depletes our vision of our professional lives.

Sociologist Scott Schieman has drawn upon decades of research to investigate what people think and feel about work. He has distilled the essence of that data to create M.O.R.E., which stands for Mooring, Opening, Relating, and Exceeding. Mooring navigates identity, structure, and purpose. Opening explores ability, agency, and creativity. Relating explains connection, support, and respect. And Exceeding focuses on recognition, reputation, and status.
Helping readers harness their sense of self and better their quality of life, the M.O.R.E. framework catalogues each element, along with metrics to assess your current job, what you value in a job, and what you aspire to achieve. The book also features a M.O.R.E. assessment, guidance on maximizing its dimensions, and tips for navigating difficult work situations.

A crucial guide for anyone who wants to get more out of their life and work, I Want M.O.R.E. energizes and empowers readers by encouraging a transformational new mindset about the purpose of work. How you see yourself is at the centre of who you are, and that is too important to leave to chance. And a little M.O.R.E. often produces big results.

This book offers a collection of contributions that identify and exemplify a wide range of overlooked, subversive changes in the history of natural philosophy, spanning from antiquity to modernity. The guiding principle of the volume is to address questions that arise from Kuhn's approach to the problem of paradigmatic change. While it is tempting to follow in Kuhn's footsteps and see the history of natural philosophy as a series of revolutions led by giant figures - theoretical watersheds diverging from the 'normal' course of events - an accurate picture seems to be more complex and nuanced. By blending philosophy, science, mathematics, this book offers a rich perspective on intellectual progress and is of interest to a broad array of scientists.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This book reveals how communities protect themselves when external support is absent.

Drawing on participatory research from Cameroon's conflict zones, the authors document the remarkable agency and creativity of conflict-affected civilians employing non-violent methods to protect one another from violence. With international and national NGOs under strict government controls in the Anglophone regions, local communities have developed their own innovative self-protection strategies that offer sustainable pathways through conflict.

This important study shifts unarmed civilian protection discourse away from externally-led interventions towards genuinely civilian-centred approaches, offering crucial insights for practitioners, policy makers and scholars working in conflict-affected contexts worldwide.

This open access book examines the role of religion in the emerging academic and policy discourses on the polycrisis?also termed the metacrisis or permacrisis. Drawing on philosophy, economics, and the comparative study of religion, the book develops a conceptual map and shared vocabulary for engaging the interlocking challenges of our age, which threaten multiple simultaneous regional instabilities across the world system. As current political, economic, social, and ecological frameworks are stretched to their limits, Akhtar explores how the world's religious traditions can be accessed as sources of spiritual inspiration and moral imagination to chart new pathways beyond our collective paralysis. Advancing a covenantal pluralistic response, the volume offers scholars, students, and policymakers a generative framework for navigating overlapping crises through interreligious wisdom. Essential reading for those working at the intersection of religion, ethics, public policy, and the global polycrisis.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This book provides a critical reflection on the relationship between education, conflict, war and peace and the global actors and practitioners that have devised strategies to engage and support education systems in conflict-affected contexts.

Exploring a wide range of issues from development assistance to education, peacebuilding, de-radicalisation programmes and global governance, it evidences the challenges and the promises of education's complex relationship to war and peace. The book highlights the field's entanglements with geopolitics and imperial interventions, which have shaped its actions and undermined and limited its potential to support social transformation towards peace with social justice.

Populism has upended politics around the world over the past decade. Claiming to speak for the people, populist leaders denigrate mainstream politicians, threaten democratic norms, and take aim at immigrants and other vulnerable minorities.

Canadians have observed this gathering storm with one eye on events elsewhere and another on populist stirrings in the domestic political arena. Populist sentiment helped fuel the Freedom Convoy and was harnessed by Pierre Poilievre as he rose to the leadership of the Conservative Party. With the outcome of the 2025 election, the momentum behind this made-in-Canada populism seems to have faltered. But with populism flourishing globally, is this really the end of the story?

In The Perils of Populism, political scientist Paul Howe answers this critical question by digging beneath the surface of recent events to examine the public attitudes, values, biases, and emotions that shape our contemporary political life. He asks probing questions about the commitment of Canadians to democratic norms, to the ideals and practices of engaged citizenship, and to principles of social tolerance and acceptance ? finding evidence of vulnerabilities that stand ready to be exploited by a firebrand populist leader who strikes a chord with a critical mass of disaffected Canadians.

In these tumultuous times, Howe advises, Canadians must recognize our vulnerability and reach across social divisions to find ways of strengthening our political community together.

This book examines Russia’s strong-state dilemma: why Russia repeatedly seeks to overcome crisis, disorder, and failed transition by rebuilding a strong state, yet keeps falling back into a cycle in which restored control does not become stable governing capacity. It argues that post-Soviet political change should be understood not simply as failed democratization, but as a sequence of state-power loss, state rebuilding, and a new center-region balance.

Focusing on Russia’s 85 federal subjects from 1991 to 2022, the book draws on an original database of 400+ governors, president-governor meeting transcripts, local media, elite biographies and interviews, institutional histories, formal rules, and electoral data. It shows that Russian state rebuilding followed an uneven strategy: the state did not restore itself everywhere, at every level, or in every sphere at once, but re-entered critical regions, sectors, and institutional junctures selectively and in stages.

The book identifies two linked mechanisms: the separation of governors from governance tools, and the disconnect between elite selection and governance capacity. Through Samara, Sverdlovsk Oblast, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, it shows how different regional paths gradually converged into similar center-region structures. Its central conclusion is that the future of Russian state rebuilding depends on whether the state can build formal institutions capable of effectively constraining, organizing, and guiding political elites.

Global circuits and local pathways are shaped by the needs of our bodies ? both as individuals and as societies ? and reflect our access to resources, networks, ideas, and knowledge. Toward Dissent highlights the paths forged through resistance and defiance. It examines how differences travel across regions through small editions, sound bites, news clippings, and translations; how research on revolution transforms our methodologies, encouraging participatory and subjective approaches; and how access to resources, communities, and ideas shapes the ways we understand, write about, and document sociopolitical struggles across the Americas.

In this book, Matthew J. Edwards combines traditional essays with shorter, more experimental texts such as manifestos, personal vignettes, interviews, and chronicles. Together, these pieces explore the circulation of ideas, objects, and cultural artifacts across the Americas, showing that while movement is essential for resisting oppression and enacting political change, our access to archives, information, and social networks determines how we engage with communities, and experiences, and how we document and understand political struggles.

This volume situates critical inquiry alongside ideological affinity and activism, arguing that political movements not only initiate social change but impact and influence the observations and critical processes that work to communicate their outcomes.

Boundaries and Community is an essential guide for building bridges in a world marked by deep divisions. Across eleven concise chapters, this book offers practical tools and reflective insights for fostering meaningful connections within and across racially, ethnically, politically, and religiously divided communities. Rather than simply describing the problems that fracture our collective lives, it provides a hands-on toolkit for addressing them and empowers readers to move beyond ideological stalemates and take constructive action.

Each chapter tackles a critical challenge of collective life ? shared experience, collective responsibility, individual rights and communal belonging, social trust, and more ? offering a clear “rule” for action, real-life examples, and thought-provoking questions for group discussion. By modelling a forum for open, community-engaged dialogue, the book equips concerned citizens with strategies to address local issues without resorting to polarized formulas of the right or left.

Boundaries and Community serves as both diagnosis and roadmap, helping readers orient themselves in today’s polarized climate and inspiring them to forge new pathways for cooperation and understanding. Whether you are a community leader, organizer, or simply someone who cares about collective well-being, this book provides the tools and inspiration to act together ? even with those with whom you fundamentally disagree.