Taiwan is seen as one of the most dangerous global flashpoints today. The political status of Taiwan (i.e., the Taiwan issue) is very complex, which involves multiple important aspects, including nationalism, ideology, democracy, national identity, regional security, geopolitics, geoeconomics, and great power rivalry. Taipei, Beijing, and Washington are the three key parties that have particularly high stakes and play the most important role in the Taiwan issue. Because of their very different concerns and fundamentally conflicting interests behind the Taiwan issue, Taipei, Beijing, and Washington are pursuing very different goals regarding the future of the island. Covering some most important aspects of the Taiwan issue, this edited volume provides readers with a multifaceted picture of this important and complex issue in the world today.

This is the first book to apply the concept of good international citizenship to the international relations of the Global South. The edited book introduces good international citizenship as a theoretical framework for analysing a diversity of agencies across the Global South. It covers different cases of non-Western states, global governance, foreign policy, and international law, and examines how non-Western actors enact ideas of good international citizenship to engage and shape the global order. The book shows how good international citizenship is not limited to Western notions of liberal internationalism but also encompasses the efforts of non-Western actors to promote distinct approaches to ethics, morality, responsibility, and leadership. The book contributes theoretically and empirically to the field of non-Western International Relations. It allows for rethinking established International Relations concepts so that these become more inclusive to the histories and experiences of different actors across the globe.

This book delves into the resurgence of China and Russia as assertive regional powers, igniting debates and renewed interest in the dynamics of great power politics and power transitions. The questions of how competition with these states will evolve and what the future international system may resemble given their potential regional dominance are at the forefront of global concerns in the coming decades. As power politics intensify, the significance of allies and alliance systems escalates, becoming critical tools for states seeking to navigate this rising great power competition effectively.

In an era marked by escalating global crises-climate change, cyber threats, pandemics, and nuclear weapons proliferation-this book introduces a science-based approach to security and global threats. It underscores the necessity of interdisciplinary science and technology to ensure that decisions and actions are grounded in knowledge. This vision seeks to inspire, promote, and facilitate collaboration across all sectors of global society. Building resilient societies and effectively addressing global threats will require substantial resources. Can we afford to save the Earth? Can we afford not to?

Four Key Elements:

• A Science-Based Approach to Security and Global Threats: The book is structured around two key chapters: an opening chapter that outlines this new vision, and a concluding chapter that reflects on how to translate that vision into actionable steps.
• Evolution of Earth and Society: A review of the development of our planet leading to modern society, with a discussion on global demography and the economy-critical components of global security and resilience.
• Key Global Communities: An introduction to five global communities-states, cities, the business and scientific communities, and civil society. It examines how each can contribute to building security and assesses their vulnerabilities to various threats.
• Major Human-Created Threats: A discussion of five large-scale threats created by human activity or arising from human interaction with nature: global warming, natural disasters, biopandemics, nuclear weapons, and cyber threats.

This book serves as a call for informed, collaborative action to address the pressing global challenges of our time.

This volume offers a critical evaluation of China's programs and projects on the African continent, zooming in on: (a) whether China is preying on states and societies on the continent or, if indeed, she is a benevolent partner on the continent; (b) whether many of the projects are undeniably integral to the growth and development of the continent, or are mostly white elephant projects; (c) examine the cost-benefit of China's involvement on the continent economic and political space; and (d) why Euro-America countries complain about the role and place of China in Africa? Bringing together mostly African scholars, the research underlines the key pros and cons of China and the Chinese involvement in the continent.

This book elucidates findings from an anthropological study that analyzes the patterns of Taiwan's Atayal tribe's fabric in their ethnic dress codes. By analyzing the changes and development of the patterns over time, the authors draw fascinating conclusions regarding the geographical migration and intermarriage practices between indigenous minority groups in Taiwan's history. The book brings new insights within East Asian linguistic anthropology in theorizing about the origins of legends and broader patterns of ethnic migration, integrating the characteristics and relationships among Atayal fabrics, and interpreting these relationships in connection with the flow of sub-ethnic groups. In doing so, the book provides rich empirical evidence for anthropologists and migration scholars to better understand the movement of ethnic groups in Taiwan, while also establishing a model for how studying textile design can be employed to establish such linkages. The book shows that the composition and changes of ethnic minority patterns have their own internal logic and causes. By studying this, the authors demonstrate how such work might translate intangible and tangible culture into explicit and shareable knowledge and provide a compass for other anthropologists and researchers in the fields of visual and linguistic anthropology, migration studies, and ethnic and indigenous cultures, in Asia and beyond.

The book is the first historical reconstruction of Italian political events over the last thirty years, that is, the period from the Tangentopoli crisis of the early 1990s to the present day. In particular, the book examines, for the first time in a systematic and documented way, the controversial relationship between parties and intellectuals, highlighting the distance, not to say the unbridgeable gap, created between politics and culture in Italy in the last three decades, the decades of the so-called Second Republic. In other words, it tries to explain why the close link between politics and culture that was the hallmark of twentieth-century politics has dissolved in Italy, and through what stages we have come to a substantial incommunicability between these two worlds in the last three decades.

This book is a collection of 44 representative publications and papers by Milton Leitenberg. It allows publications that appeared in journals and books as well as unpublished work prepared for national and international organizations to appear in one place. This makes them accessible to researchers for years and decades to come. These studies made substantial contributions to the area of arms control, particularly on the subjects of nuclear weapons, wars and conflicts, Soviet military studies, biological weapons, and other related international security areas - all of which are of continued interest to security studies and political science audiences.

The primary audience is academics and practitioners in the arms control, security studies, and peace research fields. The book is useful for graduate studies in arms control and peace research. There is no similar book to this collection.

This first of a two-part volume (Book I) deals with a unit intellectual cultural history of science in the Renaissance within fundamental frameworks. An intellectual cultural history of science examines how human and their intellectual experiences have been expressed in, and emerged by scientific ideas. Taking into account the excellence of the essays - which cover several branches and disciplines in history and epistemology of science - this book also provides perspectives on the enduring influence of a historiographical tradition, e.g., the emergence of fundamental works on mathematics and geometry, household's principal functions, food and culture, clock instrumentation, surgery as a practical branch of medicine. It describes the ways it differently accounted for variation in unlike countries and consequently how its results remain, still nowadays, a debated question, as well as due to constraints preventing an extensive exploration of its remarkable historiography. This volume gathers selected and double peer review contributions by historians of physics/mathematics/science as new fundamental perceptions in the history of science during the Renaissance, ranging across several fields of science within its intellectual and cultural history. The book is an accessible avenue to understanding cultural issues to develop scientific ideas by leading authorities who offer much-needed historical insights into the field of intellectual and fundamental history of science. It provides an absorbing and revealing read for historians, philosophers and scientists alike.

This open access book points at some of the problematic aspects of international partnerships that continue to be shaped by colonialism.

A "global partnership for sustainable development" is the 17th of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, research points to shortcomings and problematic aspects of international partnerships that have been shaped by colonialism and continue to reflect unequal power relations between the global North and South. Hence, the chapters of this edited volume explore how global partnerships can be established in a neocolonial environment in the fields of development cooperation, the global economy and knowledge production. The contributions were written by members of the Global Partnership Network (GPN), one of the Centres of Excellence for Exchange and Development funded by the German Ministry for Development Cooperation, which has been working intensively and critically on the topic of partnerships and North-South relations over the past four years.

This second of a two-part volume (Book II) extends the historical-scientific inquiry of first-part volume (Book I) by considering other specific case studies within cultural, fundamental & technological frameworks. An intellectual cultural history of science & technology examines how human and their applied sciences-experiences have been expressed in, and trained by ideas and technologies. The contributors explain ways in which the sciences allowed advanced modelling on the one hand, and the development of new technological ideas on the other hand, including methods and theories, institutions, engineering devices/instrumentation and social implications as well. Taking into account the excellence of the essays, the book covers several branches and disciplines in science & technology, e.g., theoretical mathematics and the empirical work, machinery and mechanisms, stored information, transportation, inquiring methods in history and historiography of science & technology. It describes the ways it differently accounted for variation in unlike contexts and consequently how its results remain, still nowadays, a debated question, as well as due to constraints preventing an extensive exploration of its remarkable historiography. The book gathers selected and double peer review contributions by historians of physics/mathematics/engineering/science as new perceptions of the history of science during the Renaissance ranging across several fields of science within its fundamental, cultural & technological history. The volume is an accessible avenue to understanding cultural ideas & technologies by leading authorities who offer much-needed historical insights into the field of and intellectual history of science & technology. It provides an absorbing and revealing read for historians, philosophers, and scientists alike.

Transcending the rise and fall of dynasties, tracing the growth and formation of Chinese civilization through the currents of history.

This book is an unusual excursion into Chinese cultural history. Professor Cho-yun Hsu moves beyond accounts that focus solely on the internal evolution of Chinese culture. He revisits early Chinese civilization, integrating recent archaeological discoveries to reshape our understanding of its development. Employing a big history perspective, Hsu reconstructs the dynamic interplay of diverse ethnic groups and cultures within and beyond China, highlighting the constant friction and fusion that shaped its trajectory.

This insightful work reveals why Chinese civilization has endured despite numerous internal and external hardships and turmoils. It offers a nuanced and thought-provoking perspective on China's past and its relevance to the present.

The first of two volumes on the archbishops and cathedral chapters of seventeenth-century Manila, this book fills a historiographical gap by examining the diocesan clergy of the Philippines' political maneuverings. In particular, this volume studies the archbishops' unstable authority and ecclesiastical chapters' preeminence at this time. First, it emphasizes the need for a new paradigm of conflict-ridden Catholic evangelization-ius predicandi-that explores the interactions and engagements of the Church's legal agents, mainly priests, canons, and bishops, and brings their rivalries to the fore. Second, it draws attention to one of the most neglected topics in Philippine ecclesiastical history, namely the metropolitan cathedral chapters, which, far from being monolithic units at the service of their archbishops, were too highly fragmented to constitute a single power holder. This volume's examination of these power dynamics makes it clear that history of the colonial Catholic Church cannot be separated from political history of the Philippines.

For the first time in modern Canadian history, the leader of one of the two governing party was chosen on a decidedly populist platform. Before the election of Pierre Poilievre as leader of the Conservative Party, many believed that Canada was immune to populism. In the months following his arrival as leader of the Official opposition, the polls in his favor soared. So much so, that it prompted Prime minister Justin Trudeau's resignation. The success of Poilievre's stand in favor of the working class also forced the main left-wing party, the NPD, to adopt an even more populist tone. Does Pierre Poilievre's populism come from Donald Trump's playbook? Are the 2022 truckers' occupation of Ottawa and the post-Covid pandemic inflationary context explanatory factors? This new populism made in Canada is essentially economic, with no nativist component. But its first victims were carbon pricing policies to combat climate change. From a global perspective, what lessons can we draw from this shift in Canadian politics?

This groundbreaking study examines Peking Opera legend Mei Lanfang's 1930 U.S. visit through extensive primary sources and a cross-cultural lens. It meticulously chronicles his 76 performances over 182 days, reconstructing his daily itinerary, highlighting key events, and estimating box office revenues. Drawing on over 1,000 local newspaper reports from 34 states and territories, as well as diaries, memoirs, archival records, and advertisements, this book offers fresh insights into U.S.-China cultural exchange nearly a century ago-a topic with enduring contemporary relevance. Employing a mixed-methods approach, it integrates grounded theory, abductive reasoning, and the theory of para-text to deliver a rigorous and innovative analysis.

As both a theoretical contribution and an analytical framework, the book reimagines transpacific cultural exchange, systematically exploring Peking Opera diplomacy, which involves non-governmental individuals and collectives engaged in cultural, artistic, commercial, and educational interactions. Furthermore, it delves into inculturation, examining how Mei Lanfang's visit contributed to the localization of Chinese culture in America, fostering cultural accommodation, adaptation, and integration. Finally, it introduces the theory of marginalization studies, shedding light on the peripheral figures and events that played a crucial role in Mei's visit.

By combining rigorous analysis with innovative theoretical perspectives, this book reinterprets and reimages the significance of Mei Lanfang's visit, offering an essential resource for scholars and anyone interested in modern Chinese history, transpacific studies, cultural diplomacy, and U.S.-China relations.

This book, based on a systematic analysis of leaders' speeches, examines how regimes in Turkey, India, Russia, and China strategically weaponize the concept of 'civilization' along with emotional appeals, such as pride, fear, and nostalgia, to challenge global liberal democratic norms. As the influence of liberal democracy wanes, these nations increasingly declare themselves 'civilization-states'. By redefining national identity to include peoples living in foreign countries, justifying belligerence abroad, and reinforcing anti-democratic practices domestically, these regimes position themselves as guardians of transnational peoples with distinctive civilizational values. This is the first book to systematically explore how and why these states leverage civilization and emotional manipulation to reshape both domestic politics and international relations.