Cutting-Edge Agri-Technologies for Next-Generation Farming explores how emerging innovations such as nanotechnology, genome editing, artificial intelligence, precision agriculture, and smart sensing systems are reshaping modern food production. Bringing together insights from leading global experts, this volume presents interdisciplinary perspectives on improving crop productivity, enhancing resource-use efficiency, and strengthening resilience to climate change. It offers a holistic roadmap for developing sustainable, technology-driven farming systems that balance economic viability with environmental stewardship. Designed for researchers, policymakers, students, and industry professionals, this book serves as a comprehensive reference for advancing the future of agriculture through science-based innovation.

This book explores constructions of the "good mother" within diverse nations and nationalisms, focusing on three contexts grappling with distinct forms of "demographic anxiety." Inspired by Sara Farris' inquiry into femonationalism and utilizing "maternalism" and "politics of care" as critical theoretical instruments, the book analyses the evolving political and social expectations imposed upon mothers in Lithuania, migrant mothers, including postsocialist migrant mothers from Central Asia and Caucasus in Sweden, and women in the militarizing authoritarian Russian state's construction of maternity within its "traditional values" agenda. It also probes both how "good motherhood" is enacted and contested by individual mothers, as well as how it is mobilized in resisting conservative, ethnonationalist tendencies (in Sweden) and militarism (in the case of Russia). The book's chapters illuminate the roles of political and social actors engaged with renegotiating materialist politics-such as grassroots birth activist movements and maternalist social policy campaigns-as well as those defying militarism.

This book offers a comprehensive sociological account of cyber-enabled fraud in Africa south of the Sahara, centred on Nigeria but extending across Ghana, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Jamaica, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, conviction case files, court documents, interviews, and cultural analysis of Afrobeats music, it examines online fraud not as isolated wrongdoing but as a patterned social response to postcolonial inequality, blocked mobility, and institutional failure.

The book introduces the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework, a motivation-centred typology that classifies cybercrime as socio-economic, psychosocial, or geopolitical, shifting attention from technical mechanisms to underlying purpose. It also develops the concept of Hustle Kingdoms, underground fraud “academies” that mimic schooling whilst binding learners through spiritual oaths, psychological pressure, and economic dependency, complicating simple victim?offender binaries. Across comparative chapters, the book connects cultural repertoires of online fraud in Africa south of the Sahara to Southeast Asian scam compounds and argues that coercion should be understood as a spectrum, from overt confinement to socially embedded and spiritually enforced control. It concludes with clear policy and safeguarding implications for prevention, policing, sentencing, and victim support.

This book will be of interest to criminologists, anthropologists and sociologists studying cybercrime, online fraud, money laundering, and informal economies. It will also be useful to scholars of cultural studies, cyberpsychology, and African studies, as well as to policymakers and practitioners working on cybercrime prevention.

This is the first book to explore ancient Greek alliances in terms of both crisis and resilience, offering readers a deeper understanding of how such alliances were formed, dissolved and re-established.

The chapters in this volume understand disputes between Greek allies not simply as precursors to alliance breakdown, but as a structural feature of bilateral and federal formations. By analysing their susceptibility to crises from both external (etic) and internal (emic) perspectives, this volume explores how these challenges proved to be catalysts for the transformation and adaptation of alliances. Ancient concepts of crisis were seen as inherent to the system, rather than modern notions of crisis as catalysts for revolution and instability, making resilience and adaptation crucial to the formation of alliances in ancient Greece. The book highlights the creative power and potential of ancient Greek alliances through a range of case studies, which revolve around sections on concepts and historiography, rituals and media, border management and a comparison between the Delian League and NATO. To showcase how the alliances thrived in the face of crises, the views of historiographers like Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius are discussed. Equally, the actors within alliances are characterised: the Delphic Amphiktyony, powerful poleis like Athens and Sparta and federal states like the Aitolians and the Boiotians. Mainly with a view to Hellenistic kings, the impact of external powers on the texture of Greek alliances also comes into play.

Crisis and Resilience in Ancient Greek Alliances will be valuable for students and scholars working on politics and diplomacy in ancient Greece, as well as those interested in ancient history and politics in the ancient world more broadly.

The Balkans in the Late Middle Ages, 1300-1500 is the first publication of its kind to provide a point of reference for the history of Southeastern Europe during the late medieval period. Scholars have long recognized the 14th and 15th centuries as an extremely important period in the history of the medieval Balkans. This was an era of intense political and military tumult, financial crisis, and social disruption, but also a time of cultural and intellectual innovation and achievement.

While a growing body of literature has focused on developments in the Byzantine Empire and Latin Greece (i.e., the states created by Western/Latin rulers in the Greek Peninsula and some of the Aegean islands), most of the other states in the region, including Serbia, Bulgaria, and Albania, have been largely neglected. What is more, no study has examined the whole peninsula as a geographic unit. The ultimate ambition of this 12-chapter volume is to fill this gap and produce a closely argued, fresh interpretation of events for the entire region, from Dalmatia, Wallachia, and Moldavia in the north to Byzantium and the Latin states in the south.

This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students and scholars with academic interests in the medieval Balkans, as well as to readers wanting to learn more about the history of the region.

Examining the administration of assets during the trial of the French Templars, as well as the settlement process that took place after the Order's dissolution, this book focuses on material aspects of the proceedings in France that have never been analysed in detail. These include the conflicts that accompanied the seizure of property, the actions of administrators, and the thefts and abuses that occurred at every stage of the process. The actions of Philip the Fair's sons to finalise the takeover of the Templars' property by the Hospitallers are also discussed. This book draws on documents that have not been used in previous research, including the report on the investigation conducted between 1322 and 1325 as part of the agreements concluded by Louis X and Philip V with the Hospitallers. This document is unknown to modern scholars and contains valuable information about the recovery of Templar property and the prosecution of abuses committed during this process.

This book adopts a new approach that departs from the dominant view that considers the Templar affair through the lens of the political aspirations of its most important participants, and this allows new insights into the circumstances and consequences of the Templar trial.

Of particular interest to scholars and students of the history of the Knights Templar, this book will also appeal to historians of the Knights Hospitaller, France under the last Capetians, and the papacy at the beginning of the 14th century.

This book offers a broad introduction to print culture and communication in the Stuart world, exploring the emergence of the anglophone global publishing industry in the early modern period and its interaction with various forms of communication in the Stuart dominions.

The volume begins by providing comprehensive and accessible guidance on how to find and use major online digital resources on early modern print and other forms of communication as well as how to find and analyse material in archives. The second part focuses on the processes of communication and print from composition to dissemination and offers students an introductory overview of these processes at work. The third part consists of case studies showing how the sovereign's relationship with the printing press and other forms of communication shaped key events during the century. The final part introduces how exiled communities and colonies interacted with the printing press both at home and abroad and the place of anglophone communication within these complex linguistic and religious communities.

Written in a clear and accessible style and by leading experts in the field, the book offers a starting point from which to explore this multifaceted and ever-growing field, in particular introducing readers to the new digital resources available to help them engage with key primary material. With a comprehensive glossary, a timeline and specially curated reading lists at the back of each chapter, this textbook is a valuable resource for students and lecturers of early modern Britain, print culture and the history of communication.