This book presents an up-to-date Persian edition and English translation of Ma'athiru'l-umara, a biographical dictionary of the officers of the Mughal Empire from Babur's reign at the beginning of the sixteenth century until almost the end of the eighteenth century compiled by Shahnawaz Khan Aurangabadi and completed by his son Abdul-Hayy. Insofar as possible the sources from which the authors derived their information have been identified, and explanatory notes are given for technical terms in Persian and native Indian terminology. Almost all places mentioned in the text have been identified. It is an essential reference work for scholars of Indo-Persian studies and Indian history.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of innovative sampling methods. Building on the foundations of general sampling theory, it offers a rigorous yet accessible framework for understanding and implementing modern sampling algorithms.

Sampling has undergone a profound transformation since the early 2000s. This new edition has been substantially expanded and offers a far more comprehensive treatment than the first, providing both broader scope and greater depth in modern sampling methodology. It places particular emphasis on state-of-the-art approaches, including systematic and quasi-systematic designs; maximum entropy sampling designs; balanced sampling and its variants; spatial and spread sampling that ensure geographic dispersion for autocorrelated variables; sample coordination for repeated surveys; and sampling from data streams for real-time signal analysis. Sampling enables big data reduction, illustrating how sampling theory can efficiently handle massive datasets.

Each method is presented in detail with an emphasis on practical implementation. Numerous techniques are illustrated using the R programming language, and fully functional code is provided to facilitate immediate application.

This book is intended for master's and doctoral students, as well as experienced statisticians and researchers who already have a good grasp of sampling theory and wish to enrich their toolbox with theory-based, ready-to-implement techniques.

Amid North Korea's advancing nuclear capabilities and the declining credibility of U.S. extended deterrence, South Korea has a strong motive to pursue its own nuclear deterrent. With its advanced nuclear energy program, South Korea possesses the means to develop nuclear weapons indigenously. However, its opportunity to do so is constrained by the prohibitive economic, security and reputational costs of nuclear armament. To circumvent these costs, Seoul is engaging in "nuclear hedging," pursuing the capability to develop nuclear weapons rapidly while stopping short of actual weaponization.

Drawing on Korean- and English-language documents, archival materials, and interviews with South Korean security experts, Lami Kim offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of South Korea's pursuit of nuclear hedging as an alternative to both nuclear restraint and outright nuclear armament. South Korea's renunciation of its nuclear weapons program in the 1970s - and its subsequent restraint - should not be mistaken for an absence of nuclear ambition grounded in confidence in U.S. extended deterrence. Instead, under both conservative and progressive governments, Seoul has sought the ability to acquire nuclear weapons rapidly, if necessary, as an insurance policy. A major contribution to the literature on nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, and Korean studies, this book delivers timely and insightful policy recommendations for both Washington and Seoul.

This offer of leading-edge thinking reframes the debate on national security at the dawn of the Third Space Age

During the First Space Age, President Eisenhower rallied democracies to defend freedom while preserving peace at a time when the hydrogen bomb and intercontinental ballistic missiles threatened humanity. Nearly seventy-five years later, the world stands on the cusp of a third era of space exploration, where space is simultaneously a domain for warfighting, diplomacy, science, and commerce.

Waging Peace in Orbit pays tribute to Eisenhower's multidimensional political-economic approach to national security while offering leading-edge thinking about the dawn of today's Third Space Age. While other volumes critique individual space strategies, this book uses a wider lens, adapting the Pathways to Peace framework laid out in Hans Morgenthau's classic Politics among Nations. By enlisting leading experts, this comprehensive volume examines defense strategy, space commercialization, scientific exploration, legal norms, and war planning, providing a holistic understanding of modern issues in space.

Waging Peace in Orbit enlarges the debate on space security in increasingly crowded orbits for policymakers, members of the military, national security professionals, scholars, and students interested in security studies and space policy.

This book maps the rise of right-wing parties across three European sub-regions - the Nordic countries, the Visegrad Four, and Western Europe - and examines their growing impact on domestic politics and European integration. Drawing on historical forces such as nationalism, post-war settlements, and the uneven experience of integration, it argues that the right-wing resurgence is not a recent aberration but a recurring feature of European political life. Capitalising on public frustration over immigration, sovereignty, and economic insecurity, these parties have moved from the margins to the mainstream, forcing established parties to shift rightward in response. The book analyses three interconnected questions: how right-wing parties are reshaping the broader political landscape; their impact on the EU through national governments and the European Parliament; and the nature of their support base. It is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners in European studies, comparative politics, and international relations.

This book highlights the interdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship in today's rapidly changing global landscape. Written by leading scholars and industry experts, it examines how ethnicity shapes entrepreneurial practices among indigenous communities in Namibia. Drawing on diverse theoretical frameworks and real-world insights from local leaders, it offers a unique cultural perspective on entrepreneurship.

The volume explores how indigenous entrepreneurs balance modern economic demands with deep-rooted cultural values, while addressing the challenges and opportunities they face. By foregrounding authentic voices, it contributes to a deeper understanding of indigenous entrepreneurship. This book is an essential resource for researchers, students, practitioners, and communities interested in indigenous business and development.

This book examines how populism, digital disinformation, and social media shaped Indonesia's 2024 elections. It shows how political actors, influencers, and coordinated digital campaigns used emotional narratives, identity politics, and online manipulation to mobilise support, influence public debate, and reshape democratic competition. Bringing together theoretical chapters and empirical case studies, the book explores religious populism, authoritarian tendencies, digital campaigning, misinformation, and electoral communication in Indonesia. It places the Indonesian case within wider debates on democracy, political polarisation, digital propaganda, and the growing power of online platforms in election politics. The book offers a timely account of how digital technologies are transforming populism and democratic life in the Global South.

This book offers a groundbreaking philosophical investigation into the political logic of neoliberalism. Moving beyond policy analysis, Hubert Gabrisch uncovers the conceptual roots of neoliberal thinking in the long intellectual arc from classical liberalism to the Austrian School, ordoliberalism, the Chicago School, and Public Choice theory. He shows how the prioritisation of individual freedom over democratic sovereignty-central to neoliberal thought-produces inherently fragile political orders, often resolved through authoritarian or technocratic forms of state power. Through a sweeping genealogical analysis, the book reveals how neoliberal arguments about markets, governance, and risk have shaped modern statecraft, from Europe's post-war reconstruction to contemporary transformations in China and Russia.

Bridging political philosophy, intellectual history, and political economy, this compelling study illuminates the deep tensions at the heart of liberal-democratic orders and explains why neoliberalism repeatedly survives crisis through adaptation.

This book examines ways in which political ideologies, legal frameworks, religious customs, and cultural institutions are employed by gendered power hierarchies to shape the daily lives of women and other marginalised groups in the Global South. It draws attention to the profoundly established, frequently unseen patriarchal structures that interact with caste, class, race, and religion. The book addresses the fundamental question: How do the political, religious, cultural, and legal systems of power interact to uphold or challenge gender inequality in the Global South? Drawing from critical political theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial feminism, the book is firmly rooted in the intersectionality theoretical framework. It explores the ways in which gendered power marginalises women and gender minorities while also facilitating acts of agency and resistance across a variety of geographical areas, most notably South Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The book is divided into four parts: Gendered Power and Political Participation; Cultural and Institutional Patriarchy; Resistance, Right-Wing Populism, and Gendered Narratives; and, Voice, Violence, and Visibility. Examples of case studies include the role of women in right-wing populist governments, the way gender is reinterpreted in Bhutanese and Dalit literature, the Loya Jirga and other traditional governing systems, and feminist interventions in law and diplomacy. The book argues that comprehending and altering gendered systems requires an intricate, intersectional lens. Scholars, students, and practitioners operating at the nexus of gender, politics, and postcolonial studies will benefit from this transdisciplinary resource.

With a keen attention to how culture and elite conflict shape politics, The Great Separation upends deterministic understandings of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the market reforms that followed. This ambitious posthumous volume by sociologist Xiaohong Xu turns the existing scholarship on China's "neoliberalism" on its head by demonstrating that the effort to separate mass politics from economic policy had its origins well before the Reform and Opening-up era.

Over the course of the Cultural Revolution, unfolding factional dynamics and interpretive struggles enabled Chairman Mao and his radical colleagues to mobilize workers to advance their own political goals while neutralizing the masses' economic demands, symbolically separating the political from the economic. This set the stage for a more thoroughgoing depoliticization of the economy after 1989, when China faced challenges from students and workers whose economic grievances had rapidly morphed into political demands for democracy. The result was what Xu calls ordoeconomism: an ideology that valorizes economic development, rejects mass politics, and views the state as the apolitical guardian of the economy. As Xu demonstrates, while ordoeconomism may share some affinities with neoliberalism, it is a distinctively Chinese approach that must be understood on its own terms.

This book offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to risk management in financial institutions, with a strong focus on contemporary challenges such as market volatility, liquidity pressures, and financial technology. By integrating traditional banking risks with emerging challenges, the book supports both students and professionals seeking accessible insights into banking risk, regulation, and modern financial practice.

The book begins by outlining the structure and functioning of financial markets and institutions, before moving into key areas of risk measurement, including interest rate, market, and liquidity risk. It then explores emerging themes such as fintech and operational risk. The later chapters focus on practical risk management tools, including capital adequacy, derivatives, securitisation, and prudential regulation across major economies.

The persistent underrepresentation of women in executive roles remains a critical issue in contemporary organizations, particularly when intersecting with motherhood. Despite growing awareness and institutional commitments to gender equality, female leaders continue to encounter systemic barriers that hinder their career progression, especially when navigating family planning decisions. The "career-motherhood dilemma," the tension between professional advancement and the desire to become a mother, is a complex challenge shaped by sociocultural expectations, organizational practices, and internalized pressures.

Through qualitative interviews with women in top executive roles - specifically CEOs and CFOs, this volume explores the role of leadership and motherhood, investigating the factors that influence the decision to become a mother and how this decision interacts with career trajectories. This book enriches the understanding of female leadership by shedding light on how motherhood shapes career trajectories at the executive level.

By amplifying the experiences of female leaders, it offers both theoretical contributions and practical implications - calling for more inclusive organizational norms and providing actionable insights for policymakers and firms aiming to support women in balancing leadership and motherhood without compromising career advancement.

This book focuses on the innovative startup ecosystem within universities which combines research and practice from emerging and transitioning economies, offering a comprehensive look at how universities, governments, and communities co-create robust entrepreneurial ecosystems. With a special focus on Southeast Asia and Africa, the book explores how academic institutions can become launchpads for entrepreneurial ventures, especially in contexts where resources are limited but innovation is thriving. Spanning diverse themes such as regulatory challenges, incubation models, funding gaps, technology transfer, and regional development, this book includes empirical case studies and critical reflections that unpack the enabling and inhibiting factors shaping university-driven entrepreneurship. From Jakarta's slum-based MSME incubation models to encrypted funding platforms in the digital age and from policy governance in South Africa to market access frameworks in Cambodia, each chapter offers grounded insights with global relevance.

What distinguishes this work is its interdisciplinary and practice-oriented approach, combining policy analysis, grassroots documentation, institutional theory, and field-based strategies. It presents an accessible yet scholarly lens through which stakeholders such as academics, policymakers, ecosystem builders, and startup founders can explore how innovation ecosystems can be cultivated even in low-resource settings. The reader will benefit from a comparative perspective on what works in diverse institutional and cultural contexts and from actionable insights into designing inclusive and resilient innovation systems. The book aims to inspire universities and policymakers to reimagine their role as knowledge producers and strategic actors driving local development, youth empowerment, and sustainable entrepreneurship.

What explains the varying ideological profiles of social democratic parties in contemporary Western Europe? And why have some still accepted austerity after the Great Recession? This book argues that the answer lies primarily in structural conditions: the context-specific configurations of external constraints - economic globalisation, regional economic integration in the Eurozone, and sovereign debt - that shape the political room available to social democrats when defining their electoral programmes. Drawing on empirical evidence from 20 Western European countries between 1990 and 2019, and combining cross-national quantitative analysis with in-depth qualitative evidence on party rhetoric, the book develops and rigorously probes a configurational structural explanation for ideological differences within the social democratic party family. The findings carry urgent implications: where external constraints are most pressing, genuine ideological renewal may be structurally precluded. A must-read for scholars and practitioners concerned with the future of centre-left politics and the state of representative democracy.

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including up to 1.5 million displaced Syrians. Many are Syrian farmworkers, who for decades have sustained Lebanon's agricultural system through their seasonal labor. Debt and Refuge traces how the lives of these farmworkers-turned-refugees were transformed by the war in Syria and Lebanon's devastating financial collapse, revealing the slow economic violence that can push people off their land, into waged work, and into cycles of debt.

Drawing on fieldwork centered in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, China Sajadian documents how Syrian farmworkers' debts - to labor brokers, landlords, and relatives - bound them to networks that exploited their labor and also sustained them in the face of profound uncertainty. In contrast to humanitarian portrayals of refugees as uprooted victims awaiting asylum or return, Sajadian locates their predicaments within a longer history of rural migration and familial division across the Lebanese-Syrian border. Linking together the politics of mass displacement, mass indebtedness, and our global food system, she makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and feminist question of social reproduction. Written with both ethnographic intimacy and analytical depth, Debt and Refuge offers a deeply human portrait of the gendered politics of displacement and why they matter to the future of our agricultural systems and human mobility-in Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.

The book shows how managing directors/ CEO create room for growth through the three key roles of the CEO Office - the CEO, the Chief of Staff (CoS), and the Executive Business Partner (EBP).

Many tasks. Little time. Constant decisions.

Anyone leading a company today has to take decisions at speed, solve problems, lead people, and think about tomorrow-all without losing sight of day-to-day operations. For many managing directors, this reality becomes a critical burden. With every additional responsibility, it becomes harder to maintain oversight and ensure that everything runs as planned.

The CEO Office is a structured leadership system that redistributes responsibility to create greater clarity, speed, and impact. It is designed to reduce operational overload, strengthen strategic decision-making, and coordinate internal processes so that leaders can regain time for what truly matters-especially in complex situations. The three roles within the CEO Office are strategically interlinked, enabling clear accountability and effective collaboration.

Discover how to position your company for the future despite a full to-do list-while also clearing your own head. Case studies from mid-sized companies, practical frameworks, and ready-to-use checklists make the system immediately applicable, including in your organization.

The development of pragmatics has been shaped by thought experiments without which it could not have become an autonomous subfield of linguistics. However, their nature and their impact on current trends in pragmatics has not yet been made subject to systematic scrutiny. The book addresses that gap by confronting a central puzzle: How can thought experiments in pragmatics yield new experiential information about communication when they take place entirely within the researcher's imagination. The volume offers a clear and original answer by showing that their power lies not in invention or speculation, but in a disciplined process of argumentative re evaluation of existing experiential knowledge.

The book is unique in at least two respects. First, it presents carefully elaborated case studies on Searle's and Grice's seminal thought experiments, which yield an original solution to the paradox. The key idea of the solution is that thought experiments in pragmatics neither generate new experiential information per se, nor are they mere speculations on imaginary situations. Rather, their novelty is rooted in the plausible argumentation process during which they cyclically and prismatically re-evaluate experiential information. Second, through this solution, the book contributes to the controversies on the semantics-pragmatics interface in particular as well as the methodological foundations of pragmatic research in general.

Written with conceptual clarity and supported by extensive engagement with current scholarship, this volume is of vital interest to researchers and advanced students in pragmatics, cognitive linguistics as well as the history and philosophy of linguistics.

This book provides a theoretically grounded, practically oriented framework for fostering creativity in second and additional language education. Creativity is among the most valued graduate qualities of our time - yet how to cultivate it deliberately in language education in the age of generative AI remains an open question. Drawing on sociocultural, psycholinguistic, cognitive, and linguistic theories, it offers research-informed pedagogical strategies and assessment methods that integrate AI ethically and productively - as a partner for idea generation, a scaffold for multilingual practice, and a prompt for critical reflection. Illustrated with authentic classroom cases, it addresses learner agency, teacher creativity, academic integrity, and inclusive assessment. An essential resource for language teachers, researchers, curriculum designers, and students navigating creativity and AI in language education.

A practical guide to demystifying speech technologies and integrating them into world languages courses

Speech technologies-such as speech recognition and speech synthesis-have become increasingly present in everyday life, yet many language teachers lack guidance on how to meaningfully integrate them into classroom practice. A Practical Guide to Speech Technologies for Second Language Learning addresses this gap by providing accessible explanations of key concepts, with no specialized background or training needed.

Grounded in CALL (computer-assisted language learning) and SLA theory, the book shows how speech technologies can support language learning and teaching in principled and pedagogically sound ways. The book focuses on speech synthesis and speech recognition technologies, providing practical tips and considerations for teaching speaking, listening, and pronunciation. Each section provides clear explanations of how the technologies function, insights from theory and research, and practical classroom examples, helping readers understand both their potential and limitations. The book also provides examples of activities for both English and French as second languages, and it illustrates how these technologies can be readily extended to a variety of languages.

This practical guide shows world language instructors how to integrate speech technologies into their courses. It will be useful for teachers, teacher trainers, and CALL researchers.

In a world where language connects people across cultures, Teaching for a Better World invites readers to imagine classrooms where words do more than teach grammar; they build empathy, resilience, and understanding. This groundbreaking volume is the first to focus on the integration of social-emotional learning (SEL) into English language teaching from a global perspective, bringing together educators and researchers from diverse cultural and educational contexts. Through conceptual discussions, research, and practical examples, the authors demonstrate how English lessons can also be lessons in compassion, collaboration, and global citizenship.

Organized into three sections-Conceptual Pieces, Empirical Studies, and Practical Examples-the book offers a comprehensive examination of SEL's theoretical foundations, evidence-based practices, and real-world classroom applications. Contributors explore SEL through lenses such as culturally responsive pedagogy, trauma-sensitive practices, teacher and student well-being, ecolinguistics, and intercultural dialogue. Readers will find innovative and practical ways to create inclusive, culturally responsive classrooms; support student and teacher well-being; and use English as a bridge for intercultural dialogue. Accessible and inspiring, this book's combination of conceptual depth, empirical rigor, and applied strategies position it as a foundational resource for advancing research and practice in SEL-informed English language pedagogy worldwide.

Readers of Teaching for a Better World will

• Learn pedagogically sound ways to foster empathy and resilience while creating inclusive, culturally responsive classrooms.
• Find ready-to-use lesson plans and activities.
• Encounter diverse perspectives of educators from a range of contexts, including conflict-affected regions, refugee resettlement contexts, and higher education.