This book examines the role of civil society in guarding Indonesia's democracy, with a spotlight on the 2024 general elections. The 2024 election was characterized by the incumbent's significant influence in shaping electoral outcomes, even prior to election day, including bureaucratic involvement aimed at favouring specific candidates aligned with the regime, thereby undermining procedural democratic norms. Within this context, this book considers how far civil society plays a role in safeguarding Indonesia's democracy. This book is guided by two main considerations: the general picture of Indonesia's democracy based on the 2024 general elections process, and the role of civil society in guarding the electoral process of the 2024 general elections. It looks at participation in electoral political competition vis-a-vis identity politics, such as affiliations with Islamic figures or leveraging Chinese ethnic identity, and the actions of Indonesian religious organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, as well as, the role of women's NGOs in ensuring implementation of the quota for women's representation in the 2024 elections. It also illustrates how young Muslims, utilizing digital platforms and contemporary cultural movements, have rejuvenated Islamism into a dynamic and adaptable force that effectively responds to modern challenges while upholding democratic ideals, which are marked by inclusivity, justice, and civic engagement. The central finding, however, is that this broad civic action is undermined by fragmentation within an increasingly closed and transactional political system. Ultimately, the book concludes that this diversity within civil society, despite its challenges, represents the most distinctive opportunity for safeguarding and revitalizing Indonesian democracy beyond 2024.

This interdisciplinary edited volume offers a timely and authoritative exploration of how inclusive finance can serve as a transformative lever in India's journey toward becoming a developed nation by 2047. drive equitable growth in India and beyond. It brings together eleven contributions from leading academics, policymakers, and practitioners, offering conceptual, empirical, and policy-oriented insights. The book expands conventional debates by foregrounding marginalized groups-such as persons with disabilities, women, smallholder farmers, the elderly, and informal workers-as central to financial inclusion. It combines global and national perspectives with grassroots evidence, examining topics including India's G20-driven digital finance diplomacy, digital public infrastructure (Aadhaar, UPI, PMJDY, DBT), financial innovation for financial inclusion and socioeconomic development, financial literacy for trust-building, retirement planning, disability-inclusive finance, post-pandemic gender gaps in digital finance, the role of FinTech in shaping access to informal credit, industrialization and digital financial inclusion for growth, crop insurance, and the role of microfinance in financial inclusion and economic development.

Organized into three thematic sections, the volume situates India's experience in the global discourse, examines national frameworks and life-stage needs, and highlights sectoral and regional pathways through surveys, econometric analysis, and case-based studies. A unique contribution is the pioneering of some important policy-oriented concepts, such as Disability Financial Inclusion Index, National Disability Financial Inclusion Strategy and National Financial Literacy Integration Mission. This timely resource will benefit scholars, students, regulators, practitioners, and international organizations by providing evidence-based recommendations and globally relevant strategies for advancing equity, empowerment, and sustainable financial inclusion. leading economists, policymakers, and field researchers to provide a comprehensive, evidence-based examination of financial inclusion across four thematic pillars: global frameworks and national strategies; life-cycle and demographic inclusion; community-driven models; and cross-country/regional insights. Emphasising on inclusion at the margins, rural women, persons with disabilities, informal workers, the elderly, and small farmers, this volume expands the boundaries of financial inclusion to address equity, participation, and trust.

Drawing from a rich mix of empirical methods econometric modeling, structuralist macro frameworks, and grassroots-level fieldwork, it covers a wide range of underexplored topics: post-pandemic gender gaps in digital finance, the role of FinTech in informal credit, financial literacy for trust-building, SHG vs. MFI empowerment models, and India's leadership on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and the G20 Financial Inclusion agenda. It also pioneers new tools like a proposed Disability Financial Inclusion Index.

It is beneficial for scholars and students in economics, development studies, public policy, and finance, the book also serves as a practical guide for policymakers, regulators, development practitioners, and international agencies. Its policy recommendations are rooted in local realities from regions like the Sundarbans and Jalgaon, while offering globally relevant insights through SAARC-level and cross-country comparisons.

Few countries have attempted an economic transformation as ambitious as Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, and this book examines its deeper roots, tracing the evolution of the Kingdom's oil-based development model and the forces driving reform.

The book follows Saudi Arabia's economic, political, and social evolution from the 1980s to the present, culminating in the reforms launched under Vision 2030. It first analyses the structure of the Saudi economy and its reliance on oil revenues, showing how this model shaped state institutions, welfare provision, and economic policy. It then explores the political and social dynamics underpinning reform, including demographic change, governance patterns, and an evolving social contract. Subsequent chapters assess the reforms associated with Vision 2030, their impact on diversification, labour markets, housing, and social change, and the financing mechanisms supporting them, ultimately offering a comprehensive evaluation of the Kingdom's ongoing economic transformation.

This book provides a broad and multi-country perspective on natural resource development and governance in sub-Saharan Africa. It looks beyond the resource curse to examine the intricate dynamics that underpin the public policies and corporate strategies that define natural resource management in Africa. Through exploring environmental transparency and accountability, the need to reduce corruption within the resource sector and empower local communities is highlighted. The importance of using mineral proceeds to reduce inequality and poverty is also discussed, with a particular focus on the protection of marginalised groups, indigenous peoples, and gender equality.

This book presents a framework for natural resource management that produces sustainable development and a fair distribution of profits. It will be relevant to students, researchers, and policymakers working within resource, development, and African economics.

This book presents a multidisciplinary exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) and its transformative impact across diverse sectors, from logistics and agriculture to architecture, social media, management, law, and ethics. Through selected papers from the ICAIS'24 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Studies under the theme of "Future Trends in AI: Academy Meeting with Industry", the book examines real-world applications and theoretical implications of AI technologies, offering insights into GPU-accelerated object detection, precision agriculture, interior design, digital HR practices, and equitable anti-money laundering solutions. The selected papers also address pressing ethical concerns and legal frameworks surrounding AI, including prohibited systems and jurisdictional differences in case prediction. Designed for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers, this collection fosters a deeper understanding of AI's evolving role in shaping sustainable, inclusive, and technologically advanced societies.

Medicines travel, transform, and multiply meanings across Asia's markets, temples, texts, and bodiesWhat makes something a medicine? To answer this deceptively simple question, Global Lives of Medicines offers twelve richly detailed biographies of medicinal substances across Asian history. From ginseng and frankincense to aconite, radish, and live leeches, contributors trace how materials moved through markets, temples, courts, homes, and laboratories while continually acquiring new meanings and uses.

Across the chapters, familiar categories begin to dissolve. Substances may function simultaneously as food, poison, ritual tool, or sacred object. Healing agents may be plant roots, minerals, aromatics, or even living creatures. Through these diverse case studies spanning East and South Asia, Global Lives of Medicines demonstrates how the boundaries between medicine, technology, religion, and commerce were constantly negotiated in different historical contexts. By placing these biographies in dialogue, it offers a new approach to the history of medicine-one that foregrounds the materiality, mobility, and cultural transformation of therapeutic substances across Asia.

A dynamic contemporary examination of universalism

Gathering a selection of essays by influential theorist Boris Groys, Towards a New Universalism articulates his sustained engagement with the problem of universality under contemporary conditions shaped by globalization, institutional fragmentation, and digital mediation. Rather than defending classical universalism or abandoning it in favor of cultural particularism, Groys approaches universality as something produced within shared historical, institutional, and technological frameworks.

These essays address topics spanning from identity politics to migration, museums, media, and artificial intelligence, examining how universal claims make their way into social and cultural contexts. Distinct from recent philosophical treatments of universalism, Towards a New Universalism situates the question within aesthetics, media theory, and institutional critique, offering an indispensable collection for anyone interested in the intersections of politics and art.

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This book critically explores the transformation of business ethics from a reflective moral practice into a domain shaped by legal compliance and political power. Bridging legal theory, political philosophy, and corporate studies, it examines how ethics is both depoliticized through juridification and politicized through corporate sovereignty. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's concepts of political antagonism and sovereignty, the book challenges liberal frameworks and calls for a renewed, politically engaged understanding of business ethics. This book is of interest to scholars and students of business ethics, legal theory, political philosophy, corporate governance, critical legal studies, and political theology.

This textbook on business ethics explores the central question of the extent to which moral values play a role as productive forces in the economy. By drawing on a wide range of ethical approaches and clarifications of key concepts, it conveys a comprehensive understanding of business ethics. In doing so, it deliberately refrains from adopting normative approaches.

In order to demonstrate how ethical and unethical human behavior affects economic outcomes, the work integrates current research findings from the field of economics as well as from interdisciplinary areas such as psychology and sociology. The insights gained provide new perspectives for the practical application of business ethics.

The knowledge relevant for students is first developed on a scientific basis and then presented in a structured and concise teaching format. It integrates insights from the behavioral sciences (psychology, social psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics) to provide a comprehensive and interdisciplinary perspective on business ethics.

Modernity, proposes Christophe Bouton, is not about the acceleration of time, but about living in multiple temporalities-polychrony.

Like a speeding locomotive that has lost its driver, the history of Western society since the mid-nineteenth century has been characterized as an exponential, out-of-control acceleration. Simultaneously, in recent decades, the destructive impact of human activity on the planet has increased at a spectacular rate, giving rise to what has been called the Great Acceleration. But a kind of reversal seems to be taking place: nature, once seen as a realm of repetition, has become historicized and even rushed toward an end, while history, the very site of change itself, appears strangely stagnant. In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck, Bouton offers readers a history of the idea of acceleration from the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene and invites us to undertake a critical assessment of this narrative of the "acceleration of history." Challenging the theories of Hartmut Rosa and Francois Hartog, he emphasizes the plurality of temporal experiences that characterize our present-the polychrony of modernity. Ultimately, the book's aim is not to deny the relevance of the categories of acceleration and presentism for understanding modernity, but rather to show that alternative rhythms and relationships to both past and future also exist.

This book features a collection of high-quality research papers presented at the International Conference on Tourism, Technology, and Systems (ICOTTS 2025), held at Technical University of the Atlantic, Sal, Cape Verde, from November 6 to 8, 2025. The book is divided into two volumes, and it covers the areas of technology in tourism and the tourist experience, generations and technology in tourism, digital marketing applied to tourism and travel, mobile technologies applied to sustainable tourism, information technologies in tourism, digital transformation of tourism business, e-tourism and tourism 2.0, big data and management for travel and tourism, geotagging and tourist mobility, smart destinations, robotics in tourism, and information systems and technologies.

For two decades, the dispute over national identity has dominated public discourse in France, polarising political parties, dividing academics and intellectuals, and fuelling one of the main controversies of the post-Cold War era. Yet for all the attention France's identity crisis has received, the origins of this obsession remain widely misunderstood. Key to unlocking this puzzle lies in the overlooked history of the 1980s-a crucial decade in which French national identity became bound up with a renewed political focus on culture. In this period, it was not the far right, but the Left, that reinvigorated debates around French identity. This book recovers a buried chapter. It explains when and how the politics of national identity emerged in France, and how it transformed public life, offering a fresh perspective on the relationship between culture and nation in contemporary democracies. As identity politics fractures democracies across the Western world-fuelling culture wars, inflaming debates over immigration, and redrawing the boundaries of belonging-Cultural Nationalism in France could not be more timely. Charting the wider arc from May 1968 to the end of Mitterrand's presidency in 1995, this book reveals how questions of citizenship, multiculturalism and competing cultural identities moved from the margins to the very heart of political life, a transformation whose consequences are still unfolding today.

In recent decades, dark tourism-also known as thanatourism-has sparked intense academic debate that extends well beyond the field of tourism research. The concept has captivated the attention of the social sciences and journalism alike. Thanatourism (from the Greek word Thanatos, meaning death) refers to travel to sites associated with mass death, suffering, disaster, or the macabre. These locations present a unique form of dissonant heritage that challenges future generations to reflect. This book is a curated literature overview that aims to provide meaningful answers to the questions of what dark tourism is and what motivates visitors to these sites.

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Since South Africa's democratization in 1994, the urban centers have become hubs for international finance and tourism while the peripheral townships remain burdened by poverty and crime. In Cape Town, the country's leisure capital, racial segregation has grown a township tourism market that promises an "authentic" South African experience for visitors and an economic opportunity for township residents. Black women, rejecting the notion of "slum tourism," have spearheaded an accommodation sector by turning their township homes into bed and breakfasts and guesthouses. These entrepreneurial hostesses welcome white Western tourists as well as more frequent, though less recognized, Black South African guests. By tailoring their gendered service labor for different clientele, they curate multiple narratives of township life and South Africa's future.

Pinpointing women's homes as sites of ideological construction, Accommodating Aspirations considers how tourism shapes the way we understand "developing" countries. Annie Hikido critically examines how historical structures and everyday practices produce perceptions of neighborhoods and nations. Drawing from rich ethnographic fieldwork, Hikido demonstrates how township hostesses construct competing portrayals of place through race, class, gender, and nation. Poignant portraits of their homespun hospitality illuminate the promise and precarity of Black townships in the afterlife of apartheid.

Contemporary Marketing Practices in Africa: Ethical and Sustainability Perspectives is the second volume in a series of two published to honor Professor Kofi Q. Dadzie's enduring contributions to African business and development scholarship and his leadership in advancing research capacity and elevating global visibility of African scholarship.

This second volume brings together leading scholars to examine through empirical, conceptual, and multidisciplinary perspectives the ethical and sustainability imperatives that increasingly shape customer value and define responsible marketing in Africa. Several issues are covered, including ethical compliance in market-oriented strategies, consumer perceptions of online behavioral advertising, responsible technology use, sustainable consumption, public information systems, sustainable material management, strategic sustainability marketing, crisis-driven business resilience, and transformative arts-based approaches to consumer inclusion. This volume complements and deepens the strategic and technological insights provided in Volume 1, providing readers with a holistic understanding of contemporary marketing in Africa.

This volume is designed for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars who seek actionable perspectives on ethical responsibility and environmental stewardship within African marketing contexts.

For many companies, marketing is an area with high levels of investment, which is why the question of measurability is highly relevant. Managers see themselves under increasing internal accountability to prove the value contribution of marketing. Marketing management control is therefore ascribed an ever-increasing role with the aim of ensuring, proving and improving the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing management. Without clear evidence of success, it will be difficult to defend budgets in the future.

This publication deals with the basic principles and key instruments of effective marketing management control in the context of advancing technologization and digitalization in marketing. It discusses their possible applications in a practice-oriented manner and emphasizes aspects that have proven to be particularly relevant for companies in executive education at the University of St.Gallen (HSG).

This book provides a critical analysis of the "ambition for truth" in criminal proceedings, highlighting how this perspective continues to shape current practices and may, in some cases, contribute to the objectification of defendants and the infringement of human rights. Furthermore, it contends that evidential inquisitorialism, evidentiary positivism, and evidentiary rationalism are distinct epistemologies united by an underlying authoritarian political agenda: the pursuit of truth.

This study examines the reinvention of inquisitorial procedures by modern epistemology and their subsequent integration into Latin American legal systems, where they significantly contribute to widespread incarceration and selective prosecution, reinforcing established racial and class hierarchies. The analysis advocates for procedural frameworks that preserve the presumption of innocence, while highlighting ongoing concerns about the prevalence of inquisitorial practices within contemporary criminal justice. The book references both contemporary and classical scholarship in criminal procedure-including works by James Goldschmidt, Franco Cordero, Franchesco Carnellutti, and Pedro Aragoneses Alonso-as well as critical socio-legal scholars from Brazil such as Aury Lopes Junior and Jacinto Nelson de Miranda Coutinho, along with prominent voices in Latin American criminology (Eugenio Raul Zaffaroni) and sociology (Roberto Kant de Lima and Michel Misse).

Furthermore, it interrogates the epistemological and ontological dimensions of truth within criminal procedure through the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and many others. The study seeks to develop a concept of truth specifically tailored to criminal procedure, with the objective of constraining punitive authority and safeguarding against judicial practices that may infringe upon human rights.

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.

Powerful stories of migrants' experiences reveal the painful consequences of public policy

Voices of the Border documents testimonios-first-person narratives-of migration, deportation, and asylum-seeking in and around Nogales, a city of a quarter-million inhabitants on Mexico's northern border. In this updated and expanded edition, individuals recount life on the move to find work, flee violence, or reunite with family, as well as the effects of U.S. and Mexican government immigration enforcement that complicate movement, forcing people to either move again or become immobile. In addition, chapter introductions written by migrant advocates, humanitarian aid workers, religious leaders, and scholars examine various political influences, including the Trump and Biden administrations, evolving nation-state power, shifting immigration laws and policies, the squeeze of global capitalism, diverse familial and financial situations, persistent faith, and the ways that people respond to those powers.

In tracing the routes travelled to and from Nogales-in the United States, Mexico, the Central American region, and beyond-Voices permits insight into linkages between the histories, regions, local geographies, economies, and cultures that both emerge from and shape human movements. The testimonios in this volume amplify the voices of those who are mobile, expanding understandings of what it means to be stuck or on the move, and redefining whose perspectives and experiences matter.

This book critically explores ethical leadership and responsible business practices in emerging markets, with a particular focus on Ghana and the African continent. Bridging theory and practice, it examines corruption, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder engagement, and public sector ethics through interdisciplinary analysis and real-world case studies. The work challenges Western-centric ethical paradigms by centering African perspectives and experiences, offering a contextual model of ethical leadership. It addresses the moral complexities faced by organizations in socio-politically dynamic environments and provides actionable insights for navigating ethical dilemmas. This timely contribution is essential for academics, students, policymakers, and business leaders seeking to understand and promote ethical governance and sustainable development in the Global South.