Good governance has become increasingly central to discussions of economic growth, development, and environmental management. As the world grapples with increasing inequality and environmental degradation, the role of governance in shaping sustainable outcomes has gained critical importance.

Growth, Development and Environmental Implications of Good Governance by Ramesh Chandra Das delves into the complex relationship between governance, economic progress, and environmental management. His work tackles four key questions: how governance indicators are interconnected, whether good governance is a prerequisite for growth and development or the result of it, and its role in environmental management. Drawing on case studies from around the world, Das provides a comprehensive analysis of how governance influences diverse economies. The work's unique contribution lies in its global approach, comparing governance models across different regions and offering timely insights into how governance failures and successes shape both economic and environmental stability. At a time when global governance faces significant crises, this analysis offers crucial guidance for navigating complex economic and environmental challenges.

Designed for scholars in Economics, Political Economics and Development Economics, etc. policymakers, and practitioners, this study offers valuable insights into how good governance can drive sustainable growth and development across the globe.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist illuminates how physicists think about and do physics

What principles guide physicists' ways of thinking and the practice and culture of the discipline? In The Physicist's Way, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist P.J.E. Peebles argues that definite assumptions underpin the working physicist's approach, the elements of which are learned organically by incoming generations of students and shared across the field. Peebles outlines these basic principles, elucidating how physicists apply their approach to a broad range of topics, from quantum physics to the physics of the expanding universe.

After discussing physicists' demanding tests of the fundamental theories of quantum physics and relativistic cosmology and how physicists think about the puzzling lack of consistency between the two, Peebles considers the sociology of the field and where physics might be headed. Engaging throughout with ideas developed by scientists, philosophers, and historians, he elucidates the unique place physics holds in the natural sciences for the ability to discover theories that make definite predictions that agree with what can be observed.

The Physicist's Way offers an enlightening perspective on how physicists think about and approach the practice of physics.

This Open Access book introduces the Second Chances Framework, a practice-informed tool designed to evaluate whether individuals who have committed ethical wrongdoing in organizational settings should be granted another opportunity. Drawing from twelve years of Executive MBA classroom discussions, the framework is built on real-world cases shared by experienced professionals across diverse sectors. It identifies five key factors-precedent, reparation, trust, transparency, and fairness-that guide structured reflection and ethical judgment.

The chapters delve into critical questions such as: How should organizations weigh the seriousness of the original wrongdoing? Can trust be rebuilt, and what role does transparency play in ethical decision-making? Through detailed case studies and expert analysis, the book explores the tensions and interplay between these factors, offering a flexible yet robust approach to navigating complex ethical dilemmas. The framework is not a prescriptive formula but a tool for informed judgment, making it an essential read for those involved in organizational ethics.

Aimed at scholars, practitioners, and students of organizational ethics, this book provides a structured, practical guide for navigating second chance decisions. It answers the call to embed ethics more deeply in organizational practice, ensuring decisions are grounded in ethical integrity and transparency.

The field of International Affairs (IA) - or Global Studies - remains deeply and pervasively rooted in the Western-centric view of the world. While many publications address the coloniality of different aspects of IA, this book is about the field as a whole. The open access book provides essential readings on decolonizing IA, with chapters spanning multiple disciplines and areas of intervention. It will help reshape the teaching of IA, and provide new foundational resources for research. The authors contend that researchers and practitioners must have a keen understanding of the political stakes leading to the growing call to decolonize the global order and the institutional, social, and ecological realities that shape them. The book introduces various theoretical and political movements that have sought to critique and remake the academic study and practice of international affairs. Most importantly, it offers an alternative way of thinking about contemporary problems and a framework for analysis that can inspire their future work as researchers or practitioners.

This book explores how the recent COVID-19 pandemic not only brought the tourism industry to an unparalleled halt but also generated long-lasting and devastating effects on global trade. The virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, spread worldwide in a matter of weeks, affecting four continents. The current mobility culture, supported by recent technological breakthroughs, has paradoxically been both a main carrier and a main victim of COVID-19. The paradox of mobility culture lies largely in the fact that we now move faster, yet this increased speed generates further global public-health risks. Travel bans and restrictions changed not only the security and safety protocols at transport hubs and airports, but also our travel behaviour. Although the effects of the pandemic on the tourism and hospitality industry have been widely examined by scholars, less attention has been paid to the changes in travel behaviour that occurred during the Virocene. This edited volume will be of interest to scholars, postgraduate students, and professionals in the fields of mobility theory, sociology, anthropology, social geography, and tourism.

The exegetical and theoretical investigation of the important and essential conceptions in the Zhuangzi is key to understanding Zhuangzi's views. This edited volume brings together twelve papers that advance the ongoing scholarly study of the Zhuangzi through exegetical investigation and philosophical engagement with twenty-first-century debates in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of language, and political philosophy.

The book is divided into two parts. The first presents novel interpretations of several most important and essential conceptions in the Zhuangzi, including dao ?, hua ?, yan ?, zhi ?, and ren ?. The second engages the Zhuangzi with contemporary debates, addressing issues concerning evocative indirect communication, forgetting, fictionalist interpretation, narrative theory, relativism, responsive agency, and political quietism, among others.

This volume makes a substantial contribution to Chinese philosophy, Zhuangzi scholarship, and comparative philosophy, while offering original insights into debates across multiple areas of contemporary philosophy.

Reveals the intertwined nature of imperial mapping and map history through the making of the colony of French Soudan in nineteenth-century West Africa.

Thomas J. Bassett's Writing the Land argues that mapping played a key role in France's territorial conquest of Africa, and that the process of imperial expansion and colonization shaped map history by influencing how maps were constructed, circulated, and used. Analyzing military and surveying campaigns over half a century in an area that became the colony of French Soudan, Bassett focuses on the social and spatial problems that surveyors and mapmakers tried to solve in the process of territorial conquest, as well as the conflicts that arose as they pursued their goals.

In their efforts to obtain this territory, French military leaders, cartographers, and expedition members came into continual contact with local Africans, with whom they negotiated and clashed. Often, imperial officers relied on intermediaries to navigate West African geography, drawing on the knowledge of political authorities, interpreters, guides, and long-distance traders; the maps they produced are inextricable from these interactions. Ultimately, Bassett claims, examining the processes of mapping in the context of these encounters leads us to understand these maps anew as Euro-African constructions, ones that emerge from a complex process of exchange and domination.

This book provides a multifaceted investigation into the relationship between law, normativity, and the spatio-temporal coordinates in which legal phenomena emerge and transform. It offers a cross-disciplinary and philosophically grounded perspective that rethinks the categories of space and time as fundamental dimensions of the normative experience. Bringing together contributions from legal theory, philosophy, semiotics, comparative law, and cultural studies, the volume explores how law is affected by, and in turn affects, evolving conceptions of time and space and how the legal experience belongs to human history. This book investigates the ontological status of legal norms and the implications of their despatialisation or deterritorialisation in digital and transnational contexts. Several chapters address questions about the existence and longevity of legal norms, others examine the distinction between the spatial scope and the actual validity of norms in light of the effects of political change, cyber-activities, and global regulatory trends. The temporal dimension of legal responsibility is re-examined with regard to concepts such as negligence, intention, and agency.
Moreover, the book explores challenges of decision-making posed by algorithmic governance and behavioural regulation involving classical models of normativity based on rationality and chronological linearity. Furthermore, the volume draws on intellectual traditions from across the world (Western phenomenology, classical legal thought, non-Western cosmologies and ethical frameworks) for reconsidering the way normativity is shaped by paradigms of space and time related to peculiar dimensions (rhythm, ritual, kairos), which offer alternative temporalities encompassing legal practices and our understanding of some philosophical-legal categories. By integrating legal philosophy with intercultural and technological-ecological perspectives, this book opens new avenues for understanding law's dynamic entanglement with space and time.
This volume is intended for scholars and advanced students in legal philosophy, jurisprudence, legal semiotics, comparative law, and interdisciplinary legal studies interested in exploring emerging paradigms of normativity beyond traditional legal frameworks.

This open access book is a practical guide to choosing and using theoretical frameworks in humanities and social sciences. Written by and for Ph.D. students, early career researchers, and academic supervisors, it tackles one of the most challenging parts of research and writing, that of selecting and applying theoretical frameworks in the humanities and social sciences. The book shows how theoretical frameworks operate in real doctoral projects: how they are chosen, adapted to context, justified to different audience, and sometimes refined or rethought as the study evolves. It also clarifies what a "theoretical framework" is (and is not), and how it differs from concepts such as methodology and method when it is used as a lens to investigate the research problem.

The book includes 20 richly contextualized theoretical frameworks. These theoretical frameworks are drawn from doctoral research conducted in diverse global settings. The topics span across various domains, including AI in education, teacher identity, inclusion, and cultural studies, making the book relevant to readers across a wide range of disciplines and methodological orientations. Each chapter illustrates how emerging scholars move from conceptual interests to workable analytical lenses, showing the reasoning, constraints, and trade-offs behind theoretical decisions and the implications for data and claims.

The book bridges the gap between talking about theory and research practice. This is done by offering firsthand accounts of how doctoral researchers engage with influential frameworks such as Sociocultural Theory, Activity Theory, and Critical Discourse Studies. Readers will see how theory shapes research design, informs research questions, and guide data collection and analysis, and supports interpretation and argumentation.

Equipping readers with strategies, reflective prompts, and interdisciplinary perspectives, the book helps scholars develop a defensible theoretical stance and communicate it with clarity. Whether you are drafting a dissertation proposal, revising a literature review, refining your methodology, or supervising doctoral work, this volume is an indispensable resource for building theoretical coherence, analytic rigor, and scholarly confidence.

How people with illness and disability in China take to city streets to publicize their suffering and seek help

On the streets of every major city in China, people perform stories of poverty, illness, and disability, singing or sitting with written signs to solicit public charity. In Scenes of Affliction, cultural and medical anthropologist Trang X. Ta draws on ethnographic research and media coverage, primarily in Beijing and Guangzhou, to explore how individuals and families-many of them migrants from poor rural villages-publicize their medical plights to seek not only aid but also recognition of their moral worth and human dignity. Their testimonies of adversity and destitution represent a counternarrative to state propaganda about widespread economic prosperity and social progress.

By migrating to cities to seek medical care and public assistance, sufferers are asserting their right to life and a livelihood in the new China. But their continual solicitation and portrayal of need become a form of tragic injury, turning them into entrepreneurs of their own misery. Regarded as vagrants and even criminals, these supplicants constitute a working community engaged in performative labor. As savvy observers of human behavior with a streetwise understanding of the urban infrastructure, they use their bodies, voices, and stories as moral capital to earn a living in spaces hostile to their existence.

With its focus on urban spectacle, registers of moral value, and moments of both despair and resilience, Scenes of Affliction makes an original contribution to the comparative study of vulnerable populations engaged in unacknowledged care and labor.

This book examines how small-scale commercial marijuana production shaped social and economic formation in marginal hinterland communities in late-twentieth-century eastern Australia. As traditional rural industries such as dairying and forestry fell into decline, new settlers arrived and revitalised these hilly, low-income regions-though not always in ways that long-established residents welcomed. With limited access to formal income, some households turned to growing and selling marijuana. Focusing on production rather than distribution, the book shows how the illegality of cannabis connected and normalised the socio-economic periphery, tying remote forest communities to urban markets and embedding informal activity within everyday life. The book reveals how illicit enterprise underpinned community viability and illuminates the broader role of informal economies in Australia's frontier history and regional development. Based on two decades of immersive, place-based observation, this book will appeal to scholars of anthropology, history, development studies, and rural and regional research.

This book examines assassinations in Lebanon from 1951 through 2005, addressing the impunity with which these killings have occurred and the impact of these assassinations on the political environment within the country. One core component of the book is the discussion of accountability and investigations of assassinations in Lebanon, with one full chapter devoted to a broad discussion of accountability and the impact of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Another core component of the book is the case study approach-providing in-depth analysis of five assassinations that hold significance for the political landscape of Lebanon.

This book addresses Saudi Arabia's aspirations and challenges as they look toward democratic transformation. The book examines the country's political history, economics, international relations, and the state of freedom and human rights. Research and writing on this topic have expanded widely since 9/11. Many researchers have tried to study Saudi Arabian society, state, politics, and religion to understand some aspects of Saudi Arabia. Still, despite the insistence of this research agenda, the existing literature consists primarily of standalone journal articles scattered across different disciplinary fields. Readers and researchers, therefore, lack a comprehensive, in-depth examination of the challenges and prospects for the possibility of transition toward democracy in Saudi Arabia. There's a rich history of democratic movement in Saudi Arabia that is overlooked and to date not well documented or publicized, which goes against the most common assumption that Saudi Arabia or its citizens are not yet ready for democracy. What can we learn from the achievements and failures of democratic mobilization in Saudi Arabia about the future prospects of democracy? What are the implications and significance of this study's findings on democratic transformation in Saudi Arabia and the region? Why is it important to have a volume that brings together articles and writings on the topic? Our proposed volume, The Quest for Democracy in Saudi Arabia, bridges this gap. By bringing together pioneering scholars on the topic, the book will provide a comprehensive overview of the quest for democracy in Saudi Arabia and its challenges. In so doing, the book makes novel empirical and theoretical contributions to discussions of challenges to democracy in Saudi Arabia, state repression, economy, international relations, and social movements. Given its scope and timeliness, the book will appeal to scholars and practitioners alike, including those who study democracy, authoritarianism, international relations, and studies in the Middle East; political science; sociologists interested in mobilization, civil society, and migration; legal and human rights advocates; and policymakers concerned with democracy and authoritarianism.

This book is a sociological critique of colonialism and its successors as applied to Highland Burma. This is a subject which has long-attracted outsiders interested in "developing" the highlands, and integrating them into the capitalist world system. Among those who have tried (and failed) to "govern", in the modern sense, are British colonial powers beginning in the nineteenth century, Japanese militarists, Burmese nationalists and militarists, American CIA agents, Chinese engineers, and United Nations bureaucrats. All have failed to reach their goals for "development." The result is a series of failed political, infrastructure, and economic experiments.

The book distinguishes itself from others by starting with an assumption that the development of Myanmar's highlands is a result of flawed policies by outsiders, rather than the lack of development and governance by the highlanders themselves. Despite the success of such policies in many other countries of Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, Highland Burma remains a place that is ungovernable by international standards. The distinctive questions are two-fold. First, why have the outsiders so persistently promoted policies which seemingly inevitably failed? And second, what does the response of highlanders themselves tell about what James C. Scott calls "The Art of not Being Governed?" Such questions are largely left out of the reams of consultancy reports produced about Myanmar development, politics, governance, and economy during the last 30 years.

The edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.

The One Health (OH) approach recognizes that the health of humans, animals, plants, and the wider environment are closely linked and interdependent. This holistic framework aims to improve health outcomes by promoting collaboration among various sectors, including public health, veterinary medicine, environmental science, agriculture, and ecology. But what contributions can sociology provide for the implementation of One Health initiatives? As global health threats such as COVID-19, Zika virus, and Ebola have increasingly demonstrated the need for an integrated approach, this text breaks fresh ground by demonstrating the policy, research projects, educational interventions, and institutional communications that sociology can offer to the OH approach. Written by a medical sociologist and expert researcher in One Health, this practical book provides a focused approach to the sociology of health in One Health research and highlights the most recent advances in this field. Aimed at researchers interested or involved in OH research, as well as academics and social scientists in organizational studies, sociology and anthropology with a passion for interdisciplinary learning, this powerful study offers a new agenda for the role of social sciences in One Health.

This book provides a thorough examination of African society from a sociological standpoint. While previous works have addressed specific themes, such as urban life, education, gender, and globalization, this book encompasses the full range of sociological inquiry related to Africa. Topics include theory, methodology, culture, ethnicity, social relations, stratification, media, health, religion, education, and modernization, among others.

Drawing on established scholarship and original analysis, the book provides a structured framework for understanding the development, structure, and functioning of African societies. Therefore, it will appeal to scholars, students, and researchers seeking to engage deeply with African contexts and contribute to a more inclusive global sociology.

This book explores the diverse nature of Chinese manufacturing activity in Ethiopia and highlights how investments can be guided by local political economy conditions. It examines the economic potential of foreign direct investment and its role in facilitating structural change within African economies. The approaches taken by Ethiopia to steer investment towards development objectives are compared with global trends of industrial relocation and corporate adaptation to illustrate how foreign direct investment can benefit both China and African countries. Ethiopia's proactive industrial policies are highlighted to show that African states can leverage Chinese manufacturing capital to enable industrial development and economic growth.

This book provides unique detail into the specific strategies used in Ethiopia to maximise foreign development and drive economic development. It will be relevant to students, researchers and policymakers interested in development economics, industrial policy, and the international political economy.

A thoughtful and provocative meditation on both the potential and limits of constitutionalism.

In the early twenty-first century, constitutionalism confronts numerous pressures and critiques. Some prominent critics are concerned that constitutionalism's modern form, in which high courts play a large role, limits popular self-governance. By committing their nations to detailed social and economic policies-from neoliberal requirements for balanced budgets to constitutionalized social welfare and environmental rights-many modern constitutions might make promises they cannot keep and be unduly rigid in the face of changing social, economic, and environmental conditions. Meanwhile, the rise of proto-authoritarian elected leaders around the world shows that constitutions are vulnerable to, and may even enable, democratic backsliding.

Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugaric argue that addressing each of these serious concerns through constitutional design and innovation is potentially valuable, but paradoxically, every remedy also carries with it the possibility that it will intensify the very conditions it seeks to ameliorate. Instead, Tushnet and Bugaric propose a "thin" idea of constitutionalism and suggest that we should scale back our expectations for what constitutionalism can achieve. Political mobilization, led by people attuned to the economic and cultural causes of democratic backsliding, is a better bet.

Civil Societies, Uncivil States examines why governments around the world have turned against the nongovernmental organizations they once welcomed-and how they choose their methods of repression.

In the decades following the Cold War, NGOs became central players in global governance, buoyed by a liberal international order that rewarded states for supporting civil society. That openness proved short-lived. From Russia's foreign agent laws to India's crackdowns on foreign funding, governments increasingly viewed NGOs as threats. Suparna Chaudhry argues that whether governments choose violent crackdowns against NGOs or subtler administrative restrictions depends on two factors: whether an NGO poses long-term risks to state authority, and how visible it is internationally. A state's relationship with the liberal international order shapes which strategy it pursues.

Chaudhry's findings show that administrative crackdowns allow states to maintain democratic facades while systematically dismantling infrastructures of accountability. She reveals that, paradoxically, the very successes of transnational advocacy networks in pressuring governments to reform incentivized more sophisticated tools of repression. Unflinching in its analyses, Civil Societies, Uncivil States asks us to understand how states are silencing dissent before it is too late.