This open access book presents a comprehensive exploration of resilient innovation and innovation for resilience within the context of the PR China Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). By integrating insights from diverse stakeholders, it offers a fresh perspective on enhancing resilience through innovation while promoting sustainable practices and advanced innovation solutions for enhancing resilience..
The innovative approach proposes collaborative frameworks that leverage existing initiatives in standardization, research, and international cooperation as foundational elements for building resilience. This book aims to create a network of innovation centers along the BRI, fostering international collaboration and knowledge exchange.
Covering a wide range of innovation and resilience related topics, the content includes assessments, regulations, risk management, and the role of critical infrastructures and the society in enhancing resilience. It is designed for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners interested in the intersection of innovation, sustainability, and international cooperation.
Key features of the book include:
1. Collaborative Insights: Contributions from a diverse array of experts and stakeholders, providing a multifaceted view of resilience in innovation.
2. Practical Frameworks: Actionable suggestions for implementing resilient innovation strategies, supported by case studies.
3. Strategic Relevance: Aligns with current global challenges, offering timely insights into the role of innovation in addressing systemic risks and enhancing sustainability.
This book is an essential resource for anyone looking to understand and contribute to the future of resilient innovation both along the Belt & Road Initiative and in a broader international context.

Pain in Relation: On Causality, Chronicity, and (Crip) Evidence argues that the dominant stories circulating within contemporary US culture are marked by seemingly contradictory certainties: pain is at once subjective yet universal; that pain makes life unlivable and can be overcome with perseverance. These certainties graft onto pained people into impossible imperatives: the imperatives to live "despite" our pain and to defend the value of lives imagined to be compromised "because of" it. Alyson Patsavas outlines the harm these imperatives cause and draws on feminist, queer, and disability theory to offer alternative frameworks for making sense of and relating to pain.

The study fleshes out "crip autotheory" and experiments with evidencing practices, using anecdotes, journal entries, personal reflections, list-making, and photography to map "cripistemologies of pain," or critical, disability-informed experiential ways of knowing pain. Equal parts cultural critique, intimate portrait of pained life, and commentary, Pain in Relation invites readers to challenge what they think they know about pain and explore new ways of relating to pain, pained life, and the futures we imagine for pained people.

This open access book provides theoretical, empirical and practical solutions to develop competencies needed for digital transformation and changes in work and life in African contexts. It promotes ecosystems in which educational institutions, companies and policymakers aim to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations. This book is based on the Finnish African Co-Innovation project DAIA (Digital Academies in Africa (2022-2025), where Finnish and African researchers and companies have worked together.

The book first analyses the scenarios presented in African future-related documents, before introducing solutions and new implementations to address the needs and demands identified. It presents a compilation of chapters that combine expertise from theoretical and empirical research in education, with case studies from specific industrial sectors in South Africa to map future learning ecosystems in Africa.

This open access book explores methods, approaches, techniques, values and ethical issues that create space for innovation in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) to meet contemporary needs at the regional, local, and global levels. By bringing together teaching, research and work experience from academia and the industry/private sectors, it provides a valuable resource for education providers, researchers, practitioners, teachers, school leaders, policymakers, industrial partners, and company leaders and trainers. This book also serves as a potential textbook in higher education and TVET.

Die Arbeit widmet sich dem Insolvenzantrag aus allen Blickwinkeln. Ausgehend von einem grundlegenden Versaeumnis des Gesetzgebers zeigt der Autor auf, dass das geltende Recht die Interessen der Einziehungsbetroffenen und der Tatopfer nur unzureichend beruecksichtigt. Auf Grundlage der Untersuchungsergebnisse werden abschliessend Vorschlaege zur Reform der StPO und der RiStBV erarbeitet.

This book offers an original guide to teaching English grammar to secondary multilingual learners through school genres and crosslinguistic classroom practice. It brings a descriptive approach to English grammar into secondary classrooms, showing how grammar choices shape meaning, clarity, cohesion, stance, and audience understanding. Part I introduces key resources in English grammar, including word classes, phrases, clauses, information packaging, and cohesion. Part II applies these resources to descriptive, narrative, expository, argumentative, persuasive, procedural, reflective, dialogue, monologue, and digital genres. The chapters use mentor passages, annotation routines, classroom tasks, feedback prompts, and teacher resources to support purposeful grammar teaching. Rather than treating grammar as error correction, the book frames learner language as evidence for inquiry and revision. It helps pre-service and in-service teachers connect descriptive grammar, crosslinguistic awareness, and inclusive language pedagogy to everyday classroom decisions.

This book celebrates the remarkable contributions of Dr Keiko Koda, a leader in second language (L2) acquisition and reading development, who retired from Carnegie Mellon University in 2024. The chapters in this volume explore recent theoretical developments and practical applications in L2 reading research from a cross-linguistic perspective. The book addresses a wide range of issues in L2 reading among diverse learner populations, including young multilingual learners from both low- and middle-income countries and post-industrial nations. It also focuses on various types of learners in different educational settings worldwide, such as foreign language learners, heritage language learners, and dual language learners. Topics covered include meta-analyses, innovative applications of theory in pedagogy, and the design of assessment tools. Collectively, these contributions have the potential to significantly advance both theoretical frameworks and practical approaches in the field. This book is useful for researchers, educators, graduate students, and multilingual education specialists interested in theoretical and practical advancements in second language reading and cross-linguistic transfer.

With the ongoing development of immersive technologies, growing degrees of design flexibility, and integrated communicative tools, the metaverse presents new possibilities for facilitating language learning opportunities through meaningful social interactions. As the metaverse is still emerging, the edited volume identifies the key elements of metaverse-based language learning and teaching by placing them in the context of established theories and practices in second language acquisition. It also presents metaverse platforms and tools, and provides examples of how they might be used in the field of English Language Education.

The volume is divided into four parts (Foundations, Practical Applications, Socio-Emotional, Ethical and Sustainable Dimensions, and Future Directions), consisting of 13 internationally contributed chapters that address various aspects of the metaverse-based language teaching and learning. The volume provides valuable insights for language educators, researchers, and learners, and aims to enrich the language learning and teaching landscape in an increasingly digital world.

Islampolitik: The Role of Islam in Modern-State Building examines the interrelationship between Islam and state-building in global modernity. Synthesizing scholarship from the fields of sociology, political science, history, religious studies, Middle East, and Islamic studies, this book brings together theories from both below (subjectivities) and above (governance) into one comprehensive resource.

Islampolitik investigates how modern states draw on religion, specifically Islam, when creating templates for subjectivity formation of individuals and communities as part of their broader governance strategies. The book provides a needed challenge to the long-held perception amongst scholars of governance and modernity: namely that Islam is a source of pre-modern rationales creating obstacles to modern governance and state maintenance processes. The book provides empirical insights into the connection between global modernity and modern frames for identity construction.

This open access book offers the first thorough analysis of the role of civil defense in NATO security discourse and development over the years, pinpointing critical junctures and historical events. Its novel contribution is the analysis of NATO's adoption and implementation of resilience as policy, a strategic concept, and later as a new body, the resilience committee. It explores how resilience shapes the role of civil defense and becomes a natural part of national defense and international security, and provides new insights into the knowledge of this contested concept and its adaptability once it enters a security discourse.

In terms of policy implications, one of the book's key contributions is its careful examination of the intricate roles ascribed by civil administration, civil society, market actors, and the broader populace. By explicitly addressing the social and political dynamics that have shaped NATO both historically and in the present day, it aims to ignite vital conversations around the implications of military alliances on democracy, accountability, and their influence over the internal political affairs of member states. This sheds light on the interconnectedness of these elements and encourages readers to critically reflect on the power structures at play and their far-reaching effects.

This book provides a groundbreaking analytical framework to decode the paradoxes at the heart of China's financial system. It investigates why heavy-handed government intervention persisted alongside stellar economic growth, and why the very policies that fueled the "China miracle" are now generating significant financial risks and inefficiencies.

Moving beyond mere description, the analysis adopts a historic perspective to answer four pivotal questions: Why did China maintain repressive financial policies? Why didn't these policies stifle growth? What caused the recent surge in financial risks? And what are the essential next steps for reform? The book uniquely characterizes China's reform path as one of "asymmetric market reform," driven by pragmatism rather than theoretical ideals.

The scope spans from the foundational reforms of the state-owned banks and markets to the latest revolution in digital finance. It demystifies how technologies like mobile payments and Big-Tech lending are promoting inclusion while creating new regulatory challenges. The book is tailored for academics, policymakers, financial professionals, and students seeking a sophisticated understanding of China's financial trajectory.

Why has multilateral peacebuilding in conflict-ridden states emerged as a depoliticized practice that rarely engages with local actors and agendas? And why has depoliticization persisted despite continued criticisms? Claiming Impartiality offers an innovative answer to the puzzling persistence of depoliticization in post-war peacebuilding that focuses on the institutional mandates, interests, and practices of those international and bilateral organizations that design and implement most peacebuilding interventions.

Drawing on and expanding a Bourdieusian field perspective, the book examines international organizations as actors in multiple fields of global governance. Using the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Timor-Leste, it traces the emergence and transformation of peacebuilding practices by leading international and bilateral organizations during the first two decades of the field's existence. The organizational lens highlights the tensions that exist between the objectives of simultaneously acting as a peacebuilding organization and as a peacekeeping, humanitarian, or development organization whose practices are to varying degrees committed to observing the twin principles of impartiality and neutrality. By thinking through these sometimes contradictory roles, the book offers new insights into how these organizations sideline questions of political agency in favor of expanding their influence into related fields of global governance. Claiming Impartiality discusses the future of peacebuilding and explores avenues for addressing political challenges to peace itself.

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.

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.

Russia's devastating invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a manifestation of a wider phenomenon: Russia's new, post-Soviet imperialism. This book provides a theoretically informed, critical account of Russian imperialism that is attentive to the interplay between economy and ideology, coercion and hegemony, structure and agency. While economic developments go a long way toward explaining the reemergence of Russia's imperialist impulses in the twenty-first century, a purely economic logic cannot account for the dramatic shift in Russian imperialism beginning with the annexation of Crimea and the instigation of a separatist insurgency in the Donbas. Nor can objective geopolitical developments, such as US and NATO military deployments, provide an adequate explanation for this shift. Instead, this book shows how the Kremlin's reaction to the Maidan revolution was rooted in the ideological consolidation of the previous years: the emergence of a total ideology that designates the West as Russia's eternal enemy and Ukraine as the West's geopolitical pawn. Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev examine Russian foreign policy and the Kremlin's project to remake the Russian people to better serve its imperialist agenda.

How can a small democracy resist the influence of a powerful authoritarian neighbor? Taiwan is frequently praised for its successful economic development and peaceful transition to democracy, serving as a model for other developing countries. However, it faces substantial challenges, both from internal political divisions and external geopolitical pressures. Taiwan's political landscape is shaped by several significant cleavages: national identity and ethnic disparities, economic inequality and class conflict, and generational and cultural differences. The greatest challenge to Taiwan's democracy comes from the influence of China, which has exploited these cleavages through economic leverage, propaganda, and political interference.

Under the heavy influence of Beijing's sharp power, Taiwan's democracy often faces threats of regression. Whenever China escalates its tactics, Taiwan's civil society has mobilized in response, playing a crucial role in resisting Beijing's strategies and defending democratic institutions. Thung-Hong Lin examines case studies - such as the 2014 Sunflower Movement, the 2019 support for the Hong Kong protests, and recent social movements in 2024 - to demonstrate how Taiwan's vibrant civil society is a key source of democratic resilience. This book also situates Taiwan's struggle within the broader context of US-China relations, showing how global geopolitics over the past half-century has shaped the island's destiny.

Die Arbeit befasst sich mit der Frage ihrer Einfuehrung und zeigt dabei auf, dass zwar keine Kompetenz der Europaeischen Union im Rahmen der Wirtschafts- und Waehrungsunion besteht, wohl aber im Rahmen der ihr zugewiesenen sozialpolitischen Zustaendigkeit gem. Art. 153 AEUV sowie ueber den Europaeischen Sozialfonds. Dazu analysiert sie die historische Entwicklung sowie die systematischen Bezuege, aber auch vergleichbare Diskussionen zur US-amerikanischen Arbeitslosenversicherung. Sie zeigt daran anknuepfend Moeglichkeiten einer Einfuehrung ueber differenzierte Integration innerhalb, aber auch ausserhalb des Unionsrechts auf.