This book analyses the interactions between China, the US, and the European Union (EU) with regard to tensions, competition, and cooperation.

It examines the transformation of the global system into a multipolar and multilateral one, with a particular focus on US-China relations and their interactions with the EU. The authors trace the revitalised unilateralism and selective multilateralism of the US, while also exploring the broader multilateral frameworks developed by China and other countries. The chapters examine the economic and political changes experienced by China, the US, and the EU in terms of investment, trade, manufacturing, and global relations, including the EU's Indo-Pacific policy.

This book will appeal to scholars of global studies, world history, political science, international relations, and regional studies (China, Europe, and the US).

Black communities in America have a long history of constructing sanctuaries amid oppression, from the secret hush harbors of slavery to the digital refuges created in response to the resurgence of white supremacist violence in the Trump era. These havens have offered places to grieve and to gather, to imagine freedom when the world denied it, and to practice care and resistance in the face of constant danger. They remind us that even in the darkest moments, Black people have made space to grieve, rest, heal, strategize, and imagine new futures.

In Hush to Harbor traces this enduring sanctuary-making through both historical memory and contemporary expression from the legacy of Freedmen's Towns and Green Books for Motorists in the Jim Crow era as testaments to Black mobility and mutual protection to present-day digital activism and grassroots organizing that reimagine safety in the public sphere.

Blending literary criticism, cultural history, and ethnography, Scott demonstrates that sanctuary is not merely a place of retreat but a political and spiritual practice that calls forth a collective act of making space when none is offered. In Hush to Harbor offers not just a chronicle of survival but a blueprint for sustaining Black refuge in a time of urgent need, redefining what it means to be safe in a nation that has never guaranteed safety for Black life.

This book provides the first systematic, quali-quantitative examination of how perception, orientation, and anticipation of the future are produced and reproduced in disruptive times. Utilizing an extensive and assorted Italian data set, it revolves around the contemporary sociological discussion between subjective expectations and objective chances, showing how disadvantaged actors self-excluded themselves while facing ambiguous prospects during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Supported by both qualitative and quantitative evidence, the authors advance that structural, actual opportunities largely predetermine individual stances, especially while confronted with their post-pandemic hereafter - what Bourdieu calls "the causality of the probable". Although a flood of publications ensued from the pandemic, many of which focused on the reproduction of inequalities taking place in such unsettled times, little or no attention has been paid to the dynamic through which social actors unequally envisioned future scenarios (as well as practical predispositions and adaptations to them), unevenly projecting themselves in the aftermath of the pandemic situation. Accordingly, this book interprets dispositions and attitudes toward the future of a national-scale sample of Italian subjects by highlighting to what extent these apperceptions are influenced by previous experiences, cultural schemas, and socioeconomic background.

An important contribution to the contemporary sociological discussion between subjective expectations and objective chances, it will appeal to researchers and scholars with interests in social reproduction, sociological theory, future studies, inequality, and mixed-method analysis.

Every day in the United States, an average of three people are killed by police officers. Black and Indigenous victims are disproportionately represented, and their stories are too often distorted by courts and media to justify their deaths and exonerate police actions.

In Complex Innocence, Lisa Marie Cacho examines five police killings that occurred between 2012 and 2019 across the continental U.S., Hawai?i, and the Muckleshoot Nation. Many of the victims - queer people, women of color, and other multiply marginalized individuals - had prior encounters with law enforcement, leading their deaths to be framed as deserved or inevitable. Cacho challenges these narratives by interrogating the legal, cultural, and historical frameworks that determine which acts of self-defense are protected and which are criminalized.

Drawing on self-defense law, Supreme Court cases, anti-resisting arrest statutes, and policing practices, Cacho reveals how "self-defense" as a right has been repeatedly redefined to privilege police officers while denying protection to victims of state violence. Through careful analysis of reports, testimonies, and media portrayals, she demonstrates how people of color's efforts at self-preservation are recast as threats, while officers' violence is framed as justifiable.

By reclaiming the complex innocence of those killed, Complex Innocence exposes the racial, sexual, and colonial foundations of policing. It offers an urgent critique of how U.S. law and culture sustain the cycle of sanctioned state violence.

An examination of Japan's maritime resurgence in an age of strategic competition

This book is the first to examine Japan as a comprehensive maritime power in the twenty-first century and to consider what that status means in an age of great power competition. Geoffrey F. Gresh argues that Japan has grown its maritime capabilities and influence across an array of economic, industrial, and security sectors throughout the Indo-Pacific and is vital to both regional and international stability.

Given Japan's position as a harbinger state confronting many macro trends-such as China's rise, an aging population, and climate change-Gresh draws critical lessons for other industrialized nations. Grasping how Japan envisions, invests in, and wields its diverse tools of maritime power and statecraft is essential to understanding its pursuit of a strategic vision for the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

This edited collection takes a structured and systematic approach to exploring the policymaking and policy impacts that shape private higher education (PHE) across the globe.

Although the rapid PHE expansion to a third of total global enrollment has owed much to a lack of initial government regulation, continued expansion (along with occasional stagnation or decline) results from complex interplays between private initiatives and public policy. Each affects the other in demonstrable but also subtle and sometimes elusive ways. This volume features six empirical cases rich with historical, political-economic, and socio-cultural context: the United States, Mexico, Argentina, the Philippines, Vietnam, and China. Each case is further contextualized by exploring public policy on public higher education-which often shapes PHE as much as public policy does when directly aimed at PHE. They further examine the leading research on comparative and global PHE, employing its cutting-edge concepts to promote meaningful cross-national and cross-regional comparison. The volume sheds considerable light on debates over private versus public, privateness versus publicness, and private-public hybrids and partnerships. The chapters aim to critically engage with comparative discussions on the private and public sectors and elucidate the clashing stakeholder and government visions of the future of PHE.

This timely and authoritative text will be of interest to researchers, students, and policymakers interested in global and comparative higher education (HE), PHE, governance, and public policy.

This book examines photographic collections as ways of doing and/or inspiring research in the humanities and social sciences.

Interweaving case studies and visual essays, this book:

• demonstrates the potential for photographic collections to launch new sociological, photographic, and creative work by scholars and practitioners;
• critically examines historical, social, and methodological issues revolving around a wide range of photographic collections in and of Asia;
• advances engagement with photographic collections as an innovative visual method in qualitative research.

Photographic Collections as Visual Method explores the ways in which photographic collections exceed their archetypal role as records of the past, to become not only a unit of analysis, but also the starting point for creative and critical work that intersects multiple disciplines. A wealth of data, stories, and inspiration, this book will appeal to scholars, students and practice-based researchers in the areas of visual and creative methods, especially methods for visual sociology and visual anthropology, photographic studies, museum studies, and area studies, with a particular focus on Southeast and East Asia.