For over a century, Japan has vexed and disappointed its Western allies by resisting their efforts to protect biodiversity. Consequently, foreign critics have long derided Japan as "the world's boldest eco-outlaw." Its animal protections are equally disappointing: comprehensive assessments by the World Animal Protection Index rank Japan among the worst in the developed world. Given Japan's close relationships with its foreign allies, its systemic disregard for wildlife conservation seems strangely out of character. Wildlife conservation, in fact, arguably stands as one of the greatest and most enduring sources of friction between Japan and the Western order. This enigma is neither easily understood nor rectified.

Loving and Loathing Wildlife in Japan explores Japan's complex relationship with wildlife conservation, an issue that currently challenges societies around the world. Tracing the topic from the seventeenth-century animal laws to the 1999 Act on the Welfare and Management of Animals, W. Puck Brecher examines the four dominant paradigms-compassionate control (pre-1868), utility (1868-1945), conservation (1868-1980), and welfare (1902-1999)-that have dictated how Japan has conceptualized and handled its engagements with wildlife. These paradigms span the broad range of political and attitudinal approaches adopted by modernizing Japan as it sought to manage its wildlife resources. Each offers a distinctive perspective on Japanese society, politics, and their relationship with the natural environment. Collectively, their historical arc invites readers to contemplate patterns that have variously advanced and hindered wildlife conservation, as well as potentials for future improvement. In doing so, the book illuminates historical contexts necessary to understand modern Japan's puzzling reputation as an environmental outlier and its struggle to reconcile tradition with environmental responsibility.

Embedded in Southern voices and epistemologies, this book explores how local communities in Central America understand development and the good life in the context of large-scale infrastructure projects.

The analysis focuses on six case studies: the Reventazon hydropower plant and the Guanacaste tourism projects in Costa Rica, the Barro Blanco hydropower plant in Panama, the Bahia de Tela tourism area in Honduras, and the La India and La Libertad gold mines in Nicaragua. The book draws on extensive in-depth interviews, participatory workshops and surveys to demonstrate how different social groups interpret the impacts of megaprojects. It critically examines the tensions between externally-driven investment initiatives - and the values they promote - and locally-rooted worldviews, wellbeing and ways of life. The volume concludes with a practical workshop proposal to help communities strengthen their resilience and formulate alternative development pathways based on their own cultural and social frameworks.

This book will be of particular interest to scholars in the fields of development and Latin American studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners working in the region.

This book takes a deeper look at the history of the Russian Empire and the USSR from the perspective of ethno-national minorities. It focuses on Buryat intellectuals who traveled and worked across Eurasia, sometimes crossing international borders into Europe, China, Mongolia, and Tibet.

The chapters cover a wide geographic space and address broad themes such as nationalism, identity, modernity, Buddhism, Marxism, education, cultural institutions, language, imperialism, political transition, cultural change, and the consequences of economic and social development. Buryat intellectuals occupied prominent positions in political, cultural, and religious spheres during the late Russian Empire and the early years of the USSR, an intense period of Russification, Christianization, colonization, and modernization. Using unique primary sources, the contributors investigate how Buryat intellectuals responded to these transformative forces. The book shows that they created narratives that drew upon their own history, Mongolian-Tibetan written culture, and the Russian-European intellectual tradition. These intellectuals- from diplomats to scholars to Buddhist lamas-grappled with questions about their identity and role in a rapidly changing Russian/Soviet state. Some focused on how to preserve their traditional culture, others sought to create experimental hybrid forms of identity, and others joined the process of creating a new socialist nation that rejected the past.

A novel contribution to the literature on post-colonial/decolonial approaches to knowledge making, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of history, Russian studies, Mongolian studies, Central Eurasian studies, as well as intellectual history.

This book studies the ethnic tensions in Pakistan and their repercussions on its territorial integrity and stability of the multi-ethnic and pivotal state -located at the trijunction of South Asia, South-West Asia and Central Asia. It analyses the causes of the emergence of the ethnic tensions in Pakistan since its inception and their likely course in the future. It demonstrates how the lack of proper representation from different ethnic groups in the decision- making processes of the country has had catastrophic consequences in the nation's past and present.

The book will be highly valuable to scholars, researchers and students of International Relations, Pakistan Studies, Defence Studies, South Asian Politics, and Ethnic Studies, who are interested in the complexities of Pakistan' ethnic problems.

Renowned Taiwan expert and former intelligence officer J. Michael Cole explains how this Pacific nation has become a tinderbox that could ignite a full-scale global conflict. Drawing on unparalleled access to Taiwanese government sources and two decades of on-the-ground observation, he explores the root causes of the conflict between Taiwan and China - from the identity politics that make "peaceful unification" inconceivable, to the rise of Xi Jinping, the most powerful and authoritarian Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. With in-depth analysis of how the war in Europe is influencing preparations by Beijing, Taipei, and Washington for a potential cross-Strait confrontation, The Taiwan Tinderbox is an impassioned plea for the defense of Taiwan as a priority for the international community and the future of democracy.

Ethiopia has been going through the most tumultuous period in its recent history, with conflict and civil war killing hundreds of thousands and leaving millions displaced. This book investigates the escalation and making of the current crises in Ethiopia, starting with the root causes of the protests (2015-2018), the bumpy transition (2018-2021), the civil war in the north (November 2020-November 2022) and ongoing violence in Amhara and Oromia regions, taking us up to 2024.

Adopting a diachronic approach, the book brings in historical insights to help us understand the causes of the crises and how they have led to current realities on the ground. The book presents a multiscalar analysis, investigating local identity and security concerns and state- level political, economic and security dynamics. Using the concept of the intrastate insecurity complex, the book sheds light on contested notions of security between state security on the one hand and societal security - the security of ethno- linguistic or cultural groups - on the other. It also takes into account the relevance of regime security in the complex dynamics between state and societal security.

Providing fresh conceptual and analytical perspectives on the unfolding situation, the book will be an important read for researchers, policymakers and practitioners interested in governance, development and security issues in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

This book looks at how the caste system has withstood resistance from below and survived the challenge of colonial modernity. By using empirical data from Bengal, it explores how Hindu caste society has sought to maintain its cultural hegemony and structural cohesion by frustrating reformist endeavours, by co-opting challenges by the Dalit and by marginalizing internal dissidence during the colonial period. It draws on case studies of early cultural encounters between 'high' Brahmanical tradition and the more egalitarian 'popular' religious cults of the lower castes. It also examines the Hindu 'Partition' campaign, which tended to appropriate dalit autonomous politics and made Hinduism the foundation of an emergent Indian national identity.

The book will be of use to scholars and researchers of history, political science, religion, minority studies, gender studies and South Asian studies.

This book analyzes the concept of likelihood of success in just war thinking and argues that if the concept should be retained, it must be reconsidered within the overall whole of the tradition of just war.

The concept of likelihood of success has stood out as particularly troublesome to thinkers and practitioners in the just war tradition. The idea, while related to the other categories of just war, such as proportionality and military necessity, can at times be confused with being an absolute rather than a co-belligerent criterion within the broader just war canon. With such an abstraction, justice can be collapsed into a kind of pragmatic calculation, favoring the powerful, and virtually invalidating insurrection, rebellion, or resistance. This volume brings together scholars and experts from across the tradition to reconsider and reconceptualize the likelihood of success. It analyzes this concept not only in light of the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, but also in historical cases such as Thermopylae or the Russo-Finnish Winter War. It also examines how we categorize and calculate the likelihood of success and what, after all, we mean by "success." Further, the volume considers how close or far from the target we should get, or expect to get, before claiming that a war is "unjust" or immoral, and raises the issue of the destructiveness caused by defenders themselves.

This book will be of interest to students of just war theory, military ethics, statecraft, and international relations generally.

This book develops a theory of successful reintegration after intra-state conflict, centred on the development of social capital and its use by former combatants after demobilization.

The book shows that those former combatants who are able to develop social ties and social capital in their communities, with their families and through involvement in peacebuilding activities will be more likely to experience successful reintegration as measured by their satisfaction with the reintegration process. The volume's research is based primarily on the results of a survey of former combatants in Colombia's conflict. The authors surveyed former members of the two largest and most powerful of the armed actors - the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (or AUC) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP). The book assesses the former combatants' evaluations of reconciliation processes, the prospects for the success of these efforts, and their own involvement in reconciliation programs to evaluate the extent to which former combatants are making successful efforts in this regard and whether their social capital influences their willingness to reconcile.

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, intra-state conflict, Latin American politics and International Relations.

This volume traces how the discourse of skill evolved in colonial and postcolonial India, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present neoliberal era. It introduces the concept of skill ecology to capture the broader political, economic, and social environment within which skills emerge, transform, and acquire meaning. Skill is examined here not merely as a technical attribute but as a historically contingent category, shaped by state policy, capitalist ideologies, and hierarchies of power.

Focusing on industrial training from the late colonial period - particularly the 1930s - through Nehruvian state-led industrialisation and into the era of neoliberal reform, the book explores how skilling became a terrain of collaboration and contestation between the state and the capital. It also reveals how social relations influence the legitimacy of skills, determining what forms of labour are seen as 'skilled' or 'unskilled' and for whom.

Combining perspectives from history, political science, and colonial and postcolonial studies, this interdisciplinary work offers fresh insights into the politics of labour and development in South Asia. It will be essential reading for scholars and researchers in modern history, political science, sociology, economics, social policy, and Asian studies.

This volume explores new avenues in the field of memory studies. Going beyond Western frames of reference, it shows how religion, region, caste, and class and their intersectionality and the fraught legacy of colonialism shape acts of both collective remembrance and forgetting in South Asia. The chapters in the volume call for a substantive rethinking of the conceptual and methodological frameworks in the field by posing critical questions such as, how do these layers play into and inform the processes of crafting and curating national histories and memories in South Asia? What are the silences that exist within it and how are they contested? What are the alternative modes of remembering, marking and accounting for "difficult pasts" beyond the confines of state-regulated memorial projects? And what "events" constitute dominant and rightful entry points for engaging with these themes and which remain ignored? In doing so they steer discussions on the politics of memory in the region in directions that offer opportunities for not only re-visiting the Partition of 1947 from previously unexplored perspectives but also for going beyond it as the central analytical lens for approaching questions of remembrance, forgetting and utterance in South Asia. A radical new intervention, the volume will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of history, sociology and social anthropology, politics, and South Asian studies.

This book analyzes the context, process and content of the reform of married women's property rights in seven Spanish-speaking South American countries - Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela - between 1900 and the early 1950s.

It investigates how the reforms enacted earlier in the United States, England and continental Europe and national antecedents and conditions informed the ideas of feminists, jurists and politicians and shows how their interaction influenced the content of the reforms attained. It highlights the role of feminists and their organizations in achieving stronger property rights, emphasizing their proposals to reform the civil code. The book argues that while most feminists framed their arguments in maternalist terms - that they needed stronger rights to be better wives and mothers - their proposals to reform the marital regime fell along a continuum that ranged from accepting the husband as sole household head to gender equality in marriage. Since the long-run goal was to attain equal civil and political rights, the book also demonstrates how these two demands for stronger property rights and suffrage influenced their strategies and what feminists were able to achieve.

This book contributes to a long-standing discussion on the relationship between socioeconomic and legal change and brings the findings of recent scholarship and a vast array of primary materials only available in Spanish to an English-speaking audience, interpreting legal concepts and debates in a manner accessible to social scientists. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, it supports the construction of a feminist legal history of marital regimes. It will be of interest to historians, legal scholars and feminists across a range of disciplines.

Cover image: Reception hosted by Feminismo Peruano Z.A.C. for members of the Inter-American Commission on Women attending the Eighth International Conference of American States in Lima, 1938. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Calculative Ethics examines social and development impact bonds as a form of ethical finance that adopts a fact-centred approach to addressing social ills. Impact bonds are shown to recast ethical investing through evidence-based governing, tying investor returns to demonstrated social outcomes in domains such as health and education. The book argues that this logic of fact-based financing is gaining institutional traction, reshaping investing practices, public service commissioning, and approaches to development finance.

Drawing on three case studies-addressing homelessness and chronic illness in the UK, and educational outcomes for girls and boys in India-Calculative Ethics traces how impact bonds bring together financial tools, scientific evaluation methods (such as randomised controlled trials), and performance management into programmatic responses to poverty-related issues. Rather than simply advancing financial interests under an ethical banner, impact bonds are shown to reconfigure both finance and ethics. They give rise to a calculative reasoning in which investments are organised around numerical evidence of improved well-being of vulnerable populations. The book argues that this reveals more complex power configurations than marketisation accounts typically suggest-while also interrogating the conceptual and political issues that emerge when 'facts' become the organising principle of investing and governing.

Calculative Ethics will appeal to scholars and students of international political economy-particularly those studying ethical finance and the financialisation of welfare and development-as well as researchers in economic sociology, public policy, development studies, and human geography.

This collection of chapters explores how history is created, shared, and contested in urban and marginalized spaces by examining memory, displacement, resilience, and community-driven historical interventions across Mexico.

Bridging academic research with lived experiences, the book shows how public history is a powerful tool that both reflects on the past and projects more egalitarian futures of justice, representation, and cultural affirmation. Centred mainly around Mexico City, but also touching on the impact of migration at the northern border, it contributes to the debates around new forms of history construction and covers topics including territorial dispossession, deportation processes, the violence entailed in erased histories, and the reconfiguration of daily life during the COVID pandemic. Through diverse approaches and methodologies such as documentary film, digital storytelling, public art, museum interpretations, grassroots activism, and other collective or community work, it provides readers with valuable insights into how historical narratives shape identities, social movements, and public policies, as well as a deeper understanding of how communities engage with their past to reclaim space, resist erasure, and foster belonging.

This book is a useful resource for all upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in urban history, public history, cultural studies, anthropology, and Latin American studies.

This is the first full-scale analytical and critical monograph on the moral philosophy of W. D. Ross. It shows why Ross is admired as a major figure in ethics. He provided one of the most distinctive and powerful theories in the field, and Robert Audi sets out and explains Ross's comprehensive ethics, including his theory of obligation-of duty and the right-and his theory of value, of the good and the bad. Ross is conceptually sophisticated, rich in ideas, and historically informed. He reflects the best in Aristotle's ethics and is an astute critic of Kant, Mill, Moore, and others.

Audi clarifies Ross's substantive moral views, from their metaphysical grounds to their practical applications, and explains how Ross illuminates much in contemporary ethics, theoretical and applied-intuition, reflective equilibrium, defeasibility, and many distinctions: between grounds and constitution, basic and consequential obligations, commensurability and combinability, moral stringency and moral predominance, enumerative and intuitive induction, rightness and creditworthiness, and many others. The Intuitionist Ethics of W. D. Ross presents Ross as demonstrating the powers of intuition in moral practice, portraying the diversity of standards for determining duty, and preserving the plurality of values in moral reflection. He is a judicious exemplar of full-scale ethical intuitionism, as both a method of moral thinking and a major option in doing and teaching ethics.

This book explores Greenpeace's efforts to expand its engagement in the Circumpolar North in the 21st century and how this work is affected and informed by the organization's controversial legacy of anti-sealing campaigning in the 1970s and 1980s.

Presenting the fallout for peoples and cultures targeted by Greenpeace's anti-sealing campaigning as a pivotal dimension to the organization's history, the book argues that this history must first be acknowledged in order to understand how Greenpeace has developed more positive working relationships in some instances with northern Indigenous peoples in recent years. The book looks to dispel the misconception that Greenpeace is universally rejected in the Circumpolar North, whilst also highlighting that its engagement and alliances are being built in the shadow of its yet-to-be fully tackled history as a leading part of the anti-sealing movement.

Greenpeace in the Circumpolar North is ideal for courses and research with a focus on Arctic studies, environmental activism, and Indigenous studies, and for those interested in learning more about the complex legacy of Greenpeace.

Ever since the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) was initiated in the early 2000s, political and research interest has tended to focus on its military components, rather than the more quantitatively important non-military interventions.

This book scrutinizes the enactment and effects of African non-military conflict interventions from a range of different perspectives and contexts. Research suggests that non-military interventions through the African Union and Regional Economic Communities are highly impactful, despite being typically under-resourced and less institutionally embedded within APSA. This book provides a comprehensive empirical mapping of the many mostly informal practices of non-military interventions and the complex interfaces between the African Union and Regional Economic Communities, their external 'partners', and national and local actors. Covering various cross-cutting themes such as the involvement of civil society and the role of African special envoys in non-military interventions, the book considers the variation and dynamics of such practices across time and space, as well as their intended or unintended effects.

This timely new assessment of African non-military conflict interventions will be an important read for peacebuilding practitioners and think tanks, as well as researchers working across African International Relations, peace, and conflict studies.

The Routledge Companion to East Asian Historiography offers a comprehensive exploration of the rich and dynamic traditions of historical writing in East Asia, tracing their evolution across two millennia. Rooted in the influential Chinese historiographical tradition and enriched by the distinctive contributions of Korean and Japanese scholars, the book examines how these practices have adapted to cultural, political, and intellectual shifts.

The volume's four thematic sections explore the origins and evolution of historical writing, modernity's transformative impact, and the diverse methodologies shaping contemporary scholarship. Key topics include the establishment of official historiography in imperial China, the innovative practices of the Song dynasty, and the influence of Western ideas and Marxist frameworks from the twentieth century. Emerging areas, such as social, environmental, gender, and global history, are examined, alongside comparative studies bridging East Asian and Western traditions. From ancient chronicles to modern interpretations shaped by nationalism, Marxism, scientism, and globalization, the volume highlights the interplay between tradition and innovation that defines East Asian historical culture.

As the first of its kind, this companion serves as both an essential textbook and a scholarly reference for students and researchers interested in East Asian history, global historiography, social history, intellectual history, and postmodernism.

This book examines the social life of fishing communities in South India. It shows how modernization has brought changes to coastal communities in the post-Independence era.

It focuses on inter- and intra-community dynamics, social structure, the role of religion and migration. The volume also links how developmental discourses have transformed the fabric of these communities, as well as the impact of environmental degradation on their traditional livelihoods.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology and social anthropology, development studies, demography, history of migration and diaspora studies and South Asian studies.

This book unpacks the complexities of social development in India, focusing on the institutional bottlenecks that hinder effective policy implementation.

While governments and organizations design ambitious policies for economic growth, human capital development, education, agriculture, and social welfare, their impact is often diluted due to governance inefficiencies, bureaucratic inertia, and weak last-mile service delivery. Through a blend of empirical and evidence-based research, policy analysis, and real-world case studies, the book provides a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms that drive - or obstruct - sustainable development in India. It explores pressing socio-economic issues, such as demographic shifts, sustainable futures, workforce dynamics, digital governance, e-markets, bureaucracy, and gender-based violence. The book serves as a vital resource for those seeking to understand governance challenges and the institutional reforms necessary for meaningful change. By highlighting both the problems and potential solutions, it fosters a dialogue on creating resilient and inclusive institutions that can effectively deliver on their promise of social progress.

Part of the Innovations, Practice and the Future of Public Policy in India series, this volume will be of interest to policymakers, policy practitioners, researchers, development practitioners, and engaged citizens, particularly as we move towards a tech-savvy public sector. It will be an essential resource for students and researchers of development studies, sociology, public policy and governance, economics, and South Asian studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.