This work tackles humanity's most enduring questions, from the origins of the universe to the nature of just war, by proposing a revolutionary epistemological framework that transcends traditional academic boundaries. The study argues that no single approach, whether realist or liberal, scientific or artistic, can fully capture truth's complexity. Instead, the book introduces a comprehensive four-spiral methodology that integrates cognitive (scientific), affective (artistic), intuitive (subliminal), and divinitive (spiritual) ways of knowing.

Through a cyclical process of observation, participation, and reflection, the book demonstrates how standing back to look, standing close to listen, taking part, and looking again creates an ever-deepening spiral of understanding. Each spiral, cognitive, affective, intuitive, and divinitive, offers unique insights that, when combined, reveal "radical wisdom as the truth about many truths." This methodology promises to bridge the gap between competing worldviews and provide a more complete framework for addressing life's fundamental questions.

The work challenges readers to move beyond the limitations of single-perspective thinking and embrace a pluralistic approach that honors both rational analysis and spiritual insight, empirical observation and emotional understanding.

Bureaucracy is often seen as background machinery or as an obstacle to effective government. Bureaucracy and Political Science offers a different view. It shows that public bureaucracies are political organizations: shaped by political institutions and actors, but also deeply involved in shaping policy, implementation, reform, and democratic governance. The book explains why bureaucracies cannot be understood through familiar stereotypes of red tape, drift, or inefficiency alone. It shows why managing and reforming public organizations is more political, more contested, and more difficult than standard reform narratives suggest. The result is a clear and accessible account of what bureaucracy is, how it works, and why it remains a central pillar of modern democracy.

This book offers the first comprehensive and analytically grounded study of Spanish defence policy from the democratic transition to the present era of renewed geopolitical competition. Spain has undergone a far-reaching process of military modernisation, professionalisation and multilateral integration, becoming an active contributor to NATO, the EU and international operations. Yet this transformation has remained uneven.

Bringing together leading specialists in strategic studies, political science, defence economics, civil-military relations and alliance politics, the volume examines how Spain defines, plans, funds and implements defence policy. It shows how external pressures, alliance commitments and European defence initiatives have been persistently filtered through domestic politics, fiscal constraints, public attitudes, industrial interests and historically embedded strategic traditions.

The book addresses key debates on NATO burden-sharing, European defence integration, the war in Ukraine, military readiness, procurement, industrial capacity and the relationship between national priorities and multilateral commitments. By combining theoretical insight with detailed empirical analysis, it fills a major gap in European defence studies and provides a new framework for understanding Spain's defence trajectory as a case of uneven adaptation.

It will be essential reading for students and scholars of political science, international relations, security studies, defence studies and European studies, as well as for analysts, policymakers and practitioners interested in defence, strategy and international affairs.

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.

An exploration of how memories of the Holodomor famine shaped Ukraine's national identity, existential threat perceptions, and resistance against Russia

For many international observers of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Holodomor is the most important story they have never heard. When the Ukrainian Sun Rises explores the domestic, international, and geopolitical implications of this 1932-33 genocide-an artificial famine in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Ukraine that killed at least 4 million people and changed Ukrainian society forever.

Against the backdrop of the current war between Ukraine and Russia, Hook draws on multiyear ethnographic fieldwork across Ukraine, and probes the dynamics and legacy of the Holodomor through the eyes of today's Ukrainian leaders from the political, legal, activist, and academic fields. Never-before-published interviews uncover a paradox: Although this singular event nearly destroyed Ukraine, it also provided the narrative storyline by which contemporary leaders would one day seek to rebuild their nation.

Now, as the Kremlin wages a new genocidal war against Ukraine, this book explains how memories of the Holodomor have shaped Ukrainian leaders' existential threat perceptions since 2014 and have sparked a postcolonial reclamation process that undergirds the country's stunning resistance today. This book will appeal to policymakers and those in think tanks as well as to students and scholars of international relations and anthropology.

This Open Access book examines how Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have adjusted their security strategies in response to increasing geopolitical threats. Moving beyond traditional deterrence, these states have adopted a Total Defence approach as an inclusive strategy that unites the military and civilian sectors to bolster national resilience.

Drawing on insights from scholars and military leaders, the book examines how Total Defence is understood, communicated and implemented across the region. Through detailed case studies, it reveals the shared objectives and distinct national models that influence defence policy.

The book shows how cross-border cooperation and community-based defence efforts are creating a unified operational space in the Greater Baltic Region. Offering valuable lessons for countries facing similar security challenges, it also contributes to broader discussions on NATO's evolving role in regional defence.

This book offers an explanation on how the process of socialization constitutes a new entity-a person- and what the ontological status of the new entity that comes into existence through socialization is. This title is unique in explaining the process of socialization ontologically. The author argues that acquiring personhood is only possible through socialization in society. Therefore, being a person is not an intrinsic property of an organism. A person is an entity that is constituted by the interaction between a body and a society. Persons and their bodies are, the author argues, of different ontological kinds. He defends the notion of the constitution as one which is compatible with the idea that persons are distinct entities from their bodies.

This book appeals to students and researchers and offers a suggestion to solve the problem of personal identity over time. The author puts forth the idea that persons are constituted events in contrast to the standard approach which places them in the category of objects. Discussing personhood leads naturally to a consideration of wildlife and the question of whether any non-human animal can be a person.

This unique study sheds light on the General Staff, the most important military institution in Putin's Russia

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shed light on the importance of understanding the Russian military, but also revealed how understudied and misunderstood it is. In The Russian General Staff, Oscar Jonsson analyzes and explains the role of the Russian General Staff-the brain of the Russian military. By understanding the functioning of the military's leadership and its relation to policy, the reasons for Russia's poor performance in the war become clear.

The Russian General Staff provides an anatomy of this institution and its three core functions: developing military theory, commanding the Armed Forces, and itself playing the role of a political actor. Jonsson's analysis is rooted in over a dozen years of research, fieldwork, and interviews on the Russian military. Moreover, he provides an empirical investigation into all recent Russian wars, from the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Getting a better grasp of the Russian military's machinery is critical for both scholars and practitioners to better explain and manage the threats other nations face from Russia. This book is pertinent for all defense universities and courses in Russian area studies and security studies, which will benefit from its unique contribution to Russian military studies.

Hybrid threats and hybrid warfare create complex challenges for the security and stability of the Gulf States. This book is the first comprehensive attempt to align Western and Arab Gulf concepts of these phenomena, closing a significant gap in academic and policy discourse. By clarifying terminology and frameworks, it paves the way for more effective cooperation in countering hybrid threats.

Organised into five thematic sections - conceptual foundations, threat landscapes, cybersecurity, case studies, and strategies for resilience - the book combines theoretical analysis with practical insights. The case studies range from Kuwait and Saudi-U.S. relations to Taiwan and post-Soviet states, offering a variety of comparative perspectives.

Written by scholars and practitioners from eleven countries, the book takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding and mitigating hybrid threats. It will appeal to academics, policymakers, and security professionals seeking to strengthen resilience and regional collaboration within the Gulf Cooperation Council.

This open access book explores the relations between normative mathematical texts, which encode various forms of measurement, calculation and reasoning, and the practices of accountants, craftspeople, artisans and other social actors. Mathematics is often divided into a theoretical, intellectual, and normative component, on the one hand, and, on the other, a practical-applied component, implemented in various labour and other social contexts. However, this division usually assumes that practice reflects the text, whereas, in reality, their relations are much more diverse. This volume explores how text and practice shape each other, complement each other, contradict each other or even ignore each other. In doing so, it opens up the problem of mathematical text and practice as a varied, multi-dimensional, cross-cultural and global-historical problem, where different contexts called for different negotiations between text and practice.

Chapters 1, 6, and 14, are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

How has the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the meaning and practice of security? This book addresses one of the most pressing yet insufficiently explored questions to emerge from the global health crisis: how a pandemic has challenged established security paradigms and forced a reconsideration of the boundaries between public health, governance, vulnerability, and political order.

Building on Critical Security Studies, the volume interrogates the limits of dominant state-centric and neorealist approaches, while revisiting the broader intellectual legacy opened up by the concept of human security since the 1994 UNDP Report. Rather than treating the pandemic as a temporary disruption, the contributors approach it as a critical moment that exposes the conceptual and political inadequacies of conventional security thinking. Through an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, the book examines how security agendas and public policy responses have evolved in Spain and in other contexts, including Portugal, Italy, Argentina, and Brazil.

By combining theoretical reflection with empirical analysis, this volume makes a distinctive contribution to the study of security in the post-pandemic era. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy practitioners seeking to understand how COVID-19 has reconfigured both the language of security and the policy frameworks through which contemporary societies respond to large-scale threats.

This book is the first major analysis of British foreign policy in Colombia after the Second World War, demonstrating how the tools and technologies of British imperial control were commodified and exported to Latin America amid the growth of US hegemony in the region. It draws on newly declassified archival material and oral history interviews to show how the modern Anglo-Colombian relationship was constructed and maintained through security collaboration, which involved covert operations by MI6, the Information Research Department, and the Special Air Service (SAS). The goal was to improve the Colombian state's capacity to deal with common enemies such as guerrilla insurgencies and drugs traffickers and promote Britain's wider objectives of improving the climate for foreign investment, preserving capitalist stability, and maintaining a foothold in Latin America. This book therefore integrates Latin America into the history of Britain's post-colonial security operations, revealing how Britain's relations with Colombia were far more important than previously known and disrupting prevailing narratives surrounding US domination of the region.

This book assesses the conceptual and practical contributions of the normativist and well-being approaches to health. A particular emphasis is placed on the holistic theory of Lennart Nordenfelt. The contributions of this theory are synthesized and discussed, and their relevance is put to the test, particularly with regard to mental health, which is particularly original and innovative in the field. Particular attention is paid to Nordenfelt's notions of ability and compulsion, assessing their relevance to the definition of the pathological character of depression and addiction. In addition, the book includes discussions of the notions of function and harm, for which it proposes redefinitions that take account of the most recent developments in the philosophy of medicine. Finally, the book extends this reflection on the central notions emerging from normativism in the definition of health: well-being by providing a critical analysis of the relationship between those two concepts. Several chapters discuss the relevance of a notion of well-being in the definition of health, mobilizing the philosophy of well-being as well as medical ethics.

Arms control is eroding amid a rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain security environment. In addition to a spate of treaty withdrawals and demises that have occurred since 2002, major powers are militarizing space, and private actors are developing technologies at lightning speed. Thus, there is an urgent need for arms control agreements that incorporate multiple actors and weapons to mitigate uncertainty; yet, conditions of increasing uncertainty make reaching such agreements extremely challenging, if nearly impossible. This is what Amy J. Nelson calls the arms control paradox.

Drawing on years of research and policy experience, Nelson explores why traditional arms control strategies often fall short in today's security environment. Most past agreements were built on assumptions of transparency, reciprocity, and predictability that no longer hold in a multipolar world shaped by advanced technologies and strategic opacity. By focusing narrowly on eliminating known dangers through rigid verification and technical controls, arms control has inadvertently neglected uncertainty management-the ability to acclimate to the unknown. This book proposes an adaptive approach: one that focuses on managing ambiguity rather than eliminating it and reflects how real-world decisions unfold under pressure. The Arms Control Paradox provides valuable insights and policy-relevant guidelines for twenty-first-century arms control.

The President and the Bomb: The Making of American Nuclear Policy, 1939 -1974, at once an original and compelling reconsideration of the role of human agency in international affairs, fills an important gap in the relationship between nuclear weapons policy and presidential decision-making, particularly when examined beyond the context of individual chief executives. On this score alone, Siracusa and Spiller's study makes a significant contribution to the existing literature. The outcome is a tour de force of high-level historical analysis translated into a comprehensive survey of changing presidential nuclear thinking over the first four critical decades of the bomb.

The Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party engaged in a counterinsurgency war for nearly four decades. Over this period, Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of Greater Kurdistan, was a site of sieges and ceasefires, welfare and humanitarian relief, NGO interventions and decolonial resistance - the complementary, intertwined processes of low-intensity war. War turned urban slums into high-security frontiers and transactional hubs for policy design, and settled deep into embodied knowledges and environments.

Through committed and engaged ethnography, Umut Yildirim reveals how destruction and displacement became structures of extraction, by which the Turkish state subjugated the Kurdish population into an object to be intervened in, traded, and contained. She also tracks Kurdish efforts to reassert their own stories of war through fact-building, welfare and compensation, women's wellbeing, acts of solidarity, and environmental politics. What we see is a constant dance between war and peace, movement building and its containment, forced displacement and its rehabilitation, memory and its transmutations, environmental damage and its reconstruction. Extractive States offers compelling example of how low-intensity war transforms everyday needs, embodied knowledges, and uprooted populations into securitized knowledge - and how everyday sites of perseverance can reveal such extraction, and thus help conceive of novel modes of resistance.

This book seeks to incorporate often-neglected perspectives within discussions on migration and the global labour market. It focuses on the role and experiences of women involved in South-North migration and looks at the factors that lead to their migration and movement. Based on empirical evidence of women migrating from sub-Saharan African to Europe, the outcomes of migration are contextualised within the conditions female migrants faced in their original country. Access to waged employment and shifts within household power dynamics often appeal to women who live in countries where they only have access to unwaged work and where their civil, political, and economic freedoms are restricted. Insight into the economic and structural inequalities that prevent the marginalized, including women in less gender equal societies, from migration opportunities are also covered.

This book is a corrective to the current conversations on migration that overlook the economic and social experiences of women in the Global South. It will be relevant to students, researchers, and policymakers interested in the economics of migration and the experiences of migrants.

This book provides a critical and timely examination of anthropogenic disruptions to the natural functioning of Earth systems while evaluating the extent to which such climatic perturbations affect the sustainability of BRICS+ nations in the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Responding to the multiple challenges confronting Planet Earth in this critical geological and historical age, the book first demonstrates the advent of a new political economy and governance order, triggered by the BRICS movement. It rigorously explores the far-reaching consequences of environmental crises on global peace, security, economic stability, and sustainable development, substantiating the increasingly strategic role of BRICS+ nations as a rising global economic force determined to shape sustainable futures in the Anthropocene and Capitalocene.

The book further bears out how compounded policy theories are paradoxically impacting BRICS+ nations (intra-BRICS+ nations' contractions and the bloc's opportunities) in advancing a more multipolar world order-an agenda fostered by the bloc that is so significant today that it is impossible to ignore or rebuff. Finally, the book offers a comprehensive framework for multilateral cooperation among economic alliances and institutions and among BRICS+ nations, within which the world can thrive despite the growing anthropogenic atmospheric transformations that affect the well-being of Planet Earth.

Inner Worlds examines the emergence and operation of representations of interiority-consciousness, "folk mind," "spirit"-in Japan from its industrial revolution to the rise of fascism during the interwar period. These representations functioned to reproduce the capitalist system by containing its excesses. Thus, poverty in the 1880s was ostensibly the result of defects in one's innate mental character. A degenerate "crowd mind" explained the strikes and riots of the early twentieth century. State subversion during the 1930s supposedly reflected an attenuated "folk spirit." By locating the roots of capitalism's excesses not within the socioeconomic order itself but within a defective interiority, ideologies of interiority operated to contain disruptions to Japan's socioeconomic order, conceal its defects, and sustain the capitalist system. Inner Worlds reveals how interiority was constituted in ways consistent with both the demands of the emerging capitalist order of the late nineteenth century and the conditions that coalesced to form a fascist conjecture in the 1930s.

This book contains the contributions to the World Law Congress 2025 in Santo Domingo that brings together the legal world to discuss current issues on the Rule of Law. We are living in times of change, in many regards: technologically, ecologically, geo-politically, etc. Established principles of the Rule of Law are under threat. The contributions to this book want to highlight and denominate these risks and challenges and want to offer solutions. The articles are contributed by Presidents of Constitutional and Supreme Courts, renowned scholars, and prominent figures of the (legal) society.