Illuminating Scriptural Connections invites readers into a bold and revelatory dialogue between two of the world's foundational scriptures. For the first time, the Torah's fifty-four weekly portions are viewed through the lens of the Qur'an, uncovering both the variations between the two texts as well as the shared stories, prophets, principles, and visions that illuminate a deeper spiritual kinship between Judaism and Islam.

Rick Sopher and Abdulla Galadari show that the Qur'an has something meaningful to add to each weekly portion. The Qur'an designates the Torah as a source of "guidance and light" and responds to the Torah's central narratives, from creation and prophecy to law, covenant, and divine mercy. Many commentaries compare key biblical narratives, such as Abraham's intended sacrifice, Joseph's life story, and Moses's leadership, revealing the Qur'an's perspectives. Sometimes the Qur'an upholds the Torah's understandings; at other times it accentuates its own motifs and messages. Additionally, sometimes the Qur'an appears to engage with some early rabbinic traditions, and sometimes later Jewish literature seems to engage with the Qur'an too.

Along the way, the authors confront texts viewed as sources of tension between the two faiths. They argue that the belief that the Qur'an is hostile to all Jews is rooted in textual misunderstandings. The Qur'an both esteems certain Jews and sharply criticizes others. Muhammad's encounters with Jewish communities, especially in Madinah later in his life, shaped the Qur'an's portrayal.

Engaging both scripture and history, Illuminating Scriptural Connections underscores the shared linguistic heritage of Hebrew and Arabic, and challenges assumptions of opposition to demonstrate instead a profound reciprocity of ideas. It opens new spaces for interfaith understanding and connection, showing that the spiritual DNA of Judaism and Islam are intertwined far more closely than centuries of misunderstanding have allowed us to see.

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.

This book on peace and justice for all is part of a path-breaking initiative by Springer Nature heralding a new publication format compiling auto-summaries of literature. State-of-the-art computer algorithms were applied to select relevant sources from original articles published by Springer Nature. The selection was then rearranged in a topical order, and short summaries of the selected articles were provided. The result is the auto-summarization of current texts, organized by means of a similarity-based clustering routine in coherent chapters and sections.

The book collects material from about 150 original research articles published from 2018 to 2022. Every chapter comes with an introduction by the human expert that connects the dots of content chosen for that chapter and attempts to fill gap areas. In addition to more conventional topics such as crimes against women, children, and marginalized communities, human trafficking, criminal justice, activist suppression, access to social justice, institutions, and so on, the book contains discussions on relatively newer areas such as environmental and ecological justice. The book serves as a useful resource for anyone who wants to gain a quick overview of the topic, especially current developments in the field. Due to interdisciplinary nature of the content, the content is of importance to readers from a wide array of humanitarian research.

Note: The auto-summaries have been generated by a recursive clustering algorithm via the Dimensions Auto-summarizer by Digital Science handled by Subject Matter Experts and the editors of this book. The editors of this book selected which SN content should be auto-summarized and decided its order of appearance. Please be aware that these are extractive auto-summaries, which consist of original sentences, but are not representative of its original paper, since we do not show the full length of the publication. Please note that only published SN content is represented here, and that machine-generated books are still at an experimental stage.

This volume is a collection of scholarly essays in game theory, economics, and management science published in honor of Guiomar Martin-Herran, whose work has made significant contributions to dynamic optimization and the analysis of strategic interaction in economic and managerial contexts.

Its twelve chapters address a range of topics, including groundwater exploitation, pollution control, nonrenewable resources, dual-channel competition, environmental regulation, differential games, resource extraction, fisheries, common-pool resource management, climate change, and retail services, with a shared emphasis on equilibrium analysis and dynamic decision-making.

The book will be of interest to researchers, advanced graduate students, and specialists in economics, management science, operations research, and applied mathematics concerned with contemporary applications of game-theoretic and optimization methods.

This book examines three scenarios of decarbonization to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of allocating carbon pollution-free sources across sectors (uses). For this purpose and looking at the EU target, the LSCOA (levelized social cost of abatement), the abatement speed (AS) and the cost of the avoided carbon cumulation (COACC) are estimated. The main conclusion is that accelerating the use of pollution-free sources in contestable end uses before the electricity supply is fully decarbonized is inefficient and ineffective compared to prioritizing their allocation to power generation, whether through renewables or carbon capture utilization and storage. Therefore, policies should focus first on decarbonizing the electricity supply. Only once this has largely been achieved, a deep penetration of pollution-free sources into contestable end uses (both "less difficult to abate and "hard to abate") should be promoted. Following this sequence leads to lower abatement costs and reduced carbon accumulation, minimizing the cost of avoided carbon accumulation in the atmosphere. Otherwise, indiscriminate acceleration risks slowing down the overall energy transition and undermining climate objectives (including limiting global warming). Regarding the specific decarbonization pathways, direct electrification emerges as the preferable carrier, whereas hydrogen is justified as feedstock for e-fuels supply, including imports from Middle East and North Africa countries.

This book maps out how family planning has contributed to the reshaping of the Indonesian family as found today. It uses the 2021 Family Enumeration Survey in Indonesia to pinpoint some of the key dimensions of family planning success in the country. In doing so, it points to areas that the newly-elected Prabowo government needs to address to ensure that family planning is truly women's empowerment, and men's responsibility. Fifty years ago, the dominant anxiety globally was the threat of overpopulation. The World Bank and the United Nations pressed countries to set up family planning programs to reduce high birth rates. Indonesia was an early recruit to the effort, and now, five decades later, it has achieved outstanding success. The book walks through how The National Family Planning Board trained armies of fieldworkers to promote contraceptive use, delay marriage age, and ensure universal schooling. It shows, as a result, that fertility has fallen below replacement level, education levels have risen dramatically, and the role of women in Indonesian society has blossomed. In highlighting the success of the Indonesian family planning program in reducing fertility, and providing the first analysis of the 2021 BKKBN Family Enumeration Survey, this is a landmark presentation of its key findings. This timely book is a valuable resource for demographers and population studies scholars, and for social scientists studying the fabric of Indonesian society, particularly its gender and family dynamics, and, more broadly, the role of contraception in public health.

This book provides a current analysis of how legal norms, economic power, and technological transformation interact to reshape regulatory frameworks in a rapidly evolving global order. It offers a coherent and interdisciplinary perspective on the tensions between compliance, sanction, and efficiency, highlighting how law both responds to and structures contemporary market dynamics.

At its core, the volume explores the evolving architecture of regulation at the intersection of international business law, economic governance, and technological innovation. The first part critically examines regulatory mechanisms governing markets, focusing on sanctions and counter-sanctions, labor standards within the WTO framework, the limits of EU worker protection directives, third-party litigation funding, and the effectiveness of criminal sanctions in combating tax evasion. These contributions reveal structural inconsistencies between formal compliance and actual enforcement, exposing how legal instruments can both enable and constrain economic actors in a fragmented global system.

The second part addresses the profound normative transformation driven by digitalisation and emerging technologies. It investigates the shift from traditional legal codes to algorithmic governance, the challenges of intellectual property in the age of AI-generated content, and the use of artificial intelligence in international arbitration. Further, it interrogates new legal dilemmas such as the right to disconnect in digital economies and the growing entanglement between climate security narratives and business law. Together, these analyses demonstrate how technological systems are not merely tools but active normative agents reshaping authority, accountability, and legal reasoning.

The book responds to a central problem: the increasing misalignment between traditional legal frameworks and the complex realities of globalised, digitised, and politically fragmented markets. By bridging doctrinal analysis with critical and transdisciplinary insights, it offers conceptual clarity and practical pathways for understanding regulatory effectiveness in contexts marked by uncertainty, power asymmetries, and rapid innovation.

This volume is intended for academics, researchers, policymakers, and advanced practitioners in international law, business law, economic regulation, and law and technology, as well as for those engaged in interdisciplinary studies of governance in the digital age.

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.

This handbook presents a comprehensive collation of chapters on North African Arabic. The book explores a multitude of angles through which the diachronic and synchronic intricacies of North African varieties can be examined. Both extensive and diverse at the thematic and theoretical levels as well as representative of the variety of dialects and linguistic trends adopted thereof, the book covers myriad topics, sub-topics, and peripheral studies that contribute to the field of linguistics under the rubric of North African, and its different varieties, deepening our understanding of the workings of North African as a 'genre', and a linguistic phenomenon. The goal is to achieve a better understanding of the issues in the various components of the languages and dialects - phonology, morphological, syntactic, semantic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic - as well as their theoretical and typological significance and implications. Relevant to linguists and cultural scholars focused on the North African region, this is must-have collection within the Arabic language oeuvre.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of China's economic governance model-its astonishing success in improving the lives of average people and its future challenges. Beginning with a comparative history of the Chinese and US economies from 1979 to 2025, the discussion analyzes the distinct historical phases of China's transformation. The author stresses that the details of a nation's financial system determine whether a sustainable fundamental transformation is possible.

Challenging conventional theories, the author attributes China's achievements to its ability to combine a government-planned financial system that promotes capital investment in infrastructure and industry, highly competitive markets in almost all sectors of the economy, and Confucian/socialist social capital. Using these systems, China created a benevolent cycle of high investment, fierce competition, and rapidly rising real wages.

Looking into future, the author argues that China is now in the midst of a further transition to a new growth model based on industrial upgrading. The crucial roles of industrial clusters and rural entrepreneurs are highlighted, emphasizing China's ability to apply new technologies to farming, small businesses, and manufacturing. Stressing the need for internal competition and rising wages to sustain growth, he concludes that China's unique blend of state facilitation, social capital, strong competition and adaptive reforms offers a viable model for balancing technological progress with broad-based prosperity.

This edited volume examines the effects of the two world wars on the welfare systems of European societies. Chapters analyse the dynamics between states and transnational social actors, including international institutions, voluntary associations, charities, foundations, non-governmental organisations, and advocacy groups. A key focus is on the relations between local, national, European, and trans-Atlantic spheres of action. Thereby, this volume offers a novel examination of the temporal boundaries between wartime and peacetime social policies, investigating when the military mobilisations that drove social welfare came to an end. Offering an alternative history of how European societies experienced and emerged from the two world wars, this book reinterprets the connections between warfare and welfare as they contributed to a new postwar order-the legacies of which continue to influence contemporary welfare systems today.

This book illustrates how human resource leaders can harness data and AI to solve workforce challenges from turnover and skill shortages to low engagement and strategic misalignment. Using the commercial airline sector in Portugal as a case study, the book introduces a new job satisfaction scale and a predictive churn model providing a practical roadmap for improving talent retention, strengthening leadership, and building a thriving, future-ready workforce.

Bridging academic insight with real-world applications, this book is useful for researchers, scholars and academics as well as practitioners, leaders, and executives in HRM, organizational psychology, aviation management, and data-driven decision-making.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of all general elections held in Burma/Myanmar from 1922 to 2020. It provides essential information on the five constitutions - two in the colonial period and three after independence - and on the crucial issue of the interest representation of the many ethnic groups vis-a-vis the majority community of Burmese who, from the beginning of the independence struggle against colonial rule onwards, have constituted the country's civilian and military elite. A focus lies on the role of Buddhism in shaping the understanding of legitimate rule and the factor of political contingency. The book is chiefly intended for scholars interested in the evolution of democracy in post-colonial countries, especially political scientists and experts dealing with Southeast Asian affairs. It also offers a valuable resource for diplomats, government officials and visitors of the country interested in the causes of Myanmar's painful history.

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 book explores the rapidly evolving Metaverse, where digital and physical realities merge to create immersive interactions and transactions. As virtual real estate and digital assets gain traction, investors increasingly view them as a new asset class, akin to traditional real estate or collectibles. Blockchain technology underpins this transformation, ensuring secure transactions through decentralized and transparent systems. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) play a crucial role in establishing ownership, enabling value exchange, and preserving intellectual property within virtual economies.

The book presents the financial and legal dimensions of Metaverse investments, covering blockchain, Web3, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs. It examines how digital property markets operate, with investors purchasing, selling, and monetizing virtual land and assets in platforms like The Sandbox and Decentraland. Key factors such as virtual location, user traffic, and economic activity influence the valuation of these assets.

Beyond investment opportunities, the book highlights the broader economic impact of the Metaverse, including monetization avenues for creators, developers, and businesses. It explains how smart contracts and financial assurance mechanisms enhance trust and security in virtual transactions. Additionally, it addresses the evolving legal frameworks for digital intellectual property rights, ensuring regulatory clarity and integrity.

This book is essential for investors, legal scholars, financial analysts, policymakers, and tech enthusiasts looking to understand the intersection of digital assets, blockchain, and virtual economies. By providing a comprehensive analysis of Metaverse finance, it equips readers with the insights needed to navigate this transformative digital landscape.

This book explores the life, artistry, and legacy of Razak Abdul Aziz one of Malaysia's pioneering contemporary composers-through his seminal vocal work, 10 Pantun Settings. This song cycle, composed between 1981 and 1990, reimagines traditional Malay pantun poetry through a Western art song framework, blending cultural heritage with compositional innovation. The book begins with a biographical portrait of Razak, tracing his multicultural upbringing, academic journey in the USA and UK, and his contributions to Malaysia's music education and composition landscape. It then delves into the compositional techniques behind 10 Pantun Settings, highlighting Razak's use of "Frankensteining"-a method of assembling disparate pantun texts into a cohesive musical narrative-and his rich use of musical imagery to evoke kampung life, childhood nostalgia, and emotional depth. Through musico-literary analysis, the monograph uncovers a deeper narrative embedded in the cycle: the emotional journey of an abandoned wife in a traditional arranged marriage. Beneath the playful surface of children's poetry lies a poignant commentary on emotional resilience, covert feminism, and symbolic resistance. The book also documents the performance history of the cycle, from its early academic presentations to full theatrical stagings in Malaysia, Japan, New Zealand, and the Czech Republic. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and performance analysis, this work offers a multidimensional exploration of Razak's compositional voice and the cultural significance of 10 Pantun Settings. It invites readers to engage with Malaysian musical identity, gender narratives, and the transformative power of music as a vessel for storytelling and cultural preservation.

Through newly transcribed and translated lectures, Deleuze explores Spinoza's philosophy concerning questions of good and evil and humanity's potential for realizing a full life

Available for the first time in English, On Spinoza presents the annotated transcripts of Gilles Deleuze's fifteen seminars on the seventeenth-century philosopher's Ethics, delivered at the experimental University of Vincennes at the behest of Michel Foucault. Spinoza's ambitious treatise was central to Deleuze's thought, and his course provides an accessible framework for understanding the vitality of Spinoza's philosophy.

In an informal classroom setting, Deleuze addresses fundamental aspects of Spinoza's thought: How does one undo the negativity of harmful passions such as hate, resentment, and envy? How can a system of moral judgment based on good and evil be replaced by a more sophisticated ethics of the good and the bad? And since such questions commit Spinoza to a new theory of signs, Deleuze also delves into his thinking on how these signs should guide human existence and the differences between concepts of eternity, experienced in the here and now, and the immortality promised by philosophy and religion.

Building gradually from session to session, Deleuze shows how Spinoza rejects a hierarchical reality dominated by an authoritarian and impenetrable God, instead proposing a world ruled by light and reason in which all beings are equal. Annotated by David Lapoujade and including recorded exchanges with Deleuze's students, On Spinoza offers a rare window into Deleuze's teaching, offering readers a guide for linking Spinoza to other philosophers - including Deleuze himself.

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This short book introduces students of criminology to the 'critical dimension' of that subject. The focus of this volume is on how the critique proffered in and by 'critical criminologies' is itself not above criticism. Indeed, 'critical criminologies' would do well to acquire a self-reflective and self-critical attitude towards their own pre-conceptions and the desires that underpin them.

This argument is explored and developed across a number of themes and topics, including: an overview of the basic trends in critical criminology between WW2 and the turn of the century; the most recent splintering within the 'critical dimension' of criminology; the problem of criminalization; how power and discourse not only shape and reshape life conditions but also mystify the latter; the structural origins and forms of harm and violence; the continuing search for 'alternatives'; and finally, the crimes of the powerful. Ultimately, the book debates the multiformity, inescapability and ineradicability of critique in the 'critical dimension' of criminology.

This book explores the intersection of human factors, aviation operations, management, and system optimization, focusing on how human-centered design, behavior, decision-making, organizational conditions, and management choices affect safety, system performance, and sustainable operational optimization. It bridges theory and practice through a multidisciplinary examination interpreted through the authors' long-standing aviation industry experience, including operational, technical, safety, engineering, and senior management perspectives.

Key topics include cognitive workload, human error analysis, crew resource management, fatigue risk management, communication, teamwork, situation awareness, human-machine interaction, safety management systems, aircraft maintenance Human Factors, automation, AI-supported decision-making, and ergonomic system design. Using case studies, conceptual models, applied examples, simulation-based thinking, and real-world incident and accident reports, the book provides practical insights into the systemic integration of Human Factors into aviation safety, performance, and management frameworks.

A distinctive didactic feature is the integration of structured analytical thinking with qualitative human-centered approaches and practical interpretation drawn from decades of aviation industry experience, including leadership and C-level management viewpoints. This gives readers a systematic yet adaptable framework for evaluating aviation systems from both frontline operational and strategic organizational perspectives.

By combining rigorous academic research with practical relevance and senior aviation management experience, the book serves as a valuable guide for improving modern aviation systems. Its central message is that optimization means improving the conditions under which people, technologies, organizations, and regulators can perform safely, reliably, resiliently, and sustainably.

This book challenges the dominance of GDP as the primary benchmark of social progress and offers a rigorous framework for rethinking economic success in high-income economies. Drawing on the evolution of welfare measurement-from GDP to MEW, NNW, and the Genuine Progress Indicator-the book critically examines the limits of growth-centered policy and its implications for wellbeing. Moving beyond conventional market-failure analysis, the author introduces a novel system and factor approach that addresses observed failures of modern economies alongside pressing global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, and geopolitical conflict. By integrating welfare-enhancing policies with explicit consideration of welfare-deductive risks, the book provides a balanced and policy-relevant vision of societal development. This volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in economics, public policy, and social welfare, as well as policymakers seeking practical pathways toward a welfare-oriented mature society.

This book presents an up-to-date Persian edition and English translation of Ma'athiru'l-umara, a biographical dictionary of the officers of the Mughal Empire from Babur's reign at the beginning of the sixteenth century until almost the end of the eighteenth century compiled by Shahnawaz Khan Aurangabadi and completed by his son Abdul-Hayy. Insofar as possible the sources from which the authors derived their information have been identified, and explanatory notes are given for technical terms in Persian and native Indian terminology. Almost all places mentioned in the text have been identified. It is an essential reference work for scholars of Indo-Persian studies and Indian history.

This book brings together scholars working in eleven different classical traditions ? Greek, Chinese, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, Pali, Hittite, Egyptian, Japanese and Sumerian ? to investigate how major texts in these traditions conceptualized, mapped and categorized the sentiments, attitudes and states we think of as emotion. This volume is distinctive in its focus on foundational questions concerning the categorization and conceptualization of emotion. It is also unique in its degree of collaboration among scholars working in different disciplines and in a vast range of ancient traditions. This book aims to build on the resources of these traditions to make an intervention in how we might think about emotions today.