The collapse of the USSR transformed the world from a bipolar rivalry into a unipolar order dominated by the USA. Today, the rise of China and shifting global dynamics have sparked debates about unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity. As the USA retreats as the principal superpower, China's dramatic ascent and the growing influence of nations like Russia, India, and the BRICS coalition signal the emergence of a complex multipolar world.

This book examines the decline of the unipolar world and the outdated notion of a bipolar world, emphasizing the increasing role of the BRICS bloc of nations. Following an offensive realism approach, it explores the Global South's challenge to Western dominance, analyzing development within the context of social and environmental justice. Focusing on solidarity and alternative development models, this book discusses a new world order led by non-Western powers, reshaping global economic, political, and social landscapes.

This book explores complexities in Africa-Europe or Africa-EU relations. It considers how the relations are governed, function and how the increasingly complex and changing global system shapes them. The Ruso-Ukrainian war-in its second decade-has disrupted the global security and political order. The America-China tariff row and possibilities of similar tiffs between the EU and China disrupt international trade and economic landscapes. So too, potential impacts of game changers such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), changing climate and weather patterns, changing demographics, international migration and the consequences of these factors for nation-states' sovereignty and security. Africa and Europe find themselves in need of ways to relate and simultaneously navigate these complexities, disruptions and impacts, which precipitate great power competition and rivalry between the EU and countries such as the USA and China over Africa. The rivalries create new fault lines in global politics and prompt the question on how they impact Africa-EU relations.

This book delves into the under-researched intersection of strategic human resource analytics and intelligent data-driven systems. As organizations increasingly turn to artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance HR functions, chapters within this book critically investigate how these technologies are reshaping strategic decision-making, skill development, and organizational agility.

Drawing on empirical evidence and real-world case studies, the book equips scholars, practitioners, and policymakers with cutting-edge insights and strategic tools to navigate the evolving landscape of human resource management. It explores the transformative potential of intelligent systems in recruitment, training, performance evaluation, compensation, retention, and employee well-being while also considering the accompanying ethical dilemmas, privacy concerns, and cybersecurity risks.

By addressing the ongoing debates and controversies surrounding people analytics, this book offers a timely contribution to the discourse on human-algorithmic collaboration in the workplace. It is an essential resource for those seeking way in which to best use the power of data-driven HR strategies in this era of rapid technological change.

This Open Access book argues for a more prominent position on political and policy agendas for European population ageing.? In the coming two decades, ageing populations will put significant pressure on pension systems, budgets, and economies in the European Union. Increasingly close integration between EU member states through political ties, trade and a common currency, means ageing in one country will have a direct impact on other member states. The book sketches four potential risks with cross-border implications: economic stagnation within the EU, high national debts and divergence, upward pressure on inflation, and socio-political tension within and between member states. In the report European Aging in Focus. Dealing with Pension and Budgetary Risks, the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) outlines three policy directions to anticipate and mitigate these risks: anticipate an ageing European Union and prepare society for it; steer at the EU level towards ageing-resilient socio-economic and pension policies; and protect at the national level against potential negative consequences of European ageing. While this book has a specific focus on the position of the Netherlands within an ageing Europe, it is of interest to policy makers and researchers across Europe interested in population ageing, associated pension and budgetary risks, and particularly in potential effects of these risks across national borders.?

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This comprehensive work examines the vital role of dredging equipment in national economic and defense development, highlighting seven decades of remarkable progress in China's shipbuilding industry. Through detailed analysis of technological evolution, the book showcases how Chinese workers and technical personnel demonstrated exceptional self-reliance while advancing from basic dredging equipment to sophisticated world-class machines. The narrative particularly emphasizes the industry's journey of overcoming technical challenges, documenting the transformation that has positioned China as a global leader in dredging technology. As a reference work, it offers invaluable insights and practical knowledge specifically tailored for workers, cadres, and technical personnel in related fields.

This book explains the uses of laughter in contemporary China, and demonstrates how humour in China is put to many uses. Through the use of examples from different mediums such as film, sketch comedy, stand-up and sitcoms, this book demonstrates that Chinese comedy is not just about telling jokes or presenting funny scenarios-humour is also used to criticise social trends, to mock people in authority and to allow the public to reflect on China's dramatic economic and cultural changes. The authors bring comedy figures who are well-known in China, such as Zhao Benshan, Feng Xiaogang, and Guo Degang, to the attention of international readers, using translation and explanations to explain why Chinese people find their work both amusing and meaningful. They explore uniquely Chinese forms of comedy, like xiangsheng dialogues, and consider how international genres like stand-up and situation comedy are localised in China. They demonstrate how comedy can be used to sidestep censorship and satirise the humourless restrictiveness of the Chinese government. This book appeals readers who are interested in how humour is used as a form of political communication, how humour can cross national borders, and those interested in contemporary Chinese media and politics.

This book examines how digital platforms are reshaping work, media ecosystems, and data-driven strategies. As a continuation from Platform Business Models and Strategies Vol 1, this book explores the changing nature of labor and leadership in platform businesses, the evolution of social media and news models, and the challenges of trust, reputation, and big data analytics. With insights into policy, privacy, network neutrality, this book offers a comprehensive examination of the forces driving innovation and regulation in a platform economy. This book is essential reading for scholars, researchers, practitioners, students, and industry leaders navigating the digital future.

Deradicalisation and Rehabilitation of Violent Extremist Offenders in the Global South: Lessons from Bangladesh offers a rigorous, evidence-based framework for understanding and responding to violent extremism in Bangladesh - with adaptable insights for other nations across the Global South. Structured around four interconnected outputs, the volume moves systematically from strategic diagnosis to operational implementation.

Part I presents a comprehensive needs-mapping study, drawing on comparative analyses of international case studies from Indonesia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Colombia. It profiles 103 violent extremist offenders spanning faith-based militants, left-wing extremists, and ethno-nationalists, identifying socio-demographic patterns, psychological vulnerabilities, and radicalisation pathways that underpin the need for tailored interventions.

Part II introduces the first operational training manual of its kind in South Asia, adopting a whole-of-society approach across four progressive stages: preparatory work, deradicalisation, rehabilitation, and policy reform. The manual outlines detailed counselling modules across religious, psychological, cultural, educational, and legal dimensions, with gender sensitivity and human rights compliance embedded throughout.

Part III evaluates a pilot intervention conducted in Bangladesh between August and December 2023, assessing outcomes for 32 beneficiaries using a multidimensional framework that combines counsellor evaluations, self-assessments, and independent observations.

Part IV presents a standardised Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) toolkit aligned with OECD-DAC principles, designed for scalability across prison, community, and counterterrorism settings.

Collectively, the volume provides a transformative shift from fragmented, reactive approaches to a structured, rights-compliant, and institutionally sustainable architecture for deradicalisation and rehabilitation - offering a replicable model for Global South countries confronting the complex challenges of terrorism and violent extremism.

This book explores Chinese engagement in Africa's mining sector within the context of international business. Conceptual and empirical contributions by diverse authors examine mining activities of Chinese companies in several African countries. Emerging from those contributions is a theory of minimal investment, defined as the degree to which the companies invest minimally in African operations, communities, and countries just for them to get by (i.e., function as normal).

The volume presents four conditions that explain why minimal investment persists as a dominant logic of foreign firm behaviour in Africa. Institutions permit it, strategies enact it, heritage legitimizes it, and reactions stabilize it. Minimal investment has produced order, and order is safety both for firms and often for host institutions alike. Optimal investment, by contrast, introduces 'danger' because it changes the status quo, redistributes power, and mitigates African rather than firm risk. The Theory of Minimal Investment (TMI) reveals how underinvestment is an intentional, albeit seemingly rational, historically embedded, and institutionally sustained strategy of engagement.

Coming at a time in which African countries are seeing a surge of Chinese interest in Africa, this book offers a cautionary tale of the consequences of organizations seeking the 'help' of Chinese companies. It will appeal to International Business studies and strategy researchers interested in interorganizational relationships, particularly from the African perspective.

Advocates for an approach to Christian end-times, not as the anticipation of particular futures, but as a way to inhabit the existential crises of our present, the 'times of extinction' in which we live

Public environmental concern has turned to the so-called "sixth mass extinction event" currently underway. The interdisciplinary field of extinction studies was established to increase our cultural understanding of that phenomenon, but hitherto there has been little engagement with religious faith and practice. This book stages the first conversation between extinction studies, Christian theology, and continental philosophy. It does so by reimagining eschatology-traditionally the study of "the last things" in Christian faith-for times of extinction.

Against an assumption that Christian belief in the end is essentially either about awaiting a final apocalyptic catastrophe or hoping for a final restoration of creation, the book argues that these are in fact the dubious hallmarks of what secular culture offers in precarious times. Christianity, by contrast, can offer plural conceptions of "ends" and "endings" whose purpose is not to exclusively or even primarily to anticipate the future, but rather to heighten the ethical, political, and existential significance of the present.

This work of re-imagining eschatology requires engaging some familiar theological sources in new light, ranging from St Augustine to eco-feminist theology. Its philosophical interlocutors are drawn from the continental tradition, bringing the insights of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory as indispensable lenses by which to reconceive the meanings of end-times.

The book will be essential reading to those in the environmental humanities and extinction studies curious about theology, and to scholars of theology and religion concerned about extinction, and planetary crises more broadly. It will appeal to those responding to the extinction crisis in different ways-political activists, educators, faith leaders-who wish to explore how religious and secular faith shape our thinking about the multiple crises of our present age.

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.

The book offers an extensive research work to examine the causes behind increasing rate of child marriage during COVID-19 in Northern Bangladesh.The authors have also scrutinized the existing policies to identify policy gaps and provides some policy recommendations from this insightful study. Apart from, conventional development research on child marriage, where poverty and social norms are influential factors, authors of this book has argued that instead of considering these factors separately, interaction among different economic and societal factors as well as intersectional identities are dominating behind rising child marriage. Again, COVID induced factors has pushed these cases to take a unique formation. This book is valuable for policy makers to address the social challenges which already exist and exacerbate due to COVID influence and has potential threat on human development as well as human rights like child marriage.

This book examines the economics of globalization within a modern world defined by instability and multipolar equilibrium. It presents globalization as a complex, multifaceted process that reshapes the world economy in profound ways. Particular attention is given to the ways that globalization creates economic interconnectedness, the spread of cultures, the movement of people, and the rise of global economic governance structures. By contextualizing the current challenges to globalization within its long history, the ways that economics can combat poverty, create education opportunities, and engage with artificial intelligence are outlined.

This book explores the changing nature of globalization as global economic and political dynamics continue to evolve. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in international economics, the global political economy, and economic policy.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of mathematical optimization models and techniques for solving facility location problems. It equips students with the theoretical foundations and practical knowledge needed to analyze real-world location planning problems, as well as to use and adapt optimization models and methods suited for these tasks. To support this, the book offers detailed explanations of the optimization theory underlying the methods used to solve the presented location problems. In particular, it discusses Lagrangian relaxation and duality, subgradient optimization, column generation, and Benders' decomposition in substantial depth.

Each chapter concludes with a set of exercises, some of which take the form of case studies that, while fictitious, reflect realistic applications. The book is further supplemented by a Python package, pyloa. At the end of each chapter, examples show how classes and routines from this package can be applied to solve selected location problems introduced in the chapter.

This book is intended for graduate students in operations research, applied mathematics, mathematics-economics, industrial engineering, and business administration with a focus on analytics or quantitative methods. It is also a valuable resource for university instructors designing 5-15 ECTS courses on location-planning optimization, as well as for researchers and practitioners seeking a thorough introduction to optimisation models and methods for facility location planning.

A major reassessment of New York City's first Black mayor and the fragile coalition politics that reshaped urban America.

Charting the rise and fall of New York City's first African American mayor, A Fragile Alliance offers a vivid, deeply researched account of governance, coalition-building, and political change in one of the nation's most turbulent urban eras. Drawing on newly available archival sources, James J. Barney examines David Dinkins's mayoralty (1989-1993) as both a turning point in New York City history and a revealing case study in the possibilities, and limits, of identity-based coalition politics.

Dinkins's historic 1989 election brought together a diverse, multiracial alliance that defeated entrenched political power and promised a new vision for the city. Yet once in office, Dinkins confronted a cascade of crises: rising crime and the crack epidemic, racial tensions and the Crown Heights conflict, the AIDS epidemic and its activism, economic recession, and a growing conservative backlash. Barney shows how these flashpoints tested the fragile coalition that brought Dinkins to power and ultimately contributed to its unraveling.

Blending political history, urban studies, and biography, the book explores how race, class, gender, sexuality, and shifting party politics shaped both Dinkins's governing challenges and the broader transformation of American liberalism in the late twentieth century. In reassessing a mayor often overshadowed by louder political figures, Barney illuminates how the Dinkins years anticipated today's debates over policing, public safety, identity politics, and the future of Democratic coalition-building.

Written with narrative clarity and grounded in extensive archival research, A Fragile Alliance brings long-overdue attention to a pivotal moment in New York City's political history and offers essential insight into the enduring complexities of governing a diverse metropolis in times of crisis.

Medicines travel, transform, and multiply meanings across Asia's markets, temples, texts, and bodiesWhat makes something a medicine? To answer this deceptively simple question, Global Lives of Medicines offers twelve richly detailed biographies of medicinal substances across Asian history. From ginseng and frankincense to aconite, radish, and live leeches, contributors trace how materials moved through markets, temples, courts, homes, and laboratories while continually acquiring new meanings and uses.

Across the chapters, familiar categories begin to dissolve. Substances may function simultaneously as food, poison, ritual tool, or sacred object. Healing agents may be plant roots, minerals, aromatics, or even living creatures. Through these diverse case studies spanning East and South Asia, Global Lives of Medicines demonstrates how the boundaries between medicine, technology, religion, and commerce were constantly negotiated in different historical contexts. By placing these biographies in dialogue, it offers a new approach to the history of medicine-one that foregrounds the materiality, mobility, and cultural transformation of therapeutic substances across Asia.

This book presents a classical liberal perspective on the governance and economic implications of artificial intelligence. As generative AI transforms industries and institutions, this book reframes urgent debates on safety, regulation, labour, and autonomy through the lens of classical liberal economic and political philosophy.

Drawing on Austrian economics, liberal growth theory, and institutional economics, this book argues that classical liberalism and its philosophical framework has not only historically inspired the design of artificial intelligence but also remains a critical guide for its future development and application. From neural networks as emergent orders to AI agents as capital goods, the book explores how liberal principles can guide innovation, mitigate risk, and preserve individual rights. Chapters examine interpretability, the future of work, open-source commons, and the calculation debate, engaging with theorists such as Hayek, Kirzner, Simon, and Schumpeter. The book proposes polycentric governance models for AI safety and rights protection, emphasizing pluralism, contestability, and due process over precautionary control.

This book will be an essential resource for scholars in political economy, law and economics, technology policy, and digital governance. It will also appeal to a broader readership interested in academically rigorous, liberal approaches to the challenges and opportunities of the intelligence explosion.