The universe of militant groups in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), near the Afghan border, is far more complex and diverse than is commonly understood. While these groups share many ideological and historical characteristics, the militants have very different backgrounds, tribal affiliations, and strategic concepts that are key to understanding the dynamics of this dangerous, war-torn region- the main safe haven of al-Qaeda and the gateway to fighting in Afghanistan. This volume of essays, edited by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann and produced in connection with the New America Foundation, explores the history and current state of the lawless frontier of "Talibanistan," from the groups that occupy its various sub-regions to the effects of counterinsurgency and military intervention (including drone strikes) and the possibility of reconciliation. Contributors include MIT's Sameer Lalwani, NYU's Paul Cruickshank, Afghan journalist Anand Gopal, and Brian Fishman of the New America Foundation.

Breaking into the Russian market has always been a challenging task, particularly for Western organisations, and personal networks play a crucial role in achieving this. However, personal networks that exist in Russian business remain a mystery. The aim of this book is to address the role of informal relations and trust in Russian society and business. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between Russian business and personal relations, thus helping foreign practitioners and investors to enter the Russian market and develop strong business-stakeholder relationships. With the intention not to criticise or dress up the image of Russia but to provide coherent analysis and discussion on how things work in Russia or describe "the rules of the relationships game", this book discussed ten personal networks existing in Russian society and business, nature and structure of relations, local social norms and codes, trust development process, knowledge and information sharing, entry and exit rules, and provides practical suggestions. This book is essential for anybody intending to do business in Russia and particularly suitable for practitioners, investors, researchers and business students.

In this synthetic, interdisciplinary work, Neil Brenner develops a new interpretation of the transformation of statehood under contemporary globalizing capitalism. Whereas most analysts of the emergent, post-Westphalian world order have focused on supranational and national institutional realignments, 'New State Spaces' shows that strategic subnational spaces, such as cities and city-regions, represent essential arenas in which states are being transformed. Brenner traces the transformation of urban governance in western Europe during the last four decades and, on this basis, argues that inherited geographies of state power are being fundamentally rescaled. Through a combination of theory construction, historical analysis and cross-national case studies of urban policy change, 'New State Spaces' provides an innovative analysis of the new formations of state power that are currently emerging. This is a mature and sophisticated analysis by a major young scholar

A brilliantly reported true-life thriller that goes behind the scenes of the financial crisis on Wall Street and in Washington.
In one of the most gripping financial narratives in decades, Andrew Ross Sorkin-a "New York Times" columnist and one of the country's most respected financial reporters-delivers the first definitive blow- by-blow account of the epochal economic crisis that brought the world to the brink. Through unprecedented access to the players involved, he re-creates all the drama and turmoil of these turbulent days, revealing never-before-disclosed details and recounting how, motivated as often by ego and greed as by fear and self-preservation, the most powerful men and women in finance and politics decided the fate of the world's economy.

Urban High-Technology Zones offers essential planning insights for our increasingly high-tech economy and society, looking at the role the built environment plays, the policy factors that contribute to their formation and growth, quality-of-life impacts of high tech clusters on their surrounding communities, and economic geography. Using a combination of advanced geospatial data-driven techniques with evidence-based insights, the book provides quantitative measures on high tech cluster’s social, environmental and economic impacts. While findings are from drawn cities in the US, the book’s spatial analyses, methodology, research conclusions and literature reviews are generalizable to cities around the world. Users will find numerous insights and guidance on the role high-tech clusters play in how cities reach their economic growth and social equity goals, making it a useful resource for academic research and policy guidance.

Blockchain in a Volatile-Uncertain-Complex-Ambiguous World examines the role blockchain brings in supply chain management. The book explores the theoretical foundations and empirical frameworks for using Blockchain for the logistical transportation of goods and examines how blockchain applications, barriers and opportunities of numerous technologies, describing how each converge into feasible integration. Covering policymaking and regulatory issues from a research perspective, this book is a key reference for supply chain management scholars, students and practitioners.

COVID-19 and the Sustainable Development Goals: Societal Influence explores how the coronavirus pandemic impacts the implementation of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), paying particular attention to socioeconomic and disaster risk management dimensions. Sections provide a foundational understanding of the virus and its risk factors, cover relevant mitigation measures for minimizing the spread of COVID-19, explore the virus's originations and transmission mechanisms, and look at gold standard procedures for COVID-19 testing and antibody-based diagnosis. Final sections present the latest insights on the global effects of COVID-19 and examine potential future challenges, opportunities and strategic responses.

Shared water resources in Israel and Palestine are often the site of political, economic, historical, legal and ethical contestation. In this, the second of two volumes on the subject, the authors look beyond the political tensions of the region, to argue for the need for shared water security and co-operative resource management. Winning Water Security for Palestinians and Israelis, the authors assess water security in terms of security of access to water resources, security of access to water services and security against risks to and from water. The volume compares and contrasts Israelis remarkable water security with the corresponding water insecurity of the Palestinians. The authors also set out the practical, economic, legal and ethical rationale for a revised cooperation on water security between the two peoples, proposing a workable scheme for putting into practice a new form of cooperation that would hope to benefit both peoples and strengthen their water security.

Pandemic Risk, Response, and Resilience: COVID-19 Responses in Cities Around the World examines the pandemic's global impacts on public health, economies, society and labor. The book shows how COVID-19 intensified natural and anthropogenic hazards and destroyed years of communities, governments and the work of development organizations and their investments. It focuses on how disaster resilience is central to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals in a post-COVID-19 era. Sections cover current governance practices, with special attention given to Asia's more successful responses. It shows how the various sectors across that society were most impacted by COVID-19, including tourism and food systems. This book is an essential reference for researchers and practitioners who need to understand response, preparedness and future pathways for pandemic resilience.

Our societies have become very crisis-prone. This book explores crises and the methods of anticipation, management and reconstruction, and considers a risk-crisis-territorial development continuum. The aim is to better understand a widely used concept and clarify the methods of action in the field of crisis management. The different forms of learning proposed to better face future crises are also questioned. This book invites us to analyze the resources available to support crisis management and reconstruction, and consider the unequal access to these resources in different territories in order to design future territorial strategies. This often results in a form of territorial inertia after the crises. However, some innovate, imagine renewed territories, prepare for reconstruction, or even recompose territories now in order to make them more resilient. The crisis can then be the driving force or the accelerator of these changes and contribute to the emergence of new practices, or even new urban and territorial utopias.

The articulation between persistence and change is relevant to a great number of different disciplines. It is particularly central to the study of urban and rural forms in many different fields of research, in geography, archaeology, architecture and history. Resilience puts forward the idea that we can no longer be truly satisfied with the common approaches used to study the dynamics of landscapes, such as the palimpsest approach, the regressive method and the semiological analysis amongst others, because they are based on the separation between the past and the present, which itself stems from the differentiation between nature and society. This book combines spatio-temporalities, as described in archeogeography, with concepts that have been developed in the field of ecological resilience, such as panarchy and the adaptive cycle. Thus revived, the morphological analysis in this work considers landscapes as complex resilient adaptive systems. The permanence observed in landscapes is no longer presented as the endurance of inherited forms, but as the result of a dynamic that is fed by this constant dialogue between persistence and change. Thus, resilience is here decisively on the side of dynamics rather than that of resistance.

Challenging existing political analyses of the state of emergency in Turkey, this volume argues that such states are not merely predetermined by policy and legislation but are produced, regulated, distributed and contested through the built environment in both embodied and symbolic ways. Contributors use empirical critical-spatial research carried out in Turkey over the past decade, exploring heritage, displacement and catastrophes. Contributing to the broader literature on the related concepts of exception, risk, crisis and uncertainty, the book discusses the ways in which these phenomena shape and are shaped by the built environment, and provides context-specific empirical substance to it by focusing on contemporary Turkey. In so doing, it offers nuanced insight into the debate around emergency as well as into recent urban-architectural affairs in Turkey.

Sustainable Energy Transition for Cities brings together empirical and applied research in both urban planning and sustainable energy, offering coherent and innovative best practices for urban energy transition planning. Using a multidisciplinary framework, the book views cities as an integrated system composed of components such as neighborhoods and districts within an overall net-zero energy balance. Intended for academics, practitioners and policymakers interested in sustainable energy transition, the book offers insights and best practices to promote the transition to a low carbon urban society.

"Hubbard and Kane synthesize economics, politics, and psychology to develop a new audacious theory of why countries decline. Compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the major issues that America now faces" (James Robinson, coauthor of "Why Nations Fail").
From the Ming Dynasty to Ottoman Turkey to imperial Spain, the Great Powers of the world emerged as the supreme economic, political, and military forces of their time--only to collapse into rubble and memory. What is at the root of their demise, and how can the United States stop it from happening again?
A quarter century after Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane present a bold, sweeping account of why powerful nations and civilizations break down under the heavy burden of economic imbalance. Introducing a profound new measure of economic power, "Balance" traces the triumphs and mistakes of imperial Britain, the paradox of superstate California, the long collapse of Rome, and the limits of the Japanese model of growth. Most importantly, Hubbard and Kane compare the twenty-first-century United States to the empires of old and challenge Americans to address the real problems of our country's fiscal imbalance. If there is not a new economics and politics of balance, they portend that inevitable demise is ahead.
This is more than another analysis of our nation's economy; it is a groundbreaking look at the patterns of the past and a "thought-provoking analysis that has compelling relevance for America's future" (Nobel Peace Prize-winner Henry A. Kissinger).

Focusing on different tools, platforms, and techniques, Blockchain and the Smart City: Infrastructure and Implementation uses case studies from around the world to examine blockchain deployment in diverse smart city applications. The book begins by examining the fundamental theories and concepts of blockchain. It looks at key smart cities' domains such as banking, insurance, healthcare, and supply chain management. It examines Using case studies for each domain, the book looks at payment mechanisms, fog/edge computing, green computing, and algorithms and consensus mechanisms for smart cities implementation. It looks at tools such as Hyperledger, Etherium, Corda, IBM Blockchain, Hydrachain, as well as policies and regulatory standards, applications, solutions, and methodologies. While exploring future blockchain ecosystems for smart and sustainable city life, the book concludes with the research challenges and opportunities academics, researchers, and companies in implementing blockchain applications.

International Environmental Cooperation and the Global Sustainability Capital Framework offers an integrated analysis of international environmental cooperation (IEC) and global sustainability. From a strategic management perspective, the book develops the Sustainability Capital Framework for IEC and global sustainability. The book provides an in-depth examination of the significance of state participation in international environmental agreements (IEAs), and analyzes the structure, life cycle, and evolution of IEAs. Through the Sustainability Capital Framework, the book delineates the core drivers, barriers, incentives, and critical success factors for IEC and global sustainability.

Maps and mapping are fundamentally political. Whether they are authoritarian, hegemonic, participatory or critical, they are most often guided by the desire to have control over space, and always involve power relations. This book takes stock of the knowledge acquired and the debates conducted in the field of critical cartography over some thirty years. The Politics of Mapping includes analyses of recent semiological, social and technological innovations in the production and use of maps and, more generally, geographical information. The chapters are the work of specialists in the field, in the form of a thematic analysis, a theoretical essay, or a reflection on a professional, scientific or militant practice. From mapping issues for modern states to the digital and big data era, from maps produced by Indigenous peoples or migrant-advocacy organizations in Europe, the perspectives are both historical and contemporary.

Teach students about the different ways that people change their environment. Readers will learn about farming and logging, building cities, and more. Students will also be encouraged to take care of the Earth and protect our environment. Colorful images, supporting text, a glossary, table of contents, and index all work together to engage readers and help them better understand the content. This informative, colorful book uses primary sources to captivate readers as they learn social studies topics.

Disasters undermine societal well-being, causing loss of lives and damage to social and economic infrastructures. Disaster resilience is central to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, especially in regions where extreme inequality combines with the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters. Disaster risk reduction and resilience requires participation of wide array of stakeholders ranging from academicians to policy makers to disaster managers. Disaster Resilient Cities: Adaptation for Sustainable Development offers evidence-based, problem-solving techniques from social, natural, engineering and other disciplinary perspectives. It connects data, research, conceptual work with practical cases on disaster risk management, capturing the multi-sectoral aspects of disaster resilience, adaptation strategy and sustainability. The book links disaster risk management with sustainable development under a common umbrella, showing that effective disaster resilience strategies and practices lead to achieving broader sustainable development goals.