From an award-winning science journalist comes Nomad Century, an urgent investigation of environmental migration--the most underreported, seismic consequence of our climate crisis that will force us to change where--and how--we live. "The MOST IMPORTANT BOOK I imagine I'll ever read."--Mary Roach "An IMPORTANT and PROVOCATIVE start to a crucial conversation." --Bill McKibben "We are facing a species emergency. We can survive, but to do so will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken. This is the biggest human crisis you've never heard of." Drought-hit regions bleeding those for whom a rural life has become untenable. Coastlines diminishing year on year. Wildfires and hurricanes leaving widening swaths of destruction. The culprit, most of us accept, is climate change, but not enough of us are confronting one of its biggest, and most present, consequences: a total reshaping of the earth's human geography. As Gaia Vince points out early in Nomad Century, global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literal billions displaced in the coming decades. What exactly is happening, Vince asks? And how will this new great migration reshape us all? In this deeply-reported clarion call, Vince draws on a career of environmental reporting and over two years of travel to the front lines of climate migration across the globe, to tell us how the changes already in play will transform our food, our cities, our politics, and much more. Her findings are answers we all need, now more than ever.

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

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.

In The Mosque Conflict in Catalonia: Space, Culture, and Capitalism, Martin Lundsteen examines two paradigms around mosque conflicts-one of an analytical nature and the other of a political-technical nature. Lundsteen argues that both paradigms interpret conflicts culturally, as originating primarily in the symbolic realm. Though racism and xenophobia are certainly at the core of the issue, Lundsteen shows through the study of the conflict surrounding the mosque project in Premia de Mar (Barcelona) that other dimensions of utmost importance lurk behind these interpretations. This book constitutes an anthropological approach to the intersection of local-global processes of contemporary capitalism and emphasizes the understudied socio-spatial dimension of these conflicts.

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.

"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).

Journey without End chronicles the years-long journey of extracontinentales-African and South Asian migrants moving through Latin America toward the United States. Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes an engrossing, sometimes surreal, narrative-driven critique of how state-level immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants. The book begins with Kidane, an Eritrean migrant who has left his pregnant wife behind to make the four-year trip to North America; it then picks up the natural disaster-riddled voyage of Roshan and Kamala Dhakal from Nepal to Ecuador; and it continues to the trials of Cameroonian exile Jane Mtebe, who becomes trapped in a bizarre beachside resort town on the edge of the DariEn Gap-the gateway from South to Central America. Journey without End follows these migrants as their fitful voyages put them in a semi-permanent state of legal and existential liminality as mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecks-Quito's tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panama's DariEn Gap, and a Mexican border town-into spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with race, gender, and class exploitation. Even then, migrant solidarity allows for occasional glimpses of subaltern cosmopolitanism and the possibility of mobile futures.

The birth of the world's great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the "urban age" inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world's urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities. Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City's turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of "the right to the city," the establishment and contestation of a "postpolitical" governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of "political reform" by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state. A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the "urban age" even beyond Mexico City.

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.

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.

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.