The revival of the region of east-central Europe known as 'Mitteleuropa' began in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. For Germany, 'Mitteleuropa' became a renewed geopolitical concept. Since 1990 Mitteleuropa has increasingly become a region of German economic engagement. However, German elites failed however to develop a coherent political approach to that region while simultaneously conducting an eclectic Mitteleuropa policy outside a broader framework of foreign policy. This book traces Germany's Mitteleuropa politics and puts them into an historical context and into a framework for future foreign policy.

Over recent years, the issues of Brexit, COVID and the 'migrant crisis' put Kent in the headlines like never before. Images of asylum seekers on Kent beaches, lorries queued on motorways and the crumbling white cliffs of Dover all spoke to national anxieties, and were used to support ideas that severing ties with the EU was the best - or worst - thing the UK has ever done. In this coastal driftwork, Phil Hubbard - an exiled man of Kent - considers the past, present and future of this corner of England, alighting on a number of key sites which symbolise the changing relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours. Moving from the geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel to the cultivation of oysters at Whitstable, from Derek Jarman's feted cottage at Dungeness to the art-fuelled gentrification of Margate, Borderland bridges geography, history, and archaeology, to pose important questions about the way that national identities emerge from contested local landscapes. -- .

The investigation of the interactions between human and physical systems poses unique conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges. This book establishes a spatial science framework for policymakers, social scientists, and environmental researchers as they explore and analyze complex problems. The authors provide guidance for scientists, writers, and students across a broad range of fields on how to tackle discipline-specific issues of space, place, and scale as they propose and conduct research in the spatial sciences. This practical textbook and overview blends plenty of concrete examples of spatial research and case studies to familiarize readers with the research process, demystifying and illustrating how it is actually done. The appendix contains both completed and in-progress proposals for MA and PhD theses and dissertations, as well as successful research grants. By emphasizing research as a learning and experiential process, while providing students with the encouragement and skills needed for success in proposal writing, "Research Design and Proposal Writing in Spatial Science" can serve as a textbook for research-design or project-based courses at the upper-division undergraduate and graduate level.

Human geographers have been at the forefront of research that examines the relationships between space, culture and society. This volume contains twenty-one essays, published over the past thirty years, that are iconic instances of this investigative field. With a focus on four broad themes - landscape, identity, colonialism, nature - these essays represent some of the best and most innovative interventions that geographers have made on these topics. From the visual to the corporeal, from rural Ceylon to urban America and from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, this volume brings together a set of theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded works.

Cultural diversity and difference is increasing in European cities, driven by economic integration, migration and EU enlargement. Against a background of cultural friction, "Migration and Cultural Inclusion in the European City" is centrally concerned with how governance approaches to urban management and grass roots community dialogue can foster a sense of citizenship within which cultural difference can embed a spirit of tolerance. This collection, surveying the scene in a representative cross-section of European cities, explores the question of how to build the 'multicultural' city, and scrutinizes the policy agenda across a variety of different cultural settings.

Investment in Latin America is continuously developing in complex patterns due to the region's increasing role in the global economy. The Handbook of Research on Economic Growth and Technological Change in Latin America helps readers to better understand the importance of Latin America in today's global economy. The book discusses the developments of investments involving Latin American Multinational Corporations ("Multilatinas") within the region. This investment is having profound influences on the state of business, government, and technological development in Latin America, which are all explored in this reference publication for use by researchers, scholar-practitioners, business executives, students, and academicians.

This is a book on how and why workers come together. Almost coincident with its inception, worker organisation is a central and enduring element of capitalism. In the 19th and 20th centuries' mobilisation by workers played a substantial role in reshaping critical elements of these societies in Europe, North America, Australasia and elsewhere including the introduction of minimum labour standards (living wage rates, maximum hours etc), workplace safety and compensation laws and the rise of welfare state more generally. Notwithstanding setbacks in recent decades, worker organisation represents a pivotal countervailing force to moderate the excesses of capitalism and is likely to become even more influential as the social consequences of rising global inequality become more manifest. Indeed, instability and periodic shifts in the respective influence of capital and labour are endemic to capitalism. As formal institutions have declined in some countries or unions outlawed and severely repressed in others, there has been growing recognition of informal strike activity by workers and wider alliances between unions and community organisations in others. While such developments are seen as new they aren't. Indeed, understanding of worker organisation is often ahistorical and even those understandings informed by historical research are, this book will argue, in need of revision. This book provides a new perspective on and new insights into how and why workers organise, and what shapes this organisation. The Origins of Worker Mobilisation will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers the fields of industrial relations, HRM, labour economics, labour history and related disciplines.

This cutting edge collection focuses on the nature of civil society and its role in facilitating governance in Central Asia, considering local implications related to the concept of social capital and civil society in the Uzbek context. It discusses the complexity of the notion of social capital in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, detailing the challenges and pressures facing the Uzbek people.Challenging prevailing views on post-Soviet political transitions, the book demonstrates that successful transition to democracy and rule of law cannot be accomplished unless the concerns, fears, frustrations and local understandings of the desired political system are heard, registered and carefully interpreted. Offering a comparative study of civil society and social capital in Asia, this collection is a key read not only for scholars and students in civil governance and post-soviet transitions, but also aid agencies, foreign governments, and international organisations working with civil society groups.

This book explores creative interdisciplinary and potentially transformative solutions to the current stalemate in contemporary water policy design. A more open policy conversation about water than exists at present is proposed - one that provides a space for the role of the imagination and is inclusive - of the arts and humanities, relevant stakeholders, including landholders and Indigenous peoples, as well as science, law and economics. Written for a wide audience, including practitioners and professional readers, as well as scholars and students, the book demonstrates the value of multiple disciplines, voices, perspectives, knowledges and different ways of relating to water. It provides a fresh and timely response to the urgent need for water policy that works to achieve sustainability, and may be better able to resolve complex environmental, social and cultural water issues. Utilising a broad range of evidentiary sources and case studies from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere, the authors of this edited collection demonstrate how new ways of thinking and imagining water are not only possible but already practised, and growing in saliency and impact. The current dominance of narrower ways of conceptualising our relationship with water is critiqued, including market valuation and water privatisation, and more innovative alternatives are described, including those that recognise the importance of place-based stories and narratives, adopt traditional ecological knowledge and relational water appreciations, and apply cutting-edge behavioural and ecological systems science. The book highlights how innovative approaches drawing on a wide range of views may counter prevailing policy myopia, enable reflexive governance and transform water policy towards addressing water security questions and the broader challenges posed by the Anthropocene and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The World Heritage community is currently adopting policies to mainstream human rights as part of a wider sustainability agenda. This interdisciplinary book combines a state of the art review of World Heritage policy and practice at the global level with ethnographic case studies from the Asia-Pacific region by leading scholars in the field. By joining legal reviews, anthropology and practitioner experience through in-depth case studies, it shows the diversity of human rights issues in both natural and cultural heritage sites. From site-designation to their conservation and management, the book explores the various rights issues and analyses the diverse social, cultural and legal challenges and responses at both regional and global level. Detailed case studies are included from Australia, Cambodia, China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines and Vietnam. The book will appeal to both natural and cultural heritage professionals and human rights and heritage scholars, and will serve as a useful compendium for courses use allowing students to compare, contrast and contextualize different contexts.

A vivid journey around England's great seaside resorts, exploring their history and current struggle, and what they reveal about England, from the award-winning author of Love of Country England's seaside is made up of a striking variety of coastlines including cliffs, coves, pebbled shore, wide sandy beaches, salt marshes, and estuaries cutting deep inland. On these coastal edges England's great holiday resorts grew up, developed in the early eighteenth century originally as spas for medicinal bathing but soon morphing into places of pleasure, entertainment, fantasy and adventure. Acclaimed writer Madeleine Bunting journeyed clockwise around England from Scarborough to Blackpool to understand the enduring appeal of seaside towns, and what has happened to the golden sands, cold seas and donkey rides of childhood memory. Taking in some forty resorts, staying in hotels, caravans and holiday camps, she swims from their beaches and talks to their residents to delve into their landscapes, histories and contemporary plight.

This volume offers a new perspective to debates on local food and urban sustainability presenting the long silenced voices of the small-scale farmers from the productive green fringe of Sydney's sprawling urban jungle. Providing fresh food for the city and local employment, these culturally and linguistically diverse farmers contribute not only to Sydney's globalizing demographic and cultural fabric, but also play a critical role in the city's environmental sustainability. In the battle for urban space housing development threatens to turn these farmlands into sprawling suburbia. In thinking from and with the urban 'fringe', this book moves beyond the housing versus farming debate to present a vision for urban growth that is dynamic and alive to the needs of the 21st century city. In a unique bringing together of the twin forces shaping contemporary urbanism - environmental change and global population flows - the voices from the fringe demand to be heard in the debate on future urban food sustainability.

Greenland and the International Politics of a Changing Arctic examines the international politics of semi-independent Greenland in a changing and increasingly globalised Arctic. Without sovereign statehood, but with increased geopolitical importance, independent foreign policy ambitions, and a solidified self-image as a trailblazer for Arctic indigenous peoples' rights, Greenland is making its mark on the Arctic and is in turn affected - and empowered - by Arctic developments. The chapters in this collection analyse how a distinct Greenlandic foreign policy identity shapes political ends and means, how relations to its parent state of Denmark is both a burden and a resource, and how Greenlandic actors use and influence regional institutional settings as well as foreign states and commercial actors to produce an increasingly independent - if not sovereign - entity with aims and ambitions for regional change in the Arctic. This is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of Greenland's international relations and how they are connected to wider Arctic politics. It will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in Arctic governance and security, international relations, sovereignty, geopolitics, paradiplomacy, indigenous affairs and anyone concerned with the political future of the Arctic.

Transdisciplinarity is a new way of scientifically meeting the challenges of sustainability. Indeed, interdisciplinary collaboration and co-operation with non-academic 'practice partners' is at the core of this; creating contextualised, socially relevant knowledge about complex real-world problems. Transdisciplinary Research and Sustainability breaks new ground by presenting transdisciplinary research in practice, drawing on recent advances by the vibrant transdisciplinary research communities in the German-speaking world. It describes methodological innovations developed to address wide-ranging contemporary issues including climate change adaptation, energy policy, sustainable agriculture and soil conservation. Furthermore, the authors reflect on the challenges involved in integrating non-academic actors in scientific research, on the tensions that arise in the encounter of theory and praxis, and on the inherently normative, political nature of sustainability research. Highlighting the need for academic institutions to be transformed to reflect transdisciplinarity, this timely volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sustainability Science, Transdisciplinary Studies and Philosophy of Science.

In this thought provoking book, Leonare Loeb Adler threads together 26 empirical studies that originated in diverse geographical areas. These studies present a comparison and greater understanding of the behavior of people living in a variety of different cultures. The focus on the book is well expressed in Dr. Adler's introduction in which she states that cross-cultural research recognizes that while the discovery of differences may be significant, the findings of similarities provide even more meaningful information. This book focuses on a variety of current cross-cultural and cross-ethic issues, which are pertinent to specific ages and stages in a life-span perspective. The broad interests and common concerns discussed are shared by people everywhere. Students and scholars in all the political and social science disciplines will find "Cross-Cultural Studies in Human Development" a source of stimulating ideas.

The book begins with a focus on childhood issues, including a Piagetian cognitive study in a Third World country. A report on a new test which assesses early and late stages of development in young school children of different cultures is followed by a chapter discussing applied behavior analysis in dealing with children in the classroom. In addition, there is a chapter on social concerns in childhood development. The second part of this book studies normal as well as handicapped adolescents in different cultures and presents detailed discussions on current issues such as therapeutic management of drug addiction as well as moral development. Part Three focuses on adulthood. The contributors address a wide range of topics including gender issues, attitudes toward extended family members, filial obligations to the elderly, and coming to terms with the death of a parent. Studies of topics important to the elderly complete this book's life-span perspective. The final section examines friendship and social support among old people in cross-cultural and cross-ethnic comparisons. Other chapters deal with disabilities and depression among the elderly, as well as a study of caregivers and counselors.

This book analyzes the social capital of the growing knowledge economy, from both theoretical and empirical points of view. The theoretical section discusses social capital as an economic concept, developing a theory of the social capital of the enterprise. The empirical section compares aspects of the social capital of three different socio-economic systems: the US, Japan and Sweden. The book discusses a number of issues for further research.

This title was first published in 2000: The book analyses the development of arctic environmental cooperation since the late 1980s until the establishment of the Arctic Council in 1996. The study is based on the discourse analysis of statement, documents and interviews by the different actors in the cooperation. In this book, the problem of the environment is seen as a problem of order: it is a problem of ordering relations among related actors, of ordering priorities of action and of ordering relations between different institutional arrangements locally, regionally and internally. Three discourses were found in the cooperation: discourses of sovereignty, knowledge and development. In the discourse of sovereignty, the development of relations between state and indigenous peoples in terms of international environmental cooperation is central. In the discourse of knowledge, the different forms of knowledge and the role of different producers of knowledge in cooperation has been discussed. The discourse of development focuses on the idea of sustainable development and its applications in defining the future of the Circumpolar North and the activities of the Arctic Council. The arctic cooperation can be understood as a regional effort to make an order of sustainability into practice.

The first edition of Spatial Divisions of Labour rapidly became a classic. It had enormous influence on thinking about uneven development, the nature of economic space, and the conceptualisation of place arguing for an approach embedding all these issues in a notion of spatialised social relations. This second edition includes a new first chapter and an extensive additional concluding essay addressing key issues in the debates and controversies which followed initial publication.

In dictionary form, an almanac of world history taking the place name or territory as its starting point. It links the past to the present by geography, and lists every significant political entity in history. The text is an encyclopaedic guide to the history of nations, and each entry falls into one of the following categories:

extinct states and empires

provinces of extinct and existing states

ancient and modern regions

nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples and nations

modern states

Entries for nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples are also included together with their origins and their effect on established political entities.

A number of maps are included to illustrate politico-geographical change.

This is a detailed text, listing changes in world events up to the current year and gives interesting insight into current areas of conflict like the Balkans.

This contributed volume analyzes in depth how a border area is constantly reshaped as migration policies harden, and what kind of social, political and economic impacts are produced at local and international level. The study is focused on Ventimiglia, an Italian town located 6 km away from the French-Italian border on the gulf of Genoa with a long story of commerce, custom and smuggling activities related to its proximity to the frontier. While several projects have analyzed other symbolic places of the EU migration crisis such as Lampedusa, Calais and Lesvos, there is a severe empirical gap regarding Ventimiglia, a border town at the very geographic core of the Schengen area. This case study may provide emblematic insights into what European migratory movements are currently revealing in terms of the lack of shared responsibility between EU Member States, the EU common asylum system and respect for human rights, with increasing claims for national sovereignty by some Member States.

Travelling intensively to and for work helps but also challenges people to find ways of balancing work and personal life. Drawing on a large European longitudinal study, Mobile Europe explores the diversity and ambivalence of mobility situations and the implications for family and career development.

This book examines the impacts of China's urbanization on the country's economic development, clan culture, rural societies, minority resident areas, natural environment, women, and public policy reforms, drawing on official statistics, independent survey data, archives, and fieldwork research to do so. Adopting a cross-disciplinary perspective, the book places special emphasis on issues that have been neglected in prior studies, and provides up-to-date information, reports, and analyses based on the latest events. Further, it considers future directions and strategies regarding urban development, discusses regional urbanization in selected poor and "backward" western provinces, analyzes changes in traditional clan culture brought on by urbanization, and explores evolutions in local clan societies in the Qin and Han Dynasties when cities expanded and business flourished. Lastly, the book examines the effects of infrastructure-related determinants on urban expansion rates and urban land prices, demonstrates the ebbs and flows of public opinion regarding various environmental issues, discusses planned real estate tax reform, and assesses the impact of demographic and socioeconomic changes on young unmarried women.

What is "urban"? How can it be described and contextualised? How is it used in theory and practice? Urban processes feature in key international policy and practice discourses. They are at the core of research agendas across traditional academic disciplines and emerging interdisciplinary fields. However, the concept of "the urban" remains highly contested, both as material reality and imaginary construct. The urban remains imprecisely defined. Defining the Urban is an indispensable guide for the urban transdisciplinary thinker and practitioner. Parts I and II focus on how "Academic Disciplines" and "Professional Practices," respectively, understand and engage with the urban. Included, among others, are Architecture, Ecology, Governance and Sociology. Part III, "Emerging Approaches," outlines how elements from theory and practice combine to form transdisciplinary tools and perspectives. Written by eminent experts in their respective fields, Defining the Urban provides a stepping stone for the development of a common language-a shared ontology-in the disjointed fields of urban research and practice. It is a comprehensive and accessible resource for anyone with an interest in understanding how urban scholars and practitioners can work together on this complex theme.

This book is devoted to the cultural and biological dimensions and values of landscapes, linking the concepts of biodiversity, landscape and culture and presenting an essential approach for landscape analysis, interpretation and sustainable dynamics.

Early chapters explore the concepts and values of biocultural landscapes, before addressing the methodology to identify the relationship between biological and cultural diversity. The volume continuous with a series of case studies and with an exploration of the key role of biocultural diversity in contemporary landscape ecology.

Readers will learn the importance of landscapes for different fields of natural and human sciences and are confronted to the trans-disciplinary nature of the landscape concept itself. A hierarchical approach to landscapes, in which they are composed of interacting (eco)systems, is shown to be essential in recognizing their emergent properties.

In this work, the biocultural values of landscapes are explored through their diversity in geographical scopes, methodological approaches and conceptual assumptions. Authors from Asia, Europe and North-America present diverse research experiences and views on biocultural landscapes, their pattern, conservation and management.

Landscape ecologists will find this work particularly appealing, as well as anyone with an interest in sustainable landscape development, nature conservation or cultural heritage management.

This volume is the outcome of a symposium on Biodiversity in Cultural Landscapes, organized in the framework of the 8th IALE World Congress, held in Beijing in 2011."