The South Caucasus is the key strategic region between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea and the regional powers of Iran, Turkey and Russia and is the land bridge between Asia and Europe with vital hydrocarbon routes to international markets. This volume examines the resulting geopolitical positioning of Georgia, a pivotal state and lynchpin of the region, illustrating how and why Georgia's foreign policy is 'multi-vectored', facing potential challenges from Russia, int ernal and external nationalisms, the possible break-up of the European project and EU support and uncertainty over the US commitment to the traditional liberal international order.

Memory studies is a well-established academic discipline, but the revised issue of ethnicity poses a new set of research questions, particularly in relation to the problem of the operational character of memory and ethnicity in the context of traumatized identity. Contemporary political processes in Europe, populism, and nationalism, in addition to ethnic challenges in the form of demographic shifts have created a situation in which new national identities have been developed simultaneously with emerging competitive historical memories. Memory, Identity, and Nationalism in European Regions is an essential scholarly resource that investigates the interactions between politics and managed historical memory and the discourse of ethnicity in European regions. Featuring topics such as anthropology, memory politics, and national identity, this book is ideally designed for scholars, practitioners, specialists, and politicians.

Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept maps the common ground of behavioral science. The absence of a shared foundation has given us fragmentation, a siloed state of psychological theory and practice. And the science? The integrity of choice, accountability, reason, and intention are necessary commitments at the cornerstone of civilization and any person-centered psychotherapy, but when taught along with a "scientific" requirement for reductionism and determinism, reside in contradictory intellectual universes. Peter Ossorio developed the Person Concept to remedy these problems. This book is an introduction to his work and the community of scientists, scholars, and practitioners of Descriptive Psychology. Ossorio offered these maxims that capture the discipline's spirit: 1. The world makes sense, and so do people. They make sense to begin with. 2. It's one world. Everything fits together. Everything is related to everything else. 3. Things are what they are and not something else instead. 4. Don't count on the world being simpler than it has to be. The Person Concept is a single, coherent concept of interdependent component concepts: Individual Persons; Behavior as Intentional Action; Language and Verbal Behavior; Community and Culture; and World and Reality. Descriptive Psychology uses preempirical, theory-neutral formulations and methods, to make explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. The goal is a framework with a place for what is already known with room for what is yet to be found.

What might COVID-19 mean for, and reveal about, China's place in the world? The coronavirus pandemic started in Wuhan, home to the leading lab studying the SARS virus and bats. Was that pure coincidence? This book explores what we know, and still don't know, about the origins of COVID-19, and how it was handled in China. We may never get all the answers, but much is already clear: China's record as the origin of earlier pandemics, and its struggle to bring contagious diseases under control; its history as both a victim of biological warfare and a developer of deadly bioweapons. When Covid broke out, Wuhan was building science parks to realise Beijing's ambitions in biotech research. Whoever achieves global leadership of the gene-editing industry stands to harvest great power and wealth. China has already challenged Western technological supremacy with 5G and in other industries. Yet this tiny, invisible virus has cruelly exposed a critical flaw in the Chinese political system: obsessive secrecy. The West wanted to trust the PRC, hoping that, as it prospered, it would become an open society. Made in China reveals how Beijing's leaders have betrayed that trust.

This book offers an accessible and rigorous introduction to the context, diplomacy, and law of the European Union's response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The book explores how the EU responded to the war in the initial months, and is based on research carried out on Russian and European political, diplomatic, and legal texts. Presenting a unique interdisciplinary perspective, the book delves into topics such as the EU diplomatic response, the Ukrainian application for membership of the EU, the policy and legal aspects of EU sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Additionally, the book examines the significance of the EU's unprecedented political response for the constitutional structure of the EU, and for the strategy toward the Russia of the future.

In the wake of World War II, the United States and its allies developed a new type of security arrangement in which a state could maintain a long-term, peacetime military presence on the territory of another equally sovereign state that, unlike earlier practice, was not tied to occupational regimes or colonial rule. The impact of this development on international politics is hard to overstate, and it has become a constitutive feature of contemporary security dynamics. Despite its significance, the origins of this basing practice have remained largely understudied and unexplained. In Armed Guests, Sebastian Schmidt develops a theory to explain the emergence of this phenomenon, which he calls "sovereign basing," and in doing so, shows how its development fundamentally transformed state sovereignty and the very nature of security politics. He applies concepts derived from pragmatist thought to a historical study of the relations between the United States and its wartime allies to explain how sovereign basing originated through the efforts of policymakers to come to grips with the unique security environment of the postwar era. As he argues, the tools offered by pragmatism provide needed analytical leverage over the emergence of novelty and offer valuable insight into the dynamics of stability and change. Armed Guests is a wide-ranging account of the development of sovereign basing practices in the years before and after World War II. It is a book with significant implications for our understanding of contemporary security politics and the future of basing strategies as well as for broader issues in IR, including the sociological foundations of security strategies, the nature of norms, and the practice of sovereignty.

The fifth volume in the Mathematical Cognition and Learning series focuses on informal learning environments and other parental influences on numerical cognitive development and formal instructional interventions for improving mathematics learning and performance. The chapters cover the use of numerical play and games for improving foundational number knowledge as well as school math performance, the link between early math abilities and the approximate number system, and how families can help improve the early development of math skills. The book goes on to examine learning trajectories in early mathematics, the role of mathematical language in acquiring numeracy skills, evidence-based assessments of early math skills, approaches for intensifying early mathematics interventions, the use of analogies in mathematics instruction, schema-based diagrams for teaching ratios and proportions, the role of cognitive processes in treating mathematical learning difficulties, and addresses issues associated with intervention fadeout.

How do regulatory structures evolve in EU financial governance? Incorporating insights from a variety of disciplines, Governing Finance in Europe provides a comprehensive framework to investigate the dynamics leading to centralisation, decentralisation and fragmentation in EU financial regulation. Offering a comprehensive and generalizable theoretical account of regulatory centralisation, this book combines theoretical approaches from political science, law, sociology and economics to trace centralisation in EU financial governance. Contributors build on a rich political science and legal literature and offer empirical analyses of major EU legislative packages in financial regulation, including the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) and Capital Markets Union (CMU). This book systematically identifies and examines the forces and counter-forces on regulatory centralisation. It also offers conjectures as to who benefits from the regulation and how decision-makers are held politically and legally accountable. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned scholars, this book is key reading for academics working in finance and financial policies, particularly those investigating European politics, regulation and regional integration. It will also be of interest to practitioners and policymakers, as chapters provide unique insights into the real-world implications of financial regulation. Contributors include: F. Bulfone, J. Ganderson, A. Heritier, J. Karremans, H. Marjosola, M.G. Schoeller, A. Smolenska, M. Strand

The law and practice of EU external relations is governed not only by general objectives (Articles 3(5) and 21 TEU and Article 205 TFEU) and values (Article 2 TEU) but also by a set of principles found in the Treaties and developed by the Court of Justice, which structure the system, functioning and exercise of EU external competences. This book identifies a set of 'structural principles' as a legal norm-category governing EU external relations; it explores the scope, content and function of those principles that may be categorised as structural. With an ambitious scope, and a stellar line-up of experts in the field, the collection offers a truly innovative perspective on the role of law in EU external relations.