A better understanding of regime changes, and their drivers, is vital to understanding the root causes of conflict and instability. In doing so, national and international actors can develop appropriate strategies to address, curb and prevent escalations of violence when these transitions occur. This innovative book explores the motivations and impacts of regime change and political transition in the contemporary era. Systematically examining the drivers, formats and long term impacts of transitions, the contributors seek to identify patterns, commonalities, and disjunctures between them. Bringing together leading scholars and practitioners with longstanding relationships to the conflicts they have covered, this book provides systematic cross-case examinations of regime change. It examines the structural and immediate triggers of transitions both external and internal, as well as shedding light on the ways in which everyday life is changed by them --? for better or worse. Providing a framework for typological and comparative analysis, this book provides ontological and epistemological perspectives on 14 case studies of regime change following civil wars, secessionist conflicts, popular revolutions, military rule and foreign intervention. This book is a vital tool for academics and students of political science, development, history, regional, peace and conflict studies. Reflecting on regime change processes spanning different regions and types of transition, The Elgar Companion to Post Conflict Transition is an accessible way to cover key debates. Contributors include: A.-G. Abdulai, B. Austin, R.K. Bhandari, E. Blakaj, U. Bozkurt, G. Crawford, G. Culaj, N. Dzuverovic, C. Emery, B. Engels, G. Gabusi, H.J. Giessmann, F. Kuhn, R. Mac Ginty, A. Mazrreku, S. Pogodda, R. Read, S. Robins, S. Ruzza, C. Seifert, G. Tepsic, M. van Leeuwen, A. Weber

History of full of liars. Not just little-white-telling liars, but big-honkin', whopper-telling liars - people who can convince us that even the most improbable, outrageous, nonsensical stories are true. And the worst part is that we believe them. Whoppers tells the story of history's greatest liars and the lies they told, providing a mix of narrative profiles of super-famous liars, lies, and/or hoaxes, as well as more obscure episodes.

In the latter half of the 1800s, widespread suspicion and anxiety emerged when wives of all ages and social status were accused of killing their husbands with poison. However, what seemed like a massive spike in murderous wives across the United Kingdom and United States may not have been a spike at all, but rather a poison panic caused by hungry newspapers and mass hysteria. This work explores the stories of several high-profile cases of women on trial for murdering their husbands with poison. Lust, money and power were often central to the accusations, and the sensational news coverage set off a century-long witch hunt. No woman was safe from suspicion during this untold chapter in the history of true crime.

Around 2005 something surprising happened in young adult literature: YA books became obsessed with presenting characters who wanted to have sex but couldn't-at least not without losing something vital to their identity. Since the publication of Twilight, the YA market has been flooded with books that feature naive virgins finding true love. While some YA novels do present nuanced depictions of sex and of healthy sexual relationships, the fiction most popular with young adult readers presents adolescent girls as virginal sex objects waiting to be fulfilled by their love interests. In Virginity in Young Adult Literature after Twilight, Christine Seifert looks at an alarming trend in YA novels. Labeling this phenomenon "abstinence porn," Seifert argues that these novels that fetishize virginity are harmful to readers. Like pornography, such works reduce female characters to objects whose sexual acts are the sole expression of their identities. Chapters in this book examine paranormal, dystopian, and contemporary romance, paying particular attention to recurring virginity themes or tropes. The book also provides an antidote by showing how some sex-positive teen novels provide more empowering messages to readers. Organized by genre, the books were selected for this study based on their popularity with teens. Exploring how messages about virginity are sustained and repeated from text to text, this book also calls out key reader reactions to demonstrate how they are responding to these messages. Featuring a list of discussion questions, Virginity in Young Adult Literature after Twilight will be a valuable resource for teachers, librarians, parents, and mature young adult readers.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the three workshops held at the 29th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2018, held in Regensburg, Germany, in September 2018: the Third International Workshop on Big Data Management in Cloud Systems, BDMICS 2018, the 9th International Workshop on Biological Knowledge Discovery from Data, BIOKDD, and the 15th International Workshop on Technologies for Information Retrieval, TIR. The 25 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. The papers discuss a range of topics including: parallel data management systems, consistency and privacy cloud computing and graph queries, web and domain corpora, NLP applications, social media and personalization

This two-volume set LNCS 13185 and 13186 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 44th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2022, held in April 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 35 full papers presented together with 11 reproducibility papers, 13 CLEF lab descriptions papers, 12 doctoral consortium papers, 5 workshop abstracts, and 4 tutorials abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 395 submissions. Chapter "Leveraging Customer Reviews for E-commerce Query Generation" of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This two-volume set LNCS 13185 and 13186 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 44th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2022, held in April 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 35 full papers presented together with 11 reproducibility papers, 13 CLEF lab descriptions papers, 12 doctoral consortium papers, 5 workshop abstracts, and 4 tutorials abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 395 submissions.