The great expansion of economic activity since the end of World War II has caused an unprecedented rise in living standards, but it has also caused rapid changes in earth systems. Nearly all types of natural capital—the world’s stock of resources and services provided by nature—are in decline. Clean air, abundant and clean water, fertile soils, productive fisheries, dense forests, and healthy oceans are critical for healthy lives and healthy economies. Mounting pressures, however, suggest that the trend of declining natural capital may cast a long shadow into the future. Nature’s Frontiers: Achieving Sustainability, Efficiency, and Prosperity with Natural Capital presents a novel approach to address these foundational challenges of sustainability. A methodology combining innovative science, new data sources, and cutting-edge biophysical and economic models builds sustainable resource efficiency frontiers to assess how countries can sustainably use their natural capital more efficiently. The analysis provides recommendations on how countries can better use their natural capital to achieve their economic and environ mental goals. The report indicates that significant efficiency gaps exist in nearly every country. Closing these gaps can address many of the world’s pressing economic and environmental problems—economic productivity, health, food and water security, and climate change. Although the approach outlined in this report will entail demanding policy reforms, the costs of inaction will be far higher.
The dislocations of the worldwide economic crisis, the necessity of a system of global justice to address crimes against humanity, and the notorious 'democratic deficit' of international institutions highlight the need for an innovative and truly global legal system, one that permits humanity to re-order itself according to acknowledged global needs and evolving consciousness. A new global law will constitute, by itself, a genuine legal order and will not be limited to a handful of moral principles that attempt to guide the conduct of the world's peoples. If the law of nations served the hegemonic interests of Ancient Rome, and international law served those of the European nation-state, then a new global law will contribute to the common good of all humanity and, ideally, to the development of durable world peace. This volume offers a historical-juridical foundation for the development of this new global law.
The portraits of kings that we present in this book allow us to think about the complex relationship between law, religion and sovereign power in the Middle Ages. We seek to answer the question about how medieval artists saw the relationship between king, law and faith and how these works of art helped to build, on the visual plane, the symbolic legitimacy of sovereign power. Following the historical trail of Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz and Agamben, we can observe today the relationship between the body and the acclamation and glorification of the sovereign inscribed in these works of art. They are paintings, frescos and illuminations that constitute the founding political iconography of the image that we have and make of Law and the State. The chronological organization of the images corresponds to Kantorowicz's thesis, according to which the mystical body of the king had first, a Christocentric, then a legal and, finally, a governmental foundation. First, the king as an image of Christ, then, as an image of Law and Justice, and finally, in the early Middle Ages, the king as a government.
This new book brings together leading research from around the globe. Leukaemia is cancer that begins in blood cells. In people with leukaemia, the bone marrow produces abnormal white blood cells. The abnormal cells are leukaemia cells. At first, leukaemia cells function almost normally. In time, they may crowd out normal white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. The scope of the book includes the four common types of leukaemia: chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (chronic lymphoblastic leukaemia, CLL) - most often affecting people over age 55; chronic myeloid leukaemia (chronic myelogenous leukaemia, CML) - affects mainly adults; acute lymphocytic leukaemia (acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, ALL) - the most common type of leukaemia in young children; and acute myeloid leukaemia (acute myelogenous leukaemia, AML) - which occurs in both adults and children. New advances in diagnosis, pathogenesis and therapy are also presented.
We develop a model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of a scaling-up of aid and assess the implications of different policy responses. The model features key structural characteristics of low-income countries, including varying degrees of public investment efficiency and a learning-by-doing (LBD) externality that captures Dutch disease effects. On the policy front, it distinguishes between spending the aid, which is controlled by the fiscal authority, and absorbing the aid - financing a higher current account deficit - which is influenced by the central bank's reserve accumulation policies. We calibrate the model to Uganda and run several experiments. We find that a policy mix that results in full spending and absorption of aid can generate temporary demand and real exchange rate appreciation pressures, but also have a positive effect on real GDP in the medium term, through higher public capital. Full spending with partial absorption, on the other hand, may stem appreciation pressures but can also induce adverse medium-term real GDP effects, through private sector crowding out. When aid is very inefficiently invested and there are strong LBD externalities, aid can be harmful, and partial absorption policies may be justified. But in this case, a welfare improving solution is to defer spending or - even better if possible - raise its efficiency.
Over the last forty years, graffiti and street-art have become a global phenomenon within the visual arts. Whilst they have increasingly been taken seriously by the art establishment (or perhaps the art market), their academic and popular examination still remains within old debates which argue over whether these acts are vandalism or art, and which examine the role of graffiti in gang culture and in terms of visual pollution. Based on an in-depth ethnographic study working with some of the world’s most influential Independent Public Artists, this book takes a completely new approach. Placing these illicit aesthetic practices within a broader historical, political, and aesthetic context, it argues that they are in fact both intrinsically ornamental (working within a classic architectonic framework), as well as innately ordered (within a highly ritualized, performative structure). Rather than disharmonic, destructive forms, rather than ones solely working within the dynamics of the market, these insurgent images are seen to reface rather than deface the city, operating within a modality of contemporary civic ritual. The book is divided into two main sections, Ornament and Order. Ornament focuses upon the physical artifacts themselves, the various meanings these public artists ascribe to their images as well as the tensions and communicative schemata emerging out of their material form. Using two very different understandings of political action, it places these illicit icons within the wider theoretical debate over the public sphere that they materially re-present. Order is focused more closely on the ephemeral trace of these spatial acts, the explicitly performative, practice-based elements of their aesthetic production. Exploring thematics such as carnival and play, risk and creativity, it tracks how the very residue of this cultural production structures and shapes the socio-ethico guidelines of these artists’ lifeworlds.
In Motherless Tongues, Vicente L. Rafael examines the vexed relationship between language and history gleaned from the workings of translation in the Philippines, the United States, and beyond. Moving across a range of colonial and postcolonial settings, he demonstrates translation's agency in the making and understanding of events. These include nationalist efforts to vernacularize politics, U.S. projects to weaponize languages in wartime, and autobiographical attempts by area studies scholars to translate the otherness of their lives amid the Cold War. In all cases, translation is at war with itself, generating divergent effects. It deploys as well as distorts American English in counterinsurgency and colonial education, for example, just as it re-articulates European notions of sovereignty among Filipino revolutionaries in the nineteenth century and spurs the circulation of text messages in a civilian-driven coup in the twenty-first. Along the way, Rafael delineates the untranslatable that inheres in every act of translation, asking about the politics and ethics of uneven linguistic and semiotic exchanges. Mapping those moments where translation and historical imagination give rise to one another, Motherless Tongues shows how translation, in unleashing the insurgency of language, simultaneously sustains and subverts regimes of knowledge and relations of power.
Are interactions between soldiers, politicians, and civilians improving? Every nation has to come to grips with achieving a more enduring harmony between government, the armed forces, and society if it aspires to strengthen its democracy. While there is an abundance of studies on civil-military affairs, few examine all three of these actors, let alone establish any standards with which to assess whether progress is being made. This ambitious book devises a novel framework equipped with six dimensions, each of which opens a unique window into civil-military affairs, and which form a more integrated view of the subject. Those dimensions are accompanied by a set of benchmarks and metrics that assess progress and compare one country against another. The framework is applied to case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, with the conviction that insights could be gleaned that may be relevant elsewhere. Ultimately, by unpacking the civil-military relation into its various dimensions, this study has shed light on what it takes to transform what was once a politically-minded military into an organization dedicated to serving a democratic state and society.
The dislocations of the worldwide economic crisis, the necessity of a system of global justice to address crimes against humanity, and the notorious 'democratic deficit' of international institutions highlight the need for an innovative and truly global legal system, one that permits humanity to re-order itself according to acknowledged global needs and evolving consciousness. A new global law will constitute, by itself, a genuine legal order and will not be limited to a handful of moral principles that attempt to guide the conduct of the world's peoples. If the law of nations served the hegemonic interests of Ancient Rome, and international law served those of the European nation-state, then a new global law will contribute to the common good of all humanity and, ideally, to the development of durable world peace. This volume offers a historical-juridical foundation for the development of this new global law.
This book examines one of the most emblematic cases of lawfare today: the criminal prosecution of former Brazilian President Lula. The authors argue that lawfare is not just a slogan or a game at the service of any one political ideology. Rather, it has to do with a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that should be carefully reflected upon in modern constitutional democracies, given that it is able to demolish majority rule and the rule of law. They contend it is the strategic use of the law with the purpose of delegitimizing, harming or annihilating an enemy. The literature specializing in the subject tends to alternate between analysis of only one aspect of the phenomenon or consists of extensive case studies. In order to fill this gap, this book revisits the subject and offers a sophisticated theoretical approach to lawfare, in an unprecedented combination of theory of war and theory of law. The book will be of interest to students, researchers and policy makers working in the areas of public law, international law, procedural law, anthropology of law and sociology of law, as well as political science and international relations.
This timely book offers a theistic approach to secular legal systems and demonstrates that these systems are neither agnostic nor atheist. Critical but succinct in its approach, this book focuses on an extensive range of liberal legal approaches to religious and moral issues, and subjects them to critical scrutiny from a secular perspective. Expertly written by a leading scholar, the author offers a rare combination of profundity of ideas and simplicity of expression. It is a ringing defense of the theistic conception of secular legal systems and an uncompromising attack on the agnostic and atheist conception.
The human body is not a given fact-it is acquired, achieved, and learned. The body remembers, and it does so in collectively relevant ways. This book discusses how, why, and to what extent corporeal memories are constructed but also resisted, modified, or created anew.
The portraits of kings that we present in this book allow us to think about the complex relationship between law, religion and sovereign power in the Middle Ages. We seek to answer the question about how medieval artists saw the relationship between king, law and faith and how these works of art helped to build, on the visual plane, the symbolic legitimacy of sovereign power. Following the historical trail of Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz and Agamben, we can observe today the relationship between the body and the acclamation and glorification of the sovereign inscribed in these works of art. They are paintings, frescos and illuminations that constitute the founding political iconography of the image that we have and make of Law and the State. The chronological organization of the images corresponds to Kantorowicz's thesis, according to which the mystical body of the king had first, a Christocentric, then a legal and, finally, a governmental foundation. First, the king as an image of Christ, then, as an image of Law and Justice, and finally, in the early Middle Ages, the king as a government.
Microorganisms, viruses, and computer programs encode all the information necessary to reproduce and spread themselves. Yet these mechanisms are amazingly similar in the animate world, in the world of viruses, and even in the world of technical systems. The book shows how great the parallels are between these various animate and inanimate replicating systems and what they are based on. The excursion also leads into the fascinating world of genetics, to the question of what defines life and into the programming of software that multiplies itself independently. Finally, the question is derived whether and to what extent such self-replicating technical systems can become as dangerous as infectious viruses in triggering pandemics, such as the Corona pandemic in 2020.
This book aims to study the Batman narrative, or Bat-narrative, from the point of view of its nodal relationship to modern narrative. To this end, it offers for the first time a new type of methodology adequate to the object, which delves both into materials scarcely studied in this context and well-known materials seen in a new light. This is a multidisciplinary work aimed at both the specialist and the global reader, bringing together comic studies, philosophical criticism, and literary criticism in a debate on the fate of our current global civilization.
Law and Religion in a Secular Age seeks to restore the connection between spirituality and justice, religion and law, theology and jurisprudence, and natural law and positive law by building a new bridge suitable for pluralistic societies in the secular age. The author argues for a multidimensional view of reality that includes legal, political, moral, and spiritual dimensions of human nature and society. Each of these dimensions of life needs to recognize the existence, influence, and function of the others, which act as a filter or check on the excesses of each other. This multidimensionality of reality clarifies why no legal theory can fully account for law from the legal dimension alone, just as no moral theory makes perfect sense of morality from the moral dimension?and, for that matter, nothing in physics can fully interpret the physical dimension of reality. The premises of a legal system cannot be fully explained by the legal dimension alone because the fundamental conditions and qualities of justice, freedom, and dignity touch all the dimensions of reality in which the human person acts, including the moral and the spiritual, not just the legal. Building on this multidimensional theory of reality, the author explores the core differences and the essential interconnections between law, morality, religion, and spirituality and some of the legal implications of these connections. Rafael Domingo reminds readers of the vital role of religion in shaping the conceptual framework of Western legal systems, underscores the spirit of Christianity that inspired legal institutions, principles, and values, and recalls the contributions of specific Christian jurists as central figures for the development of justice in society. Law and Religion in a Secular Age aims to be a valuable antidote against the dominant legal positivism that has cornered public morality, the defiant secularism that has marginalized religion, and any other legal doctrine that diminishes the spiritual dimension of law and justice.
Clinical Anesthesia, Seventh Edition covers the full spectrum of clinical options, providing insightful coverage of pharmacology, physiology, co-existing diseases, and surgical procedures. This classic book is unmatched for its clarity and depth of coverage. *This version does not support the video and update content that is included with the print edition. Key Features: • Formatted to comply with Kindle specifications for easy reading • Comprehensive and heavily illustrated • Full color throughout • Key Points begin each chapter and are labeled throughout the chapter where they are discussed at length • Key References are highlighted • Written and edited by acknowledged leaders in the field • New chapter on Anesthesia for Laparoscopic and Robotic Surgery Whether you’re brushing up on the basics, or preparing for a complicated case, the digital version will let you take the content wherever you go.
This book explores Mexico's foreign policy using the ‘principled pragmatism’ approach. It describes and explains main external actions from the country’s independence in the nineteenth century to Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration. The principal argument is that Mexico has resorted to principled pragmatism due to geographic, historical, economic, security, and political reasons. In other words, the nation uses this instrument to deal with the United States, defend national interests, appease domestic groups, and promote economic growth. The key characteristics of Mexico’s principled pragmatism in foreign policy are that the nation projects a double-edged diplomacy to cope with external and domestic challenges at the same time. This policy is mainly for domestic consumption, and it is also linked to the type of actors that are involved in the decision-making process and to the kind of topics included in the agenda. This principled pragmatism is related to the nature of the intention: principism is deliberate and pragmatism is forced; and this policy is used to increase Mexico’s international bargaining power.
We study a wide range of hybrid inflation-targeting (IT) and managed exchange rate regimes, analyzing their implications for inflation, output and the exchange rate in the presence of various domestic and external shocks. To this end, we develop an open economy new-Keynesian model featuring sterilized interventions in the foreign exchange (FX) market as an additional central bank instrument operating alongside the Taylor rule, and affecting the economy through portfolio balance sheet effects in the financial sector. We find that there can be advantages to combining IT with some degree of exchange rate management via FX interventions. Unlike "pure" IT or exchange rate management via interest rates, FX interventions can help insulate the economy against certain shocks, especially shocks to international financial conditions. However, managing the exchange rate through FX interventions may also hinder necessary exchange rate adjustments, e.g., in the presence of terms of trade shocks.
Periodic differential equations appear in many contexts such as in the theory of nonlinear oscillators, in celestial mechanics, or in population dynamics with seasonal effects. The most traditional approach to study these equations is based on the introduction of small parameters, but the search of nonlocal results leads to the application of several topological tools. Examples are fixed point theorems, degree theory, or bifurcation theory. These well-known methods are valid for equations of arbitrary dimension and they are mainly employed to prove the existence of periodic solutions. Following the approach initiated by Massera, this book presents some more delicate techniques whose validity is restricted to two dimensions. These typically produce additional dynamical information such as the instability of periodic solutions, the convergence of all solutions to periodic solutions, or connections between the number of harmonic and subharmonic solutions. The qualitative study of periodic planar equations leads naturally to a class of discrete dynamical systems generated by homeomorphisms or embeddings of the plane. To study these maps, Brouwer introduced the notion of a translation arc, somehow mimicking the notion of an orbit in continuous dynamical systems. The study of the properties of these translation arcs is full of intuition and often leads to "non-rigorous proofs". In the book, complete proofs following ideas developed by Brown are presented and the final conclusion is the Arc Translation Lemma, a counterpart of the Poincaré–Bendixson theorem for discrete dynamical systems. Applications to differential equations and discussions on the topology of the plane are the two themes that alternate throughout the five chapters of the book.
This book presents and analyzes the concept of online brand communities, an emerging and exciting topic in marketing and eCommerce. First, it lays out the foundations like the evolution of the Web and the so-called Social Web, its utility for users and businesses, and the evolution of the marketing mind-set to adapt the Social Web. On this basis, the book then presents a detailed analysis of online brand communities, examining the concept of virtual community with a specific focus on virtual brand communities. In this context the book also explores recent trends related to branding and brand management. Next, it proposes a classification system for online brand communities, taking into account questions like the motivating factors for consumers to join, participate and stay in a community. The process of value creation in communities is examined from both business and consumer perspectives. The book draws to a close with a brief presentation of the process broadly accepted for the successful development of online brand communities.
We study the role of the exchange rate regime, reserve accumulation, and sterilization policies in the macroeconomics of aid surges. Absent sterilization, a peg allows for almost full aid absorption — an increase in the current account deficit net of aid—delivering the same effects as those of a flexible regime but with a necessary increase in inflation. Regardless of the regime, policies that limit absorption—and result in large accumulation of reserves—are welfare reducing: they help reduce the real appreciation (and inflation under the peg), but at the expense of reducing private consumption and investment, and therefore medium-term growth.
This book develops Doukhan/Louhichi's 1999 idea to measure asymptotic independence of a random process. The authors, who helped develop this theory, propose examples of models fitting such conditions: stable Markov chains, dynamical systems or more complicated models, nonlinear, non-Markovian, and heteroskedastic models with infinite memory. Applications are still needed to develop a method of analysis for nonlinear times series, and this book provides a strong basis for additional studies.
Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes examines how historical archetypes in violent narratives on the Mexican American frontier have resulted in political discourse that feeds back into real violence. The drug battles, outlaw culture, and violence that permeate the U.S.-Mexican frontier serve as scenery and motivation for a wide swath of North American culture. In this innovative study, Rafael Acosta Morales ties the pride that many communities felt for heroic tales of banditry and rebels to the darker repercussions of the violence inflicted by the representatives of the law or the state. Narratives on bandits, cowboys, and desperadoes promise redistribution, regeneration, and community, but they often bring about the very opposite of those goals. This paradox is at the heart of Acosta Morales’s book. Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes examines the relationship between affect, narrative, and violence surrounding three historical archetypes—social bandits (often associated with the drug trade), cowboys, and desperadoes—and how these narratives create affective loops that recreate violent structures in the Mexican American frontier. Acosta Morales analyzes narrative in literary, cinematic, and musical form, examining works by Américo Paredes, Luis G. Inclán, Clint Eastwood, Rolando Hinojosa, Yuri Herrera, and Cormac McCarthy. The book focuses on how narratives of Mexican social banditry become incorporated into the social order that bandits rose against and how representations of violence in the U.S. weaponize narratives of trauma in order to justify and expand the violence that cowboys commit. Finally, it explains the usage of universality under the law as a means of criminalizing minorities by reading the stories of Mexican American men who were turned into desperadoes by the criminal law system. Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes demonstrates how these stories led to recreated violence and criminalization of minorities, a conversation especially important during this time of recognizing social inequality and social injustices. The book is part of a growing body of scholarship that applies theoretical approaches to borderlands studies, and it will be of interest to students and scholars in American and Mexican history and literature, border studies, literary criticism, cultural criticism, and related fields.
This valuable resource offers a wealth of practical and conceptual guidance to all those engaged in struggles for social justice around the world. It explains in accessible language and painstaking detail how to deploy and to understand the tools of media and communication in advancing the goals of social, cultural, and political change. A stand-out reference on a vital topic of primary international concern, with a rising profile in communications and media research programs Multinational editorial team and global contributors Covers the history of the field as well as integrating and reconceptualising its diverse perspectives and approaches Provides a fully formed framework of understanding and identifies likely future developments Features a wealth of insights into the critical role of digital media in development communication and social change
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