Why have Iranian actors displayed such aggressive behavior over the past decade, and especially since 2005? Why did Iranian perestroika fail? For a certain time now, Iranian behavior on the international scene has been characterized by military threats and deterrence postures, rhetorical intimidations of Israel, hints at military nuclearization, and assistance for “revolutionary” agitation in states with Shiite majorities. Many explanations have been offered for these variations in Iranian foreign policy behavior, such as profit motives, security opportunities brought about by the spread of technology, or “American encirclement” of Iran by troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. While these explanations have some merit, they do not answer some intriguing key questions: why is it that Iranian decision-makers declare themselves to be a great nuclear power and threaten Israel before actually being able to employ this nuclear deterrent? And why is Iran emphasizing nuclearization in spite of the high economic costs (e.g., in the form of sanctions) linked to this option? In contrast to other researchers, my analysis will elucidate these puzzles by giving more importance to narratives of “self-aggrandizement” in Iranian decision-making—by this I mean inflated presentations of one’s own cohesion and strength, employing strong images of the “enemy.” The creation of such myths has the function of re-invigorating the country`s decision-makers self-esteem while at the same time enhancing their internal legitimacy. As the re-evaluation of the “self” is not an isolated process, but related to other engaging actors, these myths also involve the demonization of other significant international actors (in this case, the United States). This study will establish and illustrate the co-variation between the US stigmatization of Iran and the radicalization of Iran’s internal narratives and foreign policy. The first part will outline the historical variations in Iranian foreign policy and its approach to international politics. In particular, it will argue that nuclear policy and rhetoric has been used to construct a positive self-image of an internationally isolated Iran. The second part will show that these chronological variations in internal Iranian narratives and foreign policy approaches are linked to the US and European framing of Iran, arguing that it is Iran’s stigmatization as a “rogue state” which has contributed to the rise of narcissistic self-descriptions that depict Western international powers as evil.
The origins of international conflict are often explained by security dilemmas, power-rivalries or profits for political or economic elites. Common to these approaches is the idea that human behaviour is mostly governed by material interests which principally involve the quest for power or wealth. The authors question this truncated image of human rationality. Borrowing the concept of recognition from models developed in philosophy and sociology, this book provides a unique set of applications to the problems of international conflict, and argues that human actions are often not motivated by a pursuit of utility maximisation as much as they are by a quest to gain recognition. This unique approach will be a welcome alternative to the traditional models of international conflict.
Theories on the origins of war are often based on the premise that the rational actor is in pursuit of material satisfaction, such as the quest for power or for wealth. These perspectives disregard the need for homo symbolicus – the preservation of a positive self-image for both emotional and instrumental reasons. A good reputation ensures authority and material resources. Non-recognition can be as much as an explanation of war as that of other explicative 'variables'. Two empirical studies examining the role of non-recognition in great power conflicts and in international crises will demonstrate the value of this symbolic approach.
Product design is characterized by a steady increase in complexity. The main focus of this book is a structural approach on complexity management. This means, system structures are considered in order to address the challenge of complexity in all aspects of product design. Structures arise from the complex dependencies of system elements. Thus, the identification of system structures provides access to the understanding of system behavior in practical applications. The book presents a methodology that enables the analysis, control and optimization of complex structures, and the applicability of domain-spanning problems. The methodology allows significant improvements on handling system complexity by creating improved system understanding on the one hand and optimizing product design that is robust for system adaptations on the other hand. Developers can thereby enhance project coordination and improve communication between team members and as a result shorten development time. The practical application of the methodology is described by means of two detailed examples.
The sensational events of the summer of 1907 - the disappearance of the Ascot Gold Cup from the Royal Enclosure, and the even more astonishing theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from a locked and guarded strongroom in Dublin Castle - remain mysterious but apparently random events. Only one man knows their secret. Captain Richard Gaudeans, cashiered officer, conman and cracksman, cuts a more appropriate figure among the fairground booths where he earns his living than the corridors of power. But the course of the year takes him into both. And in both he uses his skill and cunning to outmanoeuvre everyone in his path.
Of the full-length prose works that Thomas Merton wrote before he entered the Cistercian Order in 1941, only My Argument with the Gestapo has survived--perhaps in part because it was a book that Merton never ceased wanting to see in print.
Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is a critical study of classic American novels. Ferraro returns to Hawthorne's closet of secreted sin to reveal The Scarlet Letter as a deviously psychological turn on the ancient Meditererranean Catholic folk tales of female wanderlust, cuckolding priests, and demonic revenge. This lights the way to explore what Ferraro calls "the Protestant temptation to Marian Catholicism" in seven modern American masterworks, including Chopin's The Awakening, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Cather's The Professor's House, and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction explores stories of forbidden passion and sacrificial violence, with ultra-radiant women (and sometimes men) at their focus. It examines how these novels speak to readers across religious and social spectrums, generating an inclusive mode of address and near-universal relevance. Ferraro breaks the codes of contemporary criticism in his thematic focus and critical style, going beyond Protestantism and even Judeo-Christian Orthodoxy itself. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction encourages the attentive reader to think about the American imagination, the myriad arts of writing about the passion plays of love, and even our canonical structures for reading and thinking about literature in new ways.
The evolution of a set of fields—including operations research and systems analysis—intended to improve policymaking and explore the nature of rational decision-making. During World War II, the Allied military forces faced severe problems integrating equipment, tactics, and logistics into successful combat operations. To help confront these problems, scientists and engineers developed new means of studying which equipment designs would best meet the military's requirements and how the military could best use the equipment it had on hand. By 1941 they had also begun to gather and analyze data from combat operations to improve military leaders' ordinary planning activities. In Rational Action, William Thomas details these developments, and how they gave rise during the 1950s to a constellation of influential new fields—which he terms the “sciences of policy”—that included operations research, management science, systems analysis, and decision theory. Proponents of these new sciences embraced a variety of agendas. Some aimed to improve policymaking directly, while others theorized about how one decision could be considered more rational than another. Their work spanned systems engineering, applied mathematics, nuclear strategy, and the philosophy of science, and it found new niches in universities, in businesses, and at think tanks such as the RAND Corporation. The sciences of policy also took a prominent place in epic narratives told about the relationships among science, state, and society in an intellectual culture preoccupied with how technology and reason would shape the future. Thomas follows all these threads to illuminate and make new sense of the intricate relationships among scientific analysis, policymaking procedure, and institutional legitimacy at a crucial moment in British and American history.
Paul writes that we are justified by faith apart from 'works of the law', a disputed term that represents a fault line between 'old' and 'new' perspectives on Paul. Was the Apostle reacting against the Jews' good works done to earn salvation, or the Mosaic Law's practices that identified the Jewish people? Matthew J. Thomas examines how Paul's second century readers understood these points in conflict, how they relate to 'old' and 'new' perspectives, and what their collective witness suggests about the Apostle's own meaning. Surprisingly, these early witnesses align closely with the 'new' perspective, though their reasoning often differs from both viewpoints. They suggest that Paul opposes these works neither due to moralism, nor primarily for experiential or social reasons, but because the promised new law and covenant, which are transformative and universal in scope, have come in Christ.
Famine may be triggered by nature but its outcome arises from politics and ideology. In Three Famines, award-winning author Thomas Keneally uncovers the troubling truth -- that sustained widespread hunger is historically the outcome of government neglect and individual venality. Through the lens of three of the most disastrous famines in modern history -- the potato famine in Ireland, the famine in Bengal in 1943, and the string of famines that plagued Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s -- Keneally shows how ideology, mindsets of governments, racial preconceptions, and administrative incompetence were, ultimately, more lethal than the initiating blights or crop failures. In this compelling narrative, Keneally recounts the histories of these events while vividly evoking the terrible cost of famine at the level of the individual who starves and the nation that withers.
Professor F.A. Lindeman, The Prof, was Winston Churchill's adviser during World War II. They met almost daily during the week and Lindemann spent most weekends at Chequers. Lindemann provided the Prime Minister with advice, suggestions and the elucidation of complex scientific and economic issues during a war in which the application of rapidly developing scientific techniques was of decisive importance.
Tracing the interwoven traditions of modern welfare states in Europe over five centuries, Thomas McStay Adams explores social welfare from Portugal, France, and Italy to Britain, Belgium and Germany. He shows that the provision of assistance to those in need has faced recognizably similar challenges from the 16th century through to the present: how to allocate aid equitably (and with dignity); how to give support without undermining autonomy (and motivation); and how to balance private and public spheres of action and responsibility. Across two authoritative volumes, Adams reveals how social welfare administrators, critics, and improvers have engaged in a constant exchange of models and experience locally and across Europe. The narrative begins with the founding of the Casa da Misericordia of Lisbon in 1498, a model replicated throughout Portugal and its empire, and ends with the relaunch of a social agenda for the European Union at the meeting of the Council of Europe in Lisbon in 2000. Volume 1, which focuses on the period from 1500 to 1700, discusses the concepts of 'welfare' and 'tradition'. It looks at how 16th-century humanists joined with merchants and lawyers to renew traditional charity in distinctly modern forms, and how the discipline of religious reform affected the exercise of political authority and the promotion of economic productivity. Volume 2 examines 18th-century bienfaisance which secularized a Christian humanist notion of beneficence, producing new and sharply contested assertions of social citizenship. It goes on to consider how national struggles to establish comprehensive welfare states since the second half of the 19th century built on the power of the vote as politicians, pushed by activists and advised by experts, appealed to a growing class of industrial workers. Lastly, it looks at how 20th-century welfare states addressed aspirations for social citizenship while the institutional framework for European economic cooperation came to fruition
This book is about inner pictures and how we can access and change these pictures through our imagination. It is written not only for specialists in the field of psychotherapy and coaching, but also for the general public. Thomas Kretschmar, a specialist in the field, and Martin Tzschaschel, a journalist, have together created a book that is both comprehensive and understandable for everybody. The authors start by exploring inner pictures in general and how they influence us in everyday life, in memories, and in dreams, using examples from sports, business and other fields. The book then examines how inner pictures and the imagination can be used for therapy. The applications are drawn from both medical and non-medical treatments, including biofeedback, sleep, hypnosis, autogenic training, and the healing of physical diseases. The authors then examine the methods of imaginative psychotherapy. Additional contemporary methods are also utilised, to make this a completely up-to-date interventional approach. The book concludes with examples of cases from the authors’ own therapy practice. Parts of therapy sessions have been transcribed so that the reader is transported into the therapy room. The cases present clients with anxiety attacks, insomnia and burn out, eating disorders, phobias, and OCD.
The overarching objective of this book is to analyse the manner in which statebuilding-oriented research has and can influence policies in fragile, post-conflict environments. Large-scale, externally-assisted statebuilding is a relatively new and distinct foreign policy domain having risen to the forefront of the international agenda as the negative consequences of state weakness have been repeatedly revealed in the form of entrenched poverty, regional instability and serious threats to international security. Despite the increasing volume of research on statebuilding, the use and uptake of findings by those involved in policymaking remains largely under-examined. As such, the main themes running through the book relate to issues of research influence, use and uptake into policy. It grapples with problems associated with decision-making dynamics, knowledge management and the policy process and draws on concepts and analytical models developed within the public policy and research utilisation literature. This book will be of great interest to researchers, knowledge managers and policymakers working in the fields of post-war reconstruction, statebuilding, fragile states, stabilisation, conflict and development.
The Souls of Jewish Folk argues that late nineteenth-century Germany’s struggle with its “Jewish question”—what to do with Germany’s Jews—served as an important and to-date underexamined influence on W.E.B. Du Bois’s considerations of America’s anti-Black racism at the turn of the twentieth century. Du Bois is wellknown for his characterization of the twentieth century’s greatest challenge, “the problem of the color line.” This proposition gained prominence in the conception of Du Bois’sThe Souls of Black Folk (1903), which engages the questions of race, racial domination, and racial exploitation. James M. Thomas contends that this conception of racism is haunted by the specter of the German Jew. In 1892 Du Bois received a fellowship for his graduate studies at the University of Berlin from the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen. While a student in Berlin, Du Bois studied with some of that nation's most prominent social scientists. What The Souls of Jewish Folkasks readers to take seriously, then, is how our ideas, and indeed intellectual work itself, are shaped by and embedded within the nexus of people, places, and prevailing contexts of their time. With this book,Thomas examines how the major social, political, and economic events of Du Bois’s own life—including his time spent living and learning in a latenineteenth-century Germany defined in no small part by its violent anti-Semitism—constitute the soil from which his most serious ideas about race, racism, and the global color line sprang forth.
This books covers new aspects of location strategies and site selection through globalization. It elaborates real estate specific requirements to the planning and analysis process of industrial corporations in an international environment. It explains methods relevant for professionals in the field and discusses in detail an extensive list of site selection criterias. The book is built on existing and broadly recognized research and accelerates this know-how in an real reastate and international context. The challenges for location strategies as well as management alternatives for practitioners are shown and explained through practical examples.
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