Political Science and International Studies (R0)

This book focuses on the participation and interaction of the three great powers—i.e., China, Russia, and the United States—in Arctic affairs from an international relations perspective. Global climate change has become a shared problem for all mankind. One of its key elements is the warming of the Arctic, which is affecting every dimension of nature and humanity globally. Climate change in the Arctic will directly affect natural ecosystems, coastal areas, forests, water resources, agricultural production, animal husbandry, tourism, and other economic activities in various countries around the globe. For the Northeast Asian region, however, the opening of the Arctic Passage by melting sea ice presents an opportunity. The current international legal regime for governance in the Arctic is insufficient to cope with the challenges of global warming. This book will be of interest to scholars following the future development of the Arctic and the role of China as a newcomer to Arctic affairs.

This book offers a sharp, critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, including prior events like Occupy Central and the Mongkok Fishball Revolution,  as well as their aftermaths in light of the re-assertion of mainland sovereignty over the SAR. Reading the conflict against the grain of those who would romanticize it or simply condemn it in nationalistic fashion, Vukovich goes beyond mediatized discourse to disentangle its roots in the Basic Law system as well as in  the colonial and insufficiently post-colonial contexts and dynamics of Hong Kong. He  examines the question of localist  identity and its discontents, the problems of nativism, violence, and liberalism, the impossibility of autonomy, and what forms a genuine de-colonization can and might yet take in the city. A concluding chapter examines Hong Kong’s need for state capacity and proper, livelihood  development, in the light of theOmicron wave of the Covid pandemic, as the SAR  goes forward into a second handover era.   

This book offers a new perspective about the Gulf Arab states entering a post-oil era by looking at the political factors behind the green transformation. It discusses the recent ‘environmental enthusiasm’ in the oil- and gas-rich Gulf monarchies by asking how political power can be constituted through advocating environmental sustainability. While hydrocarbon-wealthy Gulf monarchies have been viewed as the globe’s ‘hydrocarbon powerhouse’ with an immense ecological footprint, efforts towards sustainability and environmental protection measures are increasingly monitored.

This is an open access book. Relations between Brazil and Japan progressed dynamically in the 1960s and 1970s, centering on the substantial complementarity between Japan’s needing primary goods to sustain high economic growth and Brazil’s seeking non-hegemonic investment to invigorate its resource potential. Now that this complementarity has lost significance, the two countries are restructuring their relations to protect shared values of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and the need for maintaining good relations with both China and the United States.

Analyzed here is the development of this renewed bilateral relationship in multiple directions: productivity, global environment and health, migration, and triangular cooperation in third countries’ development. Facing the prospect of a declining population, Japan may become more open to international migration, but the experience with Japanese-descent Brazilian workers since the amendment of the migration control law in 1990 presents many lessons and challenges for the symbiosis of multicultural groups. Brazil, for its part, needs to address social inequality. To this end, it is fundamental to improve the quality of work.

This book argues that Brazil and Japan can benefit from cooperation in managing those country-specific issues. It also discusses ways that Brazil and Japan can profit from coordinating action on global problems such as greenhouse gas reduction, mitigation of tropical diseases, healthy community building, and high-quality infrastructure for poverty reduction.

Reappraising Modern Indian Thought: Themes and Thinkers is a lucid and comprehensive account of the thread of socio-political thought of major Indian thinkers over the decades. In contrast to the existing texts on the subject, it explores the social and political conditions that formed the basis of political thinking of the thinkers in the past two centuries. The book begins with a detailed discussion on the development and articulation of socio-political thought that have evolved in modern India. It then goes to give a comprehensive coverage and makes an analysis of great thinkers of modern India, namely Rabindranath Tagore, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Abul Kalam Azad, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, Syed Ahmed Khan, and Muhammad Iqbal. Divided into four thematic sections; Ideal-Humanist Thought, Militant-Extremist Thought, Cultural–Revivalist Thought and Radical-Pragmatist Thought — the chapters on such thinkers not only talks about their lives and times but also discusses and examines the contributions of those to contemporary period.

This book is based on detailed empirical research conducted to analyse the communication dissemination approach applied to the world’s largest employment guarantee program MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). To uncover the insights, perspectives and understanding of the program, more than 30 villages in Western parts of India were visited and more than 400 MGNREGA beneficiaries were contacted personally by the author.

This handbook offers readers various perspectives on globalization and multilateralism with Chinese characteristics. Its originality is derived from the hybrid approaches the handbook takes, where chapters provide complementary, intertwined, and multi-level analysis on the topic. Based on contributions of scholars and practitioners from a number of countries, the handbook helps readers to comprehend ongoing debates on the Belt and Road Initiative and global governance, within a shifting balance of world power, characterized by competing views between Western and Chinese norms, standards, values, and narratives.

Split into three Parts, and consisting of 46 chapters, the handbook views globalization as comprehensive concept that benefits from the contributions of various disciplines such as geography, geo-economics, political science and international relations. In producing one of the most ambitious and updated outputs on the topic, the handbook as a whole seeks to discusswhat globalization with Chinese characteristics looks like, and the role of the Belt and Road Initiative in this process.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted dimensions of violent extremist groups in South Asia, attending especially to the relationships between the local and regional forces influencing their emergence and activities. In addition, research in the book shows how political, security-sensitive events and processes are framed, and the factors responsible for such framing. Similarly, it discusses prevalent discourses on anti-violent extremism policy and the on-the-ground militarized preventive/reactive interventions they guide, which are inspired by ideologies that increasingly reflect controversial understandings of the experiences of people within conditions of state fragility. In doing so, the book balances attention to local conditions that frame the rise and fall, or persistency, of incidences of violent extremism. The systems-based ecological framing of issues in the book is influenced by a concern for the broader questions of securitization, global governance, poverty, (under)development, and armed conflicts in South Asia.

This book is about Big Brother Naija (BBN), which is a Nigerian version of the Big Brother franchise featured in more than 50 countries of the world with its major concept drawn from George Orwell ’s novel, Nineteen Eigther-Four . It is organised and starred by Nigerians but viewed in many parts of the world. The book critically engages this relatively new phenomenon in Nigeria which apparently lacks scholarly attention. It proffers insights into the show’s significance and implications for the nation with relation to mental health, morality, cultural di

This book focuses on the public pension reform in China from both institutional and empirical studies perspectives. It introduces the process of the public pension reform in China and investigates its effects on households and firms’ behaviors and individuals’ well-being. It provides the reader with rich academic evidence for understanding the transformation of public pension and its effect on the household consumption, participating in risky financial market, and firms’ decision making on wage and employment, as well as individuals’ well-being. The main content of this book comprises three parts: (i) institutional transitions and issues on public pensions in China; (ii) the impact of public pensions on households or firms’ behaviors in China; and (iii) the impact of public pensions on well-being in China. This book provides rich academic evidence about these issues based on economic theories and econometric methods using many kinds of Chinesenationwide representative survey data. This book is highly recommended to readers who are interested in up-to-date and in-depth empirical studies on the issues of public pension reform, and its impact on individuals, households, and firms’ behaviors as well as well-being in China. This book is of interest to those who are interested in the Chinese economy, social security policymakers, and scholars with an econometric analysis background.

This book explores the subcultures, cultural trends and regulations of leisure and subcultures among young people in Beijing from 1949 to the 1980s. It complicates our understanding of the successes of the CCP and the nature of those successes—more a synergy or synthesis than victory over society or defeat. It argues that while the CCP aimed to direct the most private sphere in people’s everyday life (i.e., leisure), it did not achieve this goal by coercive means, but by appealing ways through organized leisure activities. This book suggests that although elements of youth subcultures can be observed throughout the Mao era, we should not treat them as a way of passive resistance. Instead, we must position these subcultures between different layers of the Party’s leisure regulation to examine what the CCP actually achieved. Many people who engaged in subcultures defied the blatant politicization of their leisure, some might have defied the process of collectivization, but few defiedthe process of institutionalization during which people did not find state intervention contradictory to their own way of pleasure-seeking. This book also suggests that instead of regarding the Deng Xiaoping era as a breakaway from Maoist interventionist rule, we need to see the historical continuity as revealed by the Party’s uninterrupted policy of leisure regulation. Thought provoking and at times amusing, this book will interest sinologists, historians, and scholars of China's social form.

Under the contraction of global energy supply brought on by geopolitical situation, this timely book addresses how resource-scarce developing countries respond to challenges in energy security. In particular, for countries underpinning efforts for an autonomous supply of energy, either oil/natural gas, nuclear power or renewable energy, this book revisits the evolution of overseas energy investment of two industrial giants in East Asia, Korea and Japan. It will provide meaningful lessons of how the state sets up policies and navigates political procedures for energy security. While a historical case study, it also offers its readers new insight into the international energy market by taking the stark déjà vu in its repetitive nature and putting it into context.

The book analyses how India’s rise to the status of an emerging power has affected New Delhi’s Africa policy, after sketching the historical evolution and normative underpinnings of Indo-African relations, and what challenges it has brought for New Delhi’s engagement with the continent.

India and Africa share a history dating back millennia. Today, India is one of Africa’s biggest trading partner countries, second only to China. The country regularly extends lines of credit worth billions to African nations, and its pharmaceutical producers dominate many African markets; almost one-fifth of India’s oil imports and more than one-quarter of its natural gas imports come from the continent. However, relations between India and Africa are far from being limited to economic cooperation.

The book scrutinises three foreign policy fields: (1) India’s foreign economic policy towards Africa with an in-depth analysis of Indo-African trade, investment and lines of credit; (2) NewDelhi’s development cooperation policy vis-à-vis Africa, its principles, instruments and volume; (3) India’s politico-diplomatic foreign and security policy vis-à-vis Africa, including New Delhi's high-level diplomacy, security and diaspora policy as well as multilateral Africa policy.

This book discusses the phenomenon of regional integration in Africa and the ensuing discourse on the intercontinental free trade agreement within the continent. Long before the move for the facilitation of free trade in Africa, freedom of movement by Africans within Africa backed up by the AU Protocol on free movement of persons has been in existence and in one way or the other both moves are closely related. The book explores the existing relationships between the ECOWAS Protocol on free movement, goods and services and AfCFTA on one hand and the impact of the implementation and non-implementation of these policies on West Africa on the other hand.

This book sets out to explore the new role of China in Brazilian politics and geopolitics. As China has become Brazil's biggest trade partner, Brazil's political economy has been transformed in subterranean ways, and China's role in the global economy has become a hot topic in Brazilian politics. By bringing into light a new generation of Brazilian scholars, this book seeks to consolidate the scholarship developed in the last decade and promote a new approach to Brazil-China relations, written from the perspective of the global south.

This book explores the evaluations made by religious groups and individuals about the potential of public spheres for religious practice, focussing upon public religion in societies of the Asia-Pacific. Across this region we observe a resurgence of religious traditions, increasing mediatisation of religion, and an inward turn toward conservative political programs. Against this background, relations between religion and public domains are critical influences upon civic inclusion and equal citizenship.

This book presents the assumptions, narratives, and institutions that underpin the key concepts and investigates the limits and potential of financial inclusion development strategy for gender equality. Using South Africa’s women entrepreneurs as a central case, the book interrogates the logic and politics of financial inclusion and gender equality globally and locally. It also examines conditions that explain financial inclusion and women’s empowerment concerning women-owned businesses in post-apartheid South Africa. Finally, it presents a debate on the socio-economic factors enabling and limiting women’s access to and using financial products to improve their socio-economic empowerment and the future suggestions, policies and recommendations on financial inclusion for women entrepreneurs in South Africa.

This book provides a unique ethnographic approach to the understanding of ethnogenesis in the Chinese context, with a particular focus on how it is being reshaped in the post-2000s era. It reinterprets the Chinese concept of ethnicity, or minzu, by investigating its evolution in relation to the proliferation of media technologies.

The pivotal question this book attempts to answer is: How does an ethnic group in China todayunderstand its identity, and what role does technology and media play in that process? This exploration offers a critical perspective on the complex interplay between digital technology, individual agency, and ethnic identity formation.

This book explores the relationship between the “human constant” (Jen) of the four large-scale civilizational societies—China, the USA, Japan, and India—and their international behavior, response patterns, and interaction with the international system. The book analyzes the characteristics and limitations of the current international system, as well as the way it is related to the Western type of “human constant”. It also analyzes the challenges facing China in its integration into the international system. This book aims to explore international relations from the combined psychological and cultural perspective. The key concept of this book is “Jen”, which contains a distinct Chinese cultural experience, into the theory of international relations. Unlike other IR books to treat state as the main political actor, the book analyzes both the political aspects of state as an “organizational entity” and its civilizational aspects as a “civilizational entity”; hence, it proposes a new ontology of international relations. By integrating the concept of “Jen” based on the unique Chinese cultural experience into the theory of international relations, the book reveals the interactive nature of relationship between the international system and “human constant”. The book explains the causal relationship between state’s behavior and its “human constant”, analyzes the cultural characteristics of state actors and the international system, and tries to provide a new theoretical framework for understanding culture and modernity.

This book explores the intricate web of economic diplomacy, Asia Pacific strategies, and Mega Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) that shape the region's dynamics. It also examines the European Union's perspective, considering its shared interests with East Asia and the USA. Avoiding military conflicts in sensitive regions such as the Taiwan Straits and the Korean Peninsula is crucial, as the economic ramifications of any such conflicts could be catastrophic on a global scale, fundamentally altering the course of the New Cold War.

As the world teeters on the precipice of a new era defined by global power struggles and geopolitical realignments, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of the pressing issues facing East Asia and the EU. It challenges readers to reflect on history's lessons and find wise solutions through theoretical and practical approaches.

This book explores the emerging politics of Eurasia from the vantage point of Kazakhstan. Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 has led to the end of the post-Cold War paradigm of liberal convergence and has triggered a geopolitical shift that will lead to the establishment of a renewed bipolar world order. However, if Russia is responsible for that shift, it will most likely not be the power that will be the leading force of the anti-Western bloc. The leading force of this emerging bloc will rather be China to which Russia is inevitably destined to be relegated as a junior partner in Beijing’s geopolitical orbit. This book, analyzing the geopolitics of a changing region, will interest scholars of international relations, Eurasia, and the economics of energy.

The book is 10th in the Persian Gulf Series by Middle East Institute, New Delhi (MEI@ND) and 5th with Springer Nature. It focuses on regional developments in the Gulf and India’s relations with the region in the preceding years; hence, Persian Gulf 2023 focuses on events in 2022. The broad subject of the book is Indian foreign policy and international relations. The book is based on opensource data, statistics, and information including government and international organisations’ reports, reports published by important consultancy and research institutions focused on the Gulf region, news and media reports published in the Gulf region and India and should be of great interest to analysts, academics, journalists, students, and practitioners. Each chapter in the book has several tables and figures on economic indicators, bilateral trade, and energy-related developments. It is a reference work for anyone interested in the Gulf region and at the same time it offers valuable policy recommendations. Hence, it has both academic and policy relevance.

This volume is a collection of chapters based on work within Myanmar by the authors between 2009 and 2021 while working to improve housing, land and property rights for the population. Despite the extensive application and political uptake of their work throughout the country during the brief democratic reform period of 2011-2021, and measurable progress being made, their work and that of the entire HLP community was brought to a sudden stop following the unexpected military coup in February 2021. Many of those with whom the authors worked closely on various HLP matters are no longer able to work safely on these issues in Myanmar. Others have fled the country and are now refugees, while others continue to face daily persecution and harassment by the military regime. These texts will be of great interest to scholars and activists in the region.

The book conducts a comprehensive research study on China’s urbanization. It puts forward three theoretical development models of urban planning in China, i.e., the politics-oriented city, the economy-oriented city and the human-oriented cultural city. It makes objective evaluations of the development models of the politics-oriented city and the economy-oriented city. It suggests that relations between the government and the market should be straightened out to solve the hangovers of the development model of the politics-oriented city, and eco-civilization development and cultural development should be put on the top of the government’s agenda in order to cope with the recurring problems and complications brought about by the development model of the economy-oriented city.

This book provides perspectives on the relevance of European Studies as a disciplinary category for the Asian region. That being the primary focus, the book serves a larger purpose. First, it provides insights on European society, polity and economy (including European Integration) as they are accounted in European Studies. The epistemological character of the knowledge thus conveyed has larger credibility and reliability such that they can become policy inputs and imaginations for strengthening Asian-European relationship. This approach helps overcome the trap of subjectively motivated discourses on Europe which may fail potential collaborations between the regions. Second, the design and discursivity of European Studies will be an instruction to the Asian region on the constitutive potential of regional studies in society-building. Third, the book works towards building the idea of “Europe” in terms of international law, in the minds of Asian students, researchers and decision-makers. This is extremely relevant for the future relationship and cultural engagement between the two regions. The book is of interest to policymakers, academics, embassies, state-level government offices, researchers and students.

This book is a collection of contributions related to India–China relationship beyond the issue of borders. It focuses on those elements that play important role in defining, continuing, and strengthening the interaction between the two countries.  In doing so, it explores roles of language and linguistics, history and culture, politics and economy, and philosophy and sociology that mediated ancient and modern interfaces.

The wide-ranging contributions make the book an attractive resource for academics, think-tanks, diplomats, and researchers working on Asian/India–China studies across the globe.

This book is a comprehensive introductory text to the subject of Western Muslims’ diverse interpretations, discussions and practices of Shari’a with a particular focus on their daily lives in the West. Through a series of interconnected chapters, the book navigates key themes such as Shari’a and legal pluralism, Shari’a  vis-à-vis the experiences and political participation of Muslims in Western democracies, the role of religious scholars, the dynamics of Shari’a courts, Shari’a and multiple belongings, and transnational loyalties. Functioning as a comprehensive reader and handbook, the book offers non-experts a comprehensive understanding of the meaning and relevance of Shari’a in Western contexts, exploring how Muslims interpret and apply its principles in their lived experiences and challenging the one-dimensional narratives.

This is the first book to investigate how constitutional monarchy could survive in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, during which many monarchies were overthrown by revolutions or coups d’état in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Today we have about 200 countries in the world, but there are only 28 which have their own monarchical sovereigns – emperor, king, queen, grand duke, prince, sultan or emir – and even if we add the Commonwealth realms to these, we would find almost three-quarters of the globe are republics at this moment. So will monarchy disappear from human history in the not-too-distant future? This book shows how the European monarchs have played important roles not only as heads of state, but also as heads of nation, in which they are symbols of unity and national identity, of continuity and stability, fountainheads of national achievement and success, and supporters of social service. Consequently they have grappled with difficult contemporary issues such as social welfare, the global environment, the protection of wildlife, multiculturalism and the LGBT movement which national governments would not be able to deal with sufficiently in each country. This book also suggests reforming the existing emperor system of Japan in reference to the activities of European constitutional monarchy.

The book explores the close relationship between media institutions and power elites in Arab societies. This relationship exists within an unprecedented state of competition among global powers for influence and control over necessary resources and consumer markets in the Middle East. These conflicts still ravage these societies, including Palestinian society, designated as a region characterized by "organized chaos," dominated by multiple forms of increasing political instability and complex sources of internal turmoil. Taking the specificity of the Palestinian internal conflict as a case study, the book explores the interrelationships between power elites at the three levels of international, regional, and domestic politics, via the news message of satellite TV news media outlets. This book will interest scholars of the Middle East, of media and authoritarianism, and of the sociology of the Arab world.

By exploring the trajectories of Islamist parties in six diverse countries (Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia), this book provides a comparative analysis of the strategies employed by Islamist groups to confront established political structures through electoral processes and their subsequent governance practices if and when they assume power. The latter aspect is less explored than the predominant focus on Islamist opposition movements.

The book analyses how these Islamist political parties navigate and negotiate with oppositional forces and establishments, concisely discussing the complex dynamics at play within each country.

The book also bridges the gap between North Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Asia Minor, providing a comparative analysis across regions.

Primarily serving as an introductory text to the subject of Islamist parties, the book functions as a comprehensive reader and handbook. Each chapter covers a range of key issues and themes relevant to the governance and political activities of the Islamist party of the country studied in the chapter, offering a general overview of Islamist party experiences across various themes and different historical periods.

This book delves into the intricate interplay between climate change and the dynamic shifts in global power structures, focusing on the expanded BRICS. Offering a distinctive vantage point by encapsulating the evolving dynamics of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the book through this unique perspective, sheds light on the nuanced relationship between environmental challenges and the geopolitical landscape. It has an interdisciplinary approach, seamlessly weaving insights from political science, economics, development studies, and the natural sciences. This holistic integration of diverse disciplines enhances the reader's understanding, presenting a comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted issues at the nexus of climate change and global politics. It not only maps out the current climate crisis confronting humanity in the twenty-first century, but also extends a helping hand to policymakers. The inclusion of pragmatic policy recommendations adds a pragmatic dimension, providing valuable insights that policymakers may find instrumental in addressing the challenges posed by climate change.

This book examines human capital development in the Middle East. It focuses on the investment in human capabilities, namely education and health, the two most critical components of growth and development. The book assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the healthcare sector, with particular attention paid to effectiveness of public health policies and services, health expenditure, mortality rates, and psychological effects of the pandemic on the wider society. It also evaluates the pandemic effects on the education sector, more specifically medical education, physical education, emotional effects on students and teachers, method of communications, learning and teaching, and the extent to which digital readiness has minimized these effects. The book reveals the severity of the pandemic on human capabilities in terms of loss of lives, illness, vaccinations, knowledge acquisitions, skills development, and productivity, while providing new insights for governments to deal with similar crises in the future. It uses a variety of research methods and quantitative and qualitative techniques, country case studies, and primary data collected through survey questionnaires, interviews, and official reports to analyse the impact of the pandemic on health and education. The analyses are supported by statistical data and illustrated by tables and figures. Readers, students, researchers, industry practitioners and policy makers will benefit from the new insights offered by a diverse group of 40 professors, researchers, and industry experts from across the Middle East and beyond.

This book provides a theoretically grounded and empirically fine-grained analysis of uneven state development in Afghanistan beginning in the early 20th Century. Based on archival research, the book shows that after Amanullah Shah’s abortive modernist authoritarian experiment and Habibullah Kalakani’s brief rule, a newly empowered Musahiban dynasty charted a patrimonial absolutist course. The new regime delegated considerable authority to traditional tribal areas in the southeastern and eastern part of the country, while pursuing a coercive strategy in other parts of the country that usurped traditional leadership at the regional and local levels. Previous explanations of the weakness of the Afghan state tend to emphasize structural determinants such as difficult geography, acephalous tribal organization, ethnic heterogeneity, as well as colonial interventions. Others have focused only on events after the Soviet or NATO interventions, pointing out faulty external decision-making, corrupt government officials and warlords, neighboring insurgent safe havens, or the international aid-fueled rentier economy. This book proposes an intermediate explanation for the patchwork nature of the Afghan state rooted in institutional choices made by a new ruling elite that took over in 1929. The year represents one critical juncture in Afghan history, where individual agency based on certain ideological preferences set in motion a path-dependent process that shaped its politics well into the latter half of the century.

This book explains the dynamics of revenue generation and allocation reality of city corporations in Bangladesh. It explores the state of five consecutive years of revenue generation and expenditure allocations of Dhaka North City Corporation and Gazipur City Corporation along with a discussion of to what extent the City Corporation is allowed to enjoy fiscal autonomy through the Local Government (City Corporation) Act of 2009 to generate and manage its local resources. It also finds out the institutional blocks/challenges that the city corporation faces in the process of revenue generation and mobilization, even with the existence of a solid legislative foundation. Central to the book's focus is the resource mobilizing scenario (generation and allocation of revenue) of City Corporation over the past five consecutive years. It suggests some approaches that will serve as valuable resources for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners to take steps for strengthening the finance base of urban local government through revisiting and redefining revenue generation and allocation strategies.

This book is part of a two-volumes exploration comprising 18 chapters organized into four distinct thematic sections. This volume delves into the geopolitical dynamics and power relations in East and Southeast Asia and the Global North. It examines the interactions of regional and extra-regional powers from both military and soft power perspectives. It highlights China's influence in the Indo-Pacific region, Russia's involvement in Myanmar's political economy, and Taiwan's situation. It also examines the dynamics of India-Taiwan relations and North Korea's foreign policy. This book presents interconnected discussions on various themes, offering valuable insights for readers. It provides useful insights into the role of the Global North from multiple perspectives. This will benefit students, scholars, and academicians from diverse disciplines such as International Relations, Foreign Policy, Defence and Strategic Studies, Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Journalism. The other volume provides an in-depth analysis of the intricate power struggles within this Asian region, with a particular focus on India, and delves into the power dynamics of Central Asia, and West Asia offering a comprehensive examination of the geopolitical and power-related issues that shape these regions.

This book explores the accountability paradox in the Chinese bureaucracy. The purpose of accountability is to foster compliance and responsiveness among bureaucrats, but instead, it causes bureaucrats’ coping tactics, blame-avoiding strategies, and defensive behavior, which constitutes a paradox or pathology of accountability. The accountability paradox is well documented in Western countries, but scarce attention has been paid to the accountability system in the Chinese context. It appears that the accountability paradox is also present in the Chinese context since a series of major transformations were initiated to overhaul the accountability system in China following the 18th National Party Congress in 2012, but exhibits characteristics that are unique to China. In a tightly argued book driven by comprehensive interviews and survey investigations, Dr. Tu sheds light on a subject of interest to sinologists, political scientists, and journalists.

This book offers a thorough examination and analysis of key developments in the Indo-Pacific region, providing valuable insights for foreign policy professionals, academics, and researchers in geopolitics and international relations. The editor, a long-time observer of Indo-Pacific affairs, has curated contributions from leading Indian scholars, each writing within their area of expertise. This volume is a carefully coordinated effort to present an Indian perspective on the rapid and complex changes in the Indo-Pacific. It offers a comprehensive look at major regional stakeholders, critical strategic challenges to peace and stability, and ongoing non-traditional security issues impacting the area.

This open access book examines migrant settlement in regional Australia, offering policy recommendations and conceptual frameworks for sustainable integration. With a focus on key areas such as socio-political contexts, employment, education, health, and family challenges, this book provides a holistic approach to understanding and addressing the complexities of migrant settlement.

Australia's rich cultural landscape is shaped by its status as a migration nation, with over half of its population either born overseas or having at least one migrant parent. While migration is a key element of Australia's growth, regional areas face unique challenges in attracting and retaining migrants. Despite government initiatives, skill shortages persist in regional industries, prompting a need for comprehensive policy addressing migrant needs and regional development.

This book fills a critical gap in the literature, offering valuable insights for academics, policymakers, and service providers. It not only highlights the challenges faced by migrants in regional Australia but also underscores the importance of community capacity-building and support services in facilitating successful settlement.