Books on the topic 'African studies|Economic theory'

Universities and economic development in Africa: Pact, academic core and coordination draws together evidence and synthesises the findings from eight African case studies. The three key findings presented in this report are as follows: 1. There is a lack of clarity and agreement (pact) about a development model and the role of higher education in development, at both national and institutional levels. There is, however, an increasing awareness, particularly at government level, of the importance of universities in the global context of the knowledge economy. 2. Research production at the eight African universities is not strong enough to enable them to build on their traditional undergraduate teaching roles and make a sustained contribution to development via new knowledge production. A number of universities have manageable student-staff ratios and adequately qualifi ed staff, but inadequate funds for staff to engage in research. In addition, the incentive regimes do not support knowledge production. 3. In none of the countries in the sample is there a coordinated effort between government, external stakeholders and the university to systematically strengthen the contribution that the university can make to development. While at each of the universities there are exemplary development projects that connect strongly to external stakeholders and strengthen the academic core, the challenge is how to increase the number of these projects. The project on which this report is based forms part of a larger study on Higher Education and Economic Development in Africa, undertaken by the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa (HERANA). HERANA is coordinated by the Centre for Higher Education Transformation in South Africa.

Social Currents in North Africa offers multidisciplinary analyses of social phenomena unfolding in the Maghreb today. The contributors analyze the genealogies of contemporary North African behavioral and ideological norms, and offer insights into post-Arab Spring governance and today's social and political trends. The book situates regional developments within broader international currents, without forgoing the distinct features of each socio-historical context. With its common historical, cultural, and socioeconomic foundations, the Maghreb is a cohesive area of study that allows for greater understanding of domestic developments from both single-country and comparative perspectives. This volume refines the geo-historical unity of the Maghreb by accounting for social connections, both within the nation-state and across political boundaries and historical eras. It illustrates that non-institutional phenomena are equally formative to the ongoing project of postcolonial sovereignty, to social construction and deployments of state power, and to local outlooks on social equity, economic prospects, and cultural identity. Scholars in the field of North African and Maghrebi studies were invited to working group meeting held by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), Georgetown University in Qatar, to reflect on their specialized disciplinary or methodological approaches to the region, and to comment on the overall validity of North Africa as a cohesive geo-historical unit for social scientific analysis.

Tax revenues in most African countries fall far short of what is feasible and necessary to finance basic human and economic development. Domestic tax revenue mobilization is called for, preferably in the form of a broad-based consumption tax, such as the VAT, which is less detrimental to economic growth than an income tax is. Most African VATs, however, are riddled with exemptions, exclusions, and zero rates on domestic goods and services. Hence, base-broadening rather than rate-increasing should be pursued if revenue is the goal. Base-broadening would also make the VATs less distortionary and complicated. The case for base-broadening is strengthened by the findings of incidence studies that show that the net result of fiscal systems can be equalizing if the revenue from broad-based VATs is used to finance in-kind transfers, such as healthcare and education. This highly informative and well-researched book makes the case for modernizing African VAT systems by posing the following questions. What is the role and design of a best-practice VAT? Do African VATs measure up to best practice and how productive are they of revenue? What is being done to mitigate the VAT’s regressive burden distribution? How should VAT be coordinated in regional economic communities? What are non-standard exemptions and how prevalent are they? What treatment is accorded public bodies, immovable property, financial services, and insurance? How are and should small businesses and farmers be treated? Answers to these questions are explored by reference to best practice elsewhere and on the basis of detailed analyses of country-specific VATs.

With the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement, the purpose of development is being redefined in both social and environmental terms. Despite pushback from conservative forces, change is accelerating in many sectors. To drive this transformation in ways that bring about social, environmental and economic justice at a local, national, regional and global levels, new knowledge and strong cross-regional networks capable of foregrounding different realities, needs and agendas will be essential. In fact, the power of knowledge matters today in ways that humanity has probably never experienced before, placing an emphasis on the roles of research, academics and universities. In this collection, an international diverse collection of scholars from the southern African and Nordic regions critically review the SDGs in relation to their own areas of expertise, while placing the process of knowledge production in the spotlight. In Part I, the contributors provide a sober assessment of the obstacles that neo-liberal hegemony presents to substantive transformation. In Part Two, lessons learned from North-South research collaborations and academic exchanges are assessed in terms of their potential to offer real alternatives. In Part III, a set of case studies supply clear and nuanced analyses of the scale of the challenges faced in ensuring that no one is left behind. This accessible and absorbing collection will be of interest to anyone interested in North-South research networks and in the contemporary debates on the role of knowledge production. The Southern African-Nordic Centre (SANORD) is a network of higher education institutions that stretches across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Universities in the southern African and Nordic regions that are not yet members are encouraged to join.

The objective of this research is to present the factors that enabled black students to continue their studies in Centro de Formação de Professores (CFP) at Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB). We discuss issues such as the deciding factors for those black students insertion in UFRB. What were the conditions so that those students could keep themselves in higher education? Our analytical delimitation was the existing interface between subject and their sense of belonging, which relates itself to the multiple implications in identity construction and their sense of belonging, widened to the African descendants struggle in academic space. This issue made it possible to confirm that the association between black people and university students will not remain unnoticed among ethno-racial relations and academic institutions, once along the centuries the relation established between university and those students was one between the researcher and the study object, creating this way a link between their life trajectories and their African descendants conditions inside the institutions, making it clear the existence of social, cultural and economic factors towards the perception of themselves as African descendants in the Brazilian society. This is, for those reasons, a qualitative exploratory research, using as techniques for data gathering and analysis the broader reference of life histories that also includes testimonials, interviews, biographies and autobiographies.

Global migration is more pronounced than it has ever been while issues concerning immigration are constantly in the news. Yet answers as to why remain few and far between. Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and theLiterature of New African Diasporas intersects black Atlantic, postcolonial, and queer diaspora studies to answer these increasingly crucial questions regarding crises of immigration by rethinking migration historically and globally. From histories of racial capitalism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and imperialism to contemporary neoliberal globalization and the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism, countries in the Global North continue to devastate and destabilize the global South. Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, in different ways, police the effects of their own global policies at their borders. This book uses the term conscription as a way to understand the political and economic systems that undergird contemporary immigration and its colonial histories while providing the first substantial study of a new body of contemporary African diasporic literature: migritude. Authors like FatouDiome, Shailja Patel, Nadifa Mohamed, Diriye Osman and others, address vital issues of migrancy, diaspora, global refugee crises, racism against immigrants, identity, gender, sexuality, resurgent nationalisms, and neoliberal globalization.

Phase I clinical trials test the safety and tolerability of new pharmaceuticals and typically pay healthy people to enroll as research participants. In addition to being exposed to the risks of taking investigational drugs, healthy volunteers are confined to residential research facilities for some portion of the clinical trial. Most healthy volunteers are African American and Hispanic men in their late twenties to early forties. Motivated by pervasive economic insecurity and racial discrimination, these individuals often enroll serially in Phase I trials to stay afloat or to get ahead. This book reveals not only the social inequalities on which Phase I trials rest, but also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. Healthy volunteers are enrolled in highly controlled studies that bear little resemblance to real-world conditions. Moreover, in these studies everyone—from the pharmaceutical companies sponsoring the studies, to the clinics conducting them, and the healthy volunteers paid to participate—is incentivized to game the system, with the effect that new drugs appear safer than they really are. Providing an unprecedented view of the intersection of US racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, Adverse Events calls attention to the dangers of this research enterprise to social justice and public health.

For several centuries Cape Town has accommodated a great variety of musical genres which have usually been associated with specific population groups living in and around the city. Musical styles and genres produced in Cape Town have therefore been assigned an ìidentityî which is first and foremost social. This volume tries to question the relationship established between musical styles and genres, and social --in this case pseudo-racial --identities. In Sounding the Cape, Denis-Constant Martin recomposes and examines through the theoretical prism of creolisation the history of music in Cape Town, deploying analytical tools borrowed from the most recent studies of identity configurations. He demonstrates that musical creation in the Mother City, and in South Africa, has always been nurtured by contacts, exchanges and innovations whatever the efforts made by racist powers to separate and divide people according to their origin. Musicians interviewed at the dawn of the 21st century confirm that mixture and blending characterise all Cape Town's musics. They also emphasise the importance of a rhythmic pattern particular to Cape Town, the ghoema beat, whose origins are obviously mixed. The study of music demonstrates that the history of Cape Town, and of South Africa as a whole, undeniably fostered creole societies. Yet, twenty years after the collapse of apartheid, these societies are still divided along lines that combine economic factors and 'racial'categorisations. Martin concludes that, were music given a greater importance in educational and cultural policies, it could contribute to fighting these divisions and promote the notion of a nation that, in spite of the violence of racism and apartheid, has managed to invent a unique common culture.

When American evangelicals flocked to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century to fulfill their Biblical mandate for global evangelism, their experiences abroad led them to engage more deeply in foreign policy activism at home. This book tracks these trends and illuminates the complex and significant ways in which religion shaped America's role in the late-Cold War world. The book examines the growth and influence of Christian foreign policy lobbying groups in the United States beginning in the 1970s, assesses the effectiveness of Christian efforts to attain foreign aid for favored regimes, and considers how those same groups promoted the imposition of economic and diplomatic sanctions on those nations that stifled evangelism. The book links the development of evangelical foreign policy lobbying to the overseas missionary agenda. Its case studies—Guatemala, South Africa, and the Soviet Union—reveal the extent of Christian influence on American foreign policy from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Evangelical policy work also reshaped the lives of Christians overseas and contributed to a reorientation of U.S. human rights policy. Efforts to promote global evangelism and support foreign brethren led activists to push Congress to grant aid to favored, yet repressive, regimes in countries such as Guatemala while imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on nations that persecuted Christians, such as the Soviet Union. This advocacy shifted the definitions and priorities of U.S. human rights policies with lasting repercussions that can be traced into the twenty-first century.

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans’ profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. It makes these claims on the basis of recent scholarship on how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, and evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford importing British cultural products. In doing so, this work merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora. This book, accordingly, is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, this book claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

The study of the desire, acquisition, use, and disposal of goods and services, consumption, has grown enormously in recent years, and has been the subject of major historiographical debates: Did the eighteenth century bring a consumer revolution? Was there a great divergence between East and West? Did the twentieth century see the triumph of global consumerism? Questions of consumption have become defining topics in all branches of history, from gender and labour history to political history and cultural studies. This publication offers an overview of how our understanding of consumption in history has changed in the last generation, taking the reader from the ancient period to the twenty-first century. It includes articles on Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America; brings together new perspectives; highlights cutting-edge areas of research; and offers a guide through the main historiographical developments. Contributions from leading historians examine the spaces of consumption, consumer politics, luxury and waste, nationalism and empire, the body, well-being, youth cultures and fashion. The volume also showcases the different ways in which recent historians have approached the subject, from cultural and economic history, to political history and technology studies, including areas where multidisciplinary approaches have been especially fruitful.

Transactional sex is an important factor in the spread of HIV, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This chapter reviews empirical evidence on the economic incentives that influence the decision to supply transactional sex, and it discusses several policies that may affect supply decisions. While the primary motivation for entering the transactional-sex market is the large income premium relative to other jobs, unexpected income shocks also affect sexual behavior. Based largely on a set of studies in western Kenya, the chapter shows that women are more likely to supply unprotected sex when they experience unexpected income shocks. We also show that sex workers receive informal insurance transfers from regular clients when shocks occur. Such support may induce some women into supplying sex. The chapter concludes with a discussion of possible policy options, including providing conditional cash transfers, giving information on health risks, and introducing risk-coping mechanisms such as insurance or bank accounts.

Globally, studies on migrant teachers have tended to focus on Africa and Asia, while the topic of teacher migration in the Middle East in general, and in the Gulf in particular, has not been examined before. This study examines the status of Arab migrant teachers through both an educational and institutional lens. The research employs a mixed-methods comparative approach to investigate contractual agreements, employment experiences, and social integration of Arab teachers in Qatar and the UAE. The results of the study are consistent with literature on the economic motivation behind migration. Arab migrant teachers come to the Gulf largely in order to make money and, in turn, to be able to provide for their families. In addition to examining the motivations for migration, the study also found that the majority of Arab migrant teachers come to the Gulf with the intention of living and working for significant periods of time. Examining issues such as how the uncertain employment conditions for expatriate Arab teachers manifest in their commitment to teaching, the chapter concludes by providing policy recommendations for improving the conditions and output of Arab migrant teachers in the UAE and Qatar.

Setting macroeconomic policy is especially difficult in fragile states. Political legitimacy concerns are heightened, raising issues such as who the policymakers are, what incentives move them, and how the process of policymaking is likely to work under limited legitimacy and high uncertainty both about the macroeconomic environment and about policy effectiveness. In addition, fragility expands the range of policy objectives in ways that may constrain the attainment of standard macroeconomic objectives. Specifically, in the context of fragility policymakers also need to focus on measures to mitigate fragility itself—namely, they need to address issues such as regional and ethnic economic disparities, youth unemployment, and food price inflation. Socio-political developments around the world have thus pushed policymakers to broaden their toolkit to improve the effectiveness of macroeconomic management in the face of these constraints. The chapters in this book address these issues, both by giving an analytical context from which policymakers can build to answer the questions they face in fragile situations as well as by providing lessons drawn from empirical analyses and case studies. The first section of the volume discusses the interactions between political economy considerations and macroeconomic policymaking. The second section covers the private sector environment in fragile states. The third section focuses on macroeconomic policy, especially fiscal policy, monetary policy, exchange rate policy, external flows, and aid effectiveness. The last section explains the role of the IMF in fragile states and concludes by presenting case studies from the Middle East and from Sub-Saharan Africa. The contributors to the volume are economists and political scientists from academia as well as policymakers from international organizations and from countries affected by fragility.

Around the world, federalism has emerged as the system of choice for nascent republics and established nations alike. This book considers the most promising forms of federal governance and the most effective path to enacting federal policies. The result is an essential guide to federalism, its principles, its applications, and its potential to enhance democratic governance. The book assess different models of federalism and their relative abilities to promote economic efficiency, encourage the participation of citizens, and protect individual liberties. Under the right conditions, the book argues, a federal democracy—including a national legislature with locally elected representatives—can best achieve these goals. Because a stable union between the national and local governments is key, the book also proposes an innovative method for evaluating new federal laws and their possible impact on state and local governments. Finally, to show what the adoption of federalism can mean for citizens, the book discusses the evolution of governance in the European Union and South Africa's transition from apartheid to a multiracial democracy. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book brims with applicable policy ideas and comparative case studies of global significance.

This book presents a new stage in the contributions of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to the development of Competition Law and policy. These countries have significant influence in their respective regions and in the world. The changing global environment means greater political and economic role for the BRICS and other emerging countries. BRICS countries are expected to contribute nearly half of all global gross domestic product growth by 2020. For more than a century, the path of Competition Law has been defined by the developed and industrialized countries of the world. Much later, developing countries and emerging economies came on the scene. They experience many of the old competition problems, but they also experience new problems, and experience even the old problems differently. Where are the fora to talk about Competition Law and policy fit for developing and emerging economies? The contributors in this book are well-known academic and practising economists and lawyers from both developed and developing countries. The chapters begin with a brief introduction of the topic, followed by a critical discussion and a conclusion. Accordingly, each chapter is organized around a central argument made by its author(s) in relation to the issue or case study discussed. These arguments are thoughtful, precise, and very different from each another. Each chapter is written to be a valuable freestanding contribution to our collective wisdom. The set of case studies as a whole helps to build a collection of different perspectives on competition policy.

Richard Wright left readers with a trove of fictional and nonfictional works about suffering, abuse, and anger in the United States and around the globe. He composed unforgettable images of institutionalized racism, postwar capitalist culture, Cold War neo-imperialism, gender roles and their violent consequences, and the economic and psychological preconditions for personal freedom. He insisted that humans unflinchingly confront and responsibly reconstruct their worlds. He therefore offered not only honest social criticisms but unromantic explorations of political options. The book is organized in five sections. It opens with a series of broad discussions about the content, style, and impact of Wright’s social criticism. Then the book shifts to particular dimensions of and topics in Wright’s writings, such as his interest in postcolonial politics, his approach to gendered forms of oppression, and his creative use of different literary genres to convey his warnings. The anthology closes with discussions of the different political agendas and courses of action that Wright’s thinking prompts—in particular, how his distinctive understanding of psychological life and death fosters opposition to neoslavery, efforts at social connectivity, and experiments in communal refusal. Most of the book’s chapters are original pieces written for this volume. Other entries are excerpts from influential, earlier published works, including four difficult-to-locate writings by Wright on labor solidarity, a miscarriage of justice, the cultural significance Joe Louis, and the political duties of black authors. The contributors include experts in Africana studies, history, literature, philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) incorporates citizens directly into budgetary decision-making. It continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often transform PB’s rules and procedures to meet local needs, thus creating wide variation in how PB programs function. Some programs retain features of radical democracy, others focus on community mobilization, and yet other programs seek to promote participatory development. This book provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB’s adoption, adaptation, and impacts. The book first develops six “PB types,” then, to illustrate patterns of change across the globe, four empirical chapters present a rich set of case studies that illuminate the wide differences among these programs. The empirical chapters are organized regionally, with chapters on Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and North America. The empirical chapters demonstrate that there are temporal, spatial, economic, and organizational factors that produce different programs across regions but similar programs within each region. A key finding is that the change in PB rules and design is now leading to significant differences in the outcomes these programs produce. We find that some programs successfully promote accountability, expand civil society, and improve well-being, but, that we continue to lack evidence that might demonstrate if PB leads to significant social or political change elsewhere.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiative has the potential to set the direction for a future world that works for everyone. Approved by 193 United Nations member countries in September 2016 to help guide global and national development policies in the period to 2030, the 17 goals build on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals, but also include new priority areas, such as climate change, economic inequality, innovation, sustainable consumption, peace and justice. Assessed against common agreed targets and indicators, the goals should facilitate inter-governmental cooperation and the development of regional and even global development strategies. However, each goal presents considerable challenges in terms of collecting and analysing relevant data and producing the statistics needed to measure progress. Most governments in lower resourced countries simply do not yet have the systems and controls in place to produce high quality, reliable data and statistics, and it is questionable whether the quality and integrity of the available information is adequate to support meaningful decisions and set direction for the future. There are substantial implications: where progress cannot be measured accurately because of inadequate or flawed statistics, the result can be misguided decisions, doubts about achievement of the goals and significant wasted resources. Getting statistics ‘right’ depends upon the quality and integrity of the data used to produce them and on the quality of the processes for collecting, manipulating and analysing the data. Without a documentary records as evidence of how the data were gathered and analysed or how statistics were produced and disseminated, it is not possible to confirm that the statistics are complete, accurate and relevant. Various global organisations do recognise the importance of high quality data and statistics for measuring the SDG indicators reliably, but there has been little attention to the role of records in providing the evidence needed to trust the data and statistics. There is, moreover, a lack of awareness that digital information simply will not survive without policies and procedures to manage and preserve it through time. As a result, digital data, statistics and records are being lost regularly on a large scale, particularly in lower resource countries, where the structures needed to protect and preserve them are not yet in place. This book explores, through a series of case studies, the substantial challenges for assembling reliable data and statistics to address pressing development challenges, particularly in Africa. Hopefully, by highlighting the enormous potential value of creating and using high quality data, statistics and records as an interconnected resource and describing how this can be achieved, the book will contribute to defining meaningful and realistic global and national development policies in the critical period to 2030.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.