Books on the topic 'Hard interdependence'

By the early ninth century, the responsibility for a series of social, religious and political transformations had become an integral part of running the Carolingian empire. This became especially clear when, in 813/4, Louis the Pious and his court seized the momentum generated by their predecessors and broadened the scope of these reforms ever further. These reformers knew they represented a movement greater than the sum of its parts; the interdependence between those wielding imperial authority and those bearing responsibility for ecclesiastical reforms was driven by comprehensive, yet still surprisingly diverse expectations. Taking this diversity as a starting point, this book takes a fresh look at the optimistic first decades of the ninth century. Extrapolating from a series of detailed case studies rather than presenting a new grand narrative, it offers new interpretations of contemporary theories of personal improvement and institutional correctio, and shows the self-awareness of its main instigators as they pondered what it meant to be a good Christian in a good Christian empire.

The scale of the Estates’ financial intercession on behalf of the government during the Seven Years War had been unprecedented. It also laid bare problems of financial oversight and resistance to changing conceptions of good government. As the war wound down, tension resurfaced between government and Estates that would combust in scandal and confrontation. The result was a far-reaching reform of the Estates’ organization in 1764 that aimed to reduce mismanagement and improve coordination. Given what was now the fundamental financial interdependence of central and intermediary authority, not only could the government not dispense with the Estates but it had to respect the autonomy necessary to the Estates’ financial intermediation.

Chapter abstract The extent to which the concepts of field and social space are linked to a concrete mode of empirical research—and in particular to a set of original statistical tools—has seldom been acknowledged. This chapter aims to re-establish the close link between the field concept and geometric data analysis (GDA), Bourdieu’s preferred technique for mapping the “social distances” between individuals. The elective affinity between the two is based on a relation of tight interdependence: on the one hand, the emergent practice of GDA sustains and strengthens the “implicit philosophy” of the theory of fields; on the other hand, the method’s widespread use by Bourdieu and his collaborators has facilitated GDA’s international reception in the social sciences. The chapter concludes by discussing the empirical research program that results from wedding a sociology of fields with the systematic use of GDA.

This chapter provides a more in-depth study of a small Nevada mining town called Island Mountain and the Chinese miners, merchants, and other residents. Founded by Emanuel Penrod, the town was predominantly Chinese and economic interdependence led to positive social interactions. Penrod had recognized the need for Chinese workers and adopted a policy of working with them, thus providing a harmonious atmosphere. Other residents followed his lead. This allowed the Chinese merchant China Lem (the name given to two brothers who lived there, one after the other), and his friends and associates who were miners, to live in Island Mountain for many decades without the racism and anti-Chinese prejudice present in other mining towns.

Tunis and Sicily had entangled histories in the Middle Ages. This chapter explores how two powerful Mediterranean dynasts—Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, and al‐Mustansir, emir of Tunis—struggled to assert themselves in the Sicilian Straits in the mid‐thirteenth century. While al‐Mustansir wanted Sicilian grain to feed his people, Charles needed African gold to pay for the debts he had accumulated in conquering Sicily in 1266. The question remained how that strategic interdependence would work itself out: would Charles and al‐Mustansir be partners, or would they wage a zero‐sum struggle to control the central Mediterranean? When al‐Mustansir sponsored an expeditionary force that landed on the coast of Sicily in the fall of 1267, it looked as if conflict would prevail. As it turned out, the landing was really the opening salvo in a negotiation that would extend throughout the course of the Tunis Crusade.

The current era of globalization is characterized by a high degree of interconnectedness across borders and continents. This not only goes hand in hand with significant levels of international trade and foreign direct investments but also with migration, which is all too often driven by conflicts of various kinds. While various interdependencies between conflict and migration have been explored in the literature, a link that is not yet sufficiently understood relates to the interdependencies between environmental or resource-related conflicts and migration as well as the role of governance in this respect. This book strives to overcome some of these shortages in providing an interdisciplinary analysis of the interconnectedness between environmental and resource conflicts and migration. To this end, the contributions of this book address four core questions: (i) When do environmental and resource-related problems lead to conflicts and how does this create incentives for migration? How does the governance of natural resources either reduce or enhance the chances of conflicts and migration to emerge? (ii) Who leaves a country and where do migrants go? Which migration governance arrangements are at play in mediating conflicts and in directing migration flows? (iii) How do the trajectories of national, regional and international migration governance regimes look like? How effectively do they regulate environmental or resource-related migration? (iv) Which effects does migration have on possible conflict dynamics in destination countries and what is the role of governance arrangements in this respect? How do host countries participate in governance for the prevention of environmental or resource-related conflicts in countries of origin in order to reduce or prevent migration?

Throughout the early Middle Ages, yearly penitential seasons like Rogationtide and Lent provided a context for basic doctrinal instruction—a replacement for the vanishing Patristic catechumenate. Not only was lay participation in such penitential seasons high, but the ritual structure of these holidays meant that verbal instruction and physical practice mirrored each other. Rogationtide developed a special connection with teaching on the Lord’s Prayer. During the early Middle Ages, knowledge of the Apostles’ Creed and Lord’s Prayer was the proof of someone’s Christianity. The Rogation procession—a ritual that all Christians had to join—mirrored the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—a text that all Christians were expected to understand. The interdependence of these two popular practices shaped lay experience of their own Christianization. Christian instruction occurred through rituals. The rule of prayer upheld the doctrines of faith.

This article examines the concept, development and implementation of the no harm principle and its wider role in public international law. While generally acknowledged in international environmental law protecting other states from physical harm caused to their territory, in other areas of international law the principle is of increasing importance in order to find a balancing mechanism between colliding states’ interest in case of negative externalities caused by one state to the detriment of other states. The article traces implementations of the regulatory mechanism to focus on the adverse effect in other areas of public international law, ranging from trade and monetary agreements to invocation of the concept in current initiatives especially in the context of harmful tax competition and banking regulations. This will show the general capability to balance colliding states’ interest providing solutions for an increasingly interdependent world and giving meaning to the concept of a global community.

The conservation of environment and the protection of human rights are two of the most compelling needs of our time. Unfortunately, they are not always easy to combine and too often result in mutual harm. This book analyses the idea of biocultural rights as a proposal for harmonizing the needs of environmental and human rights. These rights, considered as a basket of group rights, are those deemed necessary to protect the stewardship role that certain indigenous peoples and local communities have played towards the environment. With a view to understanding the value and merits, as well as the threats that biocultural rights entail, the book critically assesses their foundations, content, and implications, and develops new perspectives and ideas concerning their potential applicability for promoting the socio-economic interests of indigenous people and local communities. It further explores the controversial relationship of interdependence and conflict between conservation of environment and protection of human rights.

This chapter moves into the political and economic aspects of human nature. Given scarcity and interdependence, what sense has Judaism made of the material well-being necessary for human flourishing? What are Jewish attitudes toward prosperity, market relations, labor, and leisure? What has Judaism had to say about the political dimensions of human nature? If all humans are made in the image of God, what does that original equality imply for political order, authority, and justice? In what kinds of systems can human beings best flourish? It argues that Jewish tradition shows that we act in conformity with our nature when we elevate, improve, and sanctify it. As co-creators of the world with God, we are not just the sport of our biochemistry. We are persons who can select and choose among the traits that comprise our very own natures, cultivating some and weeding out others.

All federal systems face an internal tension between divisive and integrative political forces, striking a balance between providing local autonomy and representation on one hand and maintaining an integrated political community on the other hand. How multi-level systems strike this balance depends on the development of styles of either integrated politics, which creates a shared framework for political competition across the units of a federation, or independent politics, preserving highly autonomous arenas of political life. This book argues that the long-term development of integrated or independent styles of politics in multi-level systems can be shaped by two key elements of federal institutional design: the degree of fiscal decentralization, or how much is ‘at stake’ at each level of government, and the degree to which the allocation of policy jurisdiction creates legislative or administrative interdependence or autonomy. These elements of federal institutional design shape integrated and independent politics at the level of party organizations, party systems, and voter behaviour. This book tests these arguments using a mixed-method approach, drawing on original survey data from 250 subnational party leaders and aggregate electoral data from over 2,200 subnational elections in seven multi-level systems: Canada, the United States, Australia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. It supplements this with configurational analysis and qualitative case studies.

Tanit (tnt) was a word used in Phoenician as a divine title and as the name of a goddess who was fundamentally relational. The epithet tnt pn bʿl, “Tanit Face-of-Baʿal,” shows that Tanit was the sky god Baʿal’s mouthpiece, face, or some other manifestation of a part of him. The epithet both indicates that these gods formed a paredros, or divine pair, and that the pairing had something to do with the interdependence of their bodies. It is believed that Tanit was represented in art aniconically, anthropomorphically, and in the form of the so-called sign of Tanit. The last is a usually diminutive motif in which a grouping of quasi-corporeal elements resulted in a schematic human form. This brief survey of texts and images argues that the “sign of Tanit,” like the epithet tnt pn bʿl, expressed the transcendence of the natural world through the rejection of corporeal wholeness. Both the “sign” and the epithet underscore the extra-human qualities of the Tanit and Baʿal pairing, especially with respect to the interrelation and appearance of their bodies.

Ten years after the global financial crisis of 2008/9 there is widespread scepticism about the ability to curb volatile financial markets and international cooperation in general. Changes in the global rules of finance discussed in the G20 during the last ten years remain limited, and it is doubtful whether they are suitable to help mitigate and manage future crisis to come. This book argues that this failure is not simply the result of bad leadership and clash of national egoisms but rather the result of a much more fundamental competition of capitalisms. US finance-led, EU integration-led, and East Asian state-led capitalism complement each other globally, but at the same time they have conflicting preferences on how to complement their distinct domestic regulations at the international level. This interdependence of capitalist models is both relatively stable but also prone to crisis caused by volatile financial flows, global economic imbalances, and ‘currency wars’. This book shows that regulating international finance is not a technocratic exercise of finetuning the machinery of international institutions but a political process depending on the dynamic of domestic institutions and power relations. If we want to understand international economic cooperation, we need to understand the diversity of domestic dynamics of the different models of capitalism, not just concerning financial markets but also in connected areas such as corporate structure, labour markets, and welfare regimes. Ultimately, international cooperation is both desirable and possible, but needs to go hand in hand with fundamental changes at the domestic level.

This book explores how market power competition between states can create disruptions in the global political economy and potentially lead to territorial aggression and war. When a state’s firms have the ability to set prices in a key commodity market like oil or natural gas, state leaders can benefit from increased revenue, stability, and political leverage. Given these potential benefits, states may be motivated to expand their territorial reach in order to gain or maintain such market power. This market power motivation can sometimes lead to war. However, when states are economically interdependent, they may be constrained from using force to achieve their market power goals. This can open up an opportunity for institutional settlements. However, in some cases, institutional rules and procedures can preclude states from reaching a settlement in line with their market power ambitions. When this happens, states may opt for strategic delay and try to gradually accumulate market power over time through salami tactics. To explore how these dynamics play out empirically, the authors examine three cases of market power competition in hard commodity markets: Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait to seize market power in the oil export market, Russia’s territorial encroachment into Georgia and Ukraine to preserve and expand its market power in the natural gas market, and China’s ongoing use of strategic delay and gray zone tactics in the South and East China Seas to maintain its dominant position in the global market for rare earth elements.

On the one hand, the idea of a capitalist peace is a set of loosely integrated, but testable propositions. On the other hand it is part of a wider, libertarian philosophy of life. The spirit of this wider conception is best expressed by a quote from a pioneer of quantitative international politics, in 1981 Rummel wrote, “If you want peace, then minimize the power of government.” Although there has been a proliferation of variables assessing capitalism and economic interdependence—from economic freedom via contract intensity to the avoidance of state ownership or protectionism—the most frequently analyzed proposition about the capitalist peace says that trade makes military conflict and war less likely. By and large, the evidence supports this proposition in dyadic designs as well as in monadic designs. This cross-design validity of the proposition is important, because it distinguishes the peace by trade proposition from the democratic peace proposition. Most researchers agree that war is extremely unlikely in dyads where both nations are democracies. But only a minority contends that democracies are less frequently involved in military conflict than other states. The dyadic and the monadic findings are compatible because military conflict looks even more likely between an autocracy and a democracy than between two autocracies. Whereas the democratic peace is limited in application, the pacifying impact of trade or economic interdependence is more general. Moreover, the democratic peace may be embedded in a wider economic or capitalist peace. There is strong evidence that democracy rests on a foundation of capitalism or economic freedom and the prosperity that has been gained only by capitalism or some degree of economic freedom. Moreover, economic freedom and prosperity contribute to the avoidance of civil war. Better still: Economic freedom does not only promote economic growth and prosperity among those nations where people enjoy economic freedom, but the economic freedom of rich countries provides poor countries with the advantages of backwardness and catch-up opportunities.Capitalist peace theory evolves. It has been suggested that the pacifying impact of trade rests on the expectation that trade, or access to resources and markets, will continue. This suggestion requires a new look at economic sanctions, too. By interfering with trade, sanctions must undermine the expectation of future benefits of trade and globally interconnected markets. Given the rareness of evidence in favor of the effectiveness of economic sanctions in eliminating undesirable policies of other nations, a capitalist peace perspective implies the recommendation to use sanctions much less frequently than politicians do. They are likely to eliminate a pacifying factor when it is most urgently needed.The wider or visionary perspective on the capitalist peace is useful not only in connecting it with the issue of sanctions, but also in demonstrating the inherent limitations of capitalism as a tool to achieve peace. From a static perspective, capitalism, economic freedom, or trade may exert some pacifying impact, as argued above. But capitalism is a dynamic economic order. It is about “creative destruction”. Capitalism is not egalitarian. Nations grow at different speeds. They rise and decline. Capitalism and unequal economic growth upset pecking orders and contribute to power transitions that are related to risks of war, especially great power war. Whether the contribution of capitalism to power transitions—or its pacifying impact prevails—cannot be judged with much confidence.

The book proposes a profound rethink of the complex relationship between Europe—defined here as the European Union and its members—and the states of the Mediterranean Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Europe’s ‘southern neighbours’. These relations are examined through a borderlands prism that conceives of this interaction as one between an empire of sorts that seeks to export its order beyond the border, and the empire’s southern borderlands. Focusing on trade relations on the one hand, and the cooperation on migration, borders, and security on the other, the book revisits the historical origins and modalities of Europe’s selective rule transfer to MENA states, the interests underwriting these policies, and the complex dynamics marking the interaction between the two sides over a twenty-year period (1995–2015). It shows that within a system of structurally asymmetric economic relations from which Europe and MENA elites benefit the most, single MENA governments have been co-opted into the management of border and migration control where they act as Europe’s gatekeepers. Combined with specific policy choices of MENA governments, Europe’s selective expansion of its rules, practices, and disaggregated borders have contributed to rising socio-economic inequalities and the strengthening of authoritarian rule in the ‘southern neighbourhood’, with Europe tacitly tolerating serious violations of the rights of refugees and migrants at its fringes. Challenging the self-proclaimed benevolent nature of European policies and the notion of ‘Fortress Europe’ alike, the findings of this study contribute to broader debates on power, dependence, and interdependence in the discipline of international relations.

Engineering Hollywood tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before. Using extensive archival research, this book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here the studio system is seen as a technology-dependent business with connections to the larger American industrial world. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians’ societies. Rather than focusing on the technical improvements in any particular motion picture tool, this book centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with technology in this creative industry. Engineering Hollywood argues that the American industry was stabilized and able to dominate the motion picture field for decades through collaboration over technologies of everyday use. Hollywood’s relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation—with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. Accordingly, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of cooperation that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades.

This book focuses on the variability of metacognitive skills across cultures. Metacognition refers to the processes that enable agents to contextually control their first-order cognitive activity (e.g. perceiving, remembering, learning, or problem-solving) by monitoring them, i.e. assessing their likely success. It is involved in our daily observations, such as “I don’t remember where my keys are,” or “I understand your point.” These assessments may rely either on specialized feelings (e.g. the felt fluency involved in distinguishing familiar from new environments, informative from repetitive messages, difficult from easy cognitive tasks) or on folk theories about one’s own mental abilities. Variable and universal features associated with these dimensions are documented, using anthropological, linguistic, neuroscientific, and psychological evidence. Among the universal cross-cultural aspects of metacognition, children are found to be more sensitive to their own ignorance than to that of others, adults have an intuitive understanding of what counts as knowledge, and speakers are sensitive to the reliability of informational sources (independently of the way the information is linguistically expressed). On the other hand, an agent’s decisions to allocate effort, motivation to learn, and sense of being right or wrong in perceptions and memories (and other cognitive tasks) are shown to depend on specific transmitted goals, norms, and values. Metacognitive variability is seen to be modulated (among other factors) by variation in attention patterns (analytic or holistic), self-concepts (independent or interdependent), agentive properties (autonomous or heteronomous), childrearing style (individual or collective), and modes of learning (observational or pedagogical). New domains of metacognitive variability are studied, such as those generated by metacognition-oriented embodied practices (present in rituals and religious worship) and by culture-specific lay theories about subjective uncertainty and knowledge regarding natural or supernatural entities.