Book Description

The Values, World Society and Modelling Yearbook 2015, like the 2014 Yearbook, analyses contemporary world events with special attention to values, drawing on foundational ideas in a variety of academic disciplines. World society in 2015 exhibited economic, political and cultural tensions: growth and austerity; the Greek bailout referendum; the Paris attacks on the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists; the Christian south and Muslim north in the Nigerian elections; and religion and secularism in Ireland’s referendum on same-sex marriage. Demographics, austerity, migration and nationalism were all issues in the UK general election. There were debates about immigration into Europe and debates about Western military intervention. There were debates about the Enlightenment surrounding the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo. The year 2015 was the seventieth anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations, and the centenary of the birth of one of those who attended the San Francisco conference in 1945, namely John Burton, founder of the Conflict Research Society. Chapter Two of the Yearbook is “The John Burton Memorial Lecture 2015”, by Kevin Clements. Other guest contributors are Feargal Cochrane, Hugh Miall, Dennis Sandole and Rania Dimitraki. The modelling aspect of the Yearbook is strongly structured around the notions of space, time and value. Six of the chapters are about space – physical space, geographical space, psychological space, social space, political space and value space. Four of the chapters are about time: time series for human development and population; revisiting the Pinker debate about a decline in violence; physical and structural violence; the 1945–2015 UK decline in two-party and three-party politics; the flight from the centre and the rise of UKIP and Jeremy Corbyn. The chapter “Life is a Journey” discusses values in a qualitative way, then models of values are developed for particular topics and finally a systematic account is given of value spaces.