Is Southeastern Europe Doomed to Instability?


Book Description

Considering the enormous problems of the Balkans during the 1990s, the experts who contributed to this study believe that there are solutions to the seemingly intractable situation and the legacy of the disintegration of the former Soviet Union.





Book Description




The Political Thought of Václav Havel


Book Description

The book considers Václav Havel’s body of writing as a cohesive whole offering a consistent political philosophy. This bold claim is backed up through a close examination of Havel’s plays, letters, essays and aphorisms. The political philosophy that a close reading of Havel reveals is a liberal one. However, Havel is not the run-of the-mill liberal having influences from the field of phenomenology, Masaryk, Husserl, Levinas Patočka and Heidegger which give him a nuanced view of the self. Havel sees the self as something always being formed. Hence for Havel man has an ability to ‘shake’ his current state and invite transcendence into his life. This agonistic process reveals our responsibility and liberates the self from forces which coerce behaviour.




We're Doomed. Now What?


Book Description

An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and honesty. We’re Doomed. Now What? penetrates to the very heart of our time. Our moment is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what? We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his groundbreaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”




Multiple Access Channels


Book Description

Surveys general results on multiple-access channels, and gives an overview of the problems of CDMA solutions. This work includes chapters devoted to the information-theoretical aspects of multiple-access communication. It discusses multiple-access techniques and covers coding techniques.







The Sustainable Development Theory: A Critical Approach, Volume 2


Book Description

This book explores the present conflictual relationship between the economy, the environment, and society. The current mainstream economic model is analysed from the perspective of the founding economists to review its suitability to tackle issues of sustainable development. The problems of redistribution and social justice are debated at length; alongside those concerning the giant state, degrowth, and a vision of sustainability that is founded on the idea of a self-regulating free market economy. Business cycle sustainability, anti-crisis therapy, technological unemployment, the natural rate of interest, and the Bruntland matrix are also examined. This book aims to present a holistic approach to sustainable development where social, ecological, and economic components are balanced. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in this topic.




Change and Stability


Book Description

In societies that experience rapid social transformation, does an individual's social position have a major influence on their personality? Exploring this, and related questions, Melvin Kohn presents a detailed overview of how social structure relates to personality in a variety of different countries in vastly different political and social contexts. Case studies include the US, communist Poland, Japan, and Poland and the Ukraine during their transition to capitalism.




The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights


Book Description

This book identifies the more persuasive contributions by East Asian intellectuals to the international human rights debate.




The Interaction between Financial Stability and Financial Institutions: Some Reflections


Book Description

The contribution of this dissertation is to investigate financial stability issues from three different perspectives, illustrating that financial instability shows different characteristics over time, among financial institutions, and across financial activities. Chapter 1 reviews the normative and positive monetary policy literature on Taylor rules which have been augmented with exchange rates, asset prices, credit or leverage, and spreads. In addition, the chapter compares the development of these indicators for the core and the periphery of the Eurozone from 1999 (with the introduction of the euro) until 2013. Chapter 2 goes on to investigate the funding advantage that is provided to German Landesbanken by the joint liability scheme of the German Savings Banks Finance Group. Chapter 3 investigates peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and shows that the changing role of soft information, online platform default risk, liquidity risk and underdeveloped online secondary markets, and the institutionalization of P2P markets implies larger risks than traditional banking. Moreover, P2P lending can be considered part of the shadow banking sector.