Open Access Books

Wilhelm Grewe (1911-2000) began his career as a professor of international law under the Third Reich. In the immediate postwar period, he already strongly advocated a legal framework for relations between the Occupying Powers and Germany. In 1951, Konrad Adenauer entrusted him with the negotiations on the General Treaty on Germany („Deutschlandvertrag“). This case study, the first on Wilhelm Grewe, analyses his influence on the negotiations on the sovereignty and Western integration of the Federal Republic during the period from 1948-55. The study particularly highlights the practicalities of day-to-day operations and decision-making processes at the advisory level. It also assesses Grewe’s scope for action at the national and international levels. Another key element in evaluating his influence is the interaction between policy and international law. The author is Maître de conférences at the University of Nantes.

Depuis la période médiévale, le monde musulman de Méditerranée compte de nombreuses villes, d’importance variable en fonction des périodes et des lieux. Les travaux qui ont ces villes pour cadre sont abondants. L’ urbain dans le monde musulman de Méditerranée a pour origine la réaction d’un groupe de chercheurs à la multiplication des recherches qualifiées d’urbaines et une volonté de contribuer à en renouveler le point de vue dominant. Aussi bien en ce qui concerne les terrains que les disci...

Le travail forcé apparaît comme l’un des aspects les plus caractéristiques de la violence du moment colonial sur le continent africain mais n’a paradoxalement fait l’objet que de peu de réflexions détaillées. À travers l’analyse de plusieurs formes de recrutement forcé au Sénégal et en Afrique occidentale française (AOF), ce livre entend illustrer l’obsession coloniale de mise au travail et d’ordre social.À partir d’archives administratives inédites, d’articles de presse et d’entretiens oraux, ce livre propose une histoire sociale du travail forcé en Afrique de l’Ouest. Il s’intéresse aux multiples acteurs qui ont modelé et adapté au quotidien la politique économique des autorités : populations réagissant au travail forcé, chefferies locales en charge du recrutement des travailleurs ou encore planteurs privés.En proposant une chronologie allant des années 1920 à la fin des années 1960, cet ouvrage rompt avec l’historiographie usuelle du travail en Afrique de l’Ouest qui envisage l’abolition du travail forcé en 1946 comme une rupture formelle. Cette date symbolique s’inscrit dans un cycle historique plus long qui permet de penser en termes de permanences et de continuités dans les discours et les formes coercitives de mobilisation de la main-d’œuvre sur le continent.À la croisée de l’histoire du travail, de l’Afrique et du fait colonial, ce livre propose une réflexion renouvelée de la « mise en valeur » des territoires coloniaux. Il interroge dans le même temps l’impact du travail forcé sur la rhétorique et les pratiques de mobilisation de la main-d’œuvre des élites postcoloniales au lendemain de l’indépendance du Sénégal en 1960.

The always-evolving field of pediatric spine surgery has seen tremendous advancements in recent years. Improvements in surgical planning, techniques, implants, and peri-operative pathways have greatly benefited our patients and their families. Nevertheless, there are still many questions to be answered and there is room for improvement. Modern technologies, including vertebral body tethering (VBT), patient-specific strategy, self-growing rods, minimally invasive robotic assistance, and surgical navigation, are active areas of investigation. Similarly, enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) protocols as well as newer strategies for peri-operative management are promising tools to hasten recovery after surgery. This Special Issue focuses on idiopathic and neuromuscular scoliosis surgery with a special interest in new technologies, new surgical techniques, and peri-operative management protocols.

Published

The monograph presents an analysis of the most important issues connected with the socio-economical fragmentation processes and social differentiation in Latin American cities. Among the research problems particularly important are: social transformations in Latin American cities, polarization and socio-economical fragmentation, social differentiation and social policies, and, above all, acquisition of new land (often of great natural value) by developers to build new estates. Such practices are associated in contemporary subject literature with extractivism.

From Pavlov's dog expecting food when hearing a bell to stereotypes as expectations about other people’s behaviour, from Bandura’s self-efficacy as expectation for success and failure of one’s own behaviour to the "predictive brain" concept in current perception theories: expectations have been a central construct in different areas of psychological research. In each of these areas, specific concepts, theoretical approaches, and empirical methods have been developed to explain when and why expectations persist and when they do not. Many theories assume that expectations are likely to change in the face of disconfirming evidence. However, sometimes expectations persist even though they are empirically violated, suggesting that they can be “sticky” under certain circumstances. But what are these circumstances? And what are the psychological mechanisms that can explain why and when expectations persist or change after being confronted with expectation-violating evidence? Each contribution of the current book offers insights into individuals’ reactions to violations of expectations. They show that many pieces of the puzzle have been collected in the many sub-displiclines of psychology and that putting them together in an integrative fashion stays a fascinating enterprise.

The performance-based design of structures in fire is gaining growing interest as a rational alternative to the traditionally adopted prescriptive code approach. This interest has led to its introduction in different codes and standards around the world. Although engineers widely use performance-based methods to design structural components in earthquake engineering, the adoption of such methods in fire engineering is still very limited. This Special Issue addresses this shortcoming by providing engineers with the needed knowledge and recent research activities addressing performance-based design in structural fire engineering, including the use of hotspot analysis to estimate the magnitude of risk to people and property in urban areas; simulations of the evacuation of large crowds; and the identification of fire effects on concrete, steel, and special structures.

The rate of technological progress is encouraging increasingly sophisticated lines of enquiry in cognitive neuroscience and shows no sign of slowing down in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that even the strongest advocates of the cognitive neuroscience approach would maintain that advances in cognitive theory have kept in step with methods-based developments. There are several candidate reasons for the failure of neuroimaging studies to convincingly resolve many of the most important theoretical debates in the literature. For example, a significant proportion of published functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are not well grounded in cognitive theory, and this represents a step away from the traditional approach in experimental psychology of methodically and systematically building on (or chipping away at) existing theoretical models using tried and tested methods. Unless the experimental study design is set up within a clearly defined theoretical framework, any inferences that are drawn are unlikely to be accepted as anything other than speculative. A second, more fundamental issue is whether neuroimaging data alone can address how cognitive functions operate (far more interesting to the cognitive scientist than establishing the neuroanatomical coordinates of a given function - the where question).

La philosophie de Nietzsche est une philosophie perspectiviste. Elle l’est, d’abord, par son contenu interprétatif, puisque les volontés de puissance qui constituent indéfiniment les significations du monde, sont des centres d’interprétation et que ces interprétations centrées sont autant de perspectives qui s’affrontent les unes les autres. Mais elle l’est, aussi, en ce qu’elle s’offre elle-même, conformément à son perspectivisme assumé, à une multiplicité de commentaires, tous légitimes à condition de s’ouvrir, de manière forte, aux autres, et de les laisser se déployer pour les dépasser dans le jeu indéfini des herméneutiques. Ce livre sur la philosophie de Nietzsche part d’une hypothèse selon laquelle la perspective d’interprétation morale de cette philosophie est sans doute celle qui permet le mieux, d’une part, de rendre compte de son développement et de sa méthode propre et, d’autre part, de s’ouvrir aux autres perspectives interprétatives sur elle, en les comprenant sans les réduire, tout en les subordonnant ou hiérarchisant de façon rigoureuse. Ayant d’abord mis à l’épreuve cette hypothèse du point de vue d’une lecture interne de la genèse et la structure méthodique du questionnement de la morale par Nietzsche dans nos deux premières parties, notre propos est ensuite d’entendre « le questionnement moral de Nietzsche » au sens d’un génitif objectif de l’expression, par suite de reconstruire, dans notre troisième partie, « trois mises en questions morales de Nietzsche », pouvant émaner de trois perspectives philosophiques majeures sur le problème moral : kantisme, fichtéanisme (auquel le questionnement weilien est largement associé), matérialisme. La meilleure manière de présenter ces mises en questions nous a semblé consister dans l’introduction d’une sorte de dialogue entre des pensées philosophiques toujours vivantes, de sorte que cette troisième partie se termine par un essai d’envisager comment et jusqu’où Nietzsche aurait pu répondre à ces objections tant supposées que réelles.

Starting from a critique of the concept of "natural capital" which helps in defining the concepts of territorial and rural capital, the utility is affirmed of measuring the sustainability of individual and collective actions with respect to the contribution they offer to their production and reproduction. The analysis of case studies therefore poses the problem of over-exploitation of territorial capital in the absence of adequate investments for its reproduction. This requires a detailed evaluation of the eco-territorial services, focusing on the communities of actors who take care of them.

The e-publication entitled Gradivo za topografijo Dolenjske, Posavja in Bele krajine v železni dobi ('Available evidence for the topography of the Dolenjska, Posavje and Bela krajina regions in the Iron Age', only in Slovenian) presents over six hundred sites in the three regions of south-eastern Slovenia that date from this distant period of the past. It is a database that upgrades the first register of Slovene archaeological heritage (Arheološka najdišča Slovenije), published in 1975 by the Institute of Archaeology at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. This register was created with the data then available in literature, while field surveys were only performed on select sites or areas. It was followed up by a project devoting to the archaeological topography of Slovenia (Arheološke topografije Slovenije), the main objective of which was to accurately map the already known sites, as well as to discover new ones. Of all the regions of Slovenia, only the updated topography of three regions was published, among them Bela krajina, which was an integral part of the Dolenjska community in the Early Iron Age.

This book explores primary health care users who visit the clinic for short consultations, those who regularly come to collect medication for chronic illnesses, such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, arthritis, epilepsy, tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS, clients for family planning and babies coming for routine weight monitoring, immunisation and routine prophylactic treatment. Since these health care users come for short consultations, the research investigates where the bottlenecks in the clinic queues resulted in long waiting times and if these consultations were of expected quality. This book arose from the author's own experience working in a primary health care setting focused on the challenges faced by patients. This book will add to the body of knowledge and management of health care users, as this book offers practical recommendations that are tailormade for specific health care users, to be implemented by primary health care providers and settings. Furthermore, the country is faced with a burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases. New strategies are required to address the ever-changing disease pattern and the rapidly growing populations.

This major new book tackles key questions on Europe in the context of shifting parameters of East and West. The contributors - sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians - show, from a variety of different perspectives, that the conventional equation of Europe with the West must be questioned. Featuring four thematically organized chapters, the book looks at: a post-Western world Asia in Europe: encounters in history between Europe and Asia otherness in Europe and Asia. Exploring new expressions of European self-understanding in a way that challenges recent ideological notions of the ‘clash of civilizations’, this outstanding work draws on recent scholarship that shows how Europe and Asia were mutually linked in history and in contemporary perspective. It argues that as a result of current developments and the changing geopolitical context, both Europe and Asia have much in common and that it is possible to speak of cosmopolitan links rather than clashes. This book will be of great value to students and researchers in the fields of sociology, European politics and history and cultural theory.

Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), one of Husserl’s closest students and friends, ranks among the most eminent of the first generation of phenomenologists. His magisterial Controversy over the Existence of the World, written during the years of World War II in occupied Poland, consists of a fundamental defense of realism in phenomenology. Volume II, which follows the English translation of Volume I from 2013, provides fundamental analyses in the formal ontology of the world and consciousness as well as final arguments supporting the realist solution. Ingarden’s monumental work proves to be his greatest accomplishment, despite the fact that outside of Poland Ingarden is known rather as a theoretician of literature than an ontologist. The most important achievement of Ingarden’s ontology is an analysis of the modes of being of various types of objects – things, processes, events, purely intentional objects and ideas. The three-volume Controversy is perhaps the last great systematic work in the history of philosophy, and undoubtedly one of the most important works in 20th-century philosophical literature.