Open Access Books

Intervening states apply different approaches to the use force in war-torn countries. Calibrating the use of force according to the situation on the ground requires a convergence of military and police roles: soldiers have to be able to scale down, and police officers to scale up their use of force. In practice, intervening states display widely differing abilities to demonstrate such versatility. This paper argues that these differences are shaped by how the domestic institutions of sending states mediate between demands for versatile force and their own intervention practices. It considers the use of force by Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States in three contexts of international intervention: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan. The paper highlights quite different responses to security problems as varied as insurgency, terrorism, organised crime and riots. This analysis offers important lessons. Those planning and implementing international interventions should take into account differences in the use of force. At the same time, moving towards versatile force profoundly changes the characteristics of security forces and may increase their short-term risks. This difficulty points to a key message emerging from this paper: effective, sustainable support to states emerging from conflict will only be feasible if intervening states reform their own security policies and practices.

Der Sammelband widmet sich der Professionsforschung mittels der Dokumentarischen Methode, die die soziale Praxis des Lehrer:innenberufs und die impliziten Wissensbestände von Lehrpersonen in den Fokus rückt. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, welchen Beitrag die Dokumentarische Methode zur professionsbezogenen Forschung hinsichtlich des Lehrer:innenberufs leistet, d.h. welches erkenntnisgenerierende Potenzial, aber auch welche entsprechenden Limitationen mit diesem Zugang einhergehen. Ziel ist es, das Feld sowie die Genese und Veränderung von berufsbezogenen Wissensbeständen von Lehrpersonen besser zu verstehen und den Diskurs darüber zu fördern. Der Band enthält grundlagentheoretische Beiträge, nach Forschungsbereichen gegliederte Aufsätze zu empirischen Studien sowie ein umfassendes Studienreview, das mit der Dokumentarischen Methode operierende Studien, bezogen auf den Lehrer:innenberuf, systematisch betrachtet. Der Band ist Teil einer Reihe von Sammelbänden, die im Kontext des DFG-geförderten Netzwerks „Dokumentarische Schulforschung“ (NeDoS) entstanden sind.

Wolfgang Edelstein, Hannelore Faulstich-Wieland, Marianne Krüger-Potratz, Dietrich Benner, Hans-Günther Homfeldt, Maria Eleonore Karsten, Reinhard Wiesner und Dieter Sengling (Reprint) haben Forschungsdiskurse und Studiengänge zum Bildungs- und Hilfesystem geprägt, bildungs-, sozial- und disziplinpolitisch Verantwortung übernommen und stehen für demokratische Identifikationen sowie historische Kontextualisierungen erziehungswissenschaftlicher Perspektiven. Die kollegialen Fachgespräche unter Mitwirkung von Sandro Bliemetsrieder, Lalitha Chamakalayil, Benjamin Edelstein, Lisa Pfahl, Karsten Speck, Gerd Stecklina und Robert Wunsch rekonstruieren kooperative Perspektiven und bieten Kontextwissen für sekundäranalytische Forschung. Mit einem Kommentar von Anke Wischmann.

The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin offers an in-depth ethnographic account of Muslim youth’s religious identity formation and their engagement with Islam in everyday life. Focusing on Muslim women in the organisation MJD in Germany, it provides a deeper understanding of processes related to immigration, transnationalism, the transformation of identifications and the reconstruction of selfhood. The book deals with the collective content of religious identity formation and processes of differentiation, engaging with the changing role of religion in an urban European setting, restructuring of religious authority and the formation of gender identity through religion. Synnøve K.N. Bendixsen examines how the participants seek and debate what it means to be a good Muslim, and discusses the religious movement as individual engagement in a collective project.

This book, endorsed by the Economic Development Council of South Africa (EDCSA) and the PASCAL International Observatory, focuses on local economic development (LED), emphasising the role of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) in fostering sustainable economic growth. Local economic development is crucial in overcoming challenges such as historical dependence on government employment and limited funds for development. The book advocates for LED strategies to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurship by providing infrastructure, finance, mentorship and industry support. It stresses the importance of stakeholder engagement and local research in addressing regional challenges effectively. Highlighting the significance of EEs in fostering entrepreneurial development, the contributing authors to the book argue that EEs can drive job creation, boost local economies, foster innovation, enhance competitiveness and promote inclusive growth. Moreover, the chapters in the book emphasise the need for research conducted by local scholars to ensure relevance, sensitivity and ownership of findings, ultimately contributing to capacity building and sustainable development. The book proposes that LED can serve as a tool for establishing sustainable EEs and vice versa through facilitating formal collaboration among various stakeholders. Its target audience are scholars in Development Economics and scholars whose research focuses on EEs, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding regional challenges and solutions, thereby enabling meaningful contributions to local economic growth and development in the region, inviting scholars to build upon the presented research. This book provides valuable insights into promoting entrepreneurship and sustainable development, offering actionable perspectives informed by both regional and international contexts. It is based on qualitative and quantitative research and serves as an essential resource firstly for scholars, and secondly for practitioners interested in driving economic growth and development.

This volume, in ten chapters, interrogates the relationship between Marco Polo, Venice and the Devisement dou monde after his return to the city from Genoese captivity. Since Marco’s book was probably revised and corrected in collaboration with the Dominicans of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the authors of the chapters seek to define more precisely the cultural framework that made this revision possible and the social and political networks that contributed to it. The early fourteenth century is characterised by major transformations for the city and its protagonists. The connection of these elements into a unified landscape allowed for numerous acquisitions and a new vision.

Is healthcare chaplaincy a health profession? This book argues that it is. It is a plea for Christian healthcare chaplaincy to be practiced as a form of specialized spiritual care, and to be understood anew within the horizon of the Christian call for healing. Only in close cooperation with other healthcare professionals, it is argued, can healthcare chaplaincy fulfil its mission and promote encompassing and evidence-based care for patients and their relatives. And only by recentering on their spiritual resources, can Christian healthcare chaplains contribute in their own unique way to healing processes and to coping with illness, dying, and grief.

The here collected contributions relating to the 46th International Conference of the Representation Disciplines Teachers, organized jointly by Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, and San Raffaele Roma University, aim to offer the scientific community a reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to the concept of èkphrasis, a term that, in the field of representation, concerns descriptive, analogical, and digital activities that generate new knowledge in several areas of application. The Conference aims to place at the center of the discussion an interpretation of the concept of research that, without neglecting an idea of study, protection, and enhancement of environmental and cultural heritage, focuses on the needs of contemporary society and its possible developments, making use of innovative theoretical, methodological, and operational activities, including those characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. According to this interpretation, research can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the definition and testing of experimental proposals aimed at exploring new areas of investigation: this opens up imaginative and utopian perspectives in the relationship between the sciences, the arts, and the disciplines that contribute to common goals, through the experimentation of methods, techniques, and languages for conceiving, prefiguring, designing, and representing.

Del policial clásico al post-neopolicial: La estética del crimen en la narrativa mexicana, 1940–2020 is a comprehensive study of Mexican crime fiction from cultural, gender, social, political, and literary perspectives. This book covers the different phases Mexican crime fiction has evolved through in the past eighty years: classical detective fiction (1940–1960s), género negro (1970s), neopolicial (1980–2000), narconarrative (1990s to the present), and post-neopolicial (2000 to the present). The first half of the book offers an overview of the development of crime fiction in the United States, how it was adopted by Mexican writers in the 1940s, and the changes it went through in its various phases. Writers studied include, among others, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Rafael Ramírez Heredia, and Juan Hernández Luna. In addition, the author of this book coins a new term, post-neopolicial, to describe the most current form of crime fiction in the twenty-first century as exemplified in a corpus of novels that depict the realities of contemporary Mexico. The second half of the book focuses on the evolution of crime fiction by Mexican women writers from the 1940s to the present: from the classic detective formula to contemporary realistic narratives protagonized by subversive female characters in the works of María Elvira Bermúdez, Margos de Villanueva, Rosa Margot Ochoa, Ana María Maqueo, Carmen Boullosa, Myriam Laurini, Susana Pagano, Liliana Blum, Cristina Rivera Garza, Ana Ivonne Reyes Chiquete, Orfa Alarcón, Malú Huacuja del Toro, and others.

This book provides a collection of in-depth reviews broadly related to the mechanisms of viral replication as applied to various viruses of critical relevance for human or animal disease. Specifically, this book contains six different chapters: 1) Influenza A Virus Multiplication and the Cellular SUMOylation System; 2) West Nile Virus: Basic Principles, Replication Mechanism, Immune Response and Important Genetic Determinants of Virulence; 3) Hepatitis B Virus Genetic Diversity: Disease Pathogenesis; 4) An Overview of the Immune Evasion Strategies Adopted by Different Viruses With Special Reference to Classical Swine Fever Virus; 5) Viral Replication Strategies: Manipulation of ER Stress Response Pathways and Promotion of IRES-Dependent Translation; 6) Antiviral Replication Agents. This book is aimed at students, scholars, professors, and investigators who are peripherally related to, or somehow intrigued by, the different areas of virology covered in this book, as well as at those individuals with greater expertise and knowledge in the topics herein presented who may want up-to-date in depth reviews related to such topics.

Focusing on an oft-neglected geographical region of study, this book critically analyses the state of journalism in the European South and considers challenges that may indicate a profession under duress. Focusing on three Mediterranean media systems, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta, this book summarizes the basic characteristics, threats, and challenges for journalism in the region. The book first examines the “North-South” divide in Europe and the challenges Mediterranean media systems have faced in recent years. It then analyzes points of dispute for journalism, such as press freedom, investigative reporting, corruption, post-crisis economic challenges, and the evolving dilemmas of journalism ethics. The second section of the book looks more closely at the three case studies, using data extracted over a turbulent 20-year timeframe up until 2023. Based on a mixed-methods approach, the study comprises findings of interviews with journalists in the three countries under study and time series analysis of feedback regarding challenges discussed earlier in the book. The book concludes on whether journalism today is indeed under attack and reflects critically on what are the main threats that have emerged in media systems of the Mediterranean region. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers of journalism and media systems in Europe, although also bears implications for anyone studying wider issues of press freedom and journalism practice.

The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and slavery, and as its thinkers and fighters blazed the path to universal freedom, they forced anticolonial, antislavery, and antiracist ideals into modern political grammar. The first state in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery, outlaw color prejudice, and forbid colonialism, Haitians established their nation in a hostile Atlantic World. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the rest of the Americas and foreign nations and empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty. Yet Haitian writers and politicians successfully defended their independence while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian statehood. In Awakening the Ashes , Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.

In Stigma Stories: Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness, Molly Margaret Kessler focuses on ostomies and gastrointestinal conditions to show how stigma is nearly as central to living with chronic conditions as the conditions themselves. Drawing on a multi-year study that includes participant observations, interviews, and rhetorical engagement with public health campaigns, blogs, social media posts, and news articles, Stigma Stories advocates for a rhetorical praxiographic approach that is attuned to the rhetorical processes, experiences, and practices in which stigma is enacted or countered. Engaging interdisciplinary conversations from the rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, narrative medicine, and sociology, Kessler takes an innovative look at how stigma functions on individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. In doing so, Kessler reveals how stories and lived experiences have much to teach us not only about how stigma functions but also about how it can be dismantled.

Molecular toxicology is a field that investigates the interactions between chemical or biological molecules and organisms at the molecular level. In this Special Issue, we focus on the toxic effects and mechanisms of action of chemical and biological molecules, will be of great interest of readers in molecular toxicology and applied pharmacology.

Environmental quality is crucial to our health, economy, lives, and for future generations. However, during the last few years, we have faced several serious challenges, which include, but are not limited to, climate change, unsustainable consumption and production, as well as various forms of pollution. These challenges are of global concerns for the sustainable development of human beings. This reprint has collected review and research papers aimed at a wide range of environmental topics: water and wastewater treatment and management, soil degradation and conservation, pollution control, the environmental impact of technologies, air quality and the indoor environment, and advanced environmental materials. Analytical methods developed for the determination of environmental pollutants were also welcomed. Papers dealing in the synthesis of adsorbents for the solid-phase extraction of environmental pollutants also fell within the scope of this Special Issue. Contributions describing novel and significant knowledge, scientific results, and advanced applications in the field of environmental sciences and technology were also welcomed. This reprint provides an integrated view of the trends in solving the problems associated with the achievement of sustainability in environmental technology.