Walter Benjamin is one of the most influential authors in contemporary humanities, exerting a deep fascination for students and garnering scholarly interest in a variety of fields, such as history of philosophy, literature, film and media studies, political science, religion, architecture, art and history. This Handbook provides students and scholars with a guide to Walter Benjamin's work that explores each of these areas in depth while also giving the reader a chance to discover connections to other areas of thought.

In order to do justice to the complexity of Benjamin's thinking, this volume includes international scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, and is organized such that a dialogue emerges between them. Each section presents an argument for the integration of its subject into the whole, demonstrating that what might seem specialized and esoteric actually intersects with the problems and questions of the other sections.

During half a century after the war Japan's economy was built up from scratch to the world's number two, while its foreign policy has been described by many as passive and even verging on being non-existent. As a contrast, this book evinces how the foundations of Japan's foreign policy were laid in the early postwar period, and how postwar policies have been characterized by pervasive continuity, guided by distinct national goals and expressed in clear-cut national role conceptions. The far-reaching changes after the end of the Cold War transformed Japan's domestic political system. Consequently, the analyses for 1946-93 (covered in the first edition) and 1993-2020 (added in the current edition) are structured differently. In the former, each prime minister gets a chapter except for the initial period 1946-54 when three premiers figure, while the prime ministers for 1993-2020 are treated as members of triads, except the long-reigning Koizumi Junichiro and Abe Shinzo.

This open access book brings together established and emerging scholars to explore policies, statistical trends and representative research on gender equity across post-Soviet Central Asia. The book provides an overview of policy development in the promotion of gender equity, a comparative summary of changes in gender equity indicators at various levels of education, and examples of current research on an array of issues relating to gender equity across the region. The chapters present a broad picture which will be relevant to scholars of educational reform, comparative education policy, international development and gender issues.

Taking an inclusive approach, this Handbook assesses both mainstream and radical approaches to IR. Chapters examine key aspects of international security, with discussions of terrorism, cybersecurity, diplomatic and intelligence studies, alongside an analysis of the differences, origins and evolution of peace science and conflict processes. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical debates and diverse case studies, authors explore issues relating to comparative foreign policy, critical international political economy and trade. They investigate the legalization of world politics, with a focus on international organizations, law and human rights, and the world environment. Expanding on an individual's role in IR, they also explore themes such as ethnicity and nationalism, global health and religion.

Broad in scope, this Handbook advances both academic and policy knowledge, theorising and empirically apprehending the current state of IR for students, scholars and researchers of International Relations, politics and foreign policy. Global think tanks and foreign policymakers will additionally find the insights presented here beneficial.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

The realities of autonomous weapons are a complex blend of both existing military technologies and visions of their future capabilities. The expected ramifications are profound and always point to the interplay between fact and fiction, actual developments and creative imagination.

This book explores how these realities shape and become themselves shaped by popular culture, regulatory and ethics debates, military doctrines, policies and research. It examines phenomena ranging from film and artistic interpretations to warfare scenarios and weaponized artificial intelligence.

Intended for researchers (including the disciplines of political and social sciences, media, culture and technology), policy makers, educators and journalists, this is a key resource that uncovers how autonomous weapons are constructed as both a technological reality and a futuristic?possibility.

The book aims to present a history of the Silk Roads in the Caucasus region from the sixth century to the early fifteenth century-the end of the Mongol-Timurid era and the beginning of the Age of Discoveries, which began ushering in shifts in global connectivity. The volume is based on a range of Georgian, Armenian, Western, Arab, and Persian sources that are often neglected in other works on the Silk Roads. The book demonstrates that the Caucasus served as a major highway in connecting the Eurasian steppes with the Middle East and the Black Sea with inner Asia.

This book explores masculinities of Tajik men and offers insights on how migrant and non-migrant men maintain their gender identity and adjust their gender practices in the context of transnational labor migration from Tajikistan to Russia. Being in the state of transnational in-betweenness, Tajik non/migrant men and often their spouses need to adapt to gender norms of both Russian and Tajik gender orders despite the orders' very different and at times contradicting gender requirements. Therefore, the book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Tajik non/migrant men's masculinities and their navigation between various forms of masculinity: hegemonic, complicit, marginalized, protest and dominant, thereby performing flexible and strategic masculinity. While focusing on migrant men, this research also highlights the role of women in sustaining their partners' masculine image and the ways how Russian women adjust their gender practices in response to the requirements of Tajik society.

This book is a record of a seminar on mathematical logic Kurt Goedel and Hans Hahn held in Vienna in 1931-32. The seminar proceedings, given in English translation, are a unique witness of the state of research in logic and foundations of mathematics right after Goedel had published his celebrated incompleteness theorems. The seminars explain Goedel's results in logic in detail, in contrast to his publications of the time that often were quite laconic and extremely short. This book also contains Goedel's trial lecture on intuitionistic logic held in Vienna in 1933. The manuscript, recently found among the Goedel papers kept in Princeton, is preserved in Goedel's forgotten German shorthand and published here in an English translation.

The book also adds an important aspect to the intellectual history of Vienna, as both Goedel and Hahn were members of the Vienna Circle group of philosophers and scientists.

This book gives a critical evaluation of the Vienna Circle, its historical influences, and the philosophical legacy of logical empiricism. The first part of the volume contains nine original research articles by leading experts in the field on the philosophical work of Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Otto Neurath, Janina Hosiassion-Lindenbaum, Susan Stebbing, and Gustav Hempel (among others) and their respective influence on subsequent developments in philosophy and the science studies. Topics addressed in the volume include: scientific humanism and non-cognitivism, scientific pluralism, the post-war reception of Logical Empiricism, relativism and the sociology of science, inductive reasoning and probability theory, as well as aspects of logical theory reconstruction. This book is of relevance to scholars and advanced students interested in the history of logical empiricism and the history of philosophy of science more generally.

This book investigates the beginnings of Spanish colonialism in Morocco in the mid-nineteenth century, focusing on the Spanish invasion of northern Morocco and the twenty-seven-month occupation of the city of Tetouan from 1859 to 1862. By homing in on specific events, scenes, and records, the book reveals both the micro-processes of everyday life and the larger systems of beliefs, values, and representations informing them. It scrutinises the contours of the incipient Hispano-Moroccan modern colonial formation by recourse to comparative analysis of dynamics across the Islamicate, Mediterranean, and Atlantic worlds, while also emphasising the importance of local notions, spaces, and peoples in the modelling of colonial epistemologies and practices. The author adopts different disciplinary approaches, questions the dominant modes of historical knowledge production, and explores colonial power from a feminist intersectional perspective, thus acknowledging the polysemic nature of colonial rule for different historical subjects - including the lower-class and female subalterns.