Russia's devastating invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a manifestation of a wider phenomenon: Russia's new, post-Soviet imperialism. This book provides a theoretically informed, critical account of Russian imperialism that is attentive to the interplay between economy and ideology, coercion and hegemony, structure and agency. While economic developments go a long way toward explaining the reemergence of Russia's imperialist impulses in the twenty-first century, a purely economic logic cannot account for the dramatic shift in Russian imperialism beginning with the annexation of Crimea and the instigation of a separatist insurgency in the Donbas. Nor can objective geopolitical developments, such as US and NATO military deployments, provide an adequate explanation for this shift. Instead, this book shows how the Kremlin's reaction to the Maidan revolution was rooted in the ideological consolidation of the previous years: the emergence of a total ideology that designates the West as Russia's eternal enemy and Ukraine as the West's geopolitical pawn. Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev examine Russian foreign policy and the Kremlin's project to remake the Russian people to better serve its imperialist agenda.

This book provides valuable insights into the ways in which economics and management science contribute to sustainable development, organizational innovation, and social well-being. Featuring peer-reviewed contributions presented at the World Conference on Economics and Management (WorldCEM 25) held in Aveiro, Portugal, this book showcases how advanced research methodologies, innovative models, and empirical studies can inform better decision-making across sectors and regions. Featuring interdisciplinary approaches and real-world applications to offer a bridge between theory and practice, this book provides academics, scholars, researchers, and professionals with advanced scholarship in economics and management while also inspiring future research in responsible leadership, evidence-based policymaking, and inclusive growth in a rapidly changing world.

This book offers an analysis of reward-based crowdfunding based on empirical case studies and gift exchange theory. Reward-based crowdfunding projects aim to produce products that, in addition to their consumer value, also have value in terms of promoting a good cause. Supporters of the projects receive non-financial rewards for their financial contributions. The main rewards are the products of the projects. The book shows that the key to understanding reward-based crowdfunding lies in a three-way relationship between consumption, connection to a cause of deeper meaning, and belonging to a community of like-minded people. The connection between purchase and donation, between consumption and commitment, is thus established by the fact that supporters act as consumers on the one hand, but on the other hand associate a deeper meaning with the object of consumption, which motivates them to engage more strongly with this object than with 'normal' products. The book is aimed at social, media and economic scientists who are interested in the phenomena of the sharing economy, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

This Open Access book argues for a more prominent position on political and policy agendas for European population ageing. In the coming two decades, ageing populations will put significant pressure on pension systems, budgets, and economies in the European Union. Increasingly close integration between EU member states through political ties, trade and a common currency, means ageing in one country will have a direct impact on other member states. The book sketches four potential risks with cross-border implications: economic stagnation within the EU, high national debts and divergence, upward pressure on inflation, and socio-political tension within and between member states. In the report European Aging in Focus. Dealing with Pension and Budgetary Risks, the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) outlines three policy directions to anticipate and mitigate these risks: anticipate an ageing European Union and prepare society for it; steer at the EU level towards ageing-resilient socio-economic and pension policies; and protect at the national level against potential negative consequences of European ageing. While this book has a specific focus on the position of the Netherlands within an ageing Europe, it is of interest to policy makers and researchers across Europe interested in population ageing, associated pension and budgetary risks, and particularly in potential effects of these risks across national borders.

Contrary to what German historians often claim, the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century did not peter out or even fail. Although the Nazi dictatorship destroyed the Bauhaus, Dada, and their legacy in Germany in the 1930s, it also triggered a wave of emigration. Many of those who were displaced went to the United States, where they contributed to the avant-gardization of the art world, and where subsequent generations were able to continue developing the project that had remained unfinished in Europe.

Walter Benjamin coined the term "politicization of art" to describe the efforts of avant-garde artists who opposed the "aestheticization of politics" by fascism. The cultural centers of the United States succeeded in picking up on the impetus of activist art practices. This study examines the characteristic differences between the art worlds on both sides of the Atlantic, which arose as a result of historical developments and continue to exist to this day.

This book offers a rigorous and historically grounded analysis of Black women's political thought, activism, and institutional engagement across six decades. This book begins with 1965-a pivotal year in which the Voting Rights Act fundamentally transformed political participation for African Americans and, notably, the year Kamala Harris was born. This temporal convergence serves as the book's organizing framework, illustrating how the expansion of voting rights and the evolution of Black feminist politics created the conditions that made Harris's Vice Presidency possible. Drawing on political science, history, gender studies, and Black feminist theory, the chapters trace major developments in U.S. political life from 1965 to 2025. Topics include the interventions of Michelle Wallace, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker, as well as the implications of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings for understanding gendered political vulnerability. The analysis also engages the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, showing how contemporary movements-including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the resistance to book bans-extend a longer tradition of Black feminist political critique. The text foregrounds key analytical concepts such as linked fate and Black feminist epistemology, making it an essential resource for scholars and students of American politics, African American studies, and feminist theory. By situating Kamala Harris's Vice Presidency within a broader historical trajectory, the book demonstrates that Black feminist political behavior is indispensable to understanding the development of modern U.S. democracy.

With each edition of Black Feminist Politics, Duchess Harris solidifies its position as an essential and enduring text that affirms the vital importance of using a Black Feminist analysis to interpret US politics, society, and culture.

Crystal M. Moten, author of Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee

This open access book presents a comprehensive exploration of resilient innovation and innovation for resilience within the context of the PR China Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). By integrating insights from diverse stakeholders, it offers a fresh perspective on enhancing resilience through innovation while promoting sustainable practices and advanced innovation solutions for enhancing resilience..
The innovative approach proposes collaborative frameworks that leverage existing initiatives in standardization, research, and international cooperation as foundational elements for building resilience. This book aims to create a network of innovation centers along the BRI, fostering international collaboration and knowledge exchange.
Covering a wide range of innovation and resilience related topics, the content includes assessments, regulations, risk management, and the role of critical infrastructures and the society in enhancing resilience. It is designed for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners interested in the intersection of innovation, sustainability, and international cooperation.
Key features of the book include:
1. Collaborative Insights: Contributions from a diverse array of experts and stakeholders, providing a multifaceted view of resilience in innovation.
2. Practical Frameworks: Actionable suggestions for implementing resilient innovation strategies, supported by case studies.
3. Strategic Relevance: Aligns with current global challenges, offering timely insights into the role of innovation in addressing systemic risks and enhancing sustainability.
This book is an essential resource for anyone looking to understand and contribute to the future of resilient innovation both along the Belt & Road Initiative and in a broader international context.

Pain in Relation: On Causality, Chronicity, and (Crip) Evidence argues that the dominant stories circulating within contemporary US culture are marked by seemingly contradictory certainties: pain is at once subjective yet universal; that pain makes life unlivable and can be overcome with perseverance. These certainties graft onto pained people into impossible imperatives: the imperatives to live "despite" our pain and to defend the value of lives imagined to be compromised "because of" it. Alyson Patsavas outlines the harm these imperatives cause and draws on feminist, queer, and disability theory to offer alternative frameworks for making sense of and relating to pain.

The study fleshes out "crip autotheory" and experiments with evidencing practices, using anecdotes, journal entries, personal reflections, list-making, and photography to map "cripistemologies of pain," or critical, disability-informed experiential ways of knowing pain. Equal parts cultural critique, intimate portrait of pained life, and commentary, Pain in Relation invites readers to challenge what they think they know about pain and explore new ways of relating to pain, pained life, and the futures we imagine for pained people.

This book offers a historical review of globalization, an in-depth analysis of its current crises, along with predictions and practical prescriptions for its future development. Drawing on comparative studies of political and financial systems, economic models, intellectual cultures and ideologies, scientific and technological development, and crises management (pandemic, environment, etc.,), it argues that it's necessary to build a new form of globalization which is more conducive to global peace and prosperity. Also this book discusses how the Covid-19 pandemic is a watershed event that will have a significant impact on the future course of globalization. The strict lockdown policies implemented across the world highlight the threat that pandemics can pose to globalization, and have amplified the voices advocating Sino-American decoupling. However, the author is confident that it will lead to an alternative form of globalization instead by highlighting the need for greater international cooperation when facing health crises on a global scale.

This book asks what peace means when the state wages war against its own citizens in the name of security in the war on drugs. Set in Rio de Janeiro, a deeply unequal city where life chances are shaped by race, class, gender and neighbourhood, it questions whose peace is protected, and at whose expense. Tracing the historical racialisation, marginalisation and criminalisation of the favelas, the book shows how this has resulted in complex forms of hybrid governance involving criminal groups, police and the state. It conceptualizes urban violence in Rio as a form of performative, necropolitical state war-making, where a discourse of security sustains deadly and inefficient operations in the favelas. In this violent context, the book explores favela peace formation as a grassroots alternative, in which residents construct new forms of nonviolent politics and envision more just and peaceful futures, offering important insights for rethinking and decolonizing peace.

This landmark volume offers the first comprehensive demographic examination of family transformation in contemporary India, situating the country's evolving landscape within the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) framework. It reveals a family system in flux, caught between deep-rooted collectivist traditions and rising individual aspirations. Grounded in extensive primary research, including unique, large-scale surveys across India, the book offers a thoughtful, data-driven analysis of how shifting family dynamics and evolving models of family-building are impacting vulnerable populations. These include women managing the "second shift," children shaped by diverse family structures, the elderly facing the erosion of care networks, and families bearing the responsibility of caring for disabled members. It navigates critical topics from transformations in nuptial bonding and cohabitation patterns among the urban educated to shifting childbearing practices and evolving marriage markets. What distinguishes this treatise is its capture of the fundamental dialectic: the tension between the "golden cage" of traditional marriage and the shadows of the SDT, rising age at marriage, marital dissolution, and individual self-actualisation, unfolding within persistent familial obligation and their impact on women's status and economic empowerment. Weaving macro-level data with rich micro-level evidence, the volume illuminates both winners and losers of this transition, offering indispensable insights for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners worldwide.

A powerful argument that the failure of ideology has created political disconnection and apathy

Political institutions increasingly fail to provide representations where citizens can recognize, identify, and imagine themselves as part of the institutions' democratic project. Robin Truth Goodman argues that this disconnection is because ideology itself has gotten interrupted. Reversing Louis Althusser's famous formulation of ideology as "calling" to citizens who, in response, turn toward the call, she argues that citizens now feel that ideology has turned away from them and stopped calling, endangering the most basic processes of modern democracies.

Deconstructing the widespread failure of democratic institutions to connect with individuals, Goodman examines recent works by authors such as Claire Vaye Watkins, Colson Whitehead, Ling Ma, Han Kang, and Ruth Ozeki that interrogate subjective agency within three different sites of social struggle: eco-catastrophe, pandemic, and food insecurity. She shows the themes that emerge from the novels reflecting and extending how the privatization and technologization of political decision-making have effectively cut off politicians and political institutions from the people they are supposed to serve.

Basing her study in the political philosophy of Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, and other prominent feminists, Goodman draws parallels with gender theory and argues that precarity in democratic societies has prevented citizens from finding points of engagement within politics. Diagnosing this widespread inability to translate private struggles into collective responses, Ideology, Interrupted is a powerful and inspiring call for new forms of societal bonds and political engagement to rejuvenate our democratic systems.

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