This multi-disciplinary book conceptualizes, maps, and analyses ongoing standardization processes of risk issues across various sectors, processes, and practices. Standards are not only technical specifications and guidelines to support efficient risk governance, but also contain social, political, economic, and organizational aspects. This book presents a variety of standardization processe…
Presenting an ethnographic account of the emergence and application of critical political alternatives in the Global South, this book analyses the opportunities and challenges of decolonizing and transforming a modern, hierarchical and globally-immersed nation-state on the basis of indigenous terminologies. Alternative development paradigms that represent values including justice, pluralism,…
This open access book takes the current state of the Union seriously. The European Union is at a crossroads. Slowly recovering from a series of financial and economic crises, with trust fundamentally shaken by processes of disaggregation and increasingly nationalist politics, it is searching for new visions that are at once inspiring and workable. In its White Paper of 1 March 2017, the Commiss…
This book provides an analysis of the global monetary system and the necessary reforms that it should undergo to play an active role in the twenty-first century. As its title indicates, its basic diagnosis is that it is an ad hoc framework rather than a coherent system—a ‘non-system’—which evolved after the breakdown of the original Bretton Woods arrangement in the early 1970s. The book…
This open access book examines the educational conditions that support cultures of exploration in kindergartens. It conceptualises cultures of exploration, whether those cultures are created through children’s own engagement or are demanded of them through undertaking specific tasks within different institutional settings. It shows how the conditions for children’s exploration form a web of…
This publication discusses Russia’s foreign, security, defence, and military policies from both Euro-Atlantic and Russian perspectives. More importantly – this work acts as an essential platform for analysing the security challenges linked with Russia and the required responses of the Euro-Atlantic community to the complex challenges posed by Russia’s actions in the region and on a global…
Despite the fact that the globalization process tends to reinforce existing inequality structures and generate new areas of inequality on multiple levels, systematic analyses on this very important field remain scarce. Hence, this book approaches the complex question of inequality not only from different regional perspectives, covering Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and Northern America, but also …
This book explores what social justice looks like for rural schools in Australia. The author challenges the consensus that sees the distribution of resources as the panacea for the myriad challenges faced by rural schools and argues that the solution to inequality and injustice in rural settings has to take into account other important dimensions of social justice such as recognition and associ…
Until recently, most grape-based wine was consumed close to where it was produced, and mostly that was in Europe. Now more than two-fifths of all wine consumed globally is produced in another country, including in the Southern Hemisphere, the USA and Asia. This latest edition of global wine statistics not only updates data to 2016 but also adds another century of data. The motivation to assembl…
This open access book includes a series of relevant policy research articles, elaborared in the framework of the “Quality in higher education: internationalisation and databases to enhance the Romanian education system” project, implemented by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI), together with the Ministry of Education. The proj…