For over 60 years, decentralisation has been one of the most powerful reform movements in the world, affecting all of its regions and most of its coun-tries. This marks a major inversion of the much-longer-term global pattern, which featured centralised public administrations and the gradual march of the bureaucratic instruments of centralisation across large parts of the world ove…
Since beginning this project, I have practiced a daily routine of scrolling through news sites and taking screenshots of Anthropocene-related stories. I have quickly accumulated quite an archive. Browsing through my collection, I log that most of the climate headlines are dark, dim, and foreboding. I also notice an increasing number of announcements about the end o…
A hands-on approach to exploring the human mind Too often, textbooks turn the noteworthy theories, principles, and experiments of psychology into tedious discourse that even Freud would want to repress. Psych 101 cuts out the boring details and statistics, and instead, gives you a lesson in psychology that keeps you engaged - and your synapses firing. From personality quizzes and the Rors…
Too often, textbooks turn the noteworthy theories, principles, and figures of philosophy into tedious discourse that even Plato would reject. Philosophy 101 cuts out the boring details and exhausting philosophical methodology, and instead, gives you a lesson in philosophy that keeps you engaged as you explore the fascinating history of human thought and inquisition. From Aristotle and Heideg…
Cities and water have a love-hate relationship (Feldman 2017). This is especially true of rivers in many cities in Asia, which, like cities in the rest of the world, owe their locations to rivers and the trading opportunities and water sources these rivers provided. In recent years, cities across China have been beautifying and extending their waterfronts, and cities as diverse as Singapore and…
This is the first volume of the story of a tiny theatre company in a distant part of the UK that operated like a political cell; or alternatively, of a political cell that operated as a theatre company.A39 Theatre Group came into being because of the great Miners’ Strike of 1984–85. It embraced the label ‘agitprop’ as a badge of honour. A39 was moti…
In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature – and modes of literary thinking – as a key resource for such a task.
Nuclear safety and security—the protection of nuclear facilities, weapons, technologies, and materials against accidents or attacks—is an under-studied area of international security studies.1 Periodically, the subject has received high levels of attention. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, scholars and policymakers worried intense…
Albert Hoffstädt was the architect of a unique cooperation between Brill pub-lishers and the Leiden Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguis-tics, a cooperation that has so far resulted in a series of twelve etymological dictionaries and an online publication of fifteen etymological databases (). In all the years that Albert was directly involved …
I introduce this volume with distinct pleasure, since it marks the final step in a journey that started seven years ago, at the ICLA 2013 at the Sorbonne. The deci-sion to host the ICLA 2016 at the University of Vienna meant that, from 2013 to 2016, I had to face the biggest organizational challenge of my career, since I had the honour to support Achim Hölter, the chair …