EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Contagion and War

Download or read book Contagion and War written by John A. Vasquez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John A. Vasquez explains the processes that cause the spread of interstate war by looking at how contagion worked to bring countries into the First World War. Analysing all the key states that declared war, the book is comprised of three parts. Part I lays out six models of contagion: alliances, contiguity, territorial rivalry, opportunity, 'brute force', economic dependence. Part II then analyses in detail the decision making of every state that entered the war from Austria-Hungary in 1914 to the United States and Greece in 1917. Part III has two chapters - the first considers the neutral countries, and the second concludes the book with an overarching theoretical analysis, including major lessons of the war and new hypotheses about contagion. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, conflict studies and international history, especially those interested in the spread of conflict, or the First World War.

Book Kept from All Contagion

Download or read book Kept from All Contagion written by Kari Nixon and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: "The germ theory again" : disease, ideology, and the possibilities of biotic life in the world of antibiotic purity -- Keep bleeding : plague, vaccination debates, and the necessity of leaky boundaries in Defoe's Journal of the plague year and Shelley's The last man -- "A speculative idea" : childbed fever, early germ theory debates, and (en)gendered speculation in Henry James's Washington Square -- Separation and suffocation : tuberculosis, etiological uncertainty, and female friendship in women's fiction -- Tainted love : venereal disease, morality, and the contagious disease acts in Ibsen's Ghosts and Hardy's The woodlanders and Jude the obscure -- Humanity's waste : typhoid fever, the failure of isolation, and the development of probiotics in three late-century works -- Conclusion: Shuffling within our mortal coil : concluding remarks.

Book Contagion

    Book Details:
  • Author : Bruce Magnusson
  • Publisher : University of Washington Press
  • Release : 2012-09-01
  • ISBN : 0295804203
  • Pages : 213 pages

Download or read book Contagion written by Bruce Magnusson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over many decades, "contagion" has been a metaphor of choice for everything from global terrorism, suicide bombings, poverty, immigration, global financial crises, human rights, fast food, obesity, divorce, and homosexuality. Essays examine the language of epidemiology used in the war on terror, the repressive effects of global disease surveillance, and films and novels that enact the perplexities of contagion in a global context. Fear of microbial disaster becomes a framework for larger questions about the nature and location of sovereignty and the related questions of contact and hygienic isolation, fear and invisibility, the hazards of sociability, the security of surveillance, and what a healthy security might mean. Utilizing the cross-disciplinary approach of global studies, contagion emerges as a vexed trope for globalization itself.

Book Troubled Regions and Failing States

Download or read book Troubled Regions and Failing States written by Kristian Berg Harpviken and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-07 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the phenomenon of state failure better understood through a focus on the regional context? To what extent may studies of regional security benefit from a focus on the capacities and vulnerabilities of the states involved? This title addresses these questions.

Book Contagion and Chaos

Download or read book Contagion and Chaos written by Andrew T. Price-Smith and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-12-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of infectious disease as a threat to national security that examines the destabilizing effects of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, SARS, and Mad Cow Disease. Historians from Thucydides to William McNeill have pointed to the connections between disease and civil society. Political scientists have investigated the relationship of public health to governance, introducing the concept of health security. In Contagion and Chaos, Andrew Price-Smith offers the most comprehensive examination yet of disease through the lens of national security. Extending the analysis presented in his earlier book The Health of Nations, Price-Smith argues that epidemic disease represents a direct threat to the power of a state, eroding prosperity and destabilizing both its internal politics and its relationships with other states. He contends that the danger of an infectious pathogen to national security depends on lethality, transmissability, fear, and economic damage. Moreover, warfare and ecological change contribute to the spread of disease and act as “disease amplifiers.” Price-Smith presents a series of case studies to illustrate his argument: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19 (about which he advances the controversial claim that the epidemic contributed to the defeat of Germany and Austria); HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa (he contrasts the worst-case scenario of Zimbabwe with the more stable Botswana); bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as mad cow disease); and the SARS contagion of 2002-03. Emerging infectious disease continues to present a threat to national and international security, Price-Smith argues, and globalization and ecological change only accelerate the danger.

Book Thought Contagion

Download or read book Thought Contagion written by Aaron Lynch and published by . This book was released on 2008-08-06 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynch’s groundbreaking examination of memetics--the new study of how ideas and beliefs spread. What characterizes a meme is its capacity for displacing rival ideas and beliefs in an evolutionary drama that determines and changes the way people think. Exactly how do ideas spread, and what are the factors that make them genuine thought contagions? Why, for instance, do some beliefs spread throughout society, while others dwindle to extinction? What drives those intensely held beliefs that spawn ideological and political debates such as views on abortion and opinions about sex and sexuality?By drawing on examples from everyday life, Lynch develops a conceptual basis for understanding memetics. Memes evolve by natural selection in a process similar to that of Genes in evolutionary biology. What makes an idea a potent meme is how effectively it out-propagates other ideas. In memetic evolution, the "fittest ideas” are not always the truest or the most helpful, but the ones best at self replication.Thus, crash diets spread not because of lasting benefit, but by alternating episodes of dramatic weight loss and slow regain. Each sudden thinning provokes onlookers to ask, "How did you do it?” thereby manipulating them to experiment with the diet and in turn, spread it again. The faster the pounds return, the more often these people enter that disseminating phase, all of which favors outbreaks of the most pathogenic diets. Like a software virus traveling on the Internet or a flu strain passing through a city, thought contagions proliferate by programming for their own propagation. Lynch argues that certain beliefs spread like viruses and evolve like microbes, as mutant strains vie for more adherents and more hosts. In its most revolutionary aspect, memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people. Readers of this intriguing theory will be amazed to discover that many popular beliefs about family, sex, politics, religion, health, and war have succeeded by their "fitness” as thought contagions.

Book The Contagion of Liberty

Download or read book The Contagion of Liberty written by Andrew M. Wehrman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author argues that a demand for public solutions during smallpox epidemics of the eighteenth century, especially broad access to inoculation, influenced revolutionary politics and changed the way that Americans understood their health and governmental responsibilities to protect it"--

Book Emotional Contagion

    Book Details:
  • Author : Elaine Hatfield
  • Publisher : Cambridge University Press
  • Release : 1994
  • ISBN : 9780521449489
  • Pages : 256 pages

Download or read book Emotional Contagion written by Elaine Hatfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the phenomenon of emotion contagion, or the communication of mood to others.

Book How Behavior Spreads

    Book Details:
  • Author : Damon Centola
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2020-03-24
  • ISBN : 0691202427
  • Pages : 308 pages

Download or read book How Behavior Spreads written by Damon Centola and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new, counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behavior New social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue. Can the lessons learned from the viral diffusion of diseases improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? How Behavior Spreads presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior—in voting, health, technology, and finance—occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate. Damon Centola's startling findings show that the same conditions that accelerate the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors. How Behavior Spreads is a must-read for anyone interested in how the theory of social networks can transform our world.

Book Contagion and Conflict

Download or read book Contagion and Conflict written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Mixed Emotions

    Book Details:
  • Author : Andrew A. G. Ross
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2013-12-06
  • ISBN : 022607756X
  • Pages : 227 pages

Download or read book Mixed Emotions written by Andrew A. G. Ross and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that emotion plays a central role in global politics. For example, people readily care about acts of terrorism and humanitarian crises because they appeal to our compassion for human suffering. These struggles also command attention where social interactions have the power to produce or intensify the emotional responses of those who participate in them. From passionate protests to poignant speeches, Andrew A. G. Ross analyzes high-emotion events with an eye to how they shape public sentiment and finds that there is no single answer. The politically powerful play to the public’s emotions to advance their political aims, and such appeals to emotion also often serve to sustain existing values and institutions. But the affective dimension can produce profound change, particularly when a struggle in the present can be shown to line up with emotionally resonant events from the past. Extending his findings to well-studied conflicts, including the War on Terror and the violence in Rwanda and the Balkans, Ross identifies important sites of emotional impact missed by earlier research focused on identities and interests.

Book Breaking the Conflict Trap

Download or read book Breaking the Conflict Trap written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2003-05-30 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil war conflict is a core development issue. The existence of civil war can dramatically slow a country's development process, especially in low-income countries which are more vulnerable to civil war conflict. Conversely, development can impede civil war. When development succeeds, countries become safer when development fails, they experience a greater risk of being caught in a conflict trap. Ultimately, civil war is a failure of development. 'Breaking the Conflict Trap' identifies the dire consequences that civil war has on the development process and offers three main findings. First, civil war has adverse ripple effects that are often not taken into account by those who determine whether wars start or end. Second, some countries are more likely than others to experience civil war conflict and thus, the risks of civil war differ considerably according to a country's characteristics including its economic stability. Finally, Breaking the Conflict Trap explores viable international measures that can be taken to reduce the global incidence of civil war and proposes a practical agenda for action. This book should serve as a wake up call to anyone in the international community who still thinks that development and conflict are distinct issues.

Book The Genocide Contagion

    Book Details:
  • Author : Israel W. Charny
  • Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
  • Release : 2016-07-15
  • ISBN : 144225436X
  • Pages : 253 pages

Download or read book The Genocide Contagion written by Israel W. Charny and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Genocide Contagion, Israel W. Charny asks uncomfortable questions about what allows people to participate in genocide—either directly, through killing or other violent acts, or indirectly, by sitting passively while witnessing genocidal acts. Charny draws on both historical and current examples such as the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, and presses readers around the world to consider how they might contribute to genocide. Given the number of people who die from genocide or suffer indirect consequences such as forced migration, Charny argues that we must all work to resist and to learn about ourselves before critical moments arise.

Book The Diffusion of War

    Book Details:
  • Author : Randolph M. Siverson
  • Publisher : University of Michigan Press
  • Release : 1991
  • ISBN : 9780472102471
  • Pages : 168 pages

Download or read book The Diffusion of War written by Randolph M. Siverson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of wars and what causes them to expand

Book Criminal Contagion

    Book Details:
  • Author : Tuesday Reitano
  • Publisher : Hurst Publishers
  • Release : 2021-07-01
  • ISBN : 1787386163
  • Pages : 172 pages

Download or read book Criminal Contagion written by Tuesday Reitano and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covid-19 is reshaping and challenging governments, societies and economies in previously unimaginable ways—but gangsters and profiteers have adapted. They have found new routes for illegal commodities, from narcotics to people. Shortages, lockdowns and public attitudes have brought the underworld and upperworld closer together, as criminals strive to meet needs, maximise opportunities and fill governance vacuums. Unscrupulous fraudsters are touting fake remedies to desperate people: counterfeit drugs, and trafficked wildlife used in traditional medicine. Social distancing and restrictions have seen online transactions and cyber-ops replacing or supplementing physical shipments, opening opportunities for scammers and hackers. Heavy-handed state responses have created new illicit markets by prohibiting the sale of particular goods and services, while some elites have capitalised on the pandemic for personal or political gain. Covid has cast a long shadow over the rule of law. Criminal Contagion uncovers its extraordinary impacts on the global illicit economy, and their long-term implications.

Book Plagues in the Nation

    Book Details:
  • Author : Polly J. Price
  • Publisher : Beacon Press
  • Release : 2022-05-10
  • ISBN : 0807043494
  • Pages : 274 pages

Download or read book Plagues in the Nation written by Polly J. Price and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expert legal review of the US government’s response to epidemics through history—with larger conclusions about COVID-19, and reforms needed for the next plague In this narrative history of the US through major outbreaks of contagious disease, from yellow fever to the Spanish flu, from HIV/AIDS to Ebola, Polly J. Price examines how law and government affected the outcome of epidemics—and how those outbreaks in turn shaped our government. Price presents a fascinating history that has never been fully explored and draws larger conclusions about the gaps in our governmental and legal response. Plagues in the Nation examines how our country learned—and failed to learn—how to address the panic, conflict, and chaos that are the companions of contagion, what policies failed America again and again, and what we must do better next time.

Book Agent Based Modeling of Social Conflict

Download or read book Agent Based Modeling of Social Conflict written by Carlos M. Lemos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Brief revisits and extends Epstein’s classical agent-based model of civil violence by considering important mechanisms suggested by social conflict theories. Among them are: relative deprivation as generator of hardship, generalized vanishing of the risk perception (‘massive fear loss’) when the uprisings surpass a certain threshold, endogenous legitimacy feedback, and network influence effects represented by the mechanism of dispositional contagion. The model is explored in a set of computer experiments designed to provide insight on how mechanisms lead to increased complexity of the solutions. The results of the simulations are compared with statistical analyses of estimated size, duration and recurrence of large demonstrations and riots for eight African countries affected by the “Arab Spring,” based on the Social Conflict Analysis Database. It is shown that the extensions to Epstein’s model proposed herein lead to increased “generative capacity” of the agent-based model (i.e. a richer set of meaningful qualitative behaviors) as well the identification of key mechanisms and associated parameters with tipping points. The use of quantitative information (international indicators and statistical analyses of conflict events) allows the assessment of the plausibility of input parameter values and simulated results, and thus a better understanding of the model’s strengths and limitations. The contributions of the present work for understanding how mechanisms of large scale conflict lead to complexbehavior include a new form of the estimated arrest probability, a simple representation of political vs economic deprivation with a parameter which controls the `sensitivity' to value, endogenous legitimacy feedback, and the effect of network influences (due to small groups and “activists”). In addition, the analysis of the Social Conflict Analysis Database provided a quantitative description of the impact of the “Arab Spring” in several countries focused on complexity issues such as peaceful vs violent, spontaneous vs organized, and patterns of size, duration and recurrence of conflict events in this recent and important large-scale conflict process. This book will appeal to students and researchers working in these computational social science subfields.