Global geopolitics has shifted dramatically over the last thirty years. After the vanishing expectations of a unipolar international system led by the United States, China has gained an increasingly dominant role in areas as innovative as quantum computing, robotics and artificial intelligence. In the non-digital dimension, the eastern superpower has made gigantic investments in its Belt and Road Initiative, which include the development of a massive network of highways, industrial centers, harbors, pipelines and bridges, among many other works of infrastructure. These investments allow for the connection of more than 60 countries worldwide, guaranteeing China s energetic security, easier conditions for trading goods and services and, perhaps more importantly, a significant influence in the political and economic events of the world. States with political regimes as diverse as those of Russia and India are part of this growing network; in various cases, in exchange for the benefits associated wi th being part of it, major concessions were made. By way of illustration, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, among others, given their lack of capacity to pay for sorne of the works, have agreed to forfeit control of specific areas of their territories.

El fenómeno de los corredores económicos en la última década, cuya expresión más popular es la estrategia de la Franja y la Ruta propuesta por China en el 2014, ha desatado fuerzas competitivas y de interdependencia global que, soportadas en mega-proyectos de infraestructura de todo tipo (viales, férreos , energéticas, digitales, satelitales, ETC), han transformado no solo la manera como interactúa el hombre contemporáneo sino también el significado de conceptos propios de la geopolítica clásica, como soberanía territorial, la seguridad nacional, encaminando a los gobiernos a definir, con pleno discernimiento, los lineamientos de política exterior, en un mundo que además de se multipolar e interconectado, se explica en medio de la incertidumbre. Los grandes proyectos de infraestructura que han permitido conectar al oeste de China con los países de Asia Central hasta llegar a Europa, las rutas que unen el sudeste asiático para facilitar la movilidad entre islas y el territorio continental, los corredores viales y fluviales que conectarán internamente a la India con sus vecinos o aquellos que permiten unir al centro con el norte de África, además de solventar falencias logísticas de infraestructura básica de países pobres y de menor desarrollo, han alimentado grandes debates sobre su facilidad y conveniencia, pero también sobre las alternativas que los países de Asia (China, Japón, India, Corea del Sur, Turquía) brindan a las naciones para cumplir sus metas de desarrollo y conectividad. Precisamente de esos debates se ocupan los artículos de esta publicación, elaborados por 13 expertos de las ciencias sociales, que desde sus geografías analizan la experiencia a hacer parte de losas rutas que hasta días antes de la declaratoria de la pandemia se construían sin pausa en sus territorios. El objetivo es hacer síntesis de las experiencias para ofrecer referentes a América Latina. Esta publicación llega justamente cuando el fenómeno del Covid marca puntos de inflexión sobre las tendencias del desarrollo y la integración. Muchos corredores seguirán su marcha, se han tornado decisivos e insustituibles, como los tendidos de cables submarinos por los que se transmiten los datos de la telefonía móvil y el Internet, redes que permiten la comunicación basada en la virtualidad, sector que cobra gran protagonismo deben el marco del distanciamiento , aislamiento, confinamiento colectivo y del tele trabajo. Otros mega proyectos de implicanacia geopolítica serán puestos prueba. Este trabajo es un aporte al entendimiento conceptual y un análisis sistemático del fenómeno de los corredores y de sus incidencia en la geopolítica. A la vez, es una plataforma para adelantar el debate sobre los nuevos rumbos de la conectividad física y digital en un escenario que al menos, por ahora, tiene en pausa la aspiración de un mundo libre de barreras y fronteras.

Uyghur Identity and Culture brings together the work of scholars, activists, and native Uyghurs to explore the history and growing challenges that the Uyghur diaspora face across the globe in response to shifting government policies forbidding many forms of cultural expression in their homeland. The collection examines how and why the Uyghur diaspora, dispersed from their homeland to communities across Australia, Central Asia, Europe, Japan, Türkiye, and North America, now has the responsibility to preserve their language and cultural traditions so that these can be shared with future generations. The book critically investigates the government censorship of Uyghur literatures and Western media coverage of the Uyghurs, while centralizing real reflections of those who grew up in the Uyghur homeland. It considers the geographical and psychological pressures that the Uyghur diaspora endure and highlights the resilience and creativity of their relentless battle against cultural erosion. Uyghur Identity and Culture is a key contribution to diaspora literature and calls to attention the urgent need for global action on the ongoing human rights violations against the Uyghur people. It is essential reading for those interested in the history and struggles of the Uyghur diaspora as well as anyone studying sociology, race, migration, culture, and human rights studies.

NATO is once again in the spotlight. A NATO summit concluded on Monday 14 June 2021 in Brussels, ending with important decisions charting the Alliance’s path over the next decade and beyond. NATO has served as a pillar of stability and security for more than seven decades, while the world has become more complex, with a host of new players, threats, and challenges. Allied leaders endorsed an ambitious NATO 2030 agenda to ensure that NATO can meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. While the Alliance concluded to improve NATO’s political consultations, collective defense, and resilience, leaders agreed upon providing better training and capacity building to its partners in order to stand up for the rules-based international order. In light of these commitments, TPQ’s Summer 2021 issue serves as a starting point for a well-informed debate by synthesizing and comparing expert discourses from a wide range of NATO member and non-member states on key issues concerning NATO's future. As we address the issues at stake, we also seek a better mutual appreciation of divergent geographical, historical, and political perspectives. This special and timely issue has been published in collaboration with NATO, our longstanding partner. Mircea Geoana, NATO Deputy Secretary General, expresses that the security environment has never been more uncertain and contested than it is now, due to the emergence of global competition and a wide variety of complex threats. He underlines the importance of NATO summit in Brussels last June, at which the Alliance's leaders made bold decisions to adapt to a more unpredictable world and to ensure that its one billion people will be safe for the next decade and beyond. In his view, the Transatlantic Alliance will remain capable of coping with today's challenges and future-proof against ones yet to come through an ambitious and forward-looking agenda. When President Biden visited Brussels in June, he declared, "America is back." According to Jamie Shea, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges at NATO, this also means that NATO is back, as Biden reaffirmed the U.S.' solemn commitment to the defense of its European allies and Washington's willingness to once again lead a transatlantic alliance that was heavily criticized during the Trump years. He writes that at first sight, this is all good news for NATO; but could it turn out to be a mixed blessing for the Europeans in the longer run? He analyzes whether the NATO 2030 initiative is up to the task and if it provides the right answers. Due to NATO's reliance on space assets for operational effectiveness and the increased vulnerabilities of those assets, the militarization of outer space presents a range of policy and legal challenges. Having to rely on space-based assets and services to conduct military operations has proven to be NATO's Achilles heel as rivals work on counter-space techniques. Aurel Sari, Associate Professor of International Law at University of Exeter and Hitoshi Nasu, Professor of International Law at University of Exeter ask given the vulnerability of space-based assets and services to hostile interference, under what circumstances the collective defense commitment as set out in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT), arises in space.

CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.