Sophie Bessis book gives a thorough history of colonial and developmentalist thought. Bessis tells the story of the West's relationship with those parts of the rest of the world it came to dominate. Bessis follows this trajectory, from the conquest of the Americas, through the slave trade and the scramble for Africa, the White Man's burden, Manifest Destiny and the growth of "scientific" racism, on to decolonization, the ideology of development, and structural adjustment.

This book sheds light on the intricate relationship between geopolitics and business and the essential interdependence between corporations and geopolitics. Despite apparent animosity, practical solutions and theories proposed by geopolitics find resonance within the business world, and vice versa. Concepts like critical theory, disruption, hegemony, strategic rivalry, and cost-effectiveness hold common ground in both realms, even though they have historically been disregarded. Geopolitical authors have often overlooked the vital role played by businesses in shaping global affairs, while businesses themselves view geopolitics as a risk to be managed. These contrasting viewpoints have given rise to misunderstandings and misconceptions between the two spheres. The author sets out to bridge the gap between geopolitics and business, exploring how corporations perceive space, state, and power, while also analyzing the influence of classical, critical, and feminist geopolitics on business strategies. This comprehensive analysis reveals that businesses are not mere non-state agents among many, but indeed, the principal non-state agents in geopolitics. The book is an essential read for scholars, researchers, and professionals seeking a deeper understanding of the dynamic interplay between these critical forces.

This fifth issue of the Yearbook ‘Kondratieff Waves’ has the subtitle ‘Historical and Theoretical Aspects’, as its papers cover some interesting aspects of long-wave dynamics both in historical trends and in theoretical researches. The Yearbook consists of three sections. The first section (Theoretical Aspects) includes two articles devoted to the correlation between the long waves and much longer cycles, i.e. the Industrial and the Cybernetic revolutions. The second section (Historical Aspects) presents three contributions which consider the history of the USA, technological activity since the Middle Ages and some little-known aspects of the history of long-wave dynamics research. The final section (Reviews, Notes, and Reflections) includes two reviews. This issue will be useful for economists, social scientists, as well as for a wide range of those interested in the problems of the past, present, and future of global economy and globalization.

Civilizations and World Order: Geopolitics and Cultural Difference examines the role of civilizations in the context of the existing and possible world order(s) from a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspective. Contributions seek to clarify the meaning of such complex and contested notions as “civilization,” “order,” and “world order”; they do so by taking into account political, economic, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of social life. The book deals with its main theme from three angles or vectors: first, the geopolitical or power-political context of civilizations; secondly, the different roles of civilizations or cultures against the backdrop of “post-coloniality” and “Orientalism”; and thirdly, the importance of ideological and regional differences as factors supporting or obstructing world order(s). All in all, the different contributions demonstrate the impact of competing civilizational trajectories on the functioning or malfunctioning of contemporary world order.

This book problematises the idea of and debates about a ‘divided West’ that have emerged since 9/11 and the controversy over the Iraq War.

This third volume of the updated edition describes how the United States became a global power during the period from 1913 to 1945.

This Fall 2010 (VIII, 2) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, entitled “Islam: From Phobia to Understanding,” includes the proceedings of an international conference on “Debating Islamophobia,” co-organized by the issue co-editors in Madrid, Spain, in May 2009. Beginning with the lead article by the late Nasr Abu-Zayd (1943-2010) from which the title of the issue is adopted, and to whose author this collection is dedicated in celebration of his life and work, the papers explore the nature and meaning of Islamophobia and its diverse unfolding in specific national and historical contexts. The covered themes are: “Religions: From Phobia to Understanding,” “Unconscious Islamophobia,” “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences,” “Islamophobia: a French Specificity in Europe?,” “Terror and the Politics of Containment: Analysing the Discourse of the ‘War on Terror’ and its Workings of Power” “Fundamentally Danish? The Muhammad Cartoon Crisis as Transitional Drama,” “Historiographic Narratives: The Discourse Strategies for Constructing Expellable “Moorish” Subjects,” “Islamophobia and Sexism: Muslim Women in the Western Mass Media,” “Discrepancies Around the Use of the Term ‘Islamophobia,'” and “The Homelessness of Muslimness: The Muslim Umma as a Diaspora.” The publication is an academic contribution to the study of Islamophobia, a tool for social researchers and useful to overcome the prejudices and institutional barriers that produce second-class citizens at the heart of Western Europe. Contributors include: Ramón Grosfoguel (also as journal issue guest editor), Gema Martín-Muñoz (also as journal issue guest editor), Nasr Abu-Zayd, Vincent Geisser, Farish A. Noor, Heiko Henkel, José María Perceval, Laura Navarro, Javier Rosón Lorente, S. Sayyid, and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

Orientalism is about much more than just information gathered about the East within its general postcolonial period. In this period, orientalism is a Western discourse that dominated and shaped the view of the East. There is “otherization” in the way the West has historically looked at the East and within the information presented about it. These original stories of travelers in the past and previous telling about the East are facing a reconstruction through modern types of media. Cinema, television, news, newspaper, magazine, internet, social media, photography, literature, and more are transforming the way the East is presented and viewed. Under the headings of post-orientalism, neo-orientalism, or self-orientalism, these new orientalist forms of work in combination with both new and traditional media are redefining orientalism in the media and beyond. The Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond shows how both new media and traditional media deal with orientalism today through the presentation of gender, race, religion, and culture that make up orientalist theory. The chapters focus on how orientalism is presented in the media, cinema, TV, photography, and more. This book is ideal for communications theorists, media analysts, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students working in fields that include mass media, communications, film studies, ethnic studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies.

How did science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How did cognitive values—and subsequently moral, political, and social ones—come to be modelled around scientific values? In Civilization and the Culture of Science, Stephen Gaukroger explores how these values were shaped and how they began, in turn, to shape those of society. The core nineteenth- and twentieth-century development is that in which science comes to take centre stage in determining ideas of civilization, displacing Christianity in this role. Christianity had provided a unifying thread in the study of the world, however, and science had to match this, which it did through the project of the unity of the sciences. The standing of science came to rest or fall on this question, which the book sets out to show in detail is essentially ideological, not something that arose from developments within the sciences, which remained pluralistic and modular. A crucial ingredient in this process was a fundamental rethinking of the relations between science and ethics, economics, philosophy, and engineering. In his engaging description of this transition to a scientific modernity, Gaukroger examines five of the issues which underpinned this shift in detail: changes in the understanding of civilization; the push to unify the sciences; the rise of the idea of the limits of scientific understanding; the concepts of 'applied' and 'popular' science; and the way in which the public was shaped in a scientific image.

For students of Japanese history, politics and international studies, this text is a review of intellectual traditions, mutual and alternative images, and case studies of the Japanese and relations with Europe.