The United Arab Emirates are renowned for their enormous production of oil and the rise of great cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which attract millions of tourists annually. It is as if the great aridity of the country did not exist. Yet the UAE is essentially a vast desert, thinly peopled for thousands of years by nomads, grazing sheep, camels and growing a few crops in great oases like Al Ain and Liwa. Early people used spears and falcons to hunt rich populations of oryx, gazelle, ibex, and the iconic migratory bird, the houbara. These animals were decimated by the introduction of European vehicles and guns in the 1920s, and later by the oil boom in the 1950s and 1960s. Today the desert is virtually devoid of these wild animals. This and many other fascinating little-known highlights of the complex history of the lands now known as the UAE are revealed in this book.

Kemu aspires to be a writer but life with its vicissitudes doesn't make her dream an easy one, in this intriguing tale of enduring encounters of living a moral and ethical life, placing its own challenges on friendships cemented from early childhood and school.

While in the days of the Cold War models of citizenship were relatively clear-cut around the contrasting projects of reform and revolution, in the last three decades Latin America has become a laboratory for comparative research. The region has witnessed both a renewal of electoral democracy and the diversification of experiments in citizen representation and participation. The implementation of neo-liberal policies has led to countervailing transformations in democratic citizenship and to the rise of populist leaderships, while the crisis of representation has been accompanied by new forms of participation, generating profound transformations. The authors analyze these recent trends, reflected in new forms of populism, inclusion and exclusion, participation and alternative models of democracy, social insecurity and violence, diasporas and transnationalism, the politics of justice and the politics of identity and multiculturalism.