After World War II, some 12 million Germans, 3 million Poles and Ukrainians, and tens of thousands of Hungarians were expelled from their homes and forced to migrate to their supposed countries of origin. Using freshly available materials from Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czechoslovak, German, British, and American archives, the contributors to this book provide a sweeping, detailed account of the turmoil caused by the huge wave of forced migration during the nascent Cold War. The book also documents the deep and lasting political, social, and economic consequences of this traumatic time, raising difficult questions about the effect of forced migration on postwar reconstruction, the rise of Communism, and the growing tensions between Western Europe and the Eastern bloc. Those interested in European Cold-War history will find this book indispensable for understanding the profound--but hitherto little known--upheavals caused by the massive ethnic cleansing that took place from 1944 to 1948.

This volume discusses the role of comics in the formation of a modern sense of nationhood in Latin America and the rise of a collective Latino identity in the USA. It is one of the first attempts - in English and from a cultural studies perspective - to cover Latin/o American comics with a fully continental scope. Specific cases include cultural powerhouses like Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, as well as the production of lesser-known industries, like Chile, Cuba, and Peru.

In a perfect storm, the environment, the global economic system and geopolitics are all undergoing rapid, uncontrolled change. In the same way that the climate is in a state of flux, exhibiting erratic behavior before settling into a new norm, in the wake of the global economic crisis, many of the assumptions about the Western economic system have been destroyed, which leads to some troubling questions: How aggressive will water-hungry China become in order to secure a sufficient supply of it? What will happen when climate-triggered conflicts like the one in Sudan spread throughout the continent? As India takes its proper place at the high table of nations and begins large-scale importing of food, what will happen to already shrinking supplies? Global Warring takes a hard look at these questions. Journalist and analyst Cleo Paskal identifies problem areas that are most likely to start wars, destroy economies and create failed states. Examining the most likely environmental change scenarios, she illuminates the ways in which they could radically alter human existence. A fascinating tour through our uncertain future, Global Warring also offers a controversial new way forward for the global economy and the worldwide environmental crisis.

This book introduces geography, history, culture, economy and politics of North America, Latin America, France and Africa. Based on the analysis of these aspects, this book explores the possibility of unification between two geographically adjacent countries, which are the same or similar in history, culture, language and other aspects. Unification should promote economy and improve people's living condition. This book does not make such proposition that all geographically adjacent countries with the same or similar history, culture and language should be unified. Unification between countries involves too many issues. For most adjacent countries, unification between countries is simply impossible, even if they are the same or similar in history, culture, language and other aspects. In this book, exploration of unification involves Canada, USA, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, France, South Africa and some Central American countries. Unification should get the consent of the involved peoples and be achieved through peaceful means, not forces.

Local governments today are under extreme pressure to undertake boundary reform. The global trend toward urbanization has brought with it economic, environmental, social, and regional demands that have severe implications for local governments and their territories. As a result, changing the areal jurisdiction of this most basic level of government has become a persistent and pressing challenge around the globe. This collection examines the legal and regulatory procedures involved in such municipal restructuring. Case studies from eight nations - the United States, Canada, Spain, Germany, Israel, Korea, China, and South Africa - investigate how and why local governments have been enlarged in scope and reduced in number within each country. Four key aspects are examined: the geography of the local government boundary problem, the procedures associated with boundary reform, the roles of institutions and actors in boundary reform, and the implications for urban and regional governance. Redrawing Local Government Boundaries offers a broad theoretical understanding of local government boundary reform and informs the wider scholarly discussion about institutional change, state structures, and the areal jurisdiction of local governments. The first international comparative study of local boundary reform, it will be a valuable reference for scholars and students of political science, public administration, geography, urban studies, and urban planning.

Why was there such a far-reaching consensus concerning the utopian goal of national homogeneity in the first half of the twentieth century? Ethnic cleansing is analyzed here as a result of the formation of democratic nation-states, the international order based on them, and European modernity in general. Almost all mass-scale population removals were rationally and precisely organized and carried out in cold blood, with revenge, hatred and other strong emotions playing only a minor role. This book not only considers the majority of population removals which occurred in Eastern Europe, but is also an encompassing, comparative study including Western Europe, interrogating the motivations of Western statesmen and their involvement in large-scale population removals. It also reaches beyond the European continent and considers the reverberations of colonial rule and ethnic cleansing in the former British colonies.

Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.