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Post-Cold War China-Russia strategic cooperation has displayed significant development and become an increasingly important factor in contemporary international politics. However, there has been no theory-grounded framework and corresponding measurements that would allow an accurate and systematic assessment of the level of China-Russia alignment and its progress over time. How closely aligned are China and Russia? How to define and measure strategic alignments between states? This book bridges area studies and International Relations literature to develop a set of objective criteria to measure and explain the development of strategic alignment in post-Cold War China-Russia relations. China-Russia Strategic Alignment in International Politics establishes that on a range of criteria, China-Russia alignment has been moving towards a full-fledged alliance, showing a consistent incremental upward trend. There are strong structural incentives for furthering the China-Russia alignment. The alignment framework developed in the book is applicable to other cases of interstate strategic cooperation and enables systematic comparisons of different strategic alignments.

The Dutch Republic around 1600 was a laboratory of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Here conditions were favourable for the development of new ways of knowing nature and the natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who was born in Middelburg in 1588, was a seminal figure in this context. He laid the groundwork for the strictly mechanical philosophy that is at the heart of the new science. Descartes and others could build on what they learned, directly or indirectly, from Beeckman. As previous studies have mainly dealt with the scientific content of Beeckman¿s thinking, this volume also explores the wider social, scientific and cultural context of his work. Beeckman was both a craftsman and a scholar and fruitfully combined artisanal ways of knowing with international scholarly traditions. Beeckman¿s extensive private notebook offers a unique perspective on the cultures of knowledge that emerged in this crucial period in intellectual history.

Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic explores issues related to the global crises of our time: reason, science, and the environment by revisiting the notions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, which can no longer be considered purely Western or strictly secular. The book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines - engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, biology to environmental studies. Leading sociologist Alain Touraine contributes a new text in which he reflects on the role of women, refugees and migrants, and the future of democracy. In their conclusion, the editors posit a fundamental ethical distinction between modernization and modernity and call for a new understanding of modernity that is globally distributed, informed by the voices of many, and concerned with crises that threaten all of us at the level of the species - a modernity-to-come.

Engraving Accuracy in Early Modern England traces major concepts including: the creation of the visual effects of accuracy through careful action and training; the development of visual judgment and connoisseurship; the role of an epistolary network in the production of knowledge; balancing readers‿ expectations with representational conventions; and the effects of collecting on the creation and circulation of knowledge. On the one hand, this study uncovers how approaches to knowledge production differed in the seventeenth century as compared with the twenty-first century. On the other, it reveals how the early modern struggle to sort through an overwhelming quantity of visual information - brought on by major changes in image production and circulation - resonates with our own.

Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Covering prominent art works by Ai Weiwei and Richard Mosse, and extending the spectrum of representation to refugee film workshops on the island of Lésbos as well as virtual reality installations of Alejandro G. Iñárritu and works by Balkan and Turkish directors, such as Melisa ÿnel, the chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés.

Contesting Austerity compares the contentious responses to austerity in Portugal and Spain between 2008 and 2015. While in Spain a sustained wave of mobilisation lasted for three years and led to a transformation of the party system, in Portugal social movements mobilised only in specific instances, trade unions dominated protest and institutional change was limited. Contesting Austerity shows that trajectories and outcomes in these countries are linked to the nature and configurations of the players in the mobilisation process.

Performing Brains on Screen deals with film enactments and representations of the belief that human beings are essentially their brains, a belief that embodies one of the most influential modern ways of understanding the human. Films have performed brains in two chief ways: by turning physical brains into protagonists, as in the "brain movies" of the 1950s, which show terrestrial or extra-terrestrial disembodied brains carrying out their evil intentions; or by giving brains that remain unseen inside someone's head an explicitly major role, as in brain transplantation films or their successors since the 1980s, in which brain contents are transferred and manipulated by means of information technology. Through an analysis of filmic genres and particular movies, Performing Brains on Screen documents this neglected filmic universe, and demonstrates how the cinema has functioned as a cultural space where a core notion of the contemporary world has been rehearsed and problematized.

This collection of essays joins a small group of other studies bringing modern Japanese Confucianism to international scholarly notice, largely covering the time period between the Bakumatsu era of the mid-19th century and the 21st century.