Political Science Commons^™

Islam And The Environment, Jon Armajani

The Journal of Social Encounters

This is a transcript of a presentation at the Thirty-Fourth Annual Peace Studies Conference at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University on September 18, 2023. The presentation provides (1) some background information about Islam; (2) related ideas about Christianity; (3) a discussion of some verses in the Quran, which relate to the environment, and some Islamic interpretations of them; (4) an analysis of Ibrahim Abdul-Matin’s ideas on Islam and the environment; and (5) a tribute to Father Rene McGraw, OSB.

Environmental Peacebuilding: Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow, Ken Conca

The Journal of Social Encounters

The field of environmental peacebuilding emerged as a counter to the idea that violent conflict was an inevitable byproduct of environmental change. Two decades ago, my colleague Geoffrey Dabelko and I published a book, Environmental Peacemaking, sketching the argument that ecological interdependencies could be instrumentalized as a force for peace (Conca & Dabelko, 2002). Other early works from this period focused on the peace opportunities in biodiversity conservation (Matthew et al., 2002) and transboundary protected areas (Brock, 1991; Ali, 2007). Since that time, a substantial community of research and practice has emerged around these ideas. In this essay I discuss …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Michael Farmer. An Atlas Of The Tibetan Plateau. Volume 50 In Brill’S Tibetan Studies Library Series, Constance Wilkinson

Comparative Civilizations Review

An Atlas of the Tibetan Plateau is a masterful melding of science and art created by British architect and cartographer Michael Farmer. Based on extensive contemporary data painstakingly woven from satellite imagery, the intrepid and apparently indefatigable Farmer has, over decades, produced a unique and indispensable reference work.

Raphael Patai. The Hebrew Goddess, Third Enlarged Edition, Joseph Drew

Comparative Civilizations Review

According to the famous French philosopher and revolutionary, the Marquis de Condorcet, we can look back to history and discern therein a number of phases, stages through which the human mind evolves. The number of these is fixed as is the succession of them; progress and human perfectibility always dominate the movement. The progress of the human mind, Condorcet wrote in the Tableau des Progrès Historiques de l’Ésprit Humain, is reflected invariably in the successive stages of society. We move upward and onward, ineluctably.

The Heritage Of The Reincarnated Lama Of The Gobi, Mend-Ooyo Gombojav

Comparative Civilizations Review

In Mongolia’s Gobi desert, at the beginning of the 19th century, a remarkable boy was born. This boy was Danzanravjaa, the Fifth Noyon Hutagt of the Gobi. He became a man of extraordinary ability — a talented poet, a Buddhist teacher, a meditator and philosopher, the creator of a nomadic theater, a dramatist and lyricist, a composer of songs, a craftsman of religious objects, a natural scientist, and a traveler.

Table Of Contents

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Culture-Oriented Interpretations Of Corporate Responsibility, Berkay Orhaner Phd

Comparative Civilizations Review

Classical narratives of corporate responsibility reflect the cultural values of Western industrialized countries. Meanwhile, the understanding of corporate responsibility has been disseminated by globalization and this has resulted in culture-oriented interpretations of corporate responsibility from non-Western contexts.

This article aims to investigate the multidimensional relationship between corporate responsibility and globalization and outline culture-oriented corporate responsibility interpretations as a global phenomenon.

Amanda H. Podany. Weavers, Scribes, And Kings: A New History Of The Ancient Near East, Leland Conley Barrows

Comparative Civilizations Review

Professor Amanda Podany’s massive survey of ancient Near Eastern history reflects her commitment to interpreting and presenting the information revealed about the ancient history of this region by the cuneiform script etched on clay tablets and other mediums, the oldest examples dating back to 3000 BCE. She has endeavored to shed light on the details of the lives of ordinary people and day-to-day events by inserting microhistories of beer brewers, laundrymen, gardeners, slaves, as well as diviners, scribes, and priests into accounts of the rise and fall of kingdoms, empires, and their rulers. She declares that her book “…has been …

Military Comparison Of The Han Dynasty And The Roman Republic, Jack Tribolet

Comparative Civilizations Review

The Middle and Late Roman Republic (264 BCE - 27 BCE) and the Han Dynasty (202 BCE - 220 CE) characterized two concurrent military superpowers of the ancient world. Anchoring opposite ends of the Eurasian continent, the two powers shared structural similarities that enabled their longevity and resilience to ruination.

Michael Boym: The Polish Marco Polo, Agnieszka Couderq

Comparative Civilizations Review

The following is a selection drawn from Ms. Couderq’s written proposal for a television series based on the book she has published. It offers a summation of the life of this remarkable cross-civilizational traveler.

Full Issue

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Apotheosis Of The State And The Decline Of Civilization: A Systems Approach, Robert Bedeski

Comparative Civilizations Review

Humanity is undergoing a second Axial Age. The first, as described by Karl Jaspers, brought transcendence into the vision and self-understanding of humans and the world. The rise of secularism and “Death of God” is dissolving and fragmenting that transcendence — a vital subsystem of the civilization system. Economy, knowledge and government comprise three additional subsystems and have coalesced to form the modern sovereign state, diminishing the traditional place of religion, art and philosophy in civilizations. An example of a state lacking common institutions of transcendence was the Mongol empire. Ruling Russia for a quarter millennium, its state form was …

Chinese Digital Platform Companies’ Expansion In The Belt And Road Countries, Yujia He

Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce Faculty Publications

The emergence of digital platforms is shifting the digital economy toward a platform economy, and Chinese platform-based businesses like Alibaba, Tencent, and JD are increasingly expanding in the Global South. Alongside this, the Chinese government has been promoting digital economy collaboration with emerging markets through high-level engagement under the banner of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its digital economy component the Digital Silk Road (DSR). Despite significant market interest and policy attention, grounded empirical analysis of Chinese digital platforms’ expansion within Belt and Road Initiative countries is scarce. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, drawing on both quantitative …

Analysis And Application Of The Offense-Defense Theory: Russia, Ukraine, And History., Kirby Ballard

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

Political scientists and government advisors have long sought to understand what influences conflicts and how to predict them. Despite constant war, a commonly used empirical theory that can answer this question has not emerged. The majority of theories created are either conflict-specific or not empirically testable. Considering these factors, I sought out a theory that would help me better understand Russia's choice to invade Ukraine in the spring of 2022. I selected the offense-defense theory due to its many attempts to explain territorial conquest, the likeliness of conflict, and overall losses. The main focus of the theory is to explain …

Natural Resource Conflict And Socioenvironmental Resistance In Arctic States: Assessing Domestic Risks To Circumpolar Security, Jen Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How does climate change contribute to domestic natural resource conflict and socioenvironmental resistance in the Arctic? The literature assumes that developed Arctic nations possess sufficient state capacity to overcome risks of domestic conflict and unrest posed by regional development and environmental change. Arctic policy correspondingly focuses on natural resource competition, disputes, and conflict at the international level. The mechanisms and processes of domestic natural resource conflict and socioenvironmental resistance in the Arctic have thus been largely ignored in the literature, even though 27 cases of contention have occurred since the ‘shock’ sea-ice melt of 2007.

In this study, I draw …

Legislative Civility, Gridlock, Polarization, And Productivity, William D. Schreckhise, John C. Pierce, Francis A. Benjamin, Nicholas P. Lovrich, Eric D. Button

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the relationship between legislative civility and legislative productivity in US state legislatures. The research employs data from the National Survey of State Legislative Lobbyists and from the State Policy Innovation and Diffusion (SPID) database. The former dataset is used to generate an overall civility index for each state as developed by Kettler et al. The SPID database allows one to measure the legislative productivity of a state legislature. Employing these data, negative binomial and Poisson regression models reveal that state legislatures rated as more civil by their own lobbyists produced significantly more pieces of noteworthy legislation than …

President's Message, Lynn Rhodes

Comparative Civilizations Review

Throughout 2023 and into 2024, the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations has been extremely busy in the furtherance of our vision. Here are some of the highlights.

The Rise Of China And The Concept Of Civilization: Constructing Conceptual Apparatus For Cross-Civilizational Comparisons, Liah Greenfeld

Comparative Civilizations Review

The paper argues that the rise of China to a position of prominence in the contemporary world offers Western scholars a greatly expanded comparative perspective and, thus, an opportunity to re-assess their fundamental view of social reality. This comparative perspective draws attention to supra-national cultural unities, “civilizations,” first suggested by both Durkheim and Weber.

There are deficiencies in the current understanding of “civilization” in the social science literature, among others exemplified by “civilizational analysis,” and so this paper proposes a new concept which adds to the conceptual apparatus of sociological theory a new — fully independent of others — variant …

From Compromise To Confrontation: The American Secretary Of State James F. Byrnes And His Attempts To Mitigate Disagreements With The Soviet Union As The Cold War Began, John Karl

Comparative Civilizations Review

James F. Byrnes as United States Secretary of State pursued a policy based on compromise with the Soviet Union during the first year following the end of the Second World War. He was determined to use his political skill for engineering compromise in order to bring about an agreement with the Soviet Union which would lead to an era of peace. While the crucial question facing American policymakers in the wake of World War II was the creation of a new world order, a most important part of this question was the future of American-Soviet relations, the two nations that …