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This is a study of Vietnam's socialist transition and state transformation, generally known as đổi mới. It examines the drivers of socialist-regime change, the nature of the đổi mới state, and the basis of regime legitimacy in Vietnam. The Element argues that despite its “one-party rule” label, the party-state apparatus that channels said rule has become fragmented. State-building during the đổi mới period involved negotiations and bargaining that redefine authority and power relations within the state apparatus. The party-state's accountability projects are designed to target the specific self-aggrandizing tendencies of the state apparatus, its policies, and abuse of state power. At the leadership level, patterns of resource allocation underlying the đổi mới growth model as well as the VCP's cadre rotation approach have accommodated central and sub-national state elites across sectors and levels, helping shore up the legitimacy of the đổi mới state in the eyes of the state elite. The combination of sustained economic growth, expansion of political space, accountability, and tolerance of small-scale public protests have been factors in strengthening regime-society legitimization.

Scholars and professionals interested in the study and engagement with young people will find this project relevant to deepening their understanding of reading practices with comics and graphic novels. Comics reading has been an understudied experience despite its potential to enrich our exploration of reading in our currently saturated media landscape. This Element is based on seventeen in-depth interviews with teens and young adults who describe themselves as readers of comics for pleasure. These interviews provide insights about how comics reading evolves with the readers and what they consider a good or bad reading experience. Special attention is paid to the place of female readers in the comics community and material aspects of reading. From these readers, one begins to understand why comics reading is something that young people do not 'grow out of' but an experience that they 'grow with.'

This Element looks at contemporary authorship via three key authorial roles: indie publisher, hybrid author, and fanfiction writer. The twenty-first century's digital and networked media allows writers to disintermediate the established structures of royalty publishing, and to distribute their work directly to — and often in collaboration with — their readers. This demotic author, one who is “of the people”, often works in genres considered “popular” or “derivative". The demotic author eschews the top-down communication flow of author > text > reader, in favor of publishing platforms that generate attention capital, such as blogs, fanfiction communities, and social media.

Examining the interconnections between genes and culture is crucial for a more complete understanding of psychological processes. Genetic predispositions may predict different outcomes depending on one's cultural context, and culture may predict different outcomes depending on genetic predispositions – that is, genes and culture interact. Less is understood, however, about how genes and culture interact, or the psychological mechanisms through which gene–culture interactions occur. In this Element, Heewon Kwon and Joni Y. Sasaki review key findings and theories in gene–culture interaction research. Next, they discuss current issues and future directions in gene–culture research that may illuminate the path toward an explanatory framework.

Drawing data from multiple sources, Un argues that following the 1993 United Nations intervention to promote democracy, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) perpetuated a patronage state weak in administrative capacity but strong in coercive capacity. This enabled them to maintain the presence of electoral authoritarianism, but increased political awareness among the public, the rise in political activism among community-based organizations and a united opposition led to the emergence of a counter-movement. Sensing that this counter-movement might be unstoppable, the CPP has returned Cambodia to authoritarianism, a move made possible in part by China's pivot to Cambodia.

This Element compares the nature of childhood in four representative societies differing in their subsistence activities: bands of Australian hunter-gatherers, Tibetan nomadic pastoralists, peasants and farmers residing in Maya villages and towns, and South Korean students growing up in a digital information society. In addition, the Element traces a variety of intertwined global changes that have led to sharply reduced child mortality rates, shrinking family sizes, contested gender roles, increased marriage ages, long-term enrollment of children (especially girls in educational institutions), and the formation of “glocal” identities.

In this Element and its accompanying second part, Matias D.Cattaneo, Nicolás Idrobo and Rocío Titiunik provide an accessible and practical guide for the analysis and interpretation of Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs that encourages the use of a common set of practices and facilitates the accumulation of RD-based empirical evidence. Here, the focus is on the canonical sharp RD setup that has the following features: (i) the score is continuously distributed and has only one dimension, (ii) there is only one cutoff, and (iii) compliance with the treatment assignment is perfect. The second part will discuss extensions and departures from the Sharp RD setup.

Biological accounts of art typically start with evolutionary, psychological or neurobiological theories. These approaches might be able to explain many of the similarities we see in art behaviors within and across human populations, but they don't obviously explain the differences we also see. Nor do they give us guidance on how we should engage with art, or the conceptual basis for art. A more comprehensive framework, based also on the ecology of art and how art behaviors get expressed in engineered niches, can help us better understand the full range of art behaviors, their normativity and conceptual basis.

When the oral history of a medicinal plant as a genetic resource is used to develop a blockbuster drug, how is the contribution of indigenous peoples recognized in research and commercialization? What other ethical, legal, and policy issues come into play? Is it accurate for countries to self-identify as users or providers of genetic resources? This edited collection, which focuses on Canada, is the result of research conducted in partnership with indigenous peoples in that country, where melting permafrost and new sea lanes have opened the region's biodiversity, underscoring Canada's status as a user and provider of genetic resources and associated indigenous knowledge. This work is an important resource for scholars, corporations, indigenous peoples, policymakers, and concerned citizens as Canada and other countries take on the implementation of Access and Benefit Sharing policies over genetic resources and associated indigenous knowledge. This book is also available as Open Access.

This volume opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. As environmental historians turn their attention to expanded chronologies of natural change, something new can be said about human history through animals and about the globally diverse cultural and historical dynamics that have led to perceptions of animals as wild or cultures as civilized. This innovative collection of essays spanning Chinese history reveals how relations between past and present, lived and literary reality, have been central to how information about animals and the natural world has been processed and evaluated in China. Drawing on an extensive array of primary sources, ranging from ritual texts to poetry to veterinary science, this volume explores developments in the human-animal relationship through Chinese history and the ways in which the Chinese have thought about the world with and through animals. This title is also available as Open Access.

Oral Democracy studies citizens' voices in civic and political deliberations in India's gram sabhas (village assemblies), the largest deliberative institution in human history. It analyses nearly three hundred transcripts of gram sabhas, sampled within the framework of a natural experiment, allowing the authors to study how state policy affects the quality of discourse, citizens' discursive performances and state enactments embodied by elected leaders and public officials. By drawing out the varieties of speech apparent in citizen and state interactions, their analysis shows that citizens' oral participation in development and governance can be improved by strengthening deliberative spaces through policy. Even in conditions of high inequality and illiteracy, gram sabhas can create discursive equality by developing the 'oral competence' of citizens and establishing a space in which they can articulate their interests. The authors develop the concept of 'oral democracy' to aid the understanding of deliberative systems in non-Western and developing countries. This title is also available as Open Access.

International criminal law has witnessed a rapid rise after the end of the Cold War. The UN refers to the birth of a new 'age of accountability', but certain historical objections, such as selectivity or victor's justice, have never fully gone away, and many of the justice dimensions of international criminal law remain unexplored. Various critiques have emerged in socio-legal scholarship or globalization discourse, revealing that there is a stark discrepancy between reality and expectation. Linking discussion of legal theories, case-law and practice to scholarship and opinion, A Critical Introduction to International Criminal Law explores these critiques through five main themes at the heart of contemporary dilemmas:• The shifting contours of criminality and international crimes• The tension between individual and collective responsibility• The challenges of domestic, international, hybrid and regional justice institutions• The foundations of justice procedures• Approaches towards punishment and reparationSuitable for students, academics and professionals from multiple fields wishing to understand contemporary theories, practices and critiques of international criminal law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The traditionally, and wrongly, imagined vulnerabilities of the welfare state are economic. The true threats are demographic and political.The most frequently imagined threat is that the welfare state package reduces the level and growth of GDP. It does not, according to broad historical patterns and non-experimental panel econometrics. Large-budget welfare states achieve a host of social improvements without any clear loss of GDP. This Element elaborates on how this “free lunch” is gained in practice. Other threats to the welfare state are more real, however. One is the rise of anti-immigrant backlash. If combined with heavy refugee inflows, this could destroy future public support for universalist welfare state programs, even though they seem to remain economically sound. The other is that population aging poses a serious problem for financing old age. Pension deficits threaten to crowd out more productive social spending. Only a few countries have faced this issue well.

Team leaders should be full of ideas for new research projects and inspire a research group to achieve great results. This practical guide for team leaders, and those who aspire to become team leader, offers a unique approach to help readers develop research and become a more independent and productive investigator. Readers can learn how to recruit and develop talented team members, how to negotiate contracts and manage projects, and how to create wider visibility and publicity for their science. From human resources and project finances, legal affairs and knowledge transfer to public engagement and media performance, the book provides guidance to enhance skills and combine them with those of support staff on the road to success. With numerous valuable tips, real-life stories and practical exercises, this must-read guide provides everything needed to take responsibility for leading research teams. This title is available as Open Access via Cambridge Core.

Infrastructure development in Africa and Asia is expanding at breakneck speed, largely in biodiversity-rich developing nations. The trend reflects governments' efforts to promote economic growth in response to increasing populations, rising consumption rates and persistent inequalities. Large-scale infrastructure development is regularly touted as a way to meet the growing demand for energy, transport and food - and as a key to poverty alleviation. In practice, however, road networks, hydropower dams and 'development corridors' tend to have adverse effects on local populations, natural habitats and biodiversity. Such projects typically weaken the capacity of ecosystems to maintain ecological functions on which wildlife and human communities depend, particularly in the face of climate change. This title is also available as Open Access via Cambridge Core.

By the end of the 1950s, Hungary became an unlikely leader in what we now call global health. Only three years after Soviet tanks crushed the revolution of 1956, Hungary became one of the first countries to introduce the Sabin vaccine into its national vaccination programme. This immunization campaign was built on years of scientific collaboration between East and West, in which scientists, specimens, vaccines and iron lungs crossed over the Iron Curtain. Dóra Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War. She argues that despite the antagonistic international atmosphere of the 1950s, spaces of transnational corporation between blocs emerged to tackle a common health crisis. At the same time, she shows that epidemic concepts and policies were influenced by the very Cold War rhetoric that medical and political cooperation transcended. This title is also available as Open Access.

Fossil fuel subsidies strain public budgets, and contribute to climate change and local air pollution. Despite widespread agreement among experts about the benefits of reforming fossil fuel subsidies, repeated international commitments to eliminate them, and valiant efforts by some countries to reform them, they continue to persist. This book helps explain this conundrum, by exploring the politics of fossil fuel subsidies and their reform. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, the book offers new case studies both from countries that have undertaken subsidy reform, and those that have yet to do so. It explores the roles of various intergovernmental and non-governmental institutions in promoting fossil fuel subsidy reform at the international level, as well as conceptual aspects of fossil fuel subsidies. This is essential reading for researchers and practitioners, and students of political science, international relations, law, public policy, and environmental studies. This title is also available as Open Access.

Across the Americas and Europe, the family has changed and marriage is in retreat. To answer the question of what's driving these changes and how they impact social and economic inequality, progressives have typically focused on the economic causes of changing family structures, whereas conservatives tend to stress cultural and policy roots. In this illuminating book, an international group of scholars revisit these issues, offering competing and contrasting perspectives from left, center, and right, while also adding a third layer of analysis: namely, the role of gender - changes in women's roles, male employment patterns, and gendered family responsibilities - in driving family change across three continents. Unequal Family Lives: Causes and Consequences in Europe and the Americas adds richness and depth to our understanding of the relationship between family and economics in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. This title is also available as Open Access.

Most Muslim-majority countries have legal systems that enshrine both Islam and liberal rights. While not necessarily at odds, these dual commitments nonetheless provide legal and symbolic resources for activists to advance contending visions for their states and societies. Using the case study of Malaysia, Constituting Religion examines how these legal arrangements enable litigation and feed the construction of a 'rights-versus-rites binary' in law, politics, and the popular imagination. By drawing on extensive primary source material and tracing controversial cases from the court of law to the court of public opinion, this study theorizes the 'judicialization of religion' and the radiating effects of courts on popular legal and religious consciousness. The book documents how legal institutions catalyze ideological struggles, which stand to redefine the nation and its politics. Probing the links between legal pluralism, social movements, secularism, and political Islamism, Constituting Religion sheds new light on the confluence of law, religion, politics, and society. This title is also available as Open Access.

This book provides a new legal-sociological account of contemporary democracy. It is based on a revision of standard positions in democratic theory, reflecting the impact of global legal norms on the institutions of national states. Chris Thornhill argues that the establishment of fully democratic, fully inclusive governance systems in national societies was generally impeded by inner-societal structural factors, and that inclusive patterns of democratic citizenship only evolved on the foundation of global legal norms that were consolidated after 1945. He claims that this process can be best understood through a transposition of key insights of classical legal sociology onto the form of global society. Extensive analysis of select case studies in different regions illustrate these claims. Thornhill offers a sociological theory of global law to explain contemporary processes of democratic integration and institutional formation, and contemporary constructions of citizenship and political rights. This title is also available as Open Access.