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What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.

The global system of alliances that the United States built after the Second World War underpinned the stability and prosperity of the postwar order. But during the 20th century, the multilateral NATO alliance system in Europe and the bilateral San Francisco alliance system in Asia rarely interacted. This changed in the early 21st century, as US allies came together to fight and stabilise conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia. This volume presents the first-ever comparative study of US alliances in Europe and Asia from the perspectives of US allies: the challenges, opportunities and shifting dynamics of these fundamental pillars of order. This volume is essential reading for those interested in contemporary and future regional and global security dynamics.

In this study of the Portuguese intervention in the Manila Galleon Trade, Etsuko Miyata explores its history through a new approach: the examination of Chinese ceramics.

This second volume from the United Nations Intellectual History Project surveys the history of the UN's regional commissions and the ideas they have developed over the last 40 years. Each essay is devoted to one of the five regional commissions -- Europe, Asia and the Far East, Latin America, Africa, and Western Asia -- and how it has approached its mission of assessing the condition of regional economies and making prognoses about future conditions. The essays describe how each commission has added local perspectives to global debates over economic development and brought an authentic regional voice to the UN. Contributors are Adebayo Adedeji, Yves Berthelot, Leelananda de Silva, Blandine Destremau, Paul Rayment, and Gert Rosenthal.

This book provides the most extensive comparative survey of the state and conditions of democracy ever made. It focuses on 172 contemporary states, with historical data on the measures of democracy and on explanatory variables extending back to the 1850s. It presents a comprehensive exploration of democratization, its successes and failures, making predictions on the prospects for democracy for single countries and for seven regions of the world. As well as presenting empirical analyses of democratization on the basis of Vanhanens's resource distribution theory of democratization and making predictions on the prospects, the book includes contributions from five commentators, Mitchell A. Seligson on Latin America, Samuel Decalo and John W. Forje on Africa, John Henderson on Oceania and Ilter Turan on why some of the countires that pass Vanhanen's democratic threshold cannot in fact be seen as democracies. The volume also includes an introductory chapter which examines and compares other theoretical interpretations of democratization. Prospects for Democracy will be essential reading for all serious students of comparative politics and democracy.

Should same-sex couples be permitted to marry? Or should a separate institution of \"registered partnership\" or \"civil union\" be created for them? Or should the rights and duties of unmarried different-sex couples be extended to them? Should they be allowed to adopt each other's children, or jointly adopt an unrelated child? How should they be treated with regard to employment, social security, pensions, housing, immigration, taxation, inheritance, and divorce? These questions are being debated around the world, as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons increasingly (but not uniformly) insist that they cannot be truly equal without equal treatment for the loving and lasting relationships they form with their partners.