Understanding Collapse

Understanding Collapse PDF Author: Guy D. Middleton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110715149X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.

Understanding Collapse

Understanding Collapse PDF Author: Guy D. Middleton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110715149X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.

Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change

Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change PDF Author: Robert Strayer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315503964
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Taking the Soviet collapse - the most cataclysmic event of the recent past - as a case study, this text engages students in the exercise of historical analysis, interpretation and explanation. In exploring the question posed by the title, the author introduces and applies such organizing concepts as great power conflict, imperial decline, revolution, ethnic conflict, colonialism, economic development, totalitarian ideology, and transition to democracy in a most accessible way. Questions and controversies, and extracts from documentary and literary sources, anchor the text at key points. This book is intended for use in history and political science courses on the Soviet Union or more generally on the 20th century.

Collapse and Revival

Collapse and Revival PDF Author: Mr.Ayhan Kose
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1513570021
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
As the debates about the recent global recession and the subsequent recovery have clearly shown, our understanding of these questions has been very limited. This comprehensive text puts the latest global recession and ongoing recovery in perspective. With the support of a companion website and DVD, we have created several multimedia tools to help understand the basics.

Why Communism Did Not Collapse

Why Communism Did Not Collapse PDF Author: Martin K. Dimitrov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107035538
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Addresses the durability of communist autocracies in Eastern Europe and Asia, the longest-lasting type of non-democratic regime to emerge after World War I.

The Collapse of Complex Societies

The Collapse of Complex Societies PDF Author: Joseph Tainter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521386739
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.

Networks of Rebellion

Networks of Rebellion PDF Author: Paul Staniland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471028
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Insurgent cohesion is central to explaining patterns of violence, the effectiveness of counterinsurgency, and civil war outcomes. Cohesive insurgent groups produce more effective war-fighting forces and are more credible negotiators; organizational cohesion shapes both the duration of wars and their ultimate resolution. In Networks of Rebellion, Paul Staniland explains why insurgent leaders differ so radically in their ability to build strong organizations and why the cohesion of armed groups changes over time during conflicts. He outlines a new way of thinking about the sources and structure of insurgent groups, distinguishing among integrated, vanguard, parochial, and fragmented groups. Staniland compares insurgent groups, their differing social bases, and how the nature of the coalitions and networks within which these armed groups were built has determined their discipline and internal control. He examines insurgent groups in Afghanistan, 1975 to the present day, Kashmir (1988–2003), Sri Lanka from the 1970s to the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, and several communist uprisings in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The initial organization of an insurgent group depends on the position of its leaders in prewar political networks. These social bases shape what leaders can and cannot do when they build a new insurgent group. Counterinsurgency, insurgent strategy, and international intervention can cause organizational change. During war, insurgent groups are embedded in social ties that determine they how they organize, fight, and negotiate; as these ties shift, organizational structure changes as well.

Questioning Collapse

Questioning Collapse PDF Author: Patricia A. McAnany
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521515726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Questioning Collapse challenges those scholars and popular writers who advance the thesis that societies - past and present - collapse because of behavior that destroyed their environments or because of overpopulation. In a series of highly accessible and closely argued essays, a team of internationally recognized scholars bring history and context to bear in their radically different analyses of iconic events, such as the deforestation of Easter Island, the cessation of the Norse colony in Greenland, the faltering of nineteenth-century China, the migration of ancestral peoples away from Chaco Canyon in the American southwest, the crisis and resilience of Lowland Maya kingship, and other societies that purportedly "collapsed." Collectively, these essays demonstrate that resilience in the face of societal crises, rather than collapse, is the leitmotif of the human story from the earliest civilizations to the present. Scrutinizing the notion that Euro-American colonial triumphs were an accident of geography, Questioning Collapse also critically examines the complex historical relationship between race and political labels of societal "success" and "failure."

A Collapse of Horses

A Collapse of Horses PDF Author: Brian Evenson
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 156689414X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know. Praise for Brian Evenson: "Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."—Jonathan Lethem "One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today." The Believer "There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson." —George Saunders “Brian Evenson is one of the few who will still be read a hundred years from now: either by our grandchildren, or by the machines who have killed our grandchildren.” —Hobart, “An interview with Brian Evenson” "Packed with enough atrocities to give Thomas Harris pause. . . . Not many writers have the imagination or the audacity to transform what looks like salvation into an utterly original outpost of hell." —Bookforum “Evenson’s writing is something to be read in short intervals, like a good tea that you want to savor to the last drop.” —Twin Cities Geek Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice" Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and is the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York's top books.

Collapse

Collapse PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141976969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 802

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Book Description
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times

How Everything Can Collapse

How Everything Can Collapse PDF Author: Pablo Servigne
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509541403
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization. Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the capacity of human populations to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment. In this important book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on. They examine the scientific evidence and show how its findings, often presented in a detached and abstract way, are connected to people’s ordinary experiences – joining the dots, as it were, between the Anthropocene and our everyday lives. In so doing they provide a valuable guide that will help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves. Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.