This book offers new and cutting-edge analyses of under-explored subjects and issues in the realm of soft power. It attempts to fill significant scholarly gaps in understanding the process by which soft power is created, as well as gaps in demonstrating its impact. Soft power is one of the most influential ideas in the study of international politics over the past thirty years. Can nations attain their most vital foreign policy objectives in agreeable ways? Advocates of the concept of soft power have vociferously answered in the affirmative. After many years of thinking in the field of international affairs that the only effective path to influence in international politics was military and economic power, the idea of soft power offers new and exciting possibilities of gaining such influence through a more benign path, one that elevates cooperation and esteem as preferred alternatives to violence, threat and military capacity. This book posits that the realization of the full potential of soft power as a foundation for international relations is a crucial goal for our present world, one beset by war and planetary crises. The book will be of special interest to researchers across political science, international relations, cultural studies and foreign policy. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Political Power.

Describes three methods for working with animal totems, outlining directions for creating a totem cosmology, focusing on local ecosystems, and using personality traits and experiences in learning to connect with a personal animal spirit.

The author presents an internally consistent macroeconomic framework that could be used as a first step toward a more comprehensive, quantitative and qualitative assessment of the adjustment alternatives facing Uzbekistan. The three-gap framework focuses on the major imbalances of the economy for evaluating policy choices facing Uzbekistan. It emphasizes the domestic, and external factors that determine economic outcomes, and welfare. The author attempts to quantify two policy scenarios-gradual as against an accelerated policy implementation strategy. He finds that an aggressive adjustment policy would indeed improve most performance, and welfare indicators. Two major ingredients of such an aggressive adjustment strategy are the unification of the exchange rate, and implementation of current account convertibility in the balance of payments. The author also draws attention to the relative importance of external financing, and the sustainability of the balance of payments under alternative structural adjustment paths facing Uzbekistan.

This edition describes a process based on employing use cases to gather and define software requirements. Use cases, roughly defined, involve the process of figuring out exactly how end-users will "use" a software system when it is completed before coding begins. Both the process and its presentation have been thoroughly revised based on the authors' more recent consulting experience and on feedback gathered from readers of the first edition over the past three years.

Alternative Pathways to Complexity focuses on the themes of architecture, economics, and power in the evolution of complex societies. Case studies examine the relationship between political structures and economic configurations of ancient chiefdoms and states through a framework of comparative archaeology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third IFIP-TC6 Networking Conference, NETWORKING 2004, held in Athens, Greece, in May 2004. The 103 revised full papers and 40 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 539 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on network security; TCP performance; ad-hoc networks; wavelength management; multicast; wireless network performance; inter-domain routing; packet classification and scheduling; services and monitoring; admission control; competition in networks; 3G/4G wireless systems; MPLS and related technologies; flow and congestion control; performance of IEEE 802.11; optical networks; TCP and congestion; key management; authentication and DOS prevention; energy aspects of wireless networks; optical network access; routing in ad-hoc networks; fault detection, restoration, and tolerance; QoS metrics, algorithms, and architecture; content distribution, caching, and replication; and routing theory and path computation.