This book was conceived out of numerous experiences with diverse groups of people I have met over the years. Most of my experiences stemmed from my extroverted personality, starting from my relatively big family of ten—Dad and Mom and eight children, four boy and four girls. And subsequent into my school with the belief that all humans are by nature good, I could speak with anyone, foreign students from all countries in Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe, and of course, regardless of whether they are black or white or their genders or sexual orientations. As a result of my extraverted personality and the ability to engage in discussion with anybody, along with my friendly and inquiry-driven mind, those cumulatively provided me with the window through which I enhanced my interest and that fostered meaningful understanding of people from various cultures. Through collaborative engagement with people, I made great friends who trusted me and confided in me, and in return, I trusted and confided in them. We did a lot together; it was the best of times.

In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride! adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.

This book examines how African states can build the institutional capacity to better prevent, manage and cope with the new security challenges posed by violent religious extremism. Despite the evidence that violent religious extremism is exacerbated by underlying social, political, economic and governance factors, many states have focused their efforts only on reactive and coercive response strategies, overlooking more long-term measures. This comparative study of Nigeria and Kenya reflects on why insurgency in Kenya has not escalated to full blown terrorism as it has with Boko Haram in Nigeria, in spite of the similarities in relatively weak institutions of governance and colonial legacies across the two countries. The book interrogates the policy and institutional responses that have been put in place in both countries to address security challenges, and the extent of their efficacy in light of the intricate networks of politics, governance, corruption, poverty and violence and the relative fragility of state institutions. The authors highlight the areas of convergence and divergence in institutional capacities and recommend policies to enhance the capacity of institutions to manage violent religious extremism. This book will be of interest to scholars of African politics, Security, Peace studies and Terrorism.

Whether formally incorporated into curriculum and teacher training or informally integrated in contexts such as state or NGO initiatives dealing with resolving social, ethnic, and religious conflicts, peace education is increasingly recognized as a critical component in addressing violence in contemporary plural societies. Peace education can constructively undertake a reframing of historical narratives while inspiring practical community activities. An important, but insufficiently studied and theorized aspect of peace education is the role of religion. The challenge to peace education in today’s globalized, diverse, mobile, and religiously pluralistic world is to be able to take both complex global and distinctive local situations into account. The contributions to this integrative collection of essays provide exactly these local and global perspectives on the state of peace education and its relationship to religion across pedagogy and curriculum, state policies, and activism within societies on the front lines of resolving internal conflicts, whether historical or recent, that often reflect aspects of religious identities.

The Search for Peace in the Middle East provides an annotated overview of attempts to make peace in the region, including all relevant documents related to the Arab-Israeli conflict over the past century since the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, and a full set of accompanying maps specially made for this edition.

This volume addresses essential themes in international relations today, asking how we can establish when religious identity is a relevant factor in politics, when and how religion can be applied to advance positive, peace-oriented agendas in global governance, and how governments can reconsider their foreign and domestic policies.

This three-volume A-to-Z compendium consists of over 300 entries written by a team of leading international scholars and researchers working in the field. Authoritative and up-to-date, the encyclopedia covers the processes that produce our weather, important scientific concepts, the history of ideas underlying the atmospheric sciences, biographical accounts of those who have made significant contributions to climatology and meteorology and particular weather events, from extreme tropical cyclones and tornadoes to local winds.