The book deals with a broad range of contemporary and recurring empirical and practical issues encapsulated within the context of demographic inquiry and analysis. The papers included here reflect strands of thoughts and research that find expression in interdisciplinary outlook focussing on sexuality, fertility, gender, morbidity and mortality, migration, maternal and child health and the elderly.

This examination of changes in adolescent fertility emphasizes the changing social context within which adolescent childbearing takes place.

Much of a society’s resources are devoted to dealing with, or preparing for the possibility of, crime. The dominance of concerns about crime also hint at the broader implications that offending has for many different facets of society. They suggest that rather than being an outlawed subset of social activity, crime is an integrated aspect of societal processes. This book reviews some of the direct and indirect social impacts of criminality, proposing that this is worthwhile, not just in terms of understanding crime, but also because of how it elucidates more general social considerations. A range of studies that examine the interactions between crime and society are brought together, drawing on a wide range of countries and cultures including India, Israel, Nigeria, Turkey, and the USA, as well as the UK and Ireland. They include contributions from many different social science disciplines, which, taken together, demonstrate that the implicit and direct impact of crime is very widespread indeed. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

The book provides a pentapartite theoretical analysis of socio-economic factors as the grand basis for the evolution of Boko Haram terrorism in Nigeria. It describes the terrorism as a by-product of unresolved conflict emanating from unequal hegemonic power exchange with respect to the non-fulfillment of socio-economic goals between the political state and the citizenry. Rather than follow the popular notion of religion as the root causes of Boko Haram crisis, the book widens its scope to cover terrorism as a whole with a view to laying a more viable foundation for its readers to understand the concept of terrorism, provoking causes and perspectives, as well as influential factors that may interplay to sustain extremist terrorism in contemporary global society. Using Boko Haram as a potentially useful model, the book contends that the discursive framework of terrorism cannot be isolated from its socio-economic perspectives. In view of the foregoing, the simplistic response to resolving terrorism crisis in Nigeria still lies at the heart of ameliorating the socio-economic conditions of the citizens via the political state. The book will be appropriate for individuals whose interests are vested on terrorism and homeland security, terrorism and counterterrorism studies, criminal justice and organized crime, terrorism and political violence, African politics, peace and conflict resolution as well as security and conflict management. Counter-terrorism experts, policy makers, academic scholars, intelligence and security operatives will also find this book resourceful. Ultimately, as interest in terrorism studies continues to grow exponentially among Sociologists, Anthropologists and Criminologists, it is my utmost quest to provide the most invaluable themes and updated theories in terrorism research for use by independent researchers, students and academics seeking to advance empirically and theoretically driven research in the fields of terrorism, homeland security and related crimes.

This volume challenges the orthodox position on two of the main themes in fertility transition studies: the inevitable link between fewer children and quality of life and the focus on women as the sole important objects of study. In an era of unprecedented fertility decline, there is increasing concern about the lessening worldwide role that men play in the upbringing of children. The immense worldwide variation in the timing and sequencing of a man's life course events, the rise and fall in personal forunes, and the weight of society's hierarchies, all combine to affect the number of children a man fathers, when he fathers them, the number of partners he fathers them with, and the kind of support and recognition he bestows on them. The cross-disciplinary approach favoured here, including ethnographies, national surveys, and historical texts, avoids the narrow focus of many fertility studies texts. By providing detailed studies on a variety of countries ranging from Germany to Papua New Guinea, the contributors build an accurate picture of the global situation, while two Overview chapters give a wider perspective, and the Introduction synthesizes the themes identified and conclusions reached.