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Emerging and missional church movements are an increasingly global phenomenon; they exist as holistic communities that defy dualistic Western forms of church. Until now, many of the voices from these movements have gone unheard. In this volume, Ryan Bolger assembles some of the most innovative church leaders from around the world to share their candid insider stories about how God is transforming their communities in an entirely new era for the church. Bolger's new book continues the themes that he and Eddie Gibbs established formally in their critically acclaimed Emerging Churches and situates new church movements within this rubric. It explores what's happening now in innovative church movements in continental Europe, Asia, and Latin American and in African American hip-hop cultures. Featuring an international cast of contributors, the book explores the changes occurring both in emerging cultures and in emerging and missional churches across the globe today.
Explaining—and solving—the oil curse in the developing world Countries that are rich in petroleum have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil. What explains this oil curse? And can it be fixed? In this groundbreaking analysis, Michael L. Ross looks at how developing nations are shaped by their mineral wealth—and how they can turn oil from a curse into a blessing. Ross traces the oil curse to the upheaval of the 1970s, when oil prices soared and governments across the developing world seized control of their countries' oil industries. Before nationalization, the oil-rich countries looked much like the rest of the world; today, th...
Nigeria, the United States’ most important strategic partner in West Africa, is in grave trouble. While Nigerians often claim they are masters of dancing on the brink without falling off, the disastrous administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, the radical Islamic insurrection Boko Haram, and escalating violence in the delta and the north may finally provide the impetus that pushes it into the abyss of state failure. In this thoroughly updated edition, John Campbellexplores Nigeria’s post-colonial history and presents a nuanced explanation of the events and conditions that have carried this complex, dynamic, and very troubled giant to the edge. Central to his analysis are the oil wealth, endemic corruption, and elite competition that have undermined Nigeria’s nascent democratic institutions and alienated an increasingly impoverished population. However, state failure is not inevitable, nor is it in the interest of the United States. Campbell provides concrete new policy options that would not only allow the United States to help Nigeria avoid state failure but also to play a positive role in Nigeria’s political, social, and economic development.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: ECML PKDD 2010, held in Barcelona, Spain, in September 2010. The 120 revised full papers presented in three volumes, together with 12 demos (out of 24 submitted demos), were carefully reviewed and selected from 658 paper submissions. In addition, 7 ML and 7 DM papers were distinguished by the program chairs on the basis of their exceptional scientific quality and high impact on the field. The conference intends to provide an international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality research results in all areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases. A topic widely explored from both ML and DM perspectives was graphs, with motivations ranging from molecular chemistry to social networks.
This book offers a thematic study of key debates in the history of the ethnic politics, democratic governance, and minority rights in Nigeria. Nigeria provides a framework for examining the central paradox in post-colonial nation building projects in Africa – the tension between majority rule and minority rights. The liberal democratic model on which most African states were founded at independence from colonial rule, and to which they continue to aspire, is founded on majority rule. It is also founded on the protection of the rights of minority groups to political participation, social inclusion and economic resources. Maintaining this tenuous balance between majority rule and minority rights has, in the decades since independence, become the key national question in many African countries, perhaps none more so than Nigeria. This volume explores these issues, focusing on four key themes as they relate to minority rights in Nigeria: ethnic and religious identities, nationalism and federalism, political crises and armed conflicts.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: ECML PKDD 2008, held in Antwerp, Belgium, in September 2008. The 100 papers presented in two volumes, together with 5 invited talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 521 submissions. In addition to the regular papers the volume contains 14 abstracts of papers appearing in full version in the Machine Learning Journal and the Knowledge Discovery and Databases Journal of Springer. The conference intends to provide an international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality research results in all areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases. The topics addressed are application of machine learning and data mining methods to real-world problems, particularly exploratory research that describes novel learning and mining tasks and applications requiring non-standard techniques.
The topic of preferences is a new branch of machine learning and data mining, and it has attracted considerable attention in artificial intelligence research in previous years. It involves learning from observations that reveal information about the preferences of an individual or a class of individuals. Representing and processing knowledge in terms of preferences is appealing as it allows one to specify desires in a declarative way, to combine qualitative and quantitative modes of reasoning, and to deal with inconsistencies and exceptions in a flexible manner. And, generalizing beyond training data, models thus learned may be used for preference prediction. This is the first book dedicated...
This open access book analyses the domestic politics of African dominant party regimes, most notably African governments’ survival strategies, to explain their variance of opinions and responses towards the reforming policies of the EU. The author discredits the widespread assumption that the growing presence of China in Africa has made the EU’s task of supporting governance reforms difficult, positing that the EU’s good governance strategies resonate better with the survival strategies of governments in some dominant party regimes more so than others, regardless of Chinese involvement. Hackenesch studies three African nations – Angola, Ethiopia and Rwanda – which all began engaging with the EU on governance reforms in the early 2000s. She argues that other factors generally identified in the literature, such as the EU good governance strategies or economic dependence of the target country on the EU, have set additional incentives for African governments to not engage on governance reforms.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web) held in Bilbao, Spain, in September 2010. The 22 papers accepted for EC-Web, selected from 45 submissions, are organized in topical sessions on recommender systems; e-payment, security and trust; service-oriented e-commerce and business processes; and agent-based e-commerce . The volume is completed by short summaries of the two invited talks on web advertising and electronic markets.
India today looms large globally, where it hardly loomed at all twenty years ago. It is likely to be a key global actor throughout the twenty-first century and could well emerge soon as one of the top five global powers. Does the Elephant Dance? seeks to survey the main features of Indian foreign policy. It identifies elements of Indian history relevant to the topic; examines the role therein of domestic politics and internal and external security challenges, and of domestic and international economic factors; and in successive chapters delves into the specifics of India's policy within its South Asian neighbourhood, and with respect to China, the USA, West Asia (the Middle East), East Asia, Europe and Russia, and multilateral diplomacy. It also touches on Indian ties to Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. India's "soft power", the role of migration in its policy, and other cross-cutting issues are analyzed, as is the role and approach of several categories of foreign policy actors in India. Substantive conclusions close out the volume, and touch, inter alia, on the absence of an organizing framework for Indian foreign policy.