Flashpoints

A major new book by New York Times bestselling author and geopolitical forecaster George Friedman (The Next 100 Years), with a bold thesis about coming events in Europe. This provocative work examines “flashpoints,” unique geopolitical hot spots where tensions have erupted throughout history, and where conflict is due to emerge again. “There is a temptation, when you are around George Friedman, to treat him like a Magic 8 Ball.” —The New York Times Magazine With remarkable accuracy, George Friedman has forecasted coming trends in global politics, technology, population, and culture. In Flashpoints, Friedman focuses on Europe—the world’s cultural and power nexus for the past five hundred years . . . until now. Analyzing the most unstable, unexpected, and fascinating borderlands of Europe and Russia—and the fault lines that have existed for centuries and have been ground zero for multiple catastrophic wars—Friedman highlights, in an unprecedentedly personal way, the flashpoints that are smoldering once again. The modern-day European Union was crafted in large part to minimize built-in geopolitical tensions that historically have torn it apart. As Friedman demonstrates, with a mix of rich history and cultural analysis, that design is failing. Flashpoints narrates a living history of Europe and explains, with great clarity, its most volatile regions: the turbulent and ever-shifting land dividing the West from Russia (a vast area that currently includes Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania); the ancient borderland between France and Germany; and the Mediterranean, which gave rise to Judaism and Christianity and became a center of Islamic life. Through Friedman’s seamless narrative of townspeople and rivers and villages, a clear picture of regions and countries and history begins to emerge. Flashpoints is an engrossing analysis of modern-day Europe, its remarkable past, and the simmering fault lines that have awakened and will be pivotal in the near future. This is George Friedman’s most timely and, ultimately, riveting book.

A timely account of the four most troubled hotspots in the world’s most combustible region Asia is at a dangerous moment. China is rising fast, and its regional ambitions are growing. Reckless North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un may be assembling more nuclear weapons, despite diplomatic efforts to eradicate his arsenal. Japan is building up its military, throwing off constitutional constraints imposed after World War II. The United States, for so long a stabilising presence in Asia, is behaving erratically: Donald Trump is the first US president since the 1970s to break diplomatic protocol and speak with Taiwan, and the first to threaten war with North Korea if denuclearisation does not occur. The possibility of global catastrophe looms ever closer. In this revelatory analysis, geopolitical expert Brendan Taylor examines the four Asian flashpoints most likely to erupt in sudden and violent conflict: the Korean Peninsula, the East China Sea, the South China Sea and Taiwan. He sketches how clashes could play out in these global hotspots and argues that crisis can only be averted by understanding the complex relations between them. Drawing on history, in-depth reports and his intimate observations of the region, Taylor asks what the world’s major powers can do to avoid an eruption of war – and shows how Asia could change this otherwise disastrous trajectory.

Security Flashpoints: Oil, Islands, Sea Access and Military Confrontation covers a range of controversial issues rife with potential for provoking military confrontation in the world's salt water areas. Understanding the factual setting for flashpoints in the oceans requires an appreciation of the geographic circumstances of the disputants. This work starts with a global overview of island disputes provided by two leading geographers. They examine the pivotal relationship between sovereignty claims to islands and delimitation of ocean boundaries throughout the world. The most serious and complicated series of island disputes exists in the South China Sea where multiple national claims are asserted to sovereignty over the Spratly and Paracel Islands. This work gives not only an update on the status of the informal negotiations over the past several years but also the most complete insider's account so far made available in print of the unresolved issues. A suggestion is made for a constructive step toward a peaceful solution by outlining a Spratly Resource Development Agency. Another area that is brought to the attention is Southeastern Europe: the Danube River, the Adriatic Sea, the Caspian and Black Seas with particular emphasis on navigation through the Dardanelles; a definitive analysis is given of the critical freedom of navigation issues in the Strait of Hormuz as well as a comprehensive commentary on the outstanding boundary delimitation controversies in the Persian Gulf. The island and delimitation disputes in East Asian seas are also extensively discussed. The book finishes with a concept of adding political power to the legal doctrine of `critical date' in settling maritime boundary disputes. This work is of particular importance to lawyers involved in the seminal role that the Rule of Law plays for the peaceful resolution of ocean disputes. The work is based on a conference jointly sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Oceans Law and Policy and the Center for National Security Law, University of Virginia School of Law.

This book, first published in 1989, examines how a seemingly trivial incident can act as a flashpoint for wider disturbances. It investigates the underlying causes, the immediate context of the events, and the communication between police and crowd that takes place within them. The authors’ findings are based on first-hand research into case studies of political demonstrations, community disorder and industrial picketing in South Yorkshire, UK over a five-year period. Wide-ranging in its approach, the book covers industrial relations, police-community relations, and questions of political representation and legal rights. The authors provide a novel theoretical analysis, drawing on both sociology and social psychology, which they apply to their own case studies and to other instances of disorder, from Grosvenor Square in 1968 to Wapping in 1986. They also consider the possible impact of new public order legislation, and the policy implications of their research.

This resource describes more than 120 major flashpoints--current and potential conflicts from around the world. The work analyzes each situation, its issues, and present status, and includes specially commissioned maps and extensive bibliographies to aid understanding. Also includes 125 maps.

ATTENTION: ALL FACULTY & ADMINISTRATORS“Another book on student ratings? Are you kidding me?” “Nope, but this one is REALLY different.” Another review of the research or step-by-step on how to develop and interpret rating scales? NOT! (Berk did that with Thirteen Strategies) Designed to solve YOUR problems, conflicts, and confusion about how to evaluate teaching. Written expressly for YOU with Berk’s signature sense of humor.FLASHPOINT: a critical stage in a process, trouble spot, contentious issue, volatile hot button, or lowest temperature at which a flammable liquid will give off enough vapor to igniteThe “flashpoints” covered are the topics that pop up the most frequently and heatedly on listservs, blogs, and the literature. Each flashpoint is defined succinctly, options are presented, and then evidence-based recommendations for concrete action steps are proffered in an effort to stop the popping.The recommendations are grounded in psychometric, professional, and legal standards. The last-named, in particular, can protect you from costly litigation. If you hire, promote, demote, and fire full- and part-time faculty based on student ratings and other measures, then you are vulnerable to violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. Several flashpoints address procedures you can take to stay out of court. If you are a faculty member, you need to know whether your institution’s measures of teaching are appropriate and defensible, and what you should do if they are not.Four sample “flashpoints” and solutions:• Use of global items for summative decisions. SOLUTION: “Cease & desist” and use scale and subscale ratings• Low response rate in online administrations. SOLUTION: 20 strategies to increase rates• Scales to evaluate online and blended/hybrid courses. SOLUTION: 7 strategies are suggested and evaluated • Use of ratings for contract renewal, pay raise, teaching awards, and promotion and tenure. SOLUTION: Applying 80/20 rule for adverse impact to avoid lawsuits related to unequal pay, gender, race, ethnicity, and age discrimination

Covering a timely topic, which is more and more frequently in the news, this book offers vignettes that will sharpen the reader's ability to recognize and respond to difficult situations sparked by identity differences among faculty, staff, and students in college and university settings. The authors provide a systematic guide to addressing interpersonal conflicts that arise out of issues of identity difference, both for individuals and for campus work teams who provide direct service to students. Managing Diversity Flashpoints in Higher Education empowers readers to diagnose diversity flashpoint situations and positively address them without creating defensiveness and barriers to dialogue. The authors include an overview of the changing ethnic, racial, and gender composition of students in higher education in the United States and the major trends in campus responses to the changing student population. They offer an approach to creating higher education environments that welcome people of all cultural characteristics and promote civility on campus. The book is founded on the authors' research on diversity flashpoints in higher education for which they interviewed a national sample of student affairs professionals. The authors identified uncomfortable interpersonal situations with faculty members in which the discomfort arose from student identity difference. This process led to the formulation of strategies for using vignettes (resulting from interviews) in professional development sessions.

Emerging from mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories and origin points analogously serve as initial moorings for Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, a collection that considers–almost fifty years after its student protest founding--the possibilities of and limitations inherent in Asian American studies as historically entrenched, politically embedded, and institutionally situated interdiscipline. Unequivocally, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies investigates the multivalent ways in which the field has at times and—more provocatively, has not—responded to various contemporary crises, particularly as they are manifest in prevailing racist, sexist, homophobic, and exclusionary politics at home, ever-expanding imperial and militarized practices abroad, and neoliberal practices in higher education.