All reliable indicators suggest that ASEAN's (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Economic Community (AEC) will not be successfully established by its 2015 deadline. Why? Against technocratic, ...realist and constructivist accounts, this article offers an explanation rooted in the political economy of ASEAN's member-states. Economic liberalisation agreements promote the rescaling of economic governance, involving regulatory changes that may radically redistribute power and resources. Consequently, they are heavily contested between coalitions of social and political forces, without outcomes reflecting the outcome of these struggles. The argument is demonstrated by exploring the uneven sectoral liberalisation achieved under the AEC, the constrained integration of ASEAN's energy markets, and the limited deregulation of skilled labour migration.
Since holding elections in 2010, Myanmar has transitioned from a direct military dictatorship to a formally democratic system and has embarked on a period of rapid economic reform. After two decades ...of military rule, the pace of change has startled almost everyone and led to a great deal of cautious optimism. To make sense of the transition and assess the case for optimism, this article explores the political economy of Myanmar's dual transition from state socialism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy. It analyses changes within Myanmar society from a critical political economy perspective in order to both situate these developments within broader regional trends and to evaluate the country's current trajectory. In particular, the emergence of state-mediated capitalism and politico-business complexes in Myanmar's borderlands are emphasised. These dynamics, which have empowered a narrow oligarchy, are less likely to be undone by the reform process than to fundamentally shape the contours of reform. Consequently, Myanmar's future may not be unlike those of other Southeast Asian states that have experienced similar developmental trajectories.
China's massive 'Belt and Road Initiative' (BRI) - designed to build infrastructure and coordinate policymaking across Eurasia and eastern Africa - is widely seen as a clearly-defined, top-down ...'grand strategy', reflecting Beijing's growing ambition to reshape, or even dominate, regional and international order. This article argues that this view is mistaken. Foregrounding transformations in the Chinese party-state that shape China's foreign policy-making, it shows that, rather than being a coherent, geopolitically-driven grand strategy, BRI is an extremely loose, indeterminate scheme, driven primarily by competing domestic interests, particularly state capitalist interests, whose struggle for power and resources are already shaping BRI's design and implementation. This will generate outcomes that often diverge from top leaders' intentions and may even undermine key foreign policy goals.
Retention of African Americans on campus is a burning issue for the black community, and a moral and financial one for predominantly white institutions of higher education. This book offers fresh ...insights and new strategies developed by fifteen scholars concerned by the new climate in which affirmative action is being challenged and dismantled.
This is the first book devoted specifically to retention of African Americans in higher education, and is unique in addressing the distinct but inter-related concerns of all three affected constituencies: students, faculty and administrators.
This is a compelling, controversial and constructive contribution to an issue of national importance.
Many observers of international politics detect a growing Chinese challenge to the rules-based, liberal international order. In particular, some saw Beijing’s recent creation of the Asian ...Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as a threat to existing organizations governing international development financing. This article broadly concurs with more sanguine accounts emphasizing the AIIB’s similarity to existing multilateral development banks. However, we go further by arguing that the full extent of China’s challenge to global governance cannot be understood without reference to the ongoing transformation of the Chinese party-state: the contested fragmentation, decentralization and internationalization of state apparatuses. These processes mean that the AIIB is just one institution among many in China’s messy international development financing field—alongside policy and commercial banks, functional ministries, provincial governments and state-owned enterprises. Contestation among these agencies will shape China’s real challenge to global economic governance, which will often be significant, yet unintended and non-strategic, in nature.
Promising discovery (epidemiologic) data have led to the provocative hypothesis that exercise treatment may improve cancer outcomes, fueling calls for the need for large phase III trials to ...definitively test this question. Emerging epidemiologic data suggest that the potential efficacy of exercise differs on the basis of tumor subtype. The heterogeneity in response creates the strong hypothesis that a precision oncology approach is required to optimize the benefit and safety of exercise as a candidate antitumor strategy. This commentary has presented one potential translational framework that may facilitate these efforts. It is hoped that the concepts described here will provide the platform for constructive dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration to optimize the therapeutic promise of exercise treatment.
Cardio-oncology is an emerging discipline focused predominantly on the detection and management of cancer treatment–induced cardiac dysfunction (cardiotoxicity), which predisposes to development of ...overt heart failure or coronary artery disease. The direct adverse consequences, as well as those secondary to anticancer therapeutics, extend beyond the heart, however, to affect the entire cardiovascular-skeletal muscle axis (ie, whole-organism cardiovascular toxicity). The global nature of impairment creates a strong rationale for treatment strategies that augment or preserve global cardiovascular reserve capacity. In noncancer clinical populations, exercise training is an established therapy to improve cardiovascular reserve capacity, leading to concomitant reductions in cardiovascular morbidity and its attendant symptoms. Here, we overview the tolerability and efficacy of exercise on cardiovascular toxicity in adult patients with cancer. We also propose a conceptual research framework to facilitate personalized risk assessment and the development of targeted exercise prescriptions to optimally prevent or manage cardiovascular toxicity after a cancer diagnosis.
Purpose Cardiac dysfunction is a serious adverse effect of certain cancer-directed therapies that can interfere with the efficacy of treatment, decrease quality of life, or impact the actual survival ...of the patient with cancer. The purpose of this effort was to develop recommendations for prevention and monitoring of cardiac dysfunction in survivors of adult-onset cancers. Methods Recommendations were developed by an expert panel with multidisciplinary representation using a systematic review (1996 to 2016) of meta-analyses, randomized clinical trials, observational studies, and clinical experience. Study quality was assessed using established methods, per study design. The guideline recommendations were crafted in part using the Guidelines Into Decision Support methodology. Results A total of 104 studies met eligibility criteria and compose the evidentiary basis for the recommendations. The strength of the recommendations in these guidelines is based on the quality, amount, and consistency of the evidence and the balance between benefits and harms. Recommendations It is important for health care providers to initiate the discussion regarding the potential for cardiac dysfunction in individuals in whom the risk is sufficiently high before beginning therapy. Certain higher risk populations of survivors of cancer may benefit from prevention and screening strategies implemented during cancer-directed therapies. Clinical suspicion for cardiac disease should be high and threshold for cardiac evaluation should be low in any survivor who has received potentially cardiotoxic therapy. For certain higher risk survivors of cancer, routine surveillance with cardiac imaging may be warranted after completion of cancer-directed therapy, so that appropriate interventions can be initiated to halt or even reverse the progression of cardiac dysfunction.
'Non-traditional' security problems like pandemic diseases, climate change and terrorism now pervade the global agenda. Many argue that sovereign state-based governance is no longer adequate, ...demanding and constructing new approaches to manage border-spanning threats. Drawing on critical literature in political science, political geography and political economy, this is the first book that systematically explains the outcomes of these efforts. It shows that transboundary security challenges are primarily governed not through supranational organisations, but by transforming state apparatuses and integrating them into multilevel, regional or global regulatory governance networks. The socio-political contestation shaping this process determines the form, content and operation of transnational security governance regimes. Using three in-depth case studies - environmental degradation, pandemic disease, and transnational crime - this innovative book integrates global governance and international security studies and identifies the political and normative implications of non-traditional security governance, providing insights for scholars and policymakers alike.
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