SOCL 331: Global Sociology (BMC)

This open access book draws the big picture of how population change interplays with politics across the world from 1990 to 2040. Leading social scientists from a wide range of disciplines discuss, for the first time, all major political and policy aspects of population change as they play out differently in each major world region: North and South America; Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region; Western and East Central Europe; Russia, Belarus and Ukraine; East Asia; Southeast Asia; subcontinental India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Australia and New Zealand. These macro-regional analyses are completed by cross-cutting global analyses of migration, religion and poverty, and age profiles and intra-state conflicts. From all angles, this book shows how strongly contextualized the political management and the political consequences of population change are. While long-term population ageing and short-term migration fluctuations present structural conditions, political actors play a key role in (mis-)managing, manipulating, and (under-)planning population change, which in turn determines how citizens in different groups react.

International migration has become a salient concern in global politics but there is also significant variation in governance responses. By focusing on four key world regions - Europe, North America, South America, and Southeast Asia - this book explores the underlying factors that shape governance responses. Rather than focusing on the more visible outputs or outcomes of governance processes such as laws and policies, this book opens the "black box" of migration governance to reveal how understandings and representations of the causes and effects of migration held by key governance actors in these four regions have powerful effects, not only on governance outcomes, but more broadly on the prospects for global migration governance. By doing so, the book shows how migration governance systems through their operation and effects can shape migration - in its various forms - and the lived experiences of migrants

This edited book is written by six authors from Asia and Africa. The book features local conflicts in six countries in Asia and Africa and identifies how the local conflicts are affected by the forces of globalization. Cases include Nigeria's oil-related conflicts, the Democratic Republic of Congo's timber conflicts, continuing instability in Mozambique, Thailand's conflict with regard to AIDS medicine, Myanmar's local conflicts after its reforms, and the Afghanistan's conflicts over minerals; Even seemingly internal conflicts are shown to be significantly influenced by globalization forces and to create new dynamism in local politics.