Report on a month-long debate on various social problems faced by researchers in Asia.

Tackling the problems of Third World development from a different perspective, this study offers a new approach in which people at the grass roots level in South Asia become both the subjects and the objects of a participatory process of development designed to improve living conditions.

People's participation has begun to influence the practice of development substantially. This study provides an interpretation of how participation occurs, uses case studies to highlight various approaches, and develops elements of a strategy and a methodology.

Established after World War II, the United Nations strives to save successive generations from the scourge of war. This vital world body has undoubtedly succeeded in resolving many conflicts through its political and peacekeeping missions, and nurtured peace through its development support, though not always with the efficiency and effectiveness expected of it. The world is vastly different today from the days when the United Nations was set up. The challenges that the United Nations faces in the 21st century are much more complex and deadly than they were 60 years ago. Reforming and reinventing the United Nations should therefore be a matter of great interest to the international community. To tackle the challenges ahead, the United Nations needs to re-engineer its organizational arrangements, reorient its processes, revamp its decision-making systems, and reform its human resource and financial management to get the best results from them. This book suggests measures for restructuring the Security Council, rationalizing the constituent systems of the General Assembly, the ECOSOC and the Secretariat, and strengthening the peacekeeping, corruption control and accountability mechanisms. The book is a collaborative endeavour, involving contributions from international authority figures in areas such as peace and security, development assistance, resource management, leadership and ethics. The vision projected by them on the major issues inscribed on the United Nations agenda is meant to encourage fresh thinking on the part of opinion leaders, diplomats, academics, experts in foreign affairs and UN staff, so that this intergovernmental institution could be effectively geared to respond to the emerging challenges of the 21st century. Reinventing the United Nations would be of interest to the public and particularly the postgraduate students of political science, international law, and international relations, as well as diplomats, public affairs professionals and social science scholars at various levels.

With the evolution of nursing knowledge and theory, relationships between ideas and actions often become blurred and difficult to articulate. In this ground-breaking volume, the contributors present some of the ways in which nursing scholars are confronting this problem by reflecting upon the nature of nursing knowledge and the application of theory in practice. The book is divided into three sections that address: the nature of knowledge in clinical practice; the application of theoretical knowledge; and the creation of new forms and avenues of inquiry.

This book reflects the crisis of development, the associated crises of state and its impact on regional cooperation in South Asia. The resulting political and social unrest, violence and militarisation of state structures are considered in detail. The contributors to this volume focus on the depth of the crises and articulate alternatives available and sustainable in the South Asian context -- the common heritage, the renewable resource base and the available stock of knowledge which enlarges the range of technological options.

Nursing as an Aesthetic Praxis is a work into how we be, approached through narratives of nursing. As an inquiry it is both phenomenological and metaphysical as they relate to being. Being is unfolded as a process by which and through which we create and recreate ourselves for the purpose of consciously knowing that which we already are. Dis-ease is positioned as one result of how we be in this process, that as an act of ongoing creation can be recreated. To come to this place of knowing is to begin to know Love. In this way, Nursing as an Aesthetic Praxis is really a love story, a story about a way to love that when known by nurses will enable nursing to be an art of healing.

In Habermas and Giddens on Praxis and Modernity Craig Browne investigates how two of the most important and influential contemporary social theorists have sought to develop the modernist visions of the constitution of society through the autonomous actions of subjects. Comparing Habermas’s and Giddens’s conceptions of the constitution of society, interpretations of the social-structural impediments to subjects’ autonomy and attempts to delineate potentials for progressive social change within contemporary society, Browne draws on his own work, which has extended aspects of the social theorists’ approach to modernity. Despite the criticisms developed over the course of the book, Habermas and Giddens are found to be two of the most important theorists of democratization and social democracy, the dynamics of capitalist modernity and their paradoxes, social practices and reflexivity, and the foundations of social theory in the problem of the relationship of social action and social structure.