Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape th...

Creativity is at the roots of extraordinary achievements in the arts and sciences, and enables individuals and their groups to adapt flexibly to changing circumstances, to manage complex social relations, and to survive and prosper through social, technological, and medical innovations. The ability to generate novel and potentially useful ideas and problem solutions (viz., creativity) is a key ...

Culture has been identified as one of the etiological factors leading to the development of eating disorders. Rates of these disorders appear to vary among different cultures and to change across time as cultures evolve. Additionally, eating disorders appear to be more widespread among contemporary cultural groups than was previously believed. Anorexia nervosa has been recognized as a medical d...

Ancient civilizations may have dispersed or collapsed under extreme dry conditions. There are indications that the same may hold for modern societies. However, hydroclimatic change cannot be the sole predictor of the fate of contemporary societies in water-scarce regions. This paper focuses on technological change as a factor that may ameliorate the effects of increasing water scarcity and as s...

The article presents critical analysis of the state of the art in contemporary studies in social organization as factor affecting rural economic growth. We outline two major theoretical and methodological challenges that researchers have to face in order to progress further in understanding of the driving forces and obstacles to sustainable rural economic growth in developing societies. First, ...

Contemporary societies, governments, individuals are all facing problems linked directly or indirectly to the functioning of ecological systems. Whatever the reason underlying these problems – be it the necessary use of biological resources, the elimination or recycling of wastes, our inevitable dependence on ecosystem services – neither politics nor ecology can afford to ignore them, and polit...

Given the prominence and centrality of concepts such as international system or international society in the writings of classical ‘English School’-thinkers like for example Hedley Bull and Martin Wight, their strong interest in the history and evolution of international systems/ societies and their occupation with patterns of order in an anarchical international realm, the total lack of percep...

There is a general consensus among contemporary social scientists that social trust is important, as the small flood of recent publications on the topic shows. 1 The interest in trust covers, unusually in the increasingly ABSTRACT: This article identifies six main theories of the determinants of social trust, and tests them against survey data from seven societies, 1999– 2001. Three of the six ...

Massively multi-player role-playing have created shadow societies that are simultaneously a mirror and a caricature of our own societies. In this respect, they are comparable to the social commentary traditionally provided by literature and film. Over the last 100 years, however, our world has been transformed by new technologies and the myriad ways we have found to use them. Despite these new ...

In recent years, scholars have worked to understand the persistence of racial inequality in societies characterized by the condemnation of explicit racism, growing diversity, and anti-discrimination policies. Many theorists generally agree about the multiple dimensions of racism and challenge assertions about the incipient colourblindness of the current context. However, they also disagree abou...