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This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

India faces a critical phase of its post-independence existence with an alarming besiege of hostile states and violent non-state actors. The existential security predicament has emerged in an irony that features India’s steady and solid economic growth and development. Despite the robustness of the economic and strategic macro-fundamentals, India is in the throes of a critical siege of violent asymmetric conflict in a South Asian region besieged by state-failure and economic fatigue. A United States and allied strategic dilemmas vacillate in Afghanistan, a Pakistan in the throes of a new round of critical internal destabilisation with a massive spurt in radicalisation threatening to engulf the Afghanistan–Pakistan region and a China that exploits India’s unsettled boundary issues leveraging support to Pakistan, all present India its double jeopardy.

The employ of the term ‘Double-Jeopardy’ is a legalistic term that connotes that a person cannot be penalised twice for the same crime. The employ of ‘Double-Jeopardy’ in this analysis reflects India’s existential threats of violent asymmetric conflict and its pathological consequences and the perilous impact of nuclear weapons associated with such groups and their state sponsors.

This chapter endeavours to examine (a) India’s critical security vulnerabilities and responses emergent from the worsening Afghanistan–Pakistan situation; (b) the consequences of a US retreat from Afghanistan and the Chinese assertive rise in the South Asian region; (c) critical imperatives and operational safeguards in India’s nuclear security; and (d) future pathways of India in the region.

A long period of capitalist crisis has amplified uneven and combined development in most aspects of political economy and political ecology in most parts of the world, with a resulting increase in the eco-social metabolism of profit-seeking firms and their state supporters. This is especially with the revival of extraction-oriented corporations, especially fossil fuel firms, which remain the world’s most profitable. What opportunities arise for as multi-faceted a critique of “extractivism” as the conditions demand? With ongoing paralysis of United Nations climate negotiators, to illustrate, the most critical question for several decades to come is whether citizen activism can forestall further fossil fuel combustion. In many settings, the extractive industries are critical targets of climate activists, for example, where divestment of stocks is one strategy, or refusing access to land for mining is another. Invoking climate justice principles requires investigating the broader socio-ecological and economic costs and benefits of capital accumulation associated with fossil fuel use, through forceful questioning both by immediate victims and by all those concerned about GreenHouse Gas emissions. Their solidarity with each other is vital to nurture and to that end, the most powerful anti-corporate tactic developed so far, indeed beginning in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle, appears to be financial sanctions. The argumentation for invoking sanctions against the fossil fuel industry (and its enablers such as international shipping) is by itself insufficient. Also required is a solid activist tradition. There are, in 2014, two inter-related cases in which South African environmental justice activists have critiqued multi-billion dollar investments, and thus collided with the state, with two vast parastatal corporations and with their international financiers. Whether these collisions move beyond conflicting visions, and actually halt the fossil-intensive projects, is a matter that can only be worked out both through argumentation – for example, in the pages below – and through gaining the solidarity required to halt the financing of climate change.

In this chapter, we explore the ethics of developing and maintaining meaningful and equitable relationships between Māori and Pākehā scholars and researchers. We begin by asking if it is even desirable, viable, or sustainable to pursue decolonising research in disciplines and relationships that are so deeply entrenched in settler-colonialism. We consider the challenges involved in managing an equitable distribution of decolonising labour in settings with few Indigenous scholars, particularly around the constant work of educating and pointing out ignorance, as well as the emotional labour of dealing with Pākehā vulnerability, inaction, and resistance to change. Building on the Kaupapa Māori principles of whanaungatanga and manaakitanga, we suggest a tangible set of seven strategies or ‘collaborative ethics’ to address these challenges in working together and in actively dismantling while privilege and white supremacy within the Academy and wider world of research.

Purpose – This chapter analyzes two environmental conflicts in Southeast Michigan. It analyzes how activists in each community framed each conflict and what factors prevented the groups from collaborating.

Design/methodology/approach – This essay uses a multi-method approach. Researchers used participant observation, interviews, and archival information gleaned from government documents and newspapers.

Findings – Both community groups had a common opponent – a corporation that had closed its facilities in a predominantly black, low-income urban community and relocated it to a predominantly white, middle-class, rural community. Both communities had complaints about pollution, yet they did not collaborate with each other in their campaigns against the corporation.

Originality/value – The essay blends two theoretical approaches – social movement and conflict theories – to help in the assessment of how the conflicts unfolded and why collaboration between activists in the two communities did not occur. This is one of the first attempts to analyze environmental justice conflicts from this perspective.