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This paper will identify and further explore the ideals versus realities of learning poverty and the consequential effects on our moral obligations and responsibilities. The wealthy nations are now under further pressure to recognise and realise their moral obligations to enabling social justice in the context of access, and distribution, of vaccines for the poorer nations. Learning poverty has always been a feature of our global economic, and institutional order, and has become an increasingly important factor in achieving justice.

The study focusses on a human rights approach to learning poverty and the ideals versus the realities of what we are beginning to see in the times of a global pandemic. The major challenges to justice is inherent to the recognition that wealthy nations continue to have a pivotal role in the reduction of poverty. The identified major challenges in the context of learning poverty are: “nation states and the global pandemic”, “international interactions and learning poverty” and “global institutions and learning inequalities”. In particular, the authors explore the concept of ideals versus realities through three “challenges”, which continues to challenge any semblance of justice in the current global vaccine distribution. Nation states and borders, international interactions and global institutions remain barriers in overcoming what is becoming a reality of learning poverty.

This paper seeks to look beyond the economics of vaccine trade and seek a way to accept a moral claim of justice for all. The authors consider how wealthy nations are active participants in the emergence of learning poverty for many nations.

By exploring the ideals versus realities of learning poverty, and human rights, the authors highlight some of the challenges, and wealthy nations moral obligations, through the emergence of a new dimensional indicator of poverty, learning poverty.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles are shaping our daily lives, society, and will continue to transform how we will fight future wars. Advances in AI technologies have fueled an explosion of interest in the military and political domain. As AI technologies evolve, there will be increased reliance on these systems to maintain global security. For the individual and society, AI presents challenges related to surveillance, personal freedom, and privacy. For the military, we will need to exploit advances in AI technologies to support the warfighter and ensure global security. The integration of AI technologies in the battlespace presents advantages, costs, and risks in the future battlespace. This chapter will examine the issues related to advances in AI technologies, as we examine the benefits, costs, and risks associated with integrating AI and autonomous systems in society and in the future battlespace.

Despite its somewhat old-fashioned, functionalist air, “integration” is still the most popular way of conceptualizing the developing relationship between old European nation-states and their growing non-European, “ethnic” immigrant populations. It is also widely used to frame the advocacy of political means for dealing with the consequences of immigration in the post-World War II period. Many similar, difficult-to-define concepts can be used to describe the process of social change that occurs when immigrants are “integrated” into their new host society. But none occurs with the frequency or all-encompassing scope of the idea of integration across such a broad range of West European countries. This fact continues to decisively structure policy research and policy debate on these subjects in Europe.

In this book chapter, I focus on the epistemological, ontological and axiological practice traditions that help to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions about the management of trust funds in First Nation communities. Informing this chapter is a qualitative research study involving 11 First Nation community members in Canada who were interviewed. Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing and the theory of practice architectures are used to identify the cultural discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enable and/or constrain practice. The findings reveal that Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing collide adversely with trust account decision making due to the duties and obligations guiding trust settlement agreements. The ways in which trust account practices can be transformed to ensure greater alignment with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing are outlined.

Prior reports on theory and research focusing on describing and explaining national cultural influences on purchase and consumption behavior use a net effects approach (i.e., theory and analysis relying on main and interaction effects via statistical analysis). Theory and research in this chapter advances qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of a configuration perspective of culture's consequences on consumption behavior. This research informs the view that national cultures represent causal recipes (conjunctions) of cultural values; the study of main and interaction effects offer meager representations of national culture's consequences in comparison to adopting a cultural configuration stance. The configuration research here includes transforming Hofstede's country cultural scores into fuzzy set values and applying Boolean algebra to estimate the relevancy of alternative cultural configurations for each of 14 nations to consuming experiences during visits to Australia. The findings support primary and additional hypotheses that specific cultural configurations are sufficient (but not necessary) for describing substantial culture's consequences on consuming tourism experiences. For example, the animus (i.e., Carl Jung's unconscious masculine personality-force) configuration — the combination of high power (P), high individualism (I), high masculine (M), and low uncertainty avoidance (∼U) (i.e., P·I·M·∼U) — is sufficient in indicating not-shopping-for-gifts while visiting Australia. Western national cultures (e.g., United States) have higher fuzzy set scores than Eastern national cultures (e.g., Japan) for the animus configuration.

What drives this diffusion process? One neo-institutional answer to this question is that new models of nationhood, organization, and social identity exist in the larger world environment (Meyer, 2009, p. 36ff). Because they are external, these “identities” and models can be adopted without huge costs and without necessarily entailing the reorganization of society or actors’ personalities. Thus the models of modern society can spread quickly because they are relatively easy to assume and because they have high legitimacy in the international environment. Conformity produces instrumental rewards as well. And it also signals to significant “other” nations and international bodies that a nation has accepted modernity and its responsibilities (see Boli & Thomas's discussion, 1999). Thus, foreign aid, loans, and credit may flow quickly to those developing countries that enact modern institutional structures like mass education and democratic elections.