West-Central Asia: a comparative analysis of students’ trajectories in Russia (Moscow) from the 1980s and China (Yiwu) from the 2000s

Through an exploration of oral history and ethnographic material, this article makes a comparative examination of the life-trajectories of students from Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan who studied in Russia (Moscow) during the late 1980s, and from Tajikistan, Iran, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia who studied in China in the 2000s. In contrast to the cohort of students in Moscow who were mainly men from places with relatively amicable relations with the USSR, the female students of Muslim background from West and Central Asia regarded China as a place where they could pursue fulfilling forms of economic and personal autonomy. By comparing these two groups of international students, this article sheds light into the nature of historical, geographical and geopolitical connections and disconnections between West-Central Asia, Eurasia (especially Russia) and East Asia (especially China). By centring its attention to the demise of Soviet/Russian education and the emergence of China as a figure of economic prosperity, the article theorises West-Central Asia as a particular arena of interaction suitable to comprehend the networks, ‘third spaces’ or zones of interaction (e.g. Moscow and Yiwu), and forms of connection fostered by these students’ trajectories

Nation States, Cities, and People: Alternative Ways to Measure Globalization

In the last decade, attempts to measure globalization have multiplied, and they have led to the devising of diverse globalisation indexes. Besides other important similarities, the main feature shared by the most notable of these indexes is the fact that they use the same unit of analysis: the nation-state. This is a paradoxical situation, if one considers that one of the most distinctive characteristics of globalization is that its dynamics extend beyond the state. Gives this premise, the aim of the article is, on the one hand, to justify in any case the use of instruments that seek to measure globalization on the basis of states, and, on the other, to propose alternative approaches to such measurement. The paper\u2019s underlying assumption is that different approaches to the measurement of globalization are not mutually exclusive. Rather, such a plurality of perspectives is opportune given the complexity and multidimensionality of the concept of globalization

Combining biodiversity resurveys across regions to advance global change research

More and more ecologists have started to resurvey communities sampled in earlier decades to determine long-term shifts in community composition and infer the likely drivers of the ecological changes observed. However, to assess the relative importance of and interactions among multiple drivers, joint analyses of resurvey data from many regions spanning large environmental gradients are needed. In this article, we illustrate how combining resurvey data from multiple regions can increase the likelihood of driver orthogonality within the design and show that repeatedly surveying across multiple regions provides higher representativeness and comprehensiveness, allowing us to answer more completely a broader range of questions. We provide general guidelines to aid the implementation of multiregion resurvey databases. In so doing, we aim to encourage resurvey database development across other community types and biomes to advance global environmental change research