Series

The series presents latest results of academic research carried out by leading experts in the field of European Constitutionalism. Coordinated by its founding member Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ingolf Pernice, managing director of the Walter Hallstein-Institute for European Constitutional Law at the Humboldt-University Berlin, the European Constitutional Law Network (ECLN, www.ecln.net) gathers academics and judges from more than twenty EU-Member States and candidate countries as well as specialists from Switzerland, the USA and EU-institutions. Bridging different national contexts and combining practical experiences with academic reflection, the main activities of the ECLN aim both at the increase of research cooperation and the establishment of a continuous multinational academic dialogue. International conferences on recent reform steps and key issues of European multilevel constitutionalism are regularly hosted by the ECLN. The outcome of this Europe-wide and transatlantic discourse is published in this series.

‘Menschenwürde und Menschenrechte’ (Human Dignity and Human Rights) is a series of books published by the Euregio-Plattform für Menschenwürde und Menschenrechte (EUPHUR), a joint initiative founded by the Universities of Innsbruck, Bozen-Bolzano and Trento, and the Academy of Merano. The goal of EUPHUR is to examine and reflect on both basic questions of human dignity and key issues in current debates on human rights from an academic perspective in order to initiate and foster societal discourse on these subjects. The broad and diverse range of issues in this regard demands interdisciplinary cooperation between different fields, in particular law, philosophy, economics and the social sciences. Accordingly, this series of books offers a forum for works which address this subject in various forms, and which cannot only be used by established senior and junior researchers, but also publishes factually well-founded contributions from the fields of politics and journalism, to name just two. The editors welcome submissions to the series in the form of monographs, anthologies, conference proceedings and academic theses, whose publication is subject to approval by the editorial board. The works published in the series may be written in German, English or Italian.

Textbook series for students of religious and cultural studies as well as for student teachers The volumes in this series introduce the central topics, theories and methods of religious studies in both an academically sound manner and in understandable language, and they convey the subject’s basic study contents. The books’ consistent problem orientation and the didactic preparation of their individual chapters facilitate access to the subject’s specific contents. This series is ideally suited to exam preparation, for example through summaries, questions which test knowledge, discussion and comprehension questions, and diagrams and thematic cross-references.

This series documents research in the disciplines of sociology, history, cultural studies, political science and religious studies, as well as at the points where these disciplines overlap, which deals with societies in Central and Eastern Europe along with those in Central Asia. Since the beginning of the societal transformations at the end of the 1980s, one can observe that quite different developments have taken place in the aforementioned societies, whose fundamental characteristics lie within a very wide range of intensive modernisation and differentiation up to (new) forms of collectivistic orientation. Here, disciplinary and interdisciplinary publications, also with a critical approach, contribute to the discourse in social science on structures, actors and processes in the regions in question. The peculiarity of the series is that, in particular, authors from Eastern Europe are invited to publish work in it. Through their internal perspectives, these authors can contribute to substantially expanding expert knowledge on this subject area.

Volumes 1–48 published with VS-Verlag, volumes 49–80 published with VISTAS Verlag. The Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia ensures the protection of four key elements of society: human dignity, young people, media users and diversity in the private media in North Rhine-Westphalia. It fulfils this duty by regulating and overseeing existing media content on the one hand, while instructing people how they can use the media fairly and autonomously and by promoting journalism in the region on the other. The findings of research projects conducted on behalf of the Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia appear in this series of publications.

The „Contributions to Comparative and International Public Law“ discuss topics of contemporary public international law, European Union law and comparative public law. They aim to contribute to a better understanding of the basic structures and current evolutions in international, supranational and domestic public law at a time of their growing interdependence and interaction. Future volumes in the series will deal with the extraterritorial application of the UN Covenant on Social and Economic Rights, the obligations of States and International Financial Institutions to protect social and economic rights in the Sovereign Debt Crisis and the comparative law of independent regulatory agencies.

Anyone who talks about animals makes human beings their subject. Turning to animals as an object of research in various contexts certainly does not only facilitate a better understanding of animals, but also of humans and society. In animals, researchers discover themselves and their world. This ‘animal turn’ now encompasses many academic disciplines and often begins or ends with ethical questions. This series of books deals with different developmental paths in animal ethics, which should not be understood as an isolated field of ethics, but rather as a specific perspective in an interdisciplinary discourse on moral questions of human–animal relations. The series is open to all disciplines in the humanities and natural sciences. It is bilingual (German/English) and is supervised by its editors in conjunction with an academic advisory board. A peer review process is carried out on all submissions to ensure their quality.

Textbook series for students of economics at universities and colleges Academically sound and in comprehensible language, the volumes in this series introduce various topics and theories on and methods used in economics, while conveying the subject’s basic study contents. The central question the series addresses is: How can the needs of today be met in such a way that future generations will inherit an intact social, ecological and economic system? The books’ consistent problem orientation and the didactic preparation of their individual chapters facilitate access to their subject’s specialist content. This series is ideally suited to exam preparation, among other things by means of summaries, questions which test knowledge, discussion and comprehension questions, and charts and thematic cross-references.

This series of publications deals with Vietnam’s politics, society, economy and foreign relations. It is aimed at a broad readership from the fields of science, business and politics, and, in general, at readers interested in Vietnam and its neighbouring countries. The studies in the series aim to inform its readership, especially its Western audience, objectively and competently about today’s Vietnam and its role in an increasingly important region of the world: South East Asia and East Asia. As Vietnam is a dynamic state, its internal development and foreign relations are undergoing considerable change.