Are there objective criteria that we can use to discern if an act of violence constitutes terrorism, or is such labeling always a subjective and political decision? Wherein lies the boundary between domestic versus international terrori and is that a meaningful distinction to make? How do individuals get radicalized, and how do they reach the point of committing violent acts? In this chapter, we tackle these questions (and others) and the issue of terrorism in international security. There are no easy, agreed upon answers to most of them, and terrorism continues to be a highly contested and politically charged concept, while constituting a very real and pressing security threat in many countries around the world. But that is even more reason to look closely at the controversies surrounding its definition, its historical evolution and patterns, and its contemporary manifestations in the twenty-first century as well as approaches to countering terrorism and attempts at international cooperation.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the concepts of the American nightmare and Whiteness as property, supremacy, and violence. It begins with the case of Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, two Black brothers from North Carolina who lost their land in 2011 but refused to leave it. Black involuntary land loss is important for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the US because it is a major driver of racial wealth inequities. This can be explained, in part, by Whiteness, a system built on antiblackness and anti-Indianism that creates and is created to put White people at the top of the US racial hierarchy through legal, cultural, and material means, such as property. This chapter examines some key facts about Black Americans, the meaning of the American nightmare, the defining features and popular myths about Whiteness, and how it was invented, and is justified, and defended. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on Black prosperity and White riots. It ends with a discussion of two equities for reclaiming the American Dream.

Constructivism emphasizes the role of ideas, identities, and norms in shaping state behavior and international politics, as well as the intersubjective and relational nature of these ideational factors. Social relations “make or construct people – ourselves – into the kinds of beings that we are. Conversely, we make the world what it is, by doing what we do with each other and saying what we say to each other” (Onuf, 1998, 59). Constructivism therefore highlights the intangible yet relational aspects of our reality: a world in which the meaning of objects and actions is not fixed but socially constructed through our interactions; states are held together by collective belief and actively participate in the social construction of anarchy. Norms play a significant role by defining appropriate behavior and enabling action by providing a framework for actors to understand and interact with the world.

Faulting within rocks and sediment creates some of the most dramatic landscapes (Fig. 10.1). A favorite trip for many visitors to the Western United States follows the route from San Francisco to Las Vegas, or from San Francisco to Phoenix, where much of the mountainous scenery along these routes has been formed by faulting. Because of this faulting, the high alpine landscapes contrast greatly with the desert landforms in the lowlands below. After reading this chapter, you will be able to take this excursion and understand the stunning geomorphology of these faulted landscapes, and others.

Eolian, (or aeolian) simply stated, refers to the wind. Eolian processes and landforms involve the erosion, transport, and deposition of sediment by wind. Of the major geomorphic agents (wind, water, ice, and gravity), wind is perhaps the one that is most readily observed, and the one that is often in play across Earth’s surface. Wind is everywhere, and its effects are easy to find. That said, wind as a geomorphic agent is mainly felt on landscapes where vegetation cover is minimal and where sediment is exposed to the power of the wind. Even landscapes that are currently vegetated have beneath them a cover of sediments with ties to eolian systems – but from a different, usually drier and windier past. In this chapter, we will discuss the variety and importance of eolian processes, sediments, and landforms, in all manner of different places!

Volcanoes are exciting – yet dangerous – features, capable of reworking entire landscapes overnight. With more than a dozen volcanic eruptions occurring at different locations on Earth at any one time, volcanoes are a very real part of our world. Each of these volcanoes, and the many extinct ones around the world, has a different eruptive history. Some burst to life in explosive eruptions, like the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines. Others bubble up rivers of lava in what is known as an effusive eruption, like the 2018 activity on Hawai‘i’s Kilauea volcano.

This chapter will examine the landforms associated with endogenic (Earth’s internal) processes, particularly those associated with heat and which lead to eruptions of molten rock, hot water, and steam. The latter are referred to as hydrothermal processes. Therefore, we will not only discuss volcanic and plutonic landforms, but also the intriguing features associated with hydrothermal processes, such as geysers and hot springs.

In this chapter, we explore the concept of ethical practice from a Western perspective, beginning by introducing current codes of ethics, as well as debates about their limitations in guiding ethical practice. We examine some of the dominant assumptions and myths about supposedly objective ways of knowing and contrast these with critical understandings of knowledge, values and ethics. We also provide an overview of various approaches to decision-making in relation to ethical dilemmas and explore how a critical approach can offer an excellent guide for ethical practice. We further examine the practice of critical reflection and share a practitioner’s perspective from our research to demonstrate how they used critical reflection to inform ethical practice.Ethics is a domain of philosophy concerned with questions of what is right or wrong in human conduct. Given that social workers often work with people who are affected by poverty, unemployment, illness, violence, deprivation of liberties and other forms of social disadvantage and oppression, we are frequently faced with making complex ethical decisions that can affect the lives of others.

Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and Big Data techniques have allowed us to learn about the human mind through one of its richest outputs – language. In this chapter, we introduce the field of computational linguistics and go through examples of how to find natural language and how to interpret the complexities that are present within it. The chapter discusses the major state-of-the-art methods being applied in NLP and how they can be applied to psychological questions, including statistical learning, N-gram models, word embedding models, large language models, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. The chapter concludes with ethical discussions on the proliferation of chat “bots” that pervade our social networks, and the importance of balanced training sets for NLP models.