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For nearly sixty years, the regime in Rangoon has remained in power by preventing democratic change and waging war against the country's numerous ethnic nationality parties. This is the oldest ongoing conflict in the world. At the end of May, in response to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's appeal to free Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize winning pro-democracy activist, the military regime extended her house arrest for at least another year. This step is the latest demonstration of the unwillingness of the military regime to share power. As a direct consequence of the fighting and in response to sustained and widespread human rights violations throughout the country, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been displaced and huge numbers of refugees have fled to neighbouring countries.

Financial instability can have large adverse effects on an economy. One major cause of instability is asset price bubbles. This paper starts by considering how such bubbles can arise due to the expansion of money and credit. The ways in which subsequent financial instability occurs are then discussed. Banking crises can arise due to panics or as a result of the business cycle. Contagion and financial fragility can cause small disturbances to have large effects. Finally, policy issues are touched upon.

When the riots that led to the fall of President Bakiyev and his government broke out in Kyrgyztan in April 2010, the international community woke up to the country's political instability.

When the riots that led to the fall of President Bakiyev and his government broke out in Kyrgyztan in April 2010, the international community woke up to the country's political instability.

THE RUSSIAN ELECTIONS OF DECEMBER 1993 WERE A FURTHER STEP IN RUSSIA'S TRANSITION FROM A FRAGILE, EMBRYONIC DEMOCRACY TO A CONDITION OF CHRONIC INSTABILITY AND AT LEAST PARTIAL DISINTEGRATION. THE ALREADY ADVANCED PROCESS OF GRADUAL COMING-APART-AT-THE-SEAMS WILL PROBABLY CONTINUE, TO BE FOLLOWED IN DUE COURSE BY DETERMINED EFFORTS TO REUNITE THE COUNTRY, MOST LIKELY LED BY THE FORCES OF MILITANT RUSSIAN NATIONALISM. THIS ARTICLE ARGUES THAT THE PROSPECTS FOR RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY APPEAR BLEAK.

Separations exert a detrimental impact on different areas of life in both adults and children. Having already experienced family instability, stepfamily members are at risk of experiencing even multiple family separations across the life course. To better understand stepfamily (in)stability in Europe, we study stability risks and facilitators between stepfamilies in Germany. We pursue Cherlin's perspective of stepfamilies' destabilizing lack of institutionalization. Specifically, we assess the impact of social control in terms of social and legislative conditions, (step)parents' social roles in terms of gender roles, and customs and conventions of family life in terms of union status. We apply event history analysis to a sample of 2,166 stepfamilies, 543 of which end up separated, from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). For example, we find that social and legislative liberalization might destabilize stepfamilies if it eases leaving unhappy relationships, and might stabilize stepfamilies if it alleviates stepfamilies' financial or caregiving burdens through de-familiarization. In contrast to stepfather families, stepmother families' stability appears to profit from stepmothers' and biological fathers' investment in stepfamily relationships to make up for noncomplying with gendered social roles. Overall, stepfamily stability appears to benefit from individual as well as societal pursuits of re-institutionalization.

The following text is an excerpt from the book Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture, which was originally published in 2019 with Universitätsverlag Winter as part of the series American Studies – A Monograph Series. The book introduces the concept of 'narrative instability' in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend's poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text's plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite—or rather, exactly because of—their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans.

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