Developmental scientists stress the importance of exploring relational processes and contexts in association with critical consciousness (CC) development. Such inquiries are critical as the social relationships within a setting can impact a young person’s ability to exercise power and have direct implications for access to valued resources. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a developmentally inclusive lens for understanding the interactions between individual behaviors and setting-level contexts by identifying patterns of relationships among sets of actors within a system. In this chapter, we describe how SNA can help us operationalize children’s and adolescents’ understanding of power dynamics within everyday proximal settings. Specifically, we highlight the potential of SNA to quantify early developmental understandings and savviness in assessing multiple components of CC. In other words, measures of SNA at the individual, dyadic, and setting-level act as precursors that can be used to engage in CC before a fuller analysis of larger social conditions emerges developmentally.

Human rights have traditionally been viewed as being of concern to governments only. The BHR discussion challenges this traditional, state-centric view and provides reasons why businesses ought to have human rights responsibilities, too. Such reasons or justifications can be formulated from an ethical, legal, and even a more pragmatic, managerial point of view. From an ethical perspective, the chapter shows why businesses have obligations beyond profit-maximization and why human rights obligations are among such responsibilities. It lays particular emphasis on the power and authority of corporations as a possible foundation. From a legal perspective, the chapter addresses the question of whether multinational corporations have international legal personality and assesses to what extent corporate human rights obligations can be derived from international human rights law. From a pragmatic perspective, the social license to operate and the so-called business case for human rights responsibilty are explored. The chapter concludes with some reflections on general objections against corporate human rights responsibility.

This introductory chapter unpacks and integrates the study’s key concepts, theories, and fields to situate the analyses laid out in subsequent chapters. It devotes detailed attention to the inextricable and co-constitutive relationships linking societies, environments, and power. It connects Afro-Brazilian cultures with the myths of racial democracy that helped to shape their emergence in the twentieth century. It discusses concepts of cultural landscapes within economies of transatlantic exchange, and links theories of relational power with Afro-Brazilian resistance and environmental change. It frames the colonial plantation and its monocultures as the ongoing socioecological framework of coloniality, in contrast to the complex biodiverse palm oil landscapes of Northeast Brazil. Along the way, the chapter introduces the real and conceptual places involved in the study, and their interrelations, especially Bahia, the Atlantic World, and the African diaspora. It concludes with a discussion of methods and methodology and an outline of the book’s structure.

The rise of private-sector liquidity as a dominant component in global liquidity markets has created a penetrating web of financial interdependence that links the fates of investors, financial institutions and national governments to one another. The booms and busts of the last thirty years provide vivid evidence that the behavior of each of these actors can generate uncertainties that affect capital flows, credit dynamics and price levels, all of which have potentially significant social, economic and political consequences. The dynamics are ongoing. The newly released International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook celebrates a broad-based global recovery, but it also warns that the postcrisis economic expansion has not been balanced and may have peaked in several major economies.