Research within Australia and around the world underscores the short- and long-term negative effects of bullying on children’s socio-emotional health and wellbeing. While there has been a significant increase in the number of studies conducted with upper primary and secondary students, comparatively fewer studies have focused on the prior-to-school and early school contexts. The few studies that have examined the effects of bullying in the early years emphasise its negative effects, with victims and bullies exhibiting psychosocial maladjustment and psychosomatic problems similar to outcomes reported in older cohorts (see Neilsen-Hewett et al., 2017). Bullying poses a significant risk to children’s socio-emotional wellbeing and mental health. A growing awareness of how bullying manifests in early peer contexts is therefore critical in the development of effective, preventative anti-bullying programs. The goal of this chapter is to provide a synthesis of this research, including an overview of the causes and correlates of bullying and its effects on children’s socio-emotional wellbeing.

With a focus on the African Union, this chapter examines the Security Council’s practices when interacting with regional organisations in collaborative peace operations. The Security Council plays a critical role in two ways: (i) it identifies security threats and the required responses, and it authorises UN missions to deal with them; and (ii) it determines the role, if any, to be played by regional organisations and authorises the action they can take to address threats to peace in their regions. Africa is both the site of conflicts that have necessitated UN peace operations or the Council’s authorisation of enforcement actions, as in Libya in 2011, and home to that regional organisation which has engaged the most with the United Nations in maintaining international peace and security. The overarching argument of this chapter is that – notwithstanding changes in the post-Cold-War international political landscape and the rise of other voices from the periphery – the status of the Security Council as custodian of the collective security system remains undiminished. Its centrality and primacy have not been challenged or usurped by the African Union or other regional organisations.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sense of a region in crisis had prompted talk of the ‘Africanization’ of the Pacific, with the possibility of state failure creating an ‘arc of instability’ stemming from a malaise in several domestic political settings, all providing opportunities for transnational criminal and terrorist networks to gain a foothold in the region. At least this is how it appeared in some commentaries from Australia. From where New Zealand sits in the regional security scenario, these discourses perhaps seemed rather alarmist, while for most of the Pacific Island states security concerns tended to focus on more immediate, non-traditional threats, including environmental hazards such as adverse climate events impacting infrastructure, productivity and food and water security. Even so, the situations in East Timor, Bougainville and Solomon Islands, in particular, were a matter of life and death for many local people and would only be resolved with external assistance.

This chapter analyses the connections between public funding, the rule of law, and multidimensional development. First, via simulation, we document a negative relationship between the budget size and the proportion of embezzled resources (or wasted resources due to inefficiencies). Second, our result suggests that reallocating public funds from other issues to programmes associated with the rule of law can mitigate corruption up to a certain point. Third, we find that the worse the country’s performance, the easier to remain in a development trap, as it becomes more cumbersome to realise a successful allocation profile (i.e., to decipher the proper mix of rule-of-law funding and overall budget size).

This chapter opens with an introduction of a theoretical framework for understanding reading and its development, which is generally consistent across languages. In so doing, the central role of oral language development is emphasized in terms of its role in shaping later reading success. Furthermore, the complex layering of factors that shape instruction and learning is discussed in the light of the amount of variability we can attribute to teachers, by drawing on research carried out from a social policy perspective. It is shown that the answer to the question of teacher effects is hugely affected by the context in which learning occurs. In well-resourced countries, effects of teachers and teaching are important, but relatively subtle, whereas they are much more obvious in countries with few resources or substantial social challenges. In addition, the role of teachers in supporting acquisition of the language skills required for reading comprehension is discussed as we draw on a relatively small set of studies from around the world that examine the nuances of teacher-child conversations in a detailed manner.Finally, we turn to what many consider to be the heart of reading instruction – teaching children to translate printed words into meaning.

In the present study the effects of the literacy ecology of the home on children’s literacy development in rural Rwanda were examined. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected as part of a larger randomized control trial of a literacy intervention in eastern Africa. First, the Literacy Ecology theoretical framework is described as a frame of reference for the present study. Second, survey, ethnographic, and child-reading data are reported from a rural district in Rwanda; these illustrate connections between home and community literacy and children’s early reading achievement. Finally, future directions and implications of the findings for efforts to improve children's early literacy attainment in lower- and middle-income countries are explored.

This chapter examines interventions that focus on parent emotion regulation (ER). Emotions, their function, the different pathways via which emotions are generated, and the role of ER are all briefly introduced to provide the context for the way interventions efforts are considered in the chapter. Interventions that focus on ER in adults drawn from different theoretical perspectives are examined in order to review key common effective components. This is followed by a review of approaches to parent ER used in parenting interventions. We then outline how our own Tuning in to Kids suite of parenting programs targets parent ER. This includes a focus on building parent emotion awareness; promoting insight into parent’s meta-emotion beliefs (how they feel about emotions) and the impact of family of origin experiences on how parents react to emotions; teaching parents proactive, top-down, and bottom-up ER strategies; and how a focus on learning emotion coaching with their children has the added bonus of often enhancing parent ER.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of Post-WWII interstate conflicts linked to the main phases in great power tensions: the bipolar Cold War, with Korean war 1950, the Viet Nam war 1965, Interventions, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, the Détente and unipolar conflict resolving world that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the multipolar world that is emerging thereafter with terrorism, Russian intervention in Georgia and war in Ukraine and sharp tensions between the Koreas and in the East and South China Seas.

Many interventions have been undertaken since WWII for familiar reasons such as regime change. They have almost invariably been judged as breaches of the UN Charter prohibition of the interstate use of force and the claimed justifications of self-defence and protection of nationals have been rejected. Examples are the cases of the US interventions in the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada and Panama (1989) and the Russian interventions in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014 and 2022-). Even Viet Nam’s intervention in Kampuchea (1978) removing the blood-stained Pol Pot regime was judged critically by the UN General Assembly. In 1999, Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech that even though the principle of non-interference should not be jettisoned too readily, he queried whether it should not be qualified through ‘a new framework’ to permit action to remove ‘evil’ dictators like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. However, the massive bombings of Kosovo in 1999 undertaken without Security Council approval and claimed to have been for humanitarian reasons have remained controversial and have not been seen as a legal precedent.

The interstate use of force aiming at the acquisition of territory has been shown to have been rare after WWII. Interventions – actions without that aim but relying on open or shrouded or subversive use force – have remained common. Are they all illegal under Art. 2:4? Concrete cases are examined of interventions undertaken in circumstances not foreseen at the adoption of the Charter. They show an unwillingness in the UN to find force aimed at decolonization illegal. Contrived justifications for interventions undertaken in pursuit of the Cold War rejected, while understanding is shown for interventions using force in response to terrorism. Attacks – including interventions – that are imminent are deemed to justify use of force in self-defence, but attacks not seen as imminent do not. In line with this thinking, the use of force to destroy a nuclear research reactor that could have produced plutonium for future nuclear weapons was condemned by the Security Council in 1981. Attacks made with similar intentions – by cyber means and by assassinations – have nevertheless been undertaken.