A critique of current childcare systems, advocating for a transformative shift towards universal, publicly supported early childhood education and parenting leave.

Written by two leading experts in early childhood education, Early Childhood in the Anglosphere offers a unique comparison of early childhood education and care services and parenting leave across seven high-income Anglophone countries. Peter Moss and Linda Mitchell explore what these systems have in common, including the dominance of childcare services, widespread privatization and marketization, and weak parenting leave. They highlight the substantial failings of these systems and the causes and consequences of these failings. But this book is ultimately about hope, about how these failings might be made good through major changes. In other words, it is about transformation: Why transformation is both necessary and possible at this particular time? What transformation might look like? And how it might happen? Part of that transformation concerns the need for new policies and structures. Furthermore, it is about how the Anglosphere thinks about early childhood.

The authors call for a turn away from speaking of early childhood services as “childcare,” conceptualizing it in terms of business and marketized commodities. Instead, they should be envisaged as a public good with universal access for children, supported by well-paid, individual entitlements to parenting leave. Using examples from the Anglosphere and beyond, the book argues that a transformation of thinking, policies, and structures is desirable and doable.
 

Spying, the “world’s second oldest profession,” is hardly limited to the traditional great power countries. Intelligence Elsewhere, nevertheless, is the first scholarly volume to deal exclusively with the comparative study of national intelligence outside of the anglosphere and European mainstream. Past studies of intelligence and counterintelligence have tended to focus on countries such as the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, as well as, to a lesser extent, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. This volume examines the deep historical and cultural origins of intelligence in several countries of critical importance today: India, China, the Arab world, and indeed, Russia, the latter examined from a fresh perspective. The authors then delve into modern intelligence practice in countries with organizations significantly different from the mainstream: Iran, Pakistan, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Indonesia, Argentina, and Ghana.

With contributions by leading intelligence experts for each country, the chapters give the reader important insights into intelligence culture, current practice, and security sector reform. As the world morphs into an increasingly multi-polar system, it is more important than ever to understand the national intelligence systems of rising powers and regional powers that differ significantly from those of the US, its NATO allies, and its traditional opponents. This fascinating book shines new light into intelligence practices in regions that, until now, have eluded our understanding.