Since 2015, Poland's populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) has been dismantling the major checks and balances of the Polish state and subordinating the courts, the civil service, and the media to the will of the executive. Political rights have been radically restricted, and the Party has captured the entire state apparatus. The speed and depth of these antidemocratic movements took many observers by surprise: until now, Poland was widely regarded as an example of a successful transitional democracy. Poland's anti-constitutional breakdown poses three questions that this book sets out to answer: What, exactly, has happened since 2015? Why did it happen? And what are the prospects for a return to liberal democracy? These answers are formulated against a backdrop of current worldwide trends towards populism, authoritarianism, and what is sometimes called 'illiberal democracy'. As this book argues, the Polish variant of 'illiberal democracy' is an oxymoron. By undermining the separation of powers, the PiS concentrates all power in its own hands, rendering any democratic accountability illusory. There is, however, no inevitability in these anti-democratic trends: this book considers a number of possible remedies and sources of hope, including intervention by the European Union.

Highly topical and with an interdisciplinary focus, this book explores the recent political and social developments in EU citizenship. Bringing political scientists, sociologists and law scholars together, this book analyses the implications of identity categorisation regarding gender and generations in the EU and what this means for the realisation of citizens?' rights, particularly of women, young adults and migrant care workers throughout the EU. Established researchers explore the stories of social and civil rights in the EU, covering family mobility and migration issues, the precarious positions of female migrant workers across member states and the EU?s promotion of diverse family rights. Moreover, the book focuses on the prominent issues facing the new generation of young adults: particularly social mobility, civil rights and political parties?' differing views on gender and family issues. With insight into national and regional perspectives on these significant topics, the authors argue that the European Parliament is currently striving for a new consensus to unite member states and dissipate current divisions. An important read for academics and students from across the social sciences, specifically public and social policy, gender studies and European studies, interested in the future direction of the EU surrounding gender and generational division. Contributors include: G.M. Dotti Sani, J. Gal, T. Knijn, A. Krizsan, D. Lepianka, J. Long, M. Luppi, M. Naldini, R. Oomkens, L. Rolandsen Agustin, A. Santero, B. Siim, J. Sipic, D. Sirinic, C. Solera, L.J. van den Braken, M.A. Yerkes

In modern times, political and social reform often starts at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; common people with ordinary lives enact change through community organization and the desire to improve their own lives and the lives of those around them. Governments that support such movements can experience great advances and achievements in the long term. Cases on Grassroots Campaigns for Community Empowerment and Social Change presents a series of real-world studies on political and social activism in the information age, focusing on how empowerment of minority or underserved populations can serve to enact sweeping reforms regionally, nationally, or globally. This book is a critical resource for political and private actors, including government agencies, community organizers, political parties, and researchers in the social sciences. This reference work features research on timely topics such as women's empowerment, poverty, social activism and social change, community building, and empowerment of individuals in a variety of socioeconomic settings and roles.

aImpressive, provocative and smart.Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of U.S. Citizenship is breathtaking in its timeliness and its broad scope.a
-- Erika Lee, author of "At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943"

aAn urgent collection of essays by both activists and scholars that puts legislative and judicial histories into dialogue with activists' struggles to bring about social justice for immigrant communities. Its ever-present focus on social justice connects the specificity of individual historical struggles to broader political aspirations.a
--Wendy Kozol, Oberlin College

Punctuated by marches across the United States in the spring of 2006, immigrant rights has re-emerged as a significant and highly visible political issue. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of U.S. Citizenship brings prominent activists and scholars together to examine the emergence and significance of the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Contributors place the contemporary immigrant rights movement in historical and comparative contexts by looking at the ways immigrants and their allies have staked claims to rights in the past, and by examining movements based in different communities around the United States. Scholars explain the evolution of immigration policy, and analyze current conflicts around issues of immigrant rights; activists engaged in the current movement document the ways in which coalitions have been built among immigrants from different nations, and between immigrant and native- born peoples. The essays examine the ways in which questions of immigrant rights engage broader issues of identity, including gender, race, and sexuality.

It was the final speech of a long day, August 28, 1963, when hundreds of thousands gathered on the Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In a resounding cadence, Martin Luther King Jr. lifted the crowd when he told of his dream that all Americans would join together to realize the founding ideal of equality. The power of the speech created an enduring symbol of the march and the larger civil rights movement. King s speech still inspires us fifty years later, but its very power has also narrowed our understanding of the march. In this insightful history, William P. Jones restores the march to its full significance.

The opening speech of the day was delivered by the leader of the march, the great trade unionist A. Philip Randolph, who first called for a march on Washington in 1941 to press for equal opportunity in employment and the armed forces. To the crowd that stretched more than a mile before him, Randolph called for an end to segregation and a living wage for every American. Equal access to accommodations and services would mean little to people, white and black, who could not afford them. Randolph s egalitarian vision of economic and social citizenship is the strong thread running through the full history of the March on Washington Movement. It was a movement of sustained grassroots organizing, linked locally to women s groups, unions, and churches across the country. Jones s fresh, compelling history delivers a new understanding of this emblematic event and the broader civil rights movement it propelled."

Winner of the 2013 John Hope Franklin Book Prize presented by the American Studies Association A necessary read that demonstrates the ways in which certain people are devalued without attention to social contexts Social Death tackles one of the core paradoxes of social justice struggles and scholarship-that the battle to end oppression shares the moral grammar that structures exploitation and sanctions state violence. Lisa Marie Cacho forcefully argues that the demands for personhood for those who, in the eyes of society, have little value, depend on capitalist and heteropatriarchal measures of worth. With poignant case studies, Cacho illustrates that our very understanding of personhood is premised upon the unchallenged devaluation of criminalized populations of color. Hence, the reliance of rights-based politics on notions of who is and is not a deserving member of society inadvertently replicates the logic that creates and normalizes states of social and literal death. Her understanding of inalienable rights and personhood provides us the much-needed comparative analytical and ethical tools to understand the racialized and nationalized tensions between racial groups. Driven by a radical, relentless critique, Social Death challenges us to imagine a heretofore "unthinkable" politics and ethics that do not rest on neoliberal arguments about worth, but rather emerge from the insurgent experiences of those negated persons who do not live by the norms that determine the productive, patriotic, law abiding, and family-oriented subject.

What will citizenship mean to the peoples of a new, wider Europe? Welfare state retrenchment and technological change in the work place are undermining social citizenship rights and provoking a critical assessment of the West European concept itself. In the light of these changes, what models can the democratic, industrialized states of the West offer the transitional economies of the East?This innovative book presents new work by an international group of leading social scientists offers historical analysis and empirical description, as well as theoretical and political assessments, of work and citizenship in Europe. It examines the erosion of the welfare state, the emergence of poverty and the underclass, and the rights and duties connected with social citizenship. After a review of labour rights and obligations in the former socialist countries, it also assesses the state of industrial citizenship. It asks why the technological transformation of work tends to create segmentation and exclusion and argues for a debate about economic citizenship rights. Work and Citizenship in the New Europe concludes with theoretical and political arguments in favour of specific social policies on work and citizenship, examining such issues as labour participation, basic income guarantees and durable economic growth.

This multidisciplinary book introduces readers to original perspectives on crimmigration that foster holistic, contextual, and critical appreciation of the concept in Australia and its individual consequences and broader effects. This collection draws together contributions from nationally and internationally respected legal scholars and social scientists united by common and overlapping interests, who identify, critique, and reimagine crimmigration law and practice in Australia, and thereby advance understanding of this important field of inquiry. Specifically, crimmigration is addressed and analysed from a variety of standpoints, including: criminal law/justice; administrative law/justice; immigration law; international law; sociology of law; legal history feminist theory, settler colonialism, and political sociology. The book aims to: explore the historical antecedents of contemporary crimmigration and continuities with the past in Australia reveal the forces driving crimmigration and explain its relationship to border securitisation in Australia identify and examine the different facets of crimmigration, comprising: the substantive overlaps between criminal and immigration law; crimmigration processes; investigative techniques, surveillance strategies, and law enforcement agents, institutions and practices uncover the impacts of crimmigration law and practice upon the human rights and interests of non-citizens and their families. analyse crimmigration from assorted critical standpoints; including settler colonialism, race and feminist perspectives By focusing upon these issues, the book provides an interconnected collection of chapters with a cohesive narrative, notwithstanding that contributors approach the themes and specific issues from different theoretical and critical standpoints, and employ a range of research methods.

Issues of race and ethnicity in Europe have been brought to the fore by the recent electoral successes of extreme right-wing parties, while immigration and refugee policies are exposing deep uncertainties across the political spectrum. The politicization of 'race', ethnicity and immigration is a key feature of contemporary European society. In this important new volume, leading specialists explore the political mediation of racism across western Europe, examining its causes, character and consequences. Racism, Ethnicity and Politics in Contemporary Europe includes an overview of contemporary racism, investigations into its socio-economic and ideological roots, analyses of its role in party politics and studies of multilateral and non-governmental initiatives designed to promote anti-racism. The contributors provide case studies of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. They consider both the experience of racism in specific countries and common issues thrown up by the resurgence of racism at a time of profound socio-economic restructuring and political uncertainty. The rich insights offered by this book will be of interest to students and scholars active in many disciplines ranging from politics and sociology to discourse analysis and social psychology.

This is a collection of papers that were initially presented at the international conference, which was organized from 9th to 10th November 2018 by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) and Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade. The conference was organized on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Besides the introductory address, by Ben Ferencz, one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials, this volume gathers internationally renowned scholars and practitioners who deal with diverging issues from the international human rights law and politics. The volume opens with a selection of contributions broadly falling under the heading - general theoretical issues. It is followed by a handful of articles focusing on the minority rights protection in the 21st century. Third part of the book is devoted to a pertinent problem of accountability of corporations for human rights violations. The closing part of the book is dedicated to environment and bioethics as human rights issues. This volume would be of interest to both human rights scholars and practitioners as well as to those generally interested in public international law issues.

Regional integration, mass migration and the development of transnational organizations are just some of the factors challenging the traditional definitions of citizenship. In this important new book, Rainer Baubock argues that citizenship rights will have to extend beyond nationality and state territory if liberal democracies are to remain true to their own principles of inclusive membership and equal basic rights. In Transnational Citizenship theoretical discussion of the definition and extension of citizenship rights is combined with comparative policy analysis on rules of naturalization and expatriation in liberal democratic states. An important distinction is drawn between nominal citizenship, which refers to the legal status of membership, and substantial citizenship, which concerns the distribution of basic rights in a state. Three areas where states can become more open to the acceptance of migrants as citizens are suggested: naturalization, the extension of citizenship rights to non-citizens and the admission of immigrants. Although the author still regards citizenship in terms of membership of territorially bounded states, he argues that it can no longer be defined by the model of national communities. In exploring what it means to accept migrants as members of liberal democracies, Rainer Baubock has made a singular contribution to our understanding of citizenship and the right to migration. Innovative without being utopian, this important book will be welcomed by political and sociological theorists, migration researchers and lawyers concerned with issues of migration and naturalization.

No Prejudice Here chronicles a heretofore untold story of civil rights in modern America. In embracing the Western urban experience, it relates the struggle for civil rights and school desegregation in Denver, Colorado. It chronicles early legislative and political trends to promote Denver as a racially tolerant city, which encouraged African-Americans to move to the urban center for opportunities unique to communities in the postwar American West while nonetheless trying to maintain segregation by limiting educational and employment opportunities for minorities. Dynamic historian Summer Cherland recounts this tension over six decades, with specific attention to the role of community control efforts, legislative and political strategies, and the importance of youth activism. Her insightful study provides an overview of the seminar 1974 Supreme Court case Keyes v. Denver Public Schools No. 1, and traces the community's reaction to court decisions until the city was released from federal oversight twenty years later. Cherland's book proves that civil rights activism, and the need for it, lasted well beyond the years that typically define the civil rights movement, and illustrates for our contemporary consideration the longstanding struggle in urban communities for justice and equality.

Stephen Castles provides a deeper understanding of recent 'migration crises' in this fascinating and highly topical work. The book links theory and methodology to real-world migration experiences, with a truly global perspective and in-depth analysis of the links between economics, migration and asylum and refugee issues. Key features surrounding this complex and often controversial field are examined through five thematic sections: the sociological theories and methodologies most appropriate for understanding the migratory process, including the changing nature of international migration in an era of globalization analysis of contemporary types of migration and the cruciality of understanding migration as a dynamic social process - inability to do so may lead to policy failure and unintended consequences the relationship between migration and development asylum and refugees the effects of international migration on citizenship and identity, providing a critical perspective on the emergence of transnationalism. Migration, Citizenship and Identity will appeal to graduate students, senior undergraduates and lecturers in international migration, globalization, sociology, political science, demography and geography. Government officials, civil society activists, social workers, medical personnel, lawyers and other professional groups whose work is concerned with migrants and refugees will also find much to engage them.

This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.

The volume New Politics of Decisionism aims to add a new dimension to the literature of populism. It deals with what Carl Schmitt famously coined as 'decisionism' - a form of politics based on the rule of a personal will, which is opposed to the rule of impersonal norms of constitutional law. The new politics of decisionism has gained a new form of populism, and it is equally noticeable in old and new constitutional democracies. The contributions follow the Schmittian idea of legally unbounded politics, usually justified with reference to exceptional circumstances - be that global financial crisis, transnational terrorist threats or massive immigration inflows - which require exceptional measures, and address the following issues: what is populism; how do the new politics of decisionism affect democratic processes and institutions; are constitutional democracies equipped to deal with these sort of challenges; can these politics be curtailed by the involvement of other political actors? New Politics of Decisionism consists of three parts. The first part offers theoretical explanations of the concept of populism and the challenges it poses to liberal democracy. The case studies included in the second part serve to explore the origins, forms, and dynamics of populism in contemporary societies. The third part consists of case studies that explore the general issue of whether courts can confront populism.

In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. In 1930 his Atlanta World became a semiweekly, and the following year W. A. began to implement his vision for a massive newspaper chain based out of Atlanta: the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later dubbed the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. In April 1931 the World had become a triweekly, and its reach began drifting beyond the South. With The Grapevine of the Black South, Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, from its roots in the 1930s through its end in the 1950s. At its heyday, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the biggest organs of the black press during the period leading up to the classic civil rights era (1955-68). In the generation that followed, the Syndicate helped formalize knowledge among the African American population in the South. As the civil rights movement exploded throughout the region, black southerners found a collective identity in that struggle built on the commonality of the news and the subsequent interpretation of that news. Or as Gunnar Myrdal explained, the press was "the chief agency of group control. It [told] the individual how he should think and feel as an American Negro and create[d] a tremendous power of suggestion by implying that all other Negroes think and feel in this manner." It didn't create a complete homogeneity in black southern thinking, but it gave thinkers a similar set of tools from which to draw.

As Americans wrestle with red-versus-blue debates over traditional values, defense of marriage, and gay rights, reason often seems to take a back seat to emotion. In response, David Richards, a widely respected legal scholar and long-time champion of gay rights, reflects upon the constitutional and democratic principles-relating to privacy, intimate life, free speech, tolerance, and conscience-that underpin these often heated debates.

The distillation of Richards's thirty-year advocacy for the rights of gays and lesbians, his book provides a reflective treatise on basic human rights that touch all of our lives. Drawing upon his own experiences as a gay man, Richards interweaves personal observations with philosophical, political, judicial, and psychological insights to make a compelling case that gays should be entitled to the same rights and protections that every American enjoys. Indeed, the call for gay rights can trace its lineage back to the powerful protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which demanded racial and sexual equality and ultimately overthrew the bigoted status quo.

Richards focuses particularly on two key Supreme Court cases: the 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick upholding Georgia's anti-sodomy laws and the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas striking down Texas anti-sodomy laws and overturning Bowers. He shows how Bowers arose in a period of constitutional crisis over the right to privacy and examines the opinions in light of the Court's division in Roe v. Wade. He then shows that Lawrence must be understood in the context of later cases, notably Casey and Romer, which required that Bowers be reconsidered and overruled. Along the way, he examines current debates over gays in the military and same-sex marriage, assesses the Massachusetts Supreme Court's decision to permit gay marriage, and critiques the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

Eloquent and impassioned, Richards's work crystallizes the essence of the argument for a much more expansive and tolerant view of gay rights in America. It also offers a touching account of one gay man's very personal struggle to find the voice he needed to speak truth to the powerful forces of discrimination.