This book presents in-depth analyses of the wave of political protest and unrest that spread throughout Latin America between 2010 and 2015 in order to answer a question that has been challenging social scientists all over the region: why some countries have faced a divorce between their social movements and political parties while others have not? The contributions gathered in this volume intend to show that the logic of political representation in Latin America and its supposed "crisis" is not a common and constant feature for all region. Some countries like Chile, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico seem to have experienced a process of autonomization of its social movements vis-a-vis its institutional political system. However, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay have not seen such a split between civil society and the political parties. Bringing together eight case studies of the countries mentioned and a general assessment of the situation in the whole region, this book presents some interesting findings that will contribute to the discussions about the political representation crisis in Latin America, providing valuable resources for political leaders, researchers, policy makers and social activists in the region.

Experts from the global North and South analyze the implications of economic crises on children, with a particular focus on the emerging evidence from the recent global economic crisis and food and fuel price volatility of 2008-2010. They point out key policy responses deployed by governments and international agencies.

Political uncertainty and instability characterise many regions around the world and, increasingly, can be observed in more established democracies. The COVID-19 pandemic, national and international tensions, and the proliferation of autocratic, chauvinist, and, at the most extreme, fascist forces around the world all contribute to turbulent political times. Such environments constitute tremendous challenges, but also opportunities for scholars to contribute to an understanding of processes in the political market, using the lens of political branding theories. Authors from various disciplinary backgrounds, including social psychology, marketing, and media and communications, provide commentaries and analyses of branding processes in different national contexts, all characterised by tensions and challenges. The topical and provocative content of the chapters, all focusing on recent political events and phenomena in the political arena, should appeal to researchers, branding practitioners, politicians, and members of the public seeking to deepen their understanding of current events and political branding concepts.

Public education is critically important to the human capital, social well-being, and economic prosperity of nations. It is also an intensely political realm of public policy that is heavily shaped by power and special interests. Yet political scientists rarely study education, and education researchers rarely study politics. This volume attempts to change that by promoting the development of a coherent, thriving field on the comparative politics of education. As an opening wedge, the authors carry out an 11-nation comparative study of the political role of teachers unions, showing that as education systems everywhere became institutionalized, teachers unions pursued their interests by becoming well-organized, politically active, highly influential - and during the modern era, the main opponents of neoliberal reform. Across diverse nations, the commonalities are striking. The challenge going forward is to expand on this study's scope, theory, and evidence to bring education into the heart of comparative politics.

Informed by world-systems analysis, this book examines the shifting patterns of accommodation and resistance to the offshore world, with a particular focus on Mauritius as a critical but underappreciated offshore node mediating foreign investment into India and Africa. Drawing on a large pool of financial data and elite interviews, the authors present the first detailed comparative study of the Mauritius-India and Mauritius-Africa offshore relationships. These relationships serve as indicative test cases of the contemporary global tax reform agenda and its promise to rein in offshore finance. Whereas India's economic power and multilateral track record have enabled it to actively shape this agenda and implement it in a robust manner, most African countries have found themselves either unable to meet its stringent criteria or unwilling to do so out of fear that it might discourage investment. Its impact on offshore financial centers has likewise been limited. A few of the least sophisticated ones appear to have fallen by the wayside, but the rest have either remained largely unaffected, or, like Mauritius, succeeded in consolidating their operations and surviving the current round of regulatory headwinds. The findings suggest that the contemporary global tax reform agenda has thus far not only failed to make good on its promise but also actually reinforced numerous existing power hierarchies. The Uneven Offshore World is written in an accessible style and aimed at readers without specialized knowledge of tax issues.

Japan lives twice. Japan belonged to the East before 1962, when The Economist's editorialized, "Consider Japan". It gave the world a warning-cum-welcoming signal to Japan about joining the West. Thereafter Japan belonged to the West in science, industry and international law, whereas Japan was regarded psychologically in the West as belonging to the East in sakura, sushi, and snow country. After 1992, the morning after the bubble collapse, Japan belonged to the new West, not bereft of mishaps and mistakes and embedded with stall and stagnation as the rest of the old West. Yet Japan has been going through the "lost three decades" of muddling through recession and deflation, as if Japan had trod the Dengist path to "hide your strength and bide your time" without loud fanfare. By 2022 Japan will come up quietly as the oasis of stability when the world is struggling with climate change and infectious disease diffusion in addition to its decline from the overconfidence of its own capabilities. Japan has emerged, combining its aggregate niches of technology of its own erstwhile dominant manufacturing, further enhanced by technological prowess obtained by massive foreign direct investment due to sluggish domestic market demand. In examining Japanese politics in comparative angle, this book starts by asking: from the East to the West, and then whither?

The Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary survey of contemporary research related to the Horn of Africa. Situated at the junction of the Sahel-Saharan strip and the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa is growing in global importance due to demographic growth and the strategic importance of the Suez Canal. Divided into sections on authoritarianism and resistance, religion and politics, migration, economic integration, the military, and regimes and liberation, the contributors provide up-to-date, authoritative knowledge on the region in light of contemporary strategic concerns. The handbook investigates how political, economic, and security innovations have been implemented, sometimes with violence, by use of force or by negotiation - including 'ethnic federalism' in Ethiopia, independence in Eritrea and South Sudan, integration of the traditional authorities in the (neo)patrimonial administrations, Somalian Islamic Courts, the Sudanese Islamist regime, people's movements, multilateral operations, and the construction of an architecture for regional peace and security. Accessibly written, this handbook is an essential read for scholars, students, and policy professionals interested in the contemporary politics in the Horn of Africa.

This book explores the reasons behind the variation in national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, it furthers the policy studies scholarship through an examination of the effects of policy styles on national responses to the pandemic. Despite governments being faced with the same threat, significant variation in national responses, frequently of contradictory nature, has been observed. Implications about responses inform a broader class of crises beyond this specific context. The authors argue that trust in government interacts with policy styles resulting in different responses and that the acute turbulence, uncertainty, and urgency of crises complicate the ability of policymakers to make sense of the problem. Finally, the book posits that unless there is high trust between society and the state, a decentralized response will likely be disastrous and concludes that while national responses to crises aim to save lives, they also serve to project political power and protect the status quo. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of public policy, public administration, political science, sociology, public health, and crisis management/disaster management studies.

Is the Atlantic World in a state of crisis? At a time when many political observers perceive indeed a crisis in transatlantic relations, critical evaluation of past narratives and frameworks in Transatlantic Relations and Atlantic History alike become crucial. This volume provides an academic foundation to critically assess the Atlantic World and to rethink transatlantic relations in a transnational and global perspective. The TransAtlantic reconsidered brings together leading experts such as Harvard historians Charles S. Maier and Bernard Bailyn and former ERC scientific board member Nicholas Canny. All the scholars represented in this volume have helped to shape, re-shape, and challenge the narrative(s) of the Atlantic World and can thus (re-)evaluate its conceptual basis in view of historiographical developments and contemporary challenges. -- .

This open access book carefully explores the relationship between social democracy and its working-class electorate in Western Europe. Relying on different indicators, it demonstrates an important transformation in the class basis of social democracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the working-class vote is strongly fragmented and social democratic parties face competition on multiple fronts for their core electorate - and not only from radical right parties. Starting from a reflection on 'working-class parties' and using a sophisticated class schema, the book paints a nuanced and diversified picture of the trajectory of social democracy that goes beyond a simple shift from working-class to middle-class parties. Following a detailed description, the book reviews possible explanations of workers' new voting patterns and emphasizes the crucial changes in parties' ideologies. It closes with a discussion on the role of the working class in social democracy's future electoral strategies.

Assessing the different kinds of borders between African nations, the contributors present a borderland and trans-region approach to understanding the challenges and opportunities facing the peoples of the African continent. Africa faces rampant violence, terrorism, deterioration of water-energy-food provision, influxes of refugees and immigrants, and religious hatred under the trends of globalization. Solutions for these issues require new perspectives that are not attempted by conventional state-building approaches. Statehood is limited in many places on the African continent because many states are combined by loose political ties. African states' borders tend to be regarded as porous and fragile. However, as the contributors to this volume argue, those porous borders can contribute to cultural and socio-economic network construction beyond states and the creation of active borderlands by increasing people's mobility, contact, and trade. A must read for scholars of African studies that will also be of great value to academics and students with a broader interest in nationhood, globalization, and borders.

This book examines the process of presidentialisation of political parties in the Western Balkans. The Western Balkan countries deserve to be analysed in a comparative perspective due to their distinctive features in terms of processes of democratization, forms of government and institutional assets, the presence of social cleavages (religious, linguistic, ethnic), and, of course, the nature of political parties which differs from other European cases, especially in terms of origins, organization and structure. However, Western Balkan political parties do show certain similarities with other West European cases where power is centralised and held by the parties' leadership. The book ultimately attempts to test whether and to what extent the influence of institutional variables affects the level of presidentialisation of political parties, also considering the parties' organization features.

This book analyzes key popular culture artifacts linked with United States' far-right extremism to illustrate how extremists use various narrative strategies to legitimate their interests and goals and to justify violent actions. Recognizing these narrative strategies and how they are used partly explains the back and forth moves between mainstream politics and the far-right of ideas and issues that used to remain within far-right circles. The main objective of this book is to utilize theoretical approaches that centralize processes of racialization to analyze and explain how far-right extremists utilize recognizable narratives to mainstream and communicate their ideas. The book will illustrate processes by which racialized subjects are produced and violence justified. In order to do so, the book concentrates on popular culture as sources of how the far-right constitutes their identities and goals. It first develops a methodological plan to study popular culture artifacts that is drawn from scholarship on race and discourse analysis in International Relations (IR). It then analyzes far-right use of key popular culture artifacts, such as magazines, memes, and manifestos, to note how extremist identities and interests are produced, publicly communicated, and mainstreamed. This will contribute to Security Studies and IR's understanding of far-right extremism, especially how they utilize similar narrative strategies as used in mainstream contexts to justify their calls for violence.

Advocates for economic development often call for greater transparency. But what does transparency really mean? What are its consequences? This breakthrough book demonstrates how information impacts major political phenomena, including mass protest, the survival of dictatorships, democratic stability, as well as economic performance. The book introduces a new measure of a specific facet of transparency: the dissemination of economic data. Analysis shows that democracies make economic data more available than do similarly developed autocracies. Transparency attracts investment and makes democracies more resilient to breakdown. But transparency has a dubious consequence under autocracy: political instability. Mass-unrest becomes more likely, and transparency can facilitate democratic transition - but most often a new despotic regime displaces the old. Autocratic leaders may also turn these threats to their advantage, using the risk of mass-unrest that transparency portends to unify the ruling elite. Policy-makers must recognize the trade-offs transparency entails.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'When one of the world's leading scholars of civil war tells us that a country is on the brink of violent conflict, we should pay attention. This is an important book' Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die Civil wars are the biggest danger to world peace today - this book shows us why they happen, and how to avoid them. We are now living in the world's greatest era of civil wars. While violence has declined worldwide, major civil wars are now being fought in countries including Iraq, Syria and Libya, and smaller civil wars are being fought in India and Malaysia. Even countries we thought could never experience another civil war - such as the USA, Sweden and Ireland - are showing signs of unrest. So how can we stop them? In How Civil Wars Start, acclaimed expert Professor Barbara F. Walter, who has advised on political violence everywhere from the CIA to the U.S. Senate to the United Nations, explains the rise of civil wars and the conditions that create them - not least when countries are not quite democratic. As democracies across the world backslide and citizens become more polarised, civil wars will become even more widespread and last longer than they have in the past - but this urgent and important book shows us a path back toward peace.

During the next few years, most European and World cities will be developing urban agendas. Materials published on the subject have been relatively scarce until now. This edited volume introduces a case study implementation of the European Urban Agenda (EUA) in a cross-border region in the Iberian Peninsula between Spain (Galicia) and Portugal. It explores the implementation of a number of urban core principles in two distinctive regions, serving as the basis for a comparative analysis on how such galvanizing principles work, contained in the EUA. The case presented in this edited volume is the first cross-border urban agenda to be drafted. It is a unique piece that contributes to our understanding of the complexities of implementing and translating a common set of urban European principles to variety of different local milieus. The chapters of the book closely examine the various strands of the implementation of urban policies through the lenses of land use, economic competition, innovation, culture and creative industries, energy, ecology, demographic challenges, housing, social inclusion and democratic governance. These chapters are written by international renowned scholars who were involved in the drawing up of the urban agenda for this territory. The ideas, principles and concepts that they impart can be extrapolated to most cities.

This book provides an original, international and multidisciplinary perspective on the recent and extensive political and constitutional changes in Europe. The contributors cover changes from several key European countries, whether European Union members, applicant members, non-EU members or potentially former members, namely France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Spain, the Western Balkans and Switzerland. The volume offers a rare understanding of contemporary European societies by examining how people's choices as citizens and voters have influenced and can influence those changes and thus make a difference via elections and referendums. It will appeal to students and scholars of European studies, comparative politics, and voting behaviour, as well as to the wider readership interested in current affairs and European issues.

This book rigorously documents and explains the genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan state against indigenous Maya populations within the context of its counterinsurgency campaign against leftist guerrillas between 1981 and 1983. In doing so it brings to light a genocide that has remained largely invisible within both academic disciplines and the practitioner sphere. In May 2013, former de facto president of Guatemala, General Efrain Rios Montt, was for ten days indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity within Guatemala's domestic courts. Based upon over a decade of ethnographic research, including in survivors' communities in Guatemala, this book documents the historical processes shaping the genocide by analysing the evolution of both counterinsurgent and insurgent violence and strategy, focusing above all on its impact upon the civilian population. The research clearly evidences the impact of political violence upon non-combatants; how military and insurgent strategies gradually implicate civilians in conflict and the strategies civilians may adopt in order to survive them. Convincingly framed within key theoretical scholarship from genocide studies and comparative politics it speaks to a broad audience beyond Latin Americanists.

This book addresses some of the most pressing questions of our time: Is democracy threatened by globalisation? Is there a legitimacy crisis in contemporary democracies? Is the welfare state in individual countries under pressure from global trends? What are the implications of high-level migration and rising populism for democracy? Does authoritarianism pose a challenge? The volume builds on a cross-cultural study of democracy conducted by the Transformation Research Unit (TRU) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa for nearly twenty years. Three of the countries studied - South Africa, Turkey and Poland - receive individual attention as their respective democracies appear to be the most vulnerable at present. Germany, Sweden, Chile, South Korea and Taiwan are assessed in their regional contexts. Further insights are gained by examining the impact on democracy of the global screen culture of Television and the Internet, and by pointing out the lessons democracy should learn from diplomacy to fare better in the future. The book will appeal to both students and practitioners of democracy as well as the general reader.

Coming together from across several disciplines, the contributors to this book reflect on the considerable problem of inequality in Zambia, comparing it with other countries both in the region and more broadly. The World Bank consistently ranks Zambia among the countries with the highest levels of poverty and inequality globally, but the problem is not widely studied; and the studies that do exist tend to focus solely on economic measures of inequality. This book uses a multidimensional analysis of inequalities, highlighting the ways in which certain social groups and geographical locations are more likely to suffer multiple inequalities. It investigates key issues around poverty, healthcare, income, law, disability, and power inequalities. Particularly showcasing the work of local researchers, this book will be of interest to researchers of African studies, development, economics, and politics.

From the "Great Arab Revolt" against Ottoman rule in World War I to the upheavals of the Arab Spring, this text analyzes a century of modern Arab history through the lens of three intertwined notions: the idea of a single Arab nation, the reality of multiple Arab states, and the competition between them over both concrete and symbolic interests. These concepts are presented against the background of Great Power involvement in the region, regional issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Iran-Iraq war, and the rise of political Islam. The evolution of regional Arab politics is examined from its infancy at the beginning of the 20th century to the profound challenges posed by the upheavals of the Arab Spring, and through the emergence of multiple Arab states organized under the League of Arab States, the pan-Arab heyday of Gamal Abdel Nasser between 1955 and 1967, and the subsequent consolidation of a multi-polar Arab state system. This history highlights the changing nature of modern Arab identity, the achievements and shortcomings of Arab state formation processes, and the influence of enduring communal, tribal, religious and ethnic identities on the modern Arab order. Altogether, these factors help explain contemporary Arab realities and why the Arab nationalist dream of achieving power and prosperity in line with an idealized image of the past, has proven elusive. This failure, in turn, has fueled both the recent upheavals and limited the prospects for successful outcomes. This broad and readable synthesis covers the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the Arab region. By reexamining what "being Arab" means today, politically and culturally, it will be a valuable text to students seeking to understand the modern Middle East.

This book sets out to explain the variation in nations' reactions to their defeats in war. Typically, we observe two broad reactions to defeat: an inward-oriented response that accepts defeat as a reality and utilizes it as an opportunity for a new beginning, and an outward-oriented one that rejects defeat and invests national energies in restoring what was lost-most likely by force. This volume argues that although defeats in wars are humiliating experiences, those sentiments do not necessarily trigger aggressive nationalism, empower radical parties, and create revisionist foreign policy. Post-defeat, radicalization will be actualized only if it is filtered through three variables: national self-images (inflated or realistic), political parties (strong or weak), and international opportunities and constraints. The author tests this theory on four detailed case studies, Egypt (1967), Turkey/Ottoman Empire, Hungary and Bulgaria (WWI), and Islamic fundamentalism.

Since the 1920s, Socialist and Communist parties in Europe and elsewhere have engaged in episodes of both rivalry and cooperation, with each seeking to dominate the European Left. Enemy Brothers analyzes how this relationship has developed over the past century, focusing on France, Italy, and Spain, where Socialists and Communists have been politically important. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in all three nations, W. Rand Smith identifies the critical junctures that these parties faced and the strategic choices they made, especially regarding alliance partners. In explaining the parties' diverse alliance strategies, Enemy Brothers stresses the impact of institutional arrangements, party culture, and leadership. The paperback edition features a new afterword that updates the impact of the current euro-crisis through mid-2014.

Examining the 1930s and the different reactions to the crisis, this volume offers a global comparative perspective that includes a comparison across time to give insight into the contemporary global recession. Germany, Italy, Austria and Spain with their antidemocratic, authoritarian or fascistic answers to the economic crisis are compared not only to an opposite European perspective - the Swedish example - but also to other global perspectives and their political consequences in Japan, China, India, Turkey, Brazil and the United States. The book offers no recipe for economic, social or political action in today's recession, but it shows a wide range of reactions in the past, some of which led to catastrophe.

This book examines three cases of democratic transitions by self-transformation of the non-democratic regimes in Southern Europe-the Spanish reforma pactada-ruptura pactada of 1976-77, the Greek "Markezinis experiment" of 1973, and the Turkish democratic transition of 1983-in a comparative perspective. The author argues that a democratic transition initiated by the regime elites is, in contrast to widely held assumptions and notwithstanding some reservations on whether democracy can be (re-)introduced by non-democrats, worth viewing as a "window of opportunity" for democratisation. It is up to the democratic counter-elites to respond to it, using the civil society and the international factor as allies to achieve their goal of acquiring more concessions from the regime.