This book presents contemporary case studies of land use, management practices, and innovation in Africa with a view to exploring how multifunctional land uses can alleviate food insecurity and poverty. Food security and livelihoods in Africa face multiple challenges in the form of feeding a growing population on declining land areas under the impacts of climate change. The overall question is what kind of farming systems can provide resilient livelihoods? This volume presents a selection of existing farming systems that demonstrate how more efficient use of land and natural resources, labour and other inputs can have positive effects on household food security and livelihoods. It examines how aquaculture, integrated water management, peri-urban farming systems, climate-smart agriculture practices and parkland agroforestry contribute multiple benefits. Drawing on case studies from Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, contributed by young African scientists, this book provides a unique perspective on multifunctional land use in Africa and illustrates how non-conventional uses can be profitable while promoting social and environmental sustainability. Tapping into the global discussion on land scarcity and linking food security to existing land use change processes, this volume will stimulate readers looking for diversified land uses that are compatible with both household and national food security ambitions. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of African development, agriculture, food security, land use and environmental management, as well as sustainable development more generally, in addition to policymakers and practitioners working in these areas.

This book provides a systematic assessment of the behaviour of some relatively successful presidents in African presidential republics, examining the part played by presidents in the development of their countries. Using two groups of case studies, African Presidential Republics examines the variations between presidential republics within Africa since decolonisation. Jean Blondel divides the ten countries studied into those in which presidents had always been elected regularly, namely Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal and Tanzania, and those in which there was irregularity in the appointment of presidents, namely Benin, Uganda, Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria. The case studies analyse the manner in which presidential republics have manifested themselves in Africa, exploring the argument that the presidential republic is one of the key institutional arrangements likely to lead societies towards development. African Presidential Republics will be of interest to students and scholars of African politics, comparative politics and political leadership.

How can we promote people-centered governance in Africa? Cell phones/ information and communications technology (ICT) are shown to be linked to neoliberal understandings of more democratic governance structures, defined by the Worldwide Governance Indicators as: the rule of law, corruption-control, regulation quality, government effectiveness, political stability/no violence, and voice and accountability. However, these indicators fall short: they do note emphasize gender equity or pro-poor policies. Writing from an African feminist scholar-activist perspective, Assata Zerai emphasizes the voices of women in two ways: (1) she examines how women's access to ICT makes a difference to the success of people-centered governance structures; and (2) she demonstrates how African women's scholarship, too often marginalized, must be used to expand and redefine the goals and indicators of democratice governance in African countries. Challenging the status quo that praises the contributions of cell phones to the diffusion of knowledge and resultant better governance in Africa, this book is an important read for scholars of politics and technology, gender and politics, and African Studies.

As innovations in military technologies race toward ever-greater levels of automation and autonomy, debates over the ethics of violent technologies tread water. Death Machines reframes these debates, arguing that the way we conceive of the ethics of contemporary warfare is itself imbued with a set of bio-technological rationalities that work as limits. The task for critical thought must therefore be to unpack, engage, and challenge these limits. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the book offers a close reading of the technology-biopolitics-complex that informs and produces contemporary subjectivities, highlighting the perilous implications this has for how we think about the ethics of political violence, both now and in the future. -- .

This book expertly traces the long, erratic, and incomplete path of Latin America's political and socioeconomic democratization, from a group of colonies lacking democratic practice and culture up to the present. Using the lens of democracy defined by the charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), it examines the periods of US gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean Basin, the Cold War, the state terrorist dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, the imposition of neoliberalism in the 1990s, and the rise of the Pink Tide in the new millennium. The meaning of democracy has changed over time, from nineteenth-century liberalism--in which only a handful of wealthy males voted and individuals were responsible for their economic and social conditions--to governments in the late twentieth century that have embraced socioeconomic democracy by assuming responsibility (at least formally) for citizens' welfare. Latin America's movement toward democracy has not been linear. The book follows the appearance and evolution of both proponents and opponents of democracy over the last two centuries. The balance of these forces has shifted periodically, often in waves that swept across the entire region. Commitment to democracy does not guarantee implementation, but despite many setbacks, Latin America has made significant progress toward the democratic aspirations set forth in the OAS charter. Thorough and accessibly written, Democracy in Latin America is an essential text for students studying Latin American politics and history.

On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today is the first comparative analysis of two central political events that have altered our world forever: the Arab uprisings which started in Tunisia, and the Iranian revolution in 1979. Adib-Moghaddam demonstrates how contemporary forms of protest are changing our understanding about the way power and resistance function. In a theoretical tour de force which is substantiated with a range of primary material, he argues that acts of protest in Tehran to Cairo can be entirely linked to the same act in New York, London, Madrid and Athens. Breaking through the east/west, north/south divide, Adib-Moghaddam shows how the Arab revolts promise to shift the discourse away from the idea that Arabs and Muslims are peculiar, that "Middle Eastern Studies" cannot be linked to political theory, that the dynamics of rebellion "there" are fundamentally different from the politics of revolt "here". Adib-Moghaddam argues that the dialectics of power and resistance are truly universal and that they are unfolding within a globalised political context that is increasingly interconnected. In order to illuminate this argument theoretically, the study is organised around conceptual terms that feed into forms of power and resistance, such as revolution, radicalism, dissent, knowledge, neighbour and reform. These terms and concepts are discussed and deconstructed via an empirical discussion of pivotal events beyond the non-western world, demonstrating that for a long time, and without realising it, we have been living in the end times of unitary categories such as "west" and "east."

Due to the financial situation in the professional road peloton, many cycling teams struggle to find their sponsors. This situation is an opportunity for undemocratic politicians to promote their countries via cycling. Thus, some of them decided to create and support their own cycling teams. Generally, four WorldTour teams supported by undemocratic regimes and their governments have existed in professional cycling history. This book focuses on all of them; it reflects the existence of the Kazakh Astana Pro Team, the Russian Team Katusha (supported by the Russian government until the end of the 2015 season), the Bahrain Victorious (formerly called Bahrain Merida and Bahrain McLaren) or the UAE Team Emirates and the way they are/were used as sports diplomacy instruments.

Scholars have long examined the relationship between nation-states and their "internal others," such as immigrants and ethnoracial minorities. Contested Embrace shifts the analytic focus to explore how a state relates to people it views as "external members" such as emigrants and diasporas. Specifically, Jaeeun Kim analyzes disputes over the belonging of Koreans in Japan and China, focusing on their contested relationship with the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula. Extending the constructivist approach to nationalisms and the culturalist view of the modern state to a transnational context, Contested Embrace illuminates the political and bureaucratic construction of ethno-national populations beyond the territorial boundary of the state. Through a comparative analysis of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book shows how the configuration of geopolitics, bureaucratic techniques, and actors' agency shapes the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties. Kim demonstrates that being a "homeland" state or a member of the "transborder nation" is a precarious, arduous, and revocable political achievement.

Chinese citizens are far from docile, and regularly and vociferously rise up in collective protest. In some cases they have successfully applied pressure, forcing political and economic elites to satisfy their demands. In others, they have been brutally suppressed. More often than not, however, the results have been mixed. This Handbook explores individual and collective acts of protest and resistance in China since 1989, examining their key unifying underlying themes and their effect on relations between the government and society. Featuring twenty-nine chapters of original research from top scholars, this Handbook spans the broad range of protest and resistance in contemporary China. Its coverage of popular contention related to labour, land, the environment, nationalism, home ownership, information and communication technologies, the law, religion, Hong Kong and ethnic minority groups illuminates the complexity and diversity of citizen actions. The Handbook of Protest and Resistance in China suggests that while these protests and acts of resistance might threaten the ruling Chinese Communist Party, in order to strengthen and legitimise the Party's rule governing authorities best course of action may be to allow space for citizens to air their grievances, and to prioritise the resolution of complaints. This Handbook will be an invaluable resource for scholars and graduate students of Chinese and comparative politics, as well as for policy makers and interested readers seeking up to date data on protest and resistance in China, and to better understand the problems and perspectives of Chinese citizens.

This book considers local autonomy, measured as a multidimensional concept, from a cross-country comparative perspective, and examines how variations can be explained and what their consequences are. It fills a gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive study of the different components of local autonomy across a large number of countries, over time. It offers a theoretically saturated concept to measure local autonomy and applies it to 39 countries, including all 28 EU member states together with Albania, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland Turkey and Ukraine, over a period of 25 years (1990-2014).

Corruption and anti-corruption are now mainstream public policy challenges. Politicians and the public alike now discuss corruption with the type of rhetoric that they never did before. Perhaps surprisingly, however there remains little detailed, cross-national analysis of which anti-corruption strategies work and which don't. This book aims to make a contribution towards redressing this imbalance.Through case studies in six countries (Bangladesh, Kenya, Germany, Poland, South Korea and the UK) this book illustrates that those looking to fight corruption must understand that quality of governance and successful anti-corruption strategies are indelibly linked. Only when this relationship is understood, will progress in tackling corruption be made. The book is empirically rich and theoretically driven, and should be core reading for anyone interested in understanding why corruption flourishes and what works in trying to fight it.

This collection focuses on public sector coordination, key aspect of governments' have sought to tackle contemporary policy challenges. By guiding the reader through 20 case studies of novel coordination instruments from 12 countries, the compendium gives valuable lessons for achieving better coordination of public policies.

This book analyzes initiatives and concepts initiated by China, Japan and South Korea (the Republic of Korea) toward Central Asia to ascertain their impact on regionalism and regional cooperation in Central Asia. Using the case study of Uzbekistan, the book focuses on the formation of the discourse of engagement with the region of Central Asia through the notion of the Silk Road narrative. The author puts forward the prospects for engagement and cooperation in the region by analyzing initiatives such as the Eurasian/Silk Road Diplomacy of Japan of 1997, the Shanghai Process by China, the Korean corporate offensive, and other so-called Silk Road initiatives such as One Belt One Road (OBOR) or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The book argues that material factors and interests of these states are not the only motivations for engagement with Central Asia. The author suggests that cultural environment and identity act as additional behavioral incentives for the states' cooperation as these factors create a space for actors in global politics. The book deconstructs Chinese narratives and foreign policy toward smaller states and presents a more balanced account of Central Asian international relations by taking into account Japanese and South Korean approaches to Central Asia. This book encourages wider theoretical discussions of Central Asian-specific forms of cooperation and relationships. It provides a timely analysis of Central Asian international relations and is a helpful reference for researchers and students in the fields of international relations, security studies, Asian politics, global politics, Central Asian Studies and Silk Road studies.

This book is a critical reading of contemporary interventionism, exploring how interventions shape the course of conflicts and reconciliation processes in Somalia. In a critical departure from the state-capacity consensus that has dominated the debate on terrorism and state failure, this book argues that conflict and sovereignty transformations in Somalia cannot be understood as the result of a gap in state-capacity, as multiple interventions have compromised the autonomy of the target state and society to act as sovereign. Destabilising Interventions in Somalia focuses on the humanitarian intervention of the mid-1990s, the Ethiopia-Eritrean regional proxy war in the late 1990s and the Global War on Terror in the 2000s. Examining the politics and mechanisms of multiple interventions, this book shows how interveners complicate and amplify existing conflicts, how they reiterate the international dimension of the conflict itself, and how they orient the target state towards the outsourcing of sovereignty functions. Key to this process has been the violent and exclusionary nature of interventions grounded in the aspiration of transforming existing political orders. Destabilising Interventions in Somalia will be of interest to students of African peace and conflict studies, international intervention and International Relations.

This book offers the first comparative monograph on the management of elections. The book defines electoral management as a new, inter-disciplinary area and advances a realist sociological approach to study it. A series of new, original frameworks are introduced, including the PROSeS framework, which can be used by academics and practitioners around the world to evaluate electoral management quality. A networked governance approach is also introduced to understand the full range of collaborative actors involved in delivering elections, including civil society and the international community. Finally, the book evaluates some of the policy instruments used to improve the integrity of elections, including voter registration reform, training and the funding of elections. Extensive mixed methods are used throughout including thematic analysis of interviews, (auto-)ethnography, comparative historical analysis and, cross-national and national surveys of electoral officials. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners interested and involved in electoral integrity and elections, and more broadly to comparative politics, public administration, international relations and democracy studies. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license: https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138682412_oachapter01.pdf Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license: https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138682412_oachapter04.pdf

Political mobilization tends to take different forms in contemporary Catholic- and Sunni-majority countries. Luis Felipe Mantilla attributes this dynamic to changes taking place in religious communities and the political institutions that govern religious political engagement. In How Political Parties Mobilize Religion, Mantillaevenhandedly traces the emergence and success of religious parties in Mexico and Turkey, two countries shaped by assertive secular regimes. In doing so, he demonstrates that religious parties are highly responsive to political institutions, such as electoral laws, as well as to the structure of broader religious communities. Whereas in both countries, the electoral success of religious mobilizers was initially a boon for democracy, in Mexico it was marred by political mismanagement and became entangled with persistent corruption and escalating violence. In Turkey, the democratic credentials of religious mobilizers were profoundly eroded as the government became increasingly autocratic, concentrating power in very few hands and rolling back basic liberal rights. Mantilla investigates the role religious mobilization plays in the evolution of electoral politics and democratic institutions, and to what extent their trajectories reflect broader trends in political Catholicism and Islam.

This book explores whether the co-existence of (partially) overlapping and sometimes competing layers of authority, which characterizes today's global order, undermines or rather strengthens efforts to promote the rule of law on a global scale. Heupel and Reinold argue that whether multi-level governance and global legal pluralism have beneficial or detrimental effects on the international rule of law depends on specific scope conditions. Among these are the mobilization of powerful states and courts, as well as the fit between soft law and hard law arrangements. The volume comprises seven case studies written by International Relations and International Law scholars. Bridging the gap between political science and legal scholarship, the volume enables an interdisciplinary perspective on the emergence of an international rule of law. It also provides much needed empirical research on the implications of multi-level governance and global legal pluralism for the rule of law beyond the nation state.

Political mobilization tends to take different forms in contemporary Catholic- and Sunni-majority countries. Luis Felipe Mantilla attributes this dynamic to changes taking place in religious communities and the political institutions that govern religious political engagement. In How Political Parties Mobilize Religion, Mantillaevenhandedly traces the emergence and success of religious parties in Mexico and Turkey, two countries shaped by assertive secular regimes. In doing so, he demonstrates that religious parties are highly responsive to political institutions, such as electoral laws, as well as to the structure of broader religious communities. Whereas in both countries, the electoral success of religious mobilizers was initially a boon for democracy, in Mexico it was marred by political mismanagement and became entangled with persistent corruption and escalating violence. In Turkey, the democratic credentials of religious mobilizers were profoundly eroded as the government became increasingly autocratic, concentrating power in very few hands and rolling back basic liberal rights. Mantilla investigates the role religious mobilization plays in the evolution of electoral politics and democratic institutions, and to what extent their trajectories reflect broader trends in political Catholicism and Islam.

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?

This book compares the rapid development of South Korea over the past 70 years with selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa to assess what factors contributed to the country's success story, and why it is that countries that were comparable in the past continue to experience challenges in achieving and sustaining economic growth. In the 1950s, South Korea's GDP per capita was $876, roughly comparable with that of Cote d'Ivoire and somewhat below Ghana's. The country's subsequent transformation from a war-ravaged, international aid-dependent economy to the 13th largest economy in the world has been the focus of considerable international admiration and attention. But how was it that South Korea succeeded in multiplying its GDP per capita by a factor of 23, while other Less Developed Countries continue to experience challenges? This book compares South Korea's politics of development and foreign assistance with that of Ghana, Nigeria, and Zambia, which were also major recipients of the U.S. aid, to investigate the specific contexts that made it possible for South Korea to achieve success. Overall, this book argues that effective state capacity in South Korea's domestic and international politics provided an anchor for diplomatic engagement with donors and guided domestic political actors in the effective use of aid for economic development. This book will be of interest to researchers and students working on development, comparative political economy, and foreign aid, and to policy makers and practitioners looking for a greater understanding of comparative development trajectories.

'To pun, Pierre brings globalization down to earth. After all the hype, he serves as an experienced and trustworthy guide to the key question of how far nation states are 'forced' to follow global trends. His answers are nuanced, well-evidenced, and thought-provoking. This should find a place on many reading lists.' - Christopher Pollitt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Globalization raises important questions about the governing capacity of domestic institutions. In Globalization and Governance, Jon Pierre studies the impact of international norms and prescriptions on domestic governance in Japan, Sweden and the United States. The empirical analysis is focused on economic governance, administrative reform and intergovernmental relationships. Drawing on survey data, documents and interviews, the analysis finds that domestic institutions still intrinsically shape domestic governance. International norms towards deregulation and market-based administrative reform confront domestic institutions with prescriptions for reform but the three countries provide only very few examples of unmitigated domestic implementation. What Jon Pierre calls 'the microfoundations of globalization'-the assessment, adoption or rejection of international norms and ideas in vogue-is a complex process where domestic institutions and path dependencies remain at the helm. The most important exception to this pattern is governance during financial crises where countries are dependent on conditioned support from transnational institutions. This insightful and informative book will appeal to researchers, academics, post-graduate, as well as undergraduate, students in governance, political economy and international relations. Contents: 1. Globalization and the State 2. Globalization and Domestic Governance 3. Still Governing the Economy? Economic Governance 4. Cities and Regions in a Globalized World: Inter-Governmental Relationships 5. Modernizing the State: Administrative Reform 6. Conclusions: Domestic Governance in a Globalizing World References Index

This book re-examines the claim of the Conservative Party to be the 'national party' and in its politics to express the enduring 'national interest'. It explores the historical character of the Conservative Party, in particular the significance of the nation in its self-understanding. It addresses the political culture of the modern party, one which proclaims a Unionist vocation but rests mainly on English support, and considers how the Englishness of the party is reconciled with the politics of British statecraft. It considers the constitutional challenges which the Conservative Party faces in managing a changing Union, in negotiating a changing Europe and in defining a changing national interest. The book is essential reading not only for students and scholars of the Conservative Party but also for those who want to make sense of the transformations taking place in modern British politics. -- .

This bold venture into democratic theory offers a new and reinvigorating thesis for how democracy delivers on its promise of public control over public policy. In theory, popular control could be achieved through a process entirely driven by supply-side politics, with omniscient and strategic political parties converging on the median voter's policy preference at every turn. However, this would imply that there would be no distinguishable political parties (or even any reason for parties to exist) and no choice for a public to make. The more realistic view taken here portrays democracy as an ongoing series of give and take between political parties' policy supply and a mass public's policy demand. Political parties organize democratic choices as divergent policy alternatives, none of which is likely to satisfy the public's policy preferences at any one turn. While the one-off, short-run consequence of a single election often results in differences between the policies that parliaments and governments pursue and the preferences their publics hold, the authors construct theoretical arguments, employ computer simulations, and follow up with empirical analysis to show how, why, and under what conditions democratic representation reveals itself over time. Democracy, viewed as a process rather than a single electoral event, can and usually does forge strong and congruent linkages between a public and its government. This original thesis offers a challenge to democratic pessimists who would have everyone believe that neither political parties nor mass publics are up to the tasks that democracy assigns them. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

This book investigates the role of ethnic federalism in Ethiopian politics, reflecting on a long history of division amongst the country's political elites. The book argues that these patterns have enabled the resilience and survival of authoritarianism in the country, and have led to the failure of democratization. Ethnic conflict in Ethiopia stretches back to the country's imperial history. Competing nationalisms begin to emerge towards the end of the imperial era, but were formalized by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) from the 1990s onwards. Under the EPRDF, ethnicity and language classifications formed the main organizing principles for political parties and organizations, and the country's new federal arrangement was also designed along ethnic fault lines. This book argues that this ethnic federal arrangement, and the continuation of an elite political culture are major factors in explaining the continuation of authoritarianism in Ethiopia. Focusing largely on the last 27 years under the EPRDF and on the political changes of the last few years, but also stretching back to historical narratives of ethnic grievances and division, this book is an important guide to the ethnic politics of Ethiopia and will be of interest to researchers of African politics, authoritarianism and ethnic conflict.

Is lobbying, particularly by 'lobbyists for hire', resulting in a distortion of the democratic process? Does business, with its highly sophisticated and well-resourced lobbying operations, have an undue influence on decisions by politicians? The book assess the impact of lobbying on the UK political system, the extent to which it shapes the political decision-making process and the extent to which this influence is beneficial or malign. The book outlines various lobbying groups and their methods of persuasion, plus the weakness of political action groups and social media when faced with the might of the lobbying industry. The book is ideal reading for anyone seeking an introduction to lobbying. -- .