This open access book analyses migration and its relation to socio-political transformation in Switzerland. It addresses how migration has made new forms of life possible and shows how this process generated gender innovation in different fields: the changing division of work, the establishment of a nursery infrastructure, access to higher education for women, and the struggle for female suffrage. Seeing society through the lens of migration alters the perspective from which our past and thus our present is told-and our future imagined.

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.

Paying close attention to its domestic roots, this textbook provides a valuable introduction to the construction and application of US foreign policy in the modern era. Accessibly written and including helpful illustrative material, a glossary and guide to further reading, it is organised around four broad themes: * the ideologies of US foreign policy; * the institutions of US foreign policy making; * the actors who influence and shape the content of US foreign policy; * the policy goals and ideas that motivate US foreign policy. Drawing from analyses of the broader history of US foreign policy throughout the post-Second World War period, the book encourages readers to think about how these ideas, institutions and goals have been at work in the foreign policy of recent presidential administrations, including those of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Comparative Perspectives on Environmental Policies and Issues presents tools and concepts about environmental policies in several developed and developing countries. It explores a broad survey of ecological modernization theory, ecological feminism theory, environmental justice theory, the concept of sustainability, and research on environmental policies. Data were collected through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, and are used to analyze social, economic, and environmental impact on people. The book specifically discusses how the earth's basic life-supporting capital (soils, forests, species, fresh water and oceans) is degraded or depleted to provide for human needs, and how air pollution and acid precipitation, are causing widespread injury to humans, forests, and crops. Realistically, over-taxing of natural resources and ecological systems throughout the world has promoted economic growth and created increasing opportunities for people while also advancing social injustice. The use of the environment to accomplish social and economic transformation raises fundamental issues for the study of environmental policy and the natural ecological system. As human beings exploit the natural environment to meet present needs, they often will destroy resources needed for the future generations. Thus, environmental policies are enacted to ensure that social and economic impacts of the environment are compatible with the limits of natural systems. Offering an intuitive and crystal-clear explanation of the key concepts and principles of environmental policies and sustainable development, this volume is suitable not only for environmental science students, but also for instructors, practitioners, researchers, and academics.

This book examines the civil-social interactions which have shaped and continue to influence the political and social development of modern Gulf societies. It analyses the influence of public and private social spaces, such as sports arenas and dawawin as well as developments in the legal and cultural spheres. Geographically, the volume covers Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Each chapter discusses a different aspect of current trends in society, offering a multidimensional perspective on recent developments. In so doing, the chapters highlight the existence of a growing participation culture as a force for dynamic social change in a global context. Bringing to attention the continuing social change in public and private spaces, which have increased public social interactions within the last ten years, this books also demonstrates the opening of dialogues between the public and the authorities. The contributors are established scholars living in the Gulf, as well as academics with long-term field research in the region, thus providing unique perspectives on current sociopolitical trends in the Gulf states. Participation Culture in the Gulf will be useful to students and scholars of Middle Eastern politics and society, as well as social movements and political participation more generally.

This book explores key contemporary issues of democracy in our globalized and highly technologized world. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, with contributions including the fields of philosophy, political science, media studies, linguistics, and aesthetics, it reflects on the characteristics of the democratic state and democratic social practices.The book features contributions on topics such as the status of political parties, the separation of powers and the rule of law, bureaucracy and meritocracy, equality, forms of democratic participation and governance, comparisons between historical and contemporary democratic practices, individual rights, propaganda, political engagement, and consent. Further, it discusses how global information flows and new technologies affect democratic processes, including topics such as cyber-activism and open-source software as a means of empowerment to ethnocentric and class-centric technological design, globalization and media neutrality, and the mechanization of public administration. Overall, the book demonstrates how historical, philosophical, technical, and institutional issues relate to contemporary democracy. It will appeal to political theorists, social scientists and everybody interested in contemporary democracy.

After decades of solely relying on the United States for its national security needs, over the last decade, Japan has begun to actively develop and deepen its security ties with a growing number of countries and actors in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe, a development that has further intensified under the Shinzo Abe administration. This is the first book that provides a comprehensive analysis of the motives and objectives from both the Japanese and the partner-countries' perspectives, and asks what this might mean for the security architecture in the Asia-Pacific region, and what lessons can be learned for security cooperation more broadly. This book is for those interested in Japan's security policy beyond the US-Japan security alliance, and non-US centred bilateral and multilateral security cooperation. It is an ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate level courses on regional security cooperation and strategic partnerships, and Japanese foreign and security policy. -- .

The balance of economic power in Europe is shifting eastwards. Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania have all seen increases in their contributions to international trade and in the rate of GDP growth, whilst other countries have seen declines, and firms in these Central and Eastern European economies are becoming increasingly influential participants in international production systems, centred largely on Germany. This book presents an up-to-date, theoretically informed analysis of how these four countries have developed distinctive business systems since the political revolutions that transformed this region in 1989, combining the structures of liberal market capitalism established in the 1990s with practices established earlier. Influenced by the socialist inheritance of communism and increasingly diverse sources of capital, different forms of capitalism developed, less responsive to shareholder interests, and more responsive to managerial and national strategic interests This book concentrates on changing patterns of ownership and control, means of capital accumulation, the relations among multinationals, regional enterprises, and governments, and the role of the state. Whilst recognizing the role of multinationals in generating export-led growth, the book emphasizes the central role of government at national and international level. The forms of capitalism under construction differ from expectations common in the 1990s, combining elements from both US/UK and continental European models of capitalism.

This book explores the problems associated with regulating the funding of political parties and election campaigns in a timely assessment of a topic of great political controversy. From interest in Obama's capacity to raise vast sums of money, to scandals that have rocked UK and Australian governments, party funding is a global issue, reflected in this text with case studies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States. Taking an interdisciplinary approach with leading scholars from politics, geography and law, this text addresses key themes: contributions, spending controls, the role of broadcasters and special interests, and the role of the state in funding political parties. With regulatory measures apparently unable to change the behaviour of parties, why have existing laws failed to satisfy the demands for reform, and what kind of laws are necessary to change the way political parties behave? The Funding of Political Parties: Where Now? brings fresh comparative material to inform this topical and intractable debate, and assesses the wider implications of continuing problems in political funding. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, political theory, policy and law.

The year 2011 will go down in history as a turning point for the Arab world. The popular unrest that swept across the region and led to the toppling of the Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Qaddhafi regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya has fundamentally altered the social, economic, and political outlooks of these countries and the region as a whole. This book assesses the transition processes unleashed by the uprisings that took place in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011. The wave of unrest and popular mobilisation that swept through these countries is treated as the point of departure of long and complex processes of change, manipulation, restructuring, and entrenchment of the institutional structures and logics that defined politics. The book explores the constitutive elements of institutional development, namely processes of constitution making, electoral politics, the changing status and power of the judiciary, and the interplay between the civilian and the military apparatuses in Egypt and Tunisia. It also considers the extent to which these two countries have become more democratic, as a result of their institutions being more legitimate, accountable, and responsive, at the beginning of 2014 and from a comparative perspective. The impact of temporal factors in shaping transition paths is highlighted throughout the book. The book provides a comprehensive assessment of political and institutional transition processes in two key countries in North Africa and its conclusions shed light on similar processes that have taken place throughout the region since 2011. It will be a valuable resource for anyone studying Middle Eastern and North African politics, area studies, comparative institutional development and democratisation.

Although party membership has been extensively analysed in the EU Members States from Western and Eastern Europe, there is a gap in systematic data collection and analyses for the other countries in the Balkans and post-Soviet region. This book provides new and innovative insights in the area of party membership research to analyse the evolution of membership organizations in political parties from under-investigated countries. Specifically, it seeks to understand the way in which political parties and the national legislation conceptualize the notion of membership within and across countries. It provides original data and affords a first comprehensive, comparative study of party members in the EU neighbouring countries, which resonate particular interest because some of them occupy the "precarious middle ground between a full-fledge democracy and outright dictatorship". In light of these relevant observations, this systematic analysis of membership evolutions in democratizing countries brings valuable insights for the study of party politics in general. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties and party systems, party organisation and elections, post-Soviet and East European politics and more broadly to democratization studies and comparative politics.

This volume offers an empirically rich, theoretically informed study of the shifting intersections of nation/alism, gender and sexuality. Challenging a scholarly legacy that has overly focused on the masculinist character of nationalism, it pays particular attention to the people and issues less commonly considered in the context of nationalist projects, namely women and sexual minorities. Bringing together both established and emerging researchers from across the globe, this multidisciplinary and comparison-rich volume provides a multi-sited exploration of the shifting contours of belonging and Otherness generated by multifarious nationalisms. The diverse, and context specific positionings of men and women, masculinities and femininities, and hegemonic and non-normative sexualities, vis-a-vis nation/alism, are illuminated through a vibrant array of contemporary theoretical lenses. These include historical and feminist institutionalism, post-colonial theory, critical race approaches, transnational and migration theory and semiotics.

The World of Protracted Conflicts seeks to frame the models to answer three crucial questions about interstate protracted conflict: what are the most likely conditions for the onset of a protracted conflict, its escalation/persistence, and its termination? It presents the findings on protracted conflict occurrence, continuation, and resolution through testing these models and their derived hypotheses against the evidence from 33 interstate protracted conflicts in the last century. These findings will, in turn, shed further light on the conflict-crisis-war linkage. This book examines and explains patterns that exist in the eruption, evolution, and winding down of these conflicts through a systematic comparison of recent and contemporary PCs.

Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. As national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, the book argues that they recompose firm and industry boundaries, stakeholder identities and interests and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Micro level study of industrial transformation in this way provides a significant window on macro level processes of political economic change in the three societies.
Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on change in advanced political economies. It characterizes industrial change as a creative, bottom up process driven by reflective social actors. This alternative view consists of two distinctive claims. The first is that action is social, reflective, and ultimately creative. When their interactive habits are disrupted, industrial actors seek to repair their relations by reconceiving them. Such imaginative interaction redefines interest and causes unforeseen possibilities for action to emerge, enabling actors to trump existing rules and constraints. Second, industrial change driven by creative action is recompositional. In the social process of reflection, actors rearrange, modify, reconceive, and reposition inherited organizational forms and governance mechanisms as they experiment with solutions to the challenges that they face. Continuity in relations is interwoven with continuous reform and change. Most remarkably, creativity in the recomposition process makes the introduction of entirely new practices and relations possible.
Ultimately, the message of Manufacturing Possibilities is that social study of change in advanced political economies should devote itself to the discovery of possibility. Preoccupation with constraint and failure to appreciate the capaciousness of reflective social action has led much of contemporary debate to misrecognize the dynamics of change. As a result, discussion of the range of adjustment possibilities in advanced political economies has been unnecessarily limited.

Southeast Asia is a vast, populous and diverse region. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) promotes democracy and human rights as central to regional order and cooperation, but most members are not democratic and have poor or questionable human rights records. This book explores why Southeast Asian countries have collectively adopted the rhetoric of democracy and human rights, and argues that they are motivated by their concerns about external regional legitimacy. It analyses ASEAN's references to democracy and the reality of backsliding in several countries; examines the adoption of human rights rhetoric; and considers the implications for how we understand regional cooperation. The book is relevant for students and analysts who are interested in regionalism in Southeast Asia and elsewhere - particularly given growing global concerns about liberal democracy and the gaps between rhetoric and political realities.

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare's political outlook by comparing some of the playwright's best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. By situating Shakespeare 'between' these two thinkers, the distinctly modern trajectory of the playwright's work becomes visible. Throughout his career, Shakespeare interrogates the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, and the metaphor of the body politic. Simultaneously he helps to lay the groundwork for modern politics through his dramatic explorations of consent, liberty, and political violence. We can thus understand Shakespeare's corpus as a kind of eulogy: a funeral speech dedicated to outmoded and deficient theories of politics. We can also understand him as a revolutionary political thinker who, along with Machiavelli and Hobbes, reimagined the origins and ends of government. All three thinkers understood politics primarily as a response to our mortality. They depict politics as the art of managing and organizing human bodies-caring for their needs, making space for the satisfaction of desires, and protecting them from the threat of violent death. This book features new readings of Shakespeare's plays that illuminate the playwright's major political preoccupations and his investment in materialist politics.

Policy dismantling is a distinctive form of policy change, which involves the cutting, reduction, diminution or complete removal of existing policies. The perceived need to dismantle existing policies normally acquires particular poignancy during periods of acute economic austerity. Dismantling is thought to be especially productive of political conflict, pitting those who benefit from the status quo against those who, for whatever reason, seek change. However, scholars of public policy have been rather slow to offer a comprehensive account of the precise conditions under which particular aspects of policy are dismantled, grounded in systematic empirical analysis. Although our overall understanding of what causes policy to change has accelerated a lot in recent decades, there remains a bias towards the study of either policy expansion or policy stability. Dismantling does not even merit a mention in most public policy textbooks. Yet without an account of both expansion and dismantling, our understanding of policy change in general, and the politics surrounding the cutting of existing policies, will remain frustratingly incomplete.
This book seeks to develop a more comparative approach to understanding policy dismantling, by looking in greater detail at the dynamics of cutting in two different policy fields: one (social policy) which has been subjected to study before and the other (environmental policy) which has not. On the basis of a systematic analysis of the existing literatures in these two fields, it develops a new analytical framework for measuring and explaining policy dismantling. Through an analysis of six, fresh empirical cases of dismantling written by leading experts, it reveals a more nuanced picture of change, focusing on what actually motivates actors to dismantle, the strategies they use to secure their objectives and the politically significant effects they ultimately generate.
Dismantling Public Policy is essential reading for anyone wanting to better understand a hugely important facet of contemporary policy and politics. It will inform a range of student courses in comparative public policy, politics, social and environmental policy.

Many societies use labor market coordination to maximize economic growth and equality, yet employers' willing cooperation with government and labor is something of a mystery. The Political Construction of Business Interests recounts employers' struggles to define their collective social identities at turning points in capitalist development. Employers are most likely to support social investments in countries with strong peak business associations, that help members form collective preferences and realize policy goals in labor market negotiations. Politicians, with incentives shaped by governmental structures, took the initiative in association-building and those that created the strongest associations were motivated to evade labor radicalism and to preempt parliamentary democratization. Sweeping in its historical and cross-national reach, the book builds on original archival data, interviews and cross-national quantitative analyses. The research has important implications for the construction of business as a social class and powerful ramifications for equality, welfare state restructuring and social solidarity.

Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly in the post-9/11 international environment, neutrality has been conceptualised as a problematic subject. With the end of bipolarity, neutrality as a foreign and security policy lost much of its justification, and in the ongoing 'War on Terror', no state, according to the Bush Administration, can be neutral. However, much of this debate has gone unnoticed in IR literature. This book, newly available in paperback, examines the conceptualisation of neutrality from the Peloponnesian War to the present day, uncovering how neutrality has been a neglected and misunderstood subject in IR theory and politics. By rethinking neutrality through constructivism, this book argues that neutrality is intrinsically linked to identity. Using Sweden as a case study, it links identity, sovereignty, internationalism and solidarity to the debates about Swedish neutrality today and how neutrality has been central to Swedish identity and its world-view. Rather than viewing Swedish neutrality as the policy of isolationism or small and weak states, this book argues that Swedish neutrality is an embedded part of Swedish identity, and its domestic sources stem from the ideology and vision of Social Democracy. Far from isolationist, Sweden practiced an active form of neutrality, acting as the 'moral voice' of the global community. Identities are malleable, however, and this book examines the shifts in Swedish identity and neutrality. European integration, globalisation, new threats to security, and the arguments about decline of the state and sovereignty have impacted on neutrality. Whilst many are quick to herald its demise, this book argues that the norms and values of active neutrality can be reworked to contribute to a more cosmopolitan international order.

This edited volume presents a detailed account of the dynamics of socioeconomic contention in Egypt and Tunisia since 2011. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, it analyses what has happened to the socioeconomic grievances that played a key role in the mass mobilizations of 2010 and 2011. The book is based on an original data set of socioeconomic protests in the two countries and on in-depth case studies that cover the two most important types of socioeconomic contention: labor protests and protests by socioeconomically disadvantaged people outside the formal economy. Drawing on a systematic review of comparative research on Latin America, the authors argue that the dynamics of socioeconomic contention in contemporary Egypt and Tunisia reflect a deep-seated crisis of popular sector incorporation. This work promises to enrich the scholarly and the political debates on Egypt and Tunisia, the MENA region and on contentious politics in times of political change. Chapter 10 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This book examines the impact of the federal restructuring of Ethiopia on ethnic conflicts. The adoption of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia was closely related with the problem of creating a state structure that could be used as instrument of managing the complex ethno-linguistic diversity of the country. Ethiopia is a multinational country with about 85 ethno-linguistic groups and since the 1960s, it suffered from ethno-regional conflicts. The book considers multiple governance and state factors that could explain the difficulties Ethiopian federalism faces to realise its objectives. These include lack of political pluralism and the use of ethnicity as the sole instrument of state organisation. Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Ethiopia will be of interest to students and scholars of federal studies, ethnic conflict and regionalism.

This book offers a fresh re-evaluation of Yehud in the Persian period, addressing in particular the dynamics of its relationship to the Persian imperial government. Among the variety of social-political reconstructions of Persian-period Yehud, one 'consensus' stands out - one which states that the Jerusalem priesthood enjoyed a prominent level of authority, symbolized in the Jerusalem temple. Unfortunately, this leads easily into conclusions of a theocracy in Yehud. The problem, in part, is due to the immediate association of priests assumed to be authoritative with that of a theocratic governing structure.To address this problem, at least three aspects of Yehud's governing structure(s) require further attention: the social implications of a particular governing structure within a society; the developments of a society leading up to that governing structure; and, a clearly articulated definition of the term and concept of theocracy. Since many scholars appear to depend upon a theocratic 'structure' or 'spirit' at some point in their discussions of Persian-period Yehud, one would usually expect to find a clear definition of theocracy. Instead, a hasty and ill-equipped definition that seems to avoid addressing the social and political complexities is often used.The conclusion is that no power or political vacuum appears to have existed allowing the priesthood to claim power in Yehud. The Persian empire did not allow territories to develop autonomous governing structures (Chapter 2). The social, economic, and political realms of Yehud functioned within the framework of Persian imperial administration (Chapter 3). And the term theocracy, when defined according to social-scientific requirements (Chapter 4), does not accurately describe the social-political context of Yehud during the Persian period (Chapter 5).

Modern criminal justice institutions globally include police, criminal courts, and prisons. Prisons, unlike courts which developed out of an old aristocratic function and unlike police which developed out of an ancient posse or standing army function, are only about 200 years old and are humanitarian inventions. Prisons, defined as modern institutions that deprive the freedom of individuals who violate societies' most basic norms in lieu of corporal or capital punishment, were near universal at the dawn of the 21st century and their use was expanding globally. The US alone spent $60 billion on prisons in 2014. Prison Bureaucracies addresses two fundamental questions. Do prisons in Christian, Hindu, and Muslim societies separated by space and level of socioeconomic development follow a common evolutionary path? Given that differences in prison structure and performance exist, what factors-resources, laws, leadership, historical accident, institutions, culture-account for differences? Based on more than 150 interviews conducted in ten international trips with prison administrators in 15 male state prisons in the US, Mexico, India, and Honduras, Norris provides ethnographic descriptions of prisons bureaucracies that are immediately recognizable as similar institutions, but that nonetheless possessed distinctive forms and developmental trajectories. Economists and political scientists have argued that incentives provided by institutions matter for good or bad public administration, and this is undeniable in the prisons of this study. But institutional incentives were one factor among many affecting the form and function of the prisons and prison systems of this study.

Malawi is among the few countries in sub-Saharan Africa that has witnessed significant improvements in relation to meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets. It exhibits some of the main challenges facing African democracies while they attempt to consolidate the benefits of democratisation. Political Transition and Inclusive Development in Malawi critically analyses opportunities and constraints related to the impact of democracy on development in one of the world's poorest countries. The book explores how, and to what extent, processes related to democratic and economic governance can be strengthened in order to make political and administrative authorities more responsive to development needs. It also considers characteristics of successful implementation of public policy and the effective and timely delivery of basic services in local contexts; increased citizen participation and dialogue with local government authorities; factors that enable civil society organisations to hold political and administrative officials to account; and better utilisation of academic research for improved evidence-based policy formulation and implementation. This volume will be of great interest to scholars in development studies, African studies, politics, law and anthropology, as well as policymakers and those interested in democracy, governance, human rights and the implementation of anti-poverty programmes, development administration and decentralisation.

"Referendums and Democratic Government" deals with the role of different forms of referendums in modern representative democracies. It analyzes the referendum from the point of view of social choice theory and various theories of democracy. The institutions of referendums are analyzed in 22 democracies, and referendums in Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland are analyzed as case studies. Different forms of referendums are classified according to how they are initiated and how their agenda is set. It is argued that various types of referendums have been justified by arguments based on different normative theories of democracy as referendum is not a unitary phenomenon.