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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Comparative politics
Political Economy of Globalization and China's Options offers the
political economy of globalization and China's options in response
to globalization's retrogression, and the construction of world
order. What are the strategies for upgrading the competitiveness of
an emerging major power? Why does world need a new concept of
openness? What are the four major challenges for the world economy?
How do Chinese scholars think of in an "Anti-Globalization"
environment? What are the five major objectives of global politics?
Besides answering these basic questions, we will also consider
other issues: the triangular relationship among China, the United
States, and Russia; Rise of China and transformation of
international order; understanding nuclear security and safety
issues from the perspective of global governance.
Colonial wars have been a very active part of 19th and 20th century
history and their importance has often been overlooked. Their study
and analysis, in order to understand the contemporary world and
current international relations, is as necessary as it is
interesting. Examining Colonial Wars and Their Impact on
Contemporary Military History approaches the phenomenon of colonial
wars with the intention of understanding the most immediate past in
order to analyze the contemporary and current scenarios with new
tools. It contributes to the dissemination of content without
neglecting the considerations of social sciences and history, with
a compilation and analytical character. Covering topics such as
black-market armaments, imperialism, and military history, this
premier reference source is a dynamic resource for historians,
anthropologists, sociologists, government officials, students and
educators of higher education, librarians, researchers, and
academicians.
Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State
collects thirteen key essays on the Caribbean by Percy C. Hintzen,
the foremost political sociologist in Anglophone Caribbean studies.
For the past thirty years, Hintzen has been one of the most
articulate and discerning critics of the postcolonial state in
Caribbean scholarship, making seminal contributions to the study of
Caribbean politics, sociology, political economy, and diaspora
studies. His work on the postcolonial elites in the region, first
given full articulation in his book The Costs of Regime Survival:
Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in
Guyana and Trinidad, is unparalleled. Reproducing Domination
contains some of Hintzen's most important Caribbean essays over a
twenty-five-year period, from 1995 to the present. These works have
broadened and deepened his earlier work in The Costs of Regime
Survival to encompass the entire Anglophone Caribbean; interrogated
the formation and consolidation of the postcolonial Anglophone
Caribbean state; and theorized the role of race and ethnicity in
Anglophone Caribbean politics. Given the recent global resurgence
of interest in elite ownership patterns and their relationship to
power and governance, Hintzen's work assumes even more resonance
beyond the shores of the Caribbean. This groundbreaking volume
serves as an important guide for those concerned with tracing the
consolidation of power in the new elite that emerged following flag
independence in the 1960s.
Scaling the Balkans puts in conversation several fields that have
been traditionally treated as discrete: Balkan studies, Ottoman
studies, East European studies, and Habsburg and Russian studies.
By looking at the complex interrelationship between countries and
regions, demonstrating how different perspectives and different
methodological approaches inflect interpretations and conclusions,
it insists on the heuristic value of scales. The volume is a
collection of published and unpublished essays, dealing with issues
of modernism, backwardness, historical legacy, balkanism,
post-colonialism and orientalism, nationalism, identity and
alterity, society-and nation-building, historical demography and
social structure, socialism and communism in memory, and
historiography.
The Common Law is Oliver Wendell Holmes' most sustained work of
jurisprudence. In it the careful reader will discern traces of his
later thought as found in both his legal opinions and other
writings. At the outset of The Common Law Holmes posits that he is
concerned with establishing that the common law can meet the
changing needs of society while preserving continuity with the
past. A common law judge must be creative, both in determining the
society's current needs, and in discerning how best to address
these needs in a way that is continuous with past judicial
decisions. In this way, the law evolves by moving out of its past,
adapting to the needs of the present, and establishing a direction
for the future. To Holmes' way of thinking, this approach is
superior to imposing order in accordance with a philosophical
position or theory because the law would thereby lose the
flexibility it requires in responding to the needs and demands of
disputing parties as well as society as a whole. According to
Holmes, the social environment--the economic, moral, and political
milieu--alters over time. Therefore in order to remain responsive
to this social environment, the law must change as well. But the
law is also part of this environment and impacts it. There is,
then, a continual reciprocity between the law and the social
arrangements in which it is contextualized. And, as with the
evolution of species, there is no starting over. Rather, in most
cases, a judge takes existing legal concepts and principles, as
these have been memorialized in legal precedent, and adapts them,
often unconsciously, to fit the requirements of a particular case
and present social conditions.
This textbook offers a systematic and up-to-date introduction to
politics and society in the Middle East. Taking a thematic approach
that engages with core theory as well as a wide range of research,
it examines postcolonial political, social and economic
developments in the region, while also scrutinising the domestic
and international factors that have played a central role in these
developments. Topics covered include the role of religion in
political life, gender and politics, the Israel-Palestine conflict,
civil war in Syria, the ongoing threat posed by Islamist groups
such as Islamic State as well as the effects of increasing
globalisation across the MENA. Following the ongoing legacy of the
Arab Spring, it pays particular attention to the tension between
processes of democratization and the persistence of authoritarian
rule in the region. This new edition offers: - Coverage of the
latest developments, with expanded coverage of the military and
security apparatus, regional conflict and the Arab uprisings -
Textboxes linking key themes to specific historical events, figures
and concepts - Comparative spotlight features focusing on the
politics and governance of individual countries. This is an ideal
resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students approaching
Middle Eastern politics for the first time.
Centripetal democracy is the idea that legitimate democratic
institutions set in motion forms of citizen practice and
representative behaviour that serve as powerful drivers of
political identity formation. Partisan modes of political
representation in the context of multifaceted electoral and direct
democratic voting opportunities are emphasised on this model. There
is, however, a strain of thought predominant in political theory
that doubts the democratic capacities of political systems
constituted by multiple public spheres. This view is referred to as
the lingua franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems (LFT).
Inadequate democratic institutions and acute demands to divide the
political system (through devolution or secession), are predicted
by this thesis. By combining an original normative democratic
theory with a comparative analysis of how Belgium and Switzerland
have variously managed to sustain themselves as multilingual
democracies, this book identifies the main institutional features
of a democratically legitimate European Union and the conditions
required to bring it about. Part One presents a novel theory of
democratic legitimacy and political identity formation on which
subsequent analyses are based. Part Two defines the EU as a
demoi-cracy and provides a thorough democratic assessment of this
political system. Part Three explains why Belgium has largely
succumbed to the centrifugal logic predicted by the LFT, while
Switzerland apparently defies this logic. Part Four presents a
model of centripetal democracy for the EU, one that would greatly
reduce its democratic deficit and ensure that this political system
does not succumb to the centrifugal forces expected by the LFT.
Making use of a unique data set that includes more than 1000
leadership elections from over 100 parties in 14 countries over an
almost 50 year period, this volume provides the first
comprehensive, comparative examination of how parties choose their
leaders and the impact of the different decisions they make in this
regard. Among the issues examined are how leaders are chosen, the
factors that result in parties changing their selection rules, how
the rules affect the competitiveness of leadership elections, the
types of leaders chosen, the impact of leadership transition on
electoral outcomes, the factors affecting the length of leadership
tenures, and how leadership tenures come to an end. This volume is
situated in the literature on intra-party decision making and party
organizational reform and makes unique and important contributions
to our understanding of these areas. The analysis includes parties
in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary,
Israel, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Norway, and the United
Kingdom. 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.
This book comparatively assesses the China and India's soft power
strategy in Iran. By employing Joseph S. Nye's "Soft Power" theory
and forming the new concept of "Power of Bonding", this book
formulated China and India's soft power narratives and applied it
through the empirical analysis in Iran. Based on this theory, this
book seeks explanations for the question of "How China and India
respectively, strategically and comparatively use the soft power
strategy in Iran?". To reach the find-out, this book compares the
understanding, resources, strategies, influences and uses of China
and India's soft power in Iran under three thematic areas,
including "power of bonding through cultural attractions, and
attributions"; "political and diplomatic engagement" and "economic
partnerships". By analysing China and India's soft power strategy
in Iran, this book seeks to contribute to the soft power literature
through a theoretical replication based on non-Western soft power
strategy, the concept and its empirical application in China and
India.
South Africa is the most industrialized power in Africa. It was
rated the continent's largest economy in 2016 and is the only
African member of the G20. It is also the only strategic partner of
the EU in Africa. Yet despite being so strategically and
economically significant, there is little scholarship that focuses
on South Africa as a regional hegemon. This book provides the first
comprehensive assessment of South Africa's post-Apartheid foreign
policy. Over its 23 chapters - -and with contributions from
established Africa, Western, Asian and American scholars, as well
as diplomats and analysts - the book examines the current pattern
of the country's foreign relations in impressive detail. The
geographic and thematic coverage is extensive, including chapters
on: the domestic imperatives of South Africa's foreign policy;
peace-making; defence and security; bilateral relations in
Southern, Central, West, Eastern and North Africa; bilateral
relations with the US, China, Britain, France and Japan; the
country's key external multilateral relations with the UN; the
BRICS economic grouping; the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group
(ACP); as well as the EU and the World Trade Organization (WTO). An
essential resource for researchers, the book will be relevant to
the fields of area studies, foreign policy, history, international
relations, international law, security studies, political economy
and development studies.
The book analyses the diplomatic recognition of individual
countries using the case of divided nations, offering new insights
into our understanding of the evolution of the international
system. Combining large-N quantitative analysis and in-depth
comparative study, it is rich in empirical and theoretical
material.
Europeans use 'social models' to refer to the combination of
welfare state, industrial relations, and educational institutions
jointly structuring what we can think of as the supply-side of the
labor market. The dominant view in controversy over the social
models has been that in the name of equity they have impaired the
labor market's efficiency, thereby causing unemployment. But doubt
is cast on this supply-side-only diagnosis by powerful
macroeconomic developments, from the Europe-wide recession
following Germany's post-unification boom to the deepest economic
crisis since the interwar Great Depression, which the Eurozone's
truncated economic governance structure transformed into a
sovereign debt crisis, threatening the Euro's and even EU's very
survival. This book explores the interaction of Europe's diverse
social models with the major developments that shaped their
macroeconomic environment over the quarter century since the fall
of the Berlin Wall. It concludes that this environment rather than
the social models are primarily responsible for the immense social
costs of the crisis.
Nearly every common law jurisdiction in the world has adopted a
charter or bill of rights. Yet adopting a new rights document
creates, rather than resolves, many fundamental constitutional
questions. Should constitutional rights be relevant in private
disputes? Does every political question need a constitutional or
judicial answer? Should courts and legislatures equally participate
in addressing the scope of which issues are to be considered
constitutional? Judicializing Everything? illustrates how debates
surrounding these persistent judicial questions are best understood
as part of an ongoing clash between distinct forms of
constitutionalism on and off the bench. Mark S. Harding canvasses
the perennial debates within the field of constitutional studies
and provides novel ways of understanding key disagreements between
judges and scholars alike. Despite important formal differences
between rights documents in Canada, New Zealand, and the United
Kingdom, Judicializing Everything? shows that there are also
considerable similarities in the kinds of cases, arguments, and
legal outcomes in the three countries. As political life becomes
increasingly constitutionalized and judicialized, this important
book sheds light on the persistence of debates over bills of rights
and their interpretation.
This study considers the multidimensional nature of the
construction of the active civil society in the post-totalitarian
reality of Central and Eastern Europe, covering the period of
systemic transformations in the region in 1989 to the EU accession
of 2004. The analysis was carried out using a multidisciplinary
research perspective which incorporates historical, sociological,
and legal insights, as well as those from political science. The
volume illustrates the dynamic character of the process of
constructing an active civil society process in a broader
comparative perspective against the background of post-totalitarian
societies, Germany and Italy, which underwent the process of
democratic transformation in 1945 and went on to actively forge the
European Community in the 1950s.
This book theorizes Chinese politics, specifically about China's
"deliberative democracy (xieshang minzhu )". Creating a China-West
comparative framework, the author interrogates China's government's
claims to give representation to citizens, allowing readers to see
how all of these concepts interact within Chinese ideology,
democratic discourse, and governance, and their relationship with
Chinese authoritarianism. Above all, this book represents a
sustained hybridization of political theory, one which is neither a
simple democratic-authoritarian dichotomy, nor a reinterpretation
of the official propaganda. This study will interest scholars of
Chinese politics and statecraft, shedding light on an emergent
discourse of the state - Chinese xieshang minzhu. More importantly,
this book goes beyond a simple rhetorical and linguistic use of
'deliberative democracy' in the Western sense, and rather
emphasizes the very consultative nature of Chinese politics, which
facilitates and reconsolidates Chinese authoritarianism.
Why do we need European integration in increasingly fragmented and
antagonised European societies? How can European integration relate
to the national stories we carry about who we are as a nation and
where we belong? What to do with the national stories that tell
traumatising tales of past loss and sacrifice, and depict others as
villains or foes? Can we still claim that our national states are
the most legitimate way of organising European political
communities today? Engaging with these big questions of European
politics, Nevena Nancheva tells a small story from the periphery of
Europe. Looking at two post-communist Balkan states - Bulgaria and
Macedonia - she explores how their narratives of national identity
have changed in the context of Europeanisation and EU membership
preparations. In doing so, Nancheva suggests that national identity
and European integration might be more relevant than previously
thought.
That the publics of Western democracies are becoming increasingly
disenchanted with their political institutions is part of the
conventional wisdom in Political Science. This trend is often
equated with the expectation that all forms of political attachment
and participation show similar patterns of decline. Based on
empirical underpinnings derived from a range of original and
sophisticated comparative analyses from Europe and beyond, this
collection shows that no such universal pattern of decline exists.
Nor should it be expected, given the diversity of reasons that
citizens have to place or withdraw trust, and to engage in
conventional political participation or in protest. Contributers
are: Christoph Arndt, Wiebke Breustedt, Christina Eder, Manfred te
Grotenhuis, Alexia Katsanidou, Rik Linssen, Michael P. McDonald,
Ingvill C. Mochmann, Kenneth Newton, Maria Oskarson, Suzanne L.
Parker, Glenn R. Parker, Markus Quandt, Peer Scheepers, Hans
Schmeets, Thoralf Stark, and Terri L. Towner.
This book addresses one of the enduring questions of democratic
government: why do governments choose some public policies but not
others? Political executives focus on a range of policy issues,
such as the economy, social policy, and foreign policy, but they
shift their priorities over time. Despite an extensive literature,
it has proven surprisingly hard to explain policy prioritisation.
To remedy this gap, this book offers a new approach called public
policy investment: governments enhance their chances of getting
re-elected by managing a portfolio of public policies and paying
attention to the risks involved. In this way, government is like an
investor making choices about risk to yield returns on its
investments of political capital. The public provides signals about
expected political capital returns for government policies, or
policy assets, that can be captured through expressed opinion in
public polls. Governments can anticipate these signals in the
choices they make. Statecraft is the ability political leaders have
to consider risk and return in their policy portfolios and do so
amidst uncertainty in the public's policy valuation. Such actions
represent the public's views conditionally because not every
opinion change is a price signal. It then outlines a quantitative
method for measuring risk and return, applying it to the case of
Britain between 1971 and 2000 and offers case studies illustrating
statecraft by prime ministers, such as Edward Heath or Margaret
Thatcher. The book challenges comparative scholars to apply public
policy investment to countries that have separation of powers,
multiparty government, and decentralization.
Federal systems are praised for creating political stability, but
they are also blamed for causing rigidity. They are said to balance
powers, but apparently they are also threatened by instability due
to drifts in power. Federalism should support democratization, but
it can also constrain the power of the demos and strengthen the
executive. In short, there is widespread agreement that federal
systems are dynamic. The forces, mechanisms and consequences of
federal dynamics, however, are not sufficiently understood so far.
This book brings together leading experts in the field of
comparative federalism to highlight how the interplay of continuity
and change systematically generates and reinforces varieties of
federalism and varieties of federal dynamics. Federal Dynamics:
Continuity, Change and Varieties of Federalism investigates
mechanisms and resulting patterns of federal development. It offers
new analytical concepts and discusses different theoretical
propositions to systematically compare convergent and divergent
trends in federal systems. Acknowledging the theoretical pluralism
that dominates the field, the book is organized around four
sections: Models, Varieties and Dimensions of Federalism; Timing,
Sequencing and Historical Evolution; Social Change and Political
Structuring; and Actors, Institutions and Internal Dynamics.
The contributions to this volume are variously concerned with three
guiding questions: What changes within federal systems, how and
why? The focus provided by these three guiding questions allows for
a dialogue between strands of the literature that have not talked
to each other in a sufficient manner. In this way, the book makes a
significant contribution to the growing literature on continuity
and change in federal systems. Ultimately, it represents a
substantive effort in advancing research on comparative federalism.
The "European Capital of Culture" initiative offered dazzling
programmes at the RUHR.2010 and Marseille-Provence 2013 locations;
these programmes also claimed to have cultural-political
sustainability. The study examines to what extent the concepts of
the two cities contributed to processes of cultural policy
transformation at the locations in terms of sustainable governance
structures in the cultural sector. It also shows how intrinsic
identities affected a culturally shaped transformation of the two
sites. The need to reform the ECoC initiative is also discussed.
The advent of the all-volunteer force and the evolving nature of
modern warfare have transformed our military, changing it in
serious if subtle ways that few Americans are aware of. Edited by
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy, this stimulating
volume brings together insights from a remarkable group of
scholars, who shed important new light on the changes effecting
today's armed forces. Beginning with a Foreword by former Secretary
of Defense William J. Perry, the contributors take an historical
approach as they explore the ever-changing strategic, political,
and fiscal contexts in which the armed forces are trained and
deployed, and the constantly shifting objectives that they are
tasked to achieve in the post-9/11 environment. They also offer
strong points of view. Lawrence Freedman, for instance, takes the
leadership to task for uncritically embracing the high-tech
Revolution in Military Affairs when "conventional" warfare seems
increasingly unlikely. And eminent psychiatrist Jonathan Shay warns
that the post-battle effects of what he terms "moral wounds"
currently receive inadequate attention from the military and the
medical profession. Perhaps most troubling, Karl Eikenberry raises
the issue of the "political ownership" of the military in an era of
all-volunteer service, citing the argument that, absent the
political protest common to the draft era, government
decision-makers felt free to carry out military operations in both
Iraq and Afghanistan. Andrew Bacevich goes further, writing that
"it's no longer our army; it hasn't been for years; it's theirs
[the government's] and they intend to keep it." Looking at such
issues as who serves and why, the impact of non-uniformed
"contractors" in the war zone, and the growing role of women in
combat, this volume brings together leading thinkers who illuminate
the American military at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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