This book examines changing and emerging state and state-like borders in the post-Soviet space in the decades following state collapse. This book argues border-making is not only about states' physical marking of territory and claims to sovereignty but also about people's spatial practices over time. In order to illustrate how borders come about and are maintained, this book looks at border communities at internal, open administrative borders and borders in the making, as well as physically demarcated international state borders. This book also pays attention to both the spatial and temporal aspects of borders and the interplay between boundaries and borders over time and thus identifies some of the processes at play as space is territorialized in Eurasia in the aftermath of state collapse.

This volume, incorporating the work of scholars from various parts of the globe, taps the wisdom of the Westphalian (and post-Westphalian) world on the use of federalism and secession as tools for managing regional conflicts. The debate has rarely been more important than it is right now, especially in light of recent events in Catalonia, Scotland, Quebec and the Sudan - all unique political contexts raising similar questions about how best to balance competing claims for autonomy, interdependence, political voice, and exit. Exploring how various nations have encountered comparable conflicts, some more and some less successfully, the book broadens the perspectives of scholars, government officials, and citizens struggling to resolve sovereignty conflicts with a full appreciation of the underlying principles they represent.

Justice and harmony have long been two of the world's most treasured ideals, but much of modern moral and political philosophy puts them on opposite sides of the divide between liberal theories of the right and communitarian theories of the good. Joshua Mason argues that the encounter with their Chinese counterparts, zhengyi and hexie, can overcome this opposition, revealing a pattern of interrelated concerns that reframes justice and harmony as mutually interdependent concepts in a three-part framework of root harmony (benhe), harmonic justice (heyi), and just harmony (zhenghe). Broadly surveying the histories of western and Chinese moral and political philosophies and taking on the insights of philosophical hermeneutics, Justice and Harmony: Cross-Cultural Ideals in Conflict and Cooperation explores our cross-cultural conceptual inventories and develops a comparative framework that can overcome entrenched binary oppositions and reconcile these grand global values.

Moving from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the present day, this book traces the trajectory of the six East Central European former satellites of the Soviet Union (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria) that have joined the European Union. It seeks in particular to explain these countries' disenchantment with the "return to Europe" in spite of their significant advances. The book proceeds country by country and then devotes chapters to some contemporary issues, such as minorities, migration, and the relations of these "new" members with the European Union as a whole. The book eschews theory and is intended for a general audience, including students at all levels in political science and history classes devoted to the EU and to contemporary Europe, and to an academic and practitioner audience interested in world affairs and the evolution of the European Union. The book strives to fill a persistent knowledge gap in the English-speaking world concerning East Central Europe, and to offer fresh insights about the region in the context of contemporary geopolitics.

Relying on micro-evidence on the repercussions of civil conflicts, this edited book explores theories and policies of post-conflict peacebuilding. Reconsidering existing knowledge on the civil conflict and peacebuilding processes in particular, it empirically presents the relationships between conflict dynamics and citizens' norms, values, and preferences in the post-conflict context. Once it occurs, civil conflict brings enormous suffering on the local society. As a consequence of wartime coercion and violence that tear it apart, citizens come to harbor fear, distrust, and hatred of others, especially of those who are in different sociopolitical groups. This can significantly alter the pre-conflict norms and values of the citizenry and make reconciliation difficult across groups in the aftermath of the conflict. To tackle these problems, post-conflict peacebuilding should be well designed so that it can widely cover and sufficiently deal with conflict-affected citizens. This approach urges us to pay serious attention to the individual-level impact of the conflict process and dynamics. The importance of micro-level analysis does not disregard that of normative and/or macro-level approaches to the development of peacebuilding policies. However, the micro-level approach is better able to capture wartime civil-military relations that largely vary between individuals. The book is aimed at linking academic knowledge with policy development in peacebuilding. To reflect existing policy frameworks in peacebuilding, the implications of micro-evidence-based studies for conflict-affected societies are discussed here. A bottom-up approach pursued throughout this book allows us to elaborate desirable policy schemes for peacebuilding that conform to local contexts.

The book"Regional Approaches to the Energy Transition", discusses the key challenges the energy transition is facing at the European and International level. It is an edited collection gathering contributions from the experts in the field bringing together internationally renowned scholars, researchers, EU officials to address the current trends in the energy transition and its dilemmas. The book places the energy transition in a wide interdisciplinary context. It looks at energy policies, legal framework, regional strategies and the difficulties in their implementation. It argues for a regional approach to the energy transition, questioning at the same time the strategies and measures put forward for its realisation. The subject matter is topical, considering recent themes that occupy global and European political agendas. In a nutshell, the volume offers insights into regional regulations, public policies and local practices on the use of clean energy. It looks first at the EU commitment and its initiatives providing some examples from the Member States. Furthermore, it offers a comparative perspective and discusses the different approaches to the energy transition from Latin America, China, Africa and Australia. It covers a wide range of topics such as the EU renewable energy policies, Green Deal and regionalisation, energy auctions in the EU, environment in contemporary constitutionalism, Human Rights considerations, the Scandinavian perspective, practical examples from Italy and Spain. Moreover, it also considers the global context, looking at State and Market in China's coal-to-gas transition, tendencies of legal regulation in the sphere of renewable energy in Russia, the energy transition in Latin-American countries, regional approach to the energy transition and electricity access initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa, and transnationalism and the regional approach to the energy transition in Australia. The systematisation that this book offers and the exchange of good practices and experiences are useful tools for the key players to seriously engage with a just and sustainable energy transition. The proposed book is a reference and study material for academics and students, but also for the policy makers, officials and practitioners dealing with the energy transition. It provides some answers, potential solutions and alternatives to the main problems that the energy sector is facing worldwide.

This book discusses the trajectories of creating specialized autonomous units. An analysis of the mechanisms and measures taken for granting autonomy to specialised autonomous units and subsequently to coordinating them back is described. The book shows a range of patterns in the dynamics of specialization and coordination over 25 years.

This handbook provides an empirically rich analysis of referendums in Europe from the end of the Second World War to the present. It addresses a range of perennial theoretical and legal questions that face policy-makers when they offer citizens the chance to take or influence decisions by referendum, not least whether to accept the 'will of the people'. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on historical, philosophical and political science perspectives, the book includes a contextual section on the history of referendums, the theoretical questions underpinning their use, and on constitutional and legal questions about the use of referendums. The empirical sections are divided into those referendums that focus on domestic issues, such as constitutional matters or questions of social policy, and those related to the European Union, including membership referendums and treaty ratification.

Now in its fifth edition, Europe Today presents unrivaled coverage of developments in major European countries and across the region. Thoroughly revised and updated-with a new introduction and an added chapter on Spain-this is the only work that offers a sustained and unified set of both country case studies and thematic chapters on the European Union. Written by leading scholars from Europe and North America, the book offers a range of perspectives on the process of European integration, the evolution of economic performance, the spread of judicial authority, and the reaction to multiculturalism and immigration. Highlighting the impact of the global economic crisis and the struggle to assert Europe's voice more widely, the contributors provide a cosmopolitan and pragmatic assessment of what Europeans have accomplished and what challenges they continue to face. Each chapter builds on a foundation of basic political information and explanation to develop distinctive and thought-provoking contributions to current debates. A book that informs but also engages, this comprehensive text will lead readers toward a coherent and informed view of Europe today. Contributions by: Gianfranco Baldini, Simon Duke, Eric S. Einhorn, Gregory W. Fuller, Gabriel Goodliffe, Roberta Haar, Jonathan Hopkin, Erik Jones, R. Daniel Kelemen, Serhiy Kudelia, Benedicta Marzinotto, Jonathon W. Moses, Bruce Parrott, Sebastian Royo, Kate Alexander Shaw, Ben Stanley, Ronald Tiersky, John Van Oudenaren, and Helga A. Welsh

Civil Society, Post-Colonialism and Transnational Solidarity originates from Louvet's observation of the strong commitment of a layer of Irish civil society- from the man on the street to political parties, associations and trade unions- to the defence of one antagonist or the other in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning with the Six Day War in 1967 and increasingly so after the Lebanon Wars at the start of the 1980s and the Second Intifada (2000-2005). This book observes how this phenomenon is particularly striking in Northern Ireland, where Israeli and Palestinian flags have been flown by Unionists and Nationalists as signs of solidarity and identification. Louvet sheds light on the dynamics and strategies at play in the Middle East conflict in Northern Ireland but also in the Republic of Ireland, a country considered to be widely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. With an overarching perspective highlighting the influence of Irish colonial history over the motives and discourse of the different levels of mobilization in civil society, this book shows the global movement towards the fragmentation and specialization of transnational solidarity actions in Ireland.

What makes people identify with Europe? To answer this question, this book analyzes the development and determinants of a common European identity among EU citizens from the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 to the recent financial and economic crisis. The author examines citizens' identification with Europe for all EU member states, and systematically explores the theoretical and empirical implications of two turning points in the recent history of EU integration, namely the EU's enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe in 2004/2007 and the financial and economic crisis that started in 2008. The book integrates theoretical approaches to European identity in sociology, social-psychology and EU public opinion research in a comprehensive model for explaining individual identification with Europe. The empirical analysis employs a multilevel framework to systematically assess the influence of individual characteristics and the political, economic, and social context on citizens' feelings of identity. The long analysis period spanning from 1992 to the present allows inferences to be drawn about the long-term developments in the sources of European identification as well as the immediate impact of EU enlargement and the crisis on the determinants of European identification.

This book argues that citizenship is an inadequate solution to the problem of statelessness based on a critical investigation of the lived experiences of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in western Europe. It examines how statelessness affects identity formations, homelessness, belonging, non-belonging, otherness, voices, status, (non)recognition, (dis)respect, (in)visibility and presence in the uneven world of nation-states. It also demonstrates that the undoing of non-sovereign identities' subjection to structural subalternization and everyday inferiorization requires rights in excess of the mere acquisition of juridical citizenship, which tends to assume national sameness. That assumption in turn involves sovereign practices of denial and assimilation of ethnic alterity. The book therefore highlights the necessity of de-ethnicizing and decolonizing unitary nation-states that are based on the politico-cultural supremacy of a single, "core" ethnicity as the sovereign legislator of the rules and regimes of national belonging and un-belonging. It therefore broaches questions of "majority" and "minority," mobility, nationalism, home-making, equality, difference and universalism in the context of the nation-state and illustrates how stateless peoples such as Kurds and Palestinians endure and challenge their subordinate position in a hierarchical (geo-)political order and how in so doing remain bound by political otherness.

Party and Democracy questions why political parties today are held in such low estimation in advanced democracies. The first part of the volume reviews theoretical motivations behind the growing disdain for the political party. In surveying the parties' lengthy attempt to gain legitimacy, particular attention is devoted to the cultural and political conditions which led to their emergence on the ground' and then to their political and theoretical acceptance as the sole master in the chain of delegation. The second part traces the evolution of the party's organization and public confidence against the backdrop of the transition from industrial to post-industrial societies. The book suggests that, in the post-war period, parties shifted from a golden age of organizational development and positive reception by public opinion towards a more difficult relationship with society as it moved into post industrialism. Parties were unable to master societal change and thus moved towards the state to recover resources they were no longer able to extract from their constituencies. Parties have become richer and more powerful thanks to their interpenetration into the state, but they have paid' for their pervasive presence in society and the state with a declining legitimacy. Even if some changes have been introduced recently in party organizations to counteract their decline, they seem to have become ineffective; even worse, they have dampened democratic standing inside and outside parties, favouring plebiscitary tendencies. The party today is caught in a dramatic contradiction. It has become a sort of Leviathan with clay feet: very powerful thanks to the resources it gets from the state and to its control of the societal and state spheres, but very weak in terms of legitimacy and confidence in the eyes of the mass public. However, it is argued that there is still no alternative to the party. Democracy is still inextricably linked to the party system.

Populist rule is bad for democracy, yet in country after country, populists are being voted into office. Populism and Patronage shows that the populists such as Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi win elections when the institutionalized ties between non-populist parties and voters decay. Yet, the explanations for this decay differ across different types of party system. Populism and Patronage focuses on the particular vulnerability of patronage-based party systems to populism. Patronage-based systems are ones in which parties depend on the distribution of patronage through a network of brokers to mobilize voters. Drawing on principal agent theory and social network theory, this book argues that an increase in broker autonomy weakens the ties between patronage parties and voters, making latter available for direct mobilization by populists. Decentralization is thus a major factor behind populist success in patronage democracies. The volume argues that populists exploit the breakdown in national patronage networks by connecting directly with the people through the media and mass rallies, avoiding or minimizing the use of deeply-institutionalized party structures.This book not only reinterprets the recurrent appeal of populism in India, but also offers a more general theory of populist electoral support that is tested using qualitative and quantitative data on cases from across Asia and around the world, including Indonesia, Japan, Venezuela, and Peru.

This edited volume examines the form and operation of intergovernmental relations in divided societies. Using eight country case studies, it explores the interplay between politicised ethno-cultural diversity and intergovernmental relations (IGR) in countries where the distinctive identity of at least one subnational unit is acknowledged in a form of territorial autonomy. The book examines whether and how the distinctive identity of particular subnational units and the attending competing constitutional visions shape the dynamics of IGR. The goal here is not simply to determine whether intergovernmental interactions in such societies are less cordial and more conflictual than in other societies. Such interaction in any society could be strained as a result of disagreement over specific policy objectives. The question is whether the distinctive identity of particular subnational units and the attending competing constitutional visions themselves have been a primary source of intergovernmental tension. The book also examines the impact of identity politics on institutions and instruments of IGR, determining whether the ethno-cultural divide and the tension it creates have the tendency to affect the type of institutions and instruments employed in IGR. It is also about the relevance and effectiveness of institutions and instruments of IGR in acknowledging and accommodating the distinctive identities and specific demands of subnational units, thereby contributing to the peaceful management of divided societies.

An island's boundary - where it meets the sea - is self-evident and non-negotiable. But a land boundary is contestable: it can be changed and shifted to suit, reflecting power politics, the outcome of victor and vanquished in warfare, or negotiated compromise. There are today only ten inhabited islands where both these dynamics pan out. This text is the first to focus on the intriguing political economy of these rare, shared island spaces. It examines the fascination, and obsession, with islands as unitary geographies and polities; and explores the tensions in contemporary 'divided islands' - as in the case of formal and informal, legal and illegal 'border crossings' and practices - from both 'island studies' and 'international relations' perspectives.

The concentrations camps that existed in the colonised world at the turn of the 20th Century are a vivid reminder of the atrocities committed by imperial powers on indigenous populations. This study explores British, American and Spanish camp cultures, analysing debates over their legitimacy and current discussions on retributive justice.

There is a mounting body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies that add to this growing trend towards anti-politics by either removing or displacing the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation. This book examines the relationship between these two trends as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. This volume explores these questions from a variety of different perspectives and uses a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state as well as from other regional, global, and multi-level arenas. In this context, this volume examines the potential and limits of depoliticization as a concept and its position and contribution in the nexus between the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics.

This book analyzes how COVID-19 impacted politics and how politics shaped the response to the pandemic in Latin America, the region which has become the epicenter of the global health crisis started in China. The volume brings together studies carried out in eight countries of the region - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Uruguay - and show how the impacts and outcomes varied a lot across the region depending on the political processes under way in each country in the years preceding the pandemic and on the political responses adopted by each government to deal with the health crisis. The volume is divided into four parts, each one dedicated to a specific dimension of the relation between politics and COVID-19 in Latin America. The first part is dedicated to denialism, and presents three case studies of governments that denied the importance of the health crisis: Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua. The second part takes Uruguay and Colombia as two opposite examples of successful and failed state action against COVID-19. The third part analyzes how social movements faced the pandemic in Brazil and Chile. Finally, the fourth part analyzes how public opinion reacted to political responses to COVID-19 in four countries: Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. COVID-19's Political Challenges in Latin America will be a valuable resource for political scientists, sociologists and other social scientists interested in understanding how the pandemic affected politics and how politics affected the fight against the biggest health crisis faced by humanity in the last hundred years.

How successful was the EU's Lisbon Strategy? This volume provides the first comprehensive assessment of the Strategy and reflects on its key developments during its 10-year cycle. The volume contains both theoretical and empirical contributions by some of the leading scholars of EU studies across the social sciences.

This book analyses the reasons for women's participation in the various Lebanese and Palestinian militias involved in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Whilst most existing accounts of the Civil War in Lebanon either overlook the roles and experiences of women entirely or focus on women as victims or peacemakers only, 'Women and the Lebanese Civil War' highlights that women were involved as militants (and often also as fighters) in all of the militias partaking in the war. Analysing individual motivations, organisational characteristics, security-related aspects and societal factors, the book explains why women were included as fighters in some of the militias but not in others. Based on extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, the book is the first comprehensive study of female perpetrators and supporters of political violence during the Lebanese Civil War. Beyond the case of Lebanon, it questions widespread assumptions about the roles of women at times of violent conflict and war.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Territorial Autonomies affords a comprehensive, pioneering and interdisciplinary survey of this emerging field. Moving beyond traditionally narrower engagements with the subject, it combines approaches to comparative law and comparative politics to provide an authoritative guide to the principal theoretical and empirical topics in the area. Bringing together a team of cutting-edge scholars from different disciplines and continents, the volume illuminates the latest thinking and scholarship on comparative territorial autonomies. This Handbook is an authoritative, essential reference text for students, academics and researchers in its field. It will also be of key interest to those in the fields of comparative politics, comparative law, local/regional government, federalism, decentralisation and nationalism, as well as practitioners in think tanks, NGOs and international governmental organisations.

This book offers a systematic and far-reaching account of party system institutionalization in Western Europe. Drawing upon a wide array of data and through a comparison of 20 countries from the end of WWII to 2019 across three arenas of party competition (electoral, parliamentary, and governmental ones), the empirical analysis shows that, over the past decade, the level of institutionalization in the Western European party systems has dramatically declined compared with previous decades. Electoral, parliamentary, and - in some cases - governmental instability and unpredictability have reached record-high levels. Although the impact of the 2008 Great Recession has certainly worked as a catalyst, this process of de-institutionalization has been mainly driven by long-term factors, such as cleavage decline and length of democratic experience. Moreover, its consequences are relevant not only for the relationship between parties and voters, but also for the very quality of democracy, as party system deinstitutionalization causes a decline in the citizens' satisfaction of the way democracy works and even an erosion of the 'objective' democratic standards. In a nutshell, Western Europe, once seen as the land of stability and the cradle of democracy, may have become the land of party system deinstitutionalization and incipient democratic backsliding.

This book explores the phenomenon of total power in East Asia, with particular attention to China, Korea, and Japan. It shows how total power enables an examination of regional experience as a part of global context in order to demarcate the connections with other countries and regions that have similar political cultures, such as those in Central Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa. Moreover, it elucidates that the phenomenon of total power unpacks the interrelations not only between different countries, but also between political, economic, religious, or cultural aspects of the region as a whole, and of each country in particular. This book takes East Asia as a classic example of where total power has achieved the highest forms of development during traditional periods in the form of absolute economic dependence of society on the state, ideologically enshrined by a system of moral obligations toward supreme power that allowed for the establishment of a monopoly on forced labour, and the appropriation and distribution of social products. The author emphasizes the importance of exploring the tradition of total power with reference to the ongoing global crisis of European democracy. In doing so, the book shows that democratization has not brought qualitative changes to the political culture of East Asia. An essential interdisciplinary read for scholars studying political science, particularly East-West relations, this book situates East Asian political culture within a global context.