Drawing on his unique perspective as the man responsible for the party's target seats and polling, the 133-page book gives Lord Ashcroft's view of the Conservatives' progress since their third defeat in 2005, the reasons for the party's failure to win an overall majority in 2010, and David Cameron's decision to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Minority Verdict follows Lord Ashcroft's influential analysis of the 2005 election campaign, Smell the Coffee: A wake-up call for the Conservative Party, which called for the party to modernise and re-engage with voters having come to be seen as untrustworthy and out of touch. Lord Ashcroft said: "There has been speculation as to my view of the Party's performance in the election, and of David Cameron's subsequent decision to forge a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. By putting an end to speculation, Minority Verdict sets the record straight. This is a record of what I really thought at the time, and what I think now. And if there is to be a public debate about this subject, Minority Verdict represents my first and only contribution to it. I do not intend to comment beyond what is contained within its pages."

For eight years, the Roberts Court has been at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. In this acclaimed account, the much-honored, expert Supreme Court reporter Marcia Coyle reveals the fault lines in the conservative-dominated court led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.
Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation's highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the US Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action.
Marcia Coyle's brilliant inside analysis of the High Court captures four landmark decisions--concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began and how they exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United case. Most dramatically, her reporting shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups have strategized to find cases and crafted them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority.
"The Roberts Court" offers a ringside seat to the struggle to lay down the law of the land.

Nepal is associated, in most people's imagination, with Everest (Sagarmatha to the Nepalese), vivid plants and picturesque villages and people. The truth, as always, is other. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, surrounded by big and powerful neighbours. It is immensely diverse, ranging from the great mountains to the north through the trans-Himalaya, a high barren plateau, through the deep valleys, which include the one which contains the ancient cities of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur, to the Terai which is an extension of Ganges plain. This atlas describes not only the complexity of the environment, but the people, the languages, the towns and industries, the agriculture, food and land management, the natural resources, the effects of tourism, sources of energy, transport and education policies. Originally published in 1991

These `interventions’ are spurred by what in South Africa today is a buzz-phrase: social cohesion. The term, or concept, is bandied about with little reflection by leaders or spokespeople in politics, business, labour, education, sport, entertainment and the media. Yet, who would not wish to live in a socially cohesive society? How, then, do we apply the ideal in the daily round when diversity of language, religion, culture, race and the economy too often supersedes our commitment to a common citizenry? How do we live together rather than live apart? Such questions provoke the purpose of these interventions. The interventions – essays, which are short, incisive, at times provocative – tackle issues that are pertinent to both living together and living apart: equality/inequality, public pronouncement, xenophobia, safety, chieftaincy in modernity, gender-based abuse, healing, the law, education, identity, sport, new `national’ projects, the role of the arts, South Africa in the world. In focusing on such issues, the essays point towards the making of a future, in which a critical citizenry is key to a healthy society. Contributors include leading academics and public figures in South Africa today: Christopher Ballantine, Ahmed Bawa, Michael Chapman, Jacob Dlamini, Jackie Dugard, Kira Erwin, Nicole Fritz, Michael Gardiner, Gerhard Maré, Monique Marks, Rajend Mesthrie, Bonita Meyersfeld, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, Njabulo S. Ndebele, Kathryn Pillay, Faye Reagon, Brenda Schmahmann, Himla Soodyall, David Spurrett and Thuto Thipe.

George Orwell's essay examines the power of language to shape political ideas. It is about the importance of writing concisely, clearly and precisely and the dangers to our ability to think when language, especially political language, is obscured by vague, cliched phrases and hackneyed metaphors. In it, he argues that when political discourse trades clarity and precision for stock phrases, the debasement of politics follows. First published in Horizon in 1946, Orwell's essay was soon recognised as an important text, circulated by newspaper editors to their journalists and reprinted in magazines and anthologies of contemporary writing. It continues to be relevant to our own age.

This book examines the failure of Islamic politics in becoming a hegemonic force in Indonesia and the far-reaching consequences for current practices of democracy and of Islam itself. In contrast to the thesis of compatibility between Islam and democracy following the dominant discourse of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and neoliberal democracy, this study situates Islamic politics in broader social settings by examining its nature and trajectories throughout Indonesia's modern political history. The book thus investigates how the practices of Islamic politics, or Islamism, have shaped and been transformed through political contestations and the formation of coalitions of multiple forces in constructing Indonesia's socio-political landscape. Using the concept of hegemony from poststructuralist discourse theory, the analytical framework applied in this book goes beyond liberal epistemologies of Islamism that prescribe the separation of religion from politics and treat Islamism as an object of intervention. Instead, the book is premised on the contention that Indonesia is a political construction, in which Islam has become one of the major discourses that have defined and transformed Indonesia's nation-state throughout history. In this view, it is argued that the nature and dynamics of Islamism are not driven primarily by different interpretations of religious doctrines, cultural norms or by the imperative of institutions. Rather, the struggles of different Islamist projects in their quest for hegemony are contingent on the outcomes of socio-political changes and contestations that involve multiple political forces, both within and beyond the Islamists, in specific historical conjunctures.

Doing theology requires dissension and tenacity. Dissension is required when scriptural texts, and the colonial bodies and traditions (read: Babylon) that capitalize upon those, inhibit or prohibit "rising to life." With "nerves" to dissent, the attentions of the first cluster of essays extend to scriptures and theologies, to borders and native peoples. The title for the first cluster - "talking back with nerves, against Babylon" - appeals to the spirit of feminist (to talk back against patriarchy) and RastafarI (to chant down Babylon) critics. The essays in the second cluster - titled "persevering with tenacity, through shitstems" - testify that perseverance is possible, and it requires tenacity. Tenacity is required so that the oppressive systems of Babylon do not have the final word. These two clusters are framed by two chapters that set the tone and push back at the usual business of doing theology, inviting engagement with the wisdom and nerves of artists and poets, and two closing chapters that open up the conversation for further dissension and tenacity. Doing theology with dissension and tenacity is unending.

This book is a systematic inquiry of conspiracy theories across Latin America. Conspiracy theories project not only an interpretive logic of reality that leads people to believe in sinister machinations, but also imply a theory of power that requires mobilizing and taking action. Through history, many have fallen for the allure of conspiratorial narratives, even the most unsubstantiated and bizarre. This book traces the main conspiracy theories developing in Latin America since late colonial times and into the present, and identifies the geopolitical, socioeconomic and cultural scenarios of their diffusion and mobilization. Students and scholars of Latin American history and politics, as well as comparatists, will find in this book penetrating analyses of major conspiratorial designs in this multi-state region of the Americas.