Nigeria's democratisation efforts since attaining political independence from Britain have been tumultuous and have spanned over three successive republics. A persistent bug decimating Nigeria's democracy and repeatedly leading to military coups has been brazen electoral violence perpetrated by the nation's political elite. Nigeria's 2019 Democratic Experience analyses and explains what went wrong in Nigeria's experiment with democracy. Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation and the world's seventh most populous nation, also contributes 70% of West Africa's population. She is sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producer and has remained Africa's largest economy by GDP since 2014. The country has hundreds of diverse ethnic nationalities and languages grouped into 36 states (or federating units) and an independent federal capital territory. Though recognized as Africa's largest democracy, her democratisation process since the 1960s has remained tumultuous with massive electoral violence and political intolerance. This repeatedly compelled the military to intervene in the nation's political history in the years 1966, 1983 and 1985. It is these developments that provided the motivation for this volume to capture for posterity the conduct of the 2019 General Elections in Nigeria.

In 1958, Suzanne and Ezra Vogel embedded themselves in a Tokyo suburban community, interviewing six middle-class families regularly for a year. Their research led to Japan's New Middle Class, a classic work on the sociology of Japan. Now, Suzanne Hall Vogel's compelling sequel traces the evolution of Japanese society over the ensuing decades through the lives of three of these ordinary yet remarkable women and their daughters and granddaughters. Vogel contends that the role of the professional housewife constrained Japanese middle-class women in the postwar era-and yet it empowered them as well. Precisely because of fixed gender roles, with women focusing on the home and children while men focused on work, Japanese housewives had remarkable authority and autonomy within their designated realm. Wives and mothers now have more options than their mothers and grandmothers did, but they find themselves unprepared to cope with this new era of choice. These gripping biographies poignantly illustrate the strengths and the vulnerabilities of professional housewives and of families facing social change and economic uncertainty in contemporary Japan.

Offering an alternative discourse on modernization and development viewed specifically from the East Asia perspective, this book focuses its analysis on the Korean experience of modernization and development. It considers the broad range of societal transformations which have occurred over the past half century, utilizing the vernacular language of Korea extracted from everyday life to interpret, characterize, globalize and pedagogically broaden the understanding and the human meaning behind these complex social changes.

This book examines the cultural heritage of Inner Eurasia (Central Asia) through the arts, from prehistoric times to the ancient and medieval golden ages. The manuscript features extensive analysis of multiple Inner Eurasian cultural groups, their artistic traditions, and the development thereof throughout the region's history.

This is the first book-length study to read women of the Beat Generation as feminist writers. The book focuses on one author from each of the three generations that comprise the groups of female writers associated with the Beats – Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Anne Waldman – as well as on experimental and multimedia artists, such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, who have not been read through the prism of Beat feminism before. This book argues that these writers’ feminism evolved over time but persistently focussed on intertextuality, transformation, revisionism, gender, interventionist poetics and activism. It demonstrates how these Beat feminisms counteract the ways in which women have been undermined, possessed or silenced.

This volume proposes an alternative development paradigm to the existing capitalist extant one, and studies how it is distinctly different from the older system. Rooted in the principles of solidarity between humans, as well as between humans and nature, this alternative paradigm replaces the methodological individualism of capitalism by ‘reciprocal altruism’, a new logic of capital, to give pace and direction to the development process. The essays in this volume highlight instances of various forms of solidarity that have emerged in the contemporary world—such as resistance movements of informal workers, the formation of an autonomous cooperative of self-employed waste pickers in India, called SWaCH, and Brazil and Cuba’s experiments with Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE)—to achieve long sustaining cohesive development. They also provide recommendations as to how the State can mold its development process to the benefit of marginalized communities, especially in India and Bangladesh. Featuring insights from leading experts in the field, Theorizing Cohesive Development will be an indispensable read for students and researchers of development studies, economics, political economy, political science and sociology, minority studies and Asian studies.

Gender Revolution carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations and draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response. The authors look to large scale phenomena in this contemporary study and address the ways electoral politics and the #MeToo movement are reshaping everyday life. This gender revolution has led to a culture in which women, and increasing numbers of men, refuse to accept traditional gender norms and gender inequalities. People of all genders no longer tolerate abuses of power in politics or in their interpersonal relationships, and in ways both large and small, and despite vigorous resistance, women are seizing power and refusing to back down. The authors note on the one hand that people of all genders in support of these transformations are voting for progressive candidates, engaging on social media, and making their interpersonal relationships more equal. On the other, they document considerable backlash and contestation, as some people are resisting these changes and creating adversarial gender divisions. Probing across these issues, the book develops an analysis of gendered social and cultural change that reveals how movement ideas diffuse into broader culture. Gender Revolution presents a vibrant and essential study for a moment marked by significant changes to attitudes, beliefs, and views surrounding gender and gender relations, and will appeal to readers interested in the scholarly study of gender, society, politics, and culture.

Gender Revolution carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations and draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response. The authors look to large scale phenomena in this contemporary study and address the ways electoral politics and the #MeToo movement are reshaping everyday life. This gender revolution has led to a culture in which women, and increasing numbers of men, refuse to accept traditional gender norms and gender inequalities. People of all genders no longer tolerate abuses of power in politics or in their interpersonal relationships, and in ways both large and small, and despite vigorous resistance, women are seizing power and refusing to back down. The authors note on the one hand that people of all genders in support of these transformations are voting for progressive candidates, engaging on social media, and making their interpersonal relationships more equal. On the other, they document considerable backlash and contestation, as some people are resisting these changes and creating adversarial gender divisions. Probing across these issues, the book develops an analysis of gendered social and cultural change that reveals how movement ideas diffuse into broader culture. Gender Revolution presents a vibrant and essential study for a moment marked by significant changes to attitudes, beliefs, and views surrounding gender and gender relations, and will appeal to readers interested in the scholarly study of gender, society, politics, and culture.

This book analyzes the influence of memory on social conflict as well as the role of ethnicity in state formation and governance in Nigeria. It examines the nexus between the Nigerian civil war and the conflict in the oil rich Niger Delta against the background of memory and ethnicization of the state. Ultimately, both social conflicts, though separated by decades, profit from shared memories in a largely ethnicized state structure. Nigeria emerges as a centrifugal state characterized by bias in resource distribution and concentration of power in the center. These forces create the perception of marginalization and sponsor enduring memory of a biased state not helped by failure of the state to ensure closure of the civil war. The book argues that the non-systematic closure of the civil war has generated memory lapse which has given rise to social conflicts and dissension in the socio-geographical region of the erstwhile Biafra republic. These conflicts in the contemporary history of Nigeria include the persistent Niger Delta oil conflict and recurrent struggle for the realization of a sovereign state of Biafra. In effect, these conflicts are products of structural bias and distributional injustice; and both can be related to the social memory lag of the civil war and weak Nigerian state. The book traces how memory is produced and disseminated within social groups in Southeastern Nigeria, which is the theater of both the civil war and youth-driven oil conflict in the Niger Delta. While these conflicts have without doubt benefitted from memory lapse of the past, they have equally drawn momentum from ethnicity which has significantly and negatively affected the role of the state.

Analyzing the role of creative industries, this book explores regional development within the economic cycle. Using the Greek region of Epirus as an in-depth case study, the authors identify the main opportunities for the region's development as well as the necessary conditions and constraints to achieve future economic growth. The last decade has seen creative industries receive growing attention from researchers, leading to an increasing body of analysis, studies and statistics. Despite this, they remain to be poorly understood and thus underestimated by many societies and policy makers, including those in the Greek economy. Creative Industries in Greece provides a close study of this sector and disseminates its best practices to examine its strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, the American invasion of Iraq, and the Arab uprisings of 2010-11, a new Middle East has emerged. The Syrian civil war has displaced half the country's population, and ISIS and other jihadi groups thrive in the political vacuum there and in Iraq, setting a new standard for political violence. Meanwhile, regimes in Egypt and Bahrain have become even more repressive after the uprisings there, and Libya and Yemen have virtually ceased to exist as states. The hallmarks of this new Middle East are rebellion and repression, proxy wars, sectarian strife, the rise of the Islamic State, and intraregional polarization. International and regional actors stoke the flames, with the United States and Russia seeking to reposition themselves in the region and Saudi Arabia and Iran vying for supremacy. In the long term, perils including climate change, food and water insecurity, and population growth, along with bad governance and stagnant economies, will determine the destiny of the region. In The New Middle East: What Everyone Needs to Know (R), renowned Middle East scholar James L. Gelvin explains all these developments and more in a concise question-and-answer format. Outlining the social, political, and economic contours of the New Middle East, he illuminates the current crisis in the region and explores how the region will continue to change in the decades to come.

This volume explores the impact of good governance upon social sectors' development in India and other selected economies of the world. Economic development in the true sense depends on the development of different social sectors like education, healthcare, gender equality, etc., as well as economic factors. Good governance makes the sectors perform well on the one hand, and helps in economic growth and development on the other. Conversely, bad or weak governance in the form of corruption and low effectiveness of the governments, may lead to poor performance of the sectors, and low growth and backwardness of the economies. This book explores the associations between different social sectors' performances with quality of governance, and growth and development of different economies and groups in detail and establishes theoretical and empirical examinations for the individual economies and groups from the different corners of the globe with the help of new theories and latest data. This book will be useful for students and researchers in the fields of Economics, Sociology, Political Studies, Public Finance, International Relations, Social Sciences as well as policy makers and think tanks.

The Routledge Handbook of Far‐Right Extremism in Europe is a timely and important study of the far and extreme right-wing phenomenon across a broad spectrum of European countries, and in relation to a selected list of core areas and topics such as anti‐gender, identitarian politics, hooliganism, and ideology. The handbook deals with the rise and the developments of the far‐right movements, parties, and organisations across diverse countries in Europe. Crucially it discusses the main topics and features issues pertaining to the far‐right ideology and positioning, and considers how central and less central actors of the far‐right milieus have fared within the given context. Comprising a wide range of subject expertise, the contributors focus on far-right organisations on the margins of the electoral sphere, as well as street‐level movements, and the relationship between them and electoral politics. The handbook spans nearly twenty European country‐cases, grouped according to geographical/regional area. It includes case studies where the far right has gained increased momentum, as well as countries where it has been much less successful in mobilising public opinion and electorate. Another important feature is the inclusion of street‐level mobilisations, such as football firms, thereby expanding and updating existing research, which is primarily focused on political parties and organisations. Multidisciplinary and comprehensive, this handbook will be of great interest to scholars and students of Criminology, Political Science, Extremism Studies, European Studies, Media and Communication, and Sociology.

Public Administration has experienced a fundamental rethinking of its basic objectives, concepts and theories during the 21st century. This book examines the transformations happening in global societies, the economy and in politics, to trace the trajectory of public administration as an academic discipline as well as being a focus of social science research. It presents a reassessment of governance in heterogenous developing countries that goes beyond the traditional Weberian bureaucratic model, toward new models of organization and management, informed by their legal, constitutional, economic and political needs, aspirations and ground realities. This is especially important in relation to the marginalized sections of society that primarily rely on citizen entitlements through public service delivery systems. The author looks at widening the range and scope of public administrative agencies with the gradual cooperation of multiple actors, such as the civil society, people at large and even the private sector, in a partnering role. The author revisits the discipline to tackle intellectual dilemmas that current governance theories and practices are confronting, or will have to confront in future administrative situations. In the second edition, the volume brings into focus lessons on policy and governance learnt from the Global South in building administrative capacities in post-Covid-19 times. An essential read on the mandates and challenges for the state regarding the rising South, this book will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of politics, especially governance and public policy, sociology and development studies. It will also be of interest to bureaucrats, NGOs and government officials.

Industry 4.0 explores the emergence of disruptive digital technologies such as robotics, blockchain, nanotechnology and 3D printing and their impact on human lives and jobs in globalized 21st century societies. Incorporating a cutting edge area studies perspective, it considers the challenges and long term implications of the rise of 'Tech Giants' such as Alibaba, Google and Baidu through the lens of past industrial revolutions, looking back at the transformative technologies and industrial developments - the steam engine, electrification, telegraph, mass production, and the rise of digital technology - upon which the modern world was built. It investigates the mirror profiles of the world's largest tech companies in the US and China (Baidu and Google, Alibaba and Amazon, Wechat and Facebook) and provides a unique comparison of Tech Giants with 19th century colonial empires and monopolistic trading companies in terms of political-economic dominance. A key tool for instructors and students focused on courses on Technological History, Digital Technology and Cultures, New Media, Digital Ethics and China studies, this book provides practical guidance on how readers can equip themselves to face key workplace and societal challenges in a virtually interconnected world shaped by Tech Giant monopoly.

Recent scholarship has framed early Confucians as just war theorists with relatively permissive criteria for the just use of violence. Lead Them with Virtue: A Confucian Alternative to War makes the case that such interpretations conflict with what Mencius and Xunzi were trying to do. Kurtis Hagen argues that they both strove to prevent war by contrasting the situations of their day with idealized versions of the semi-mythic activities of sage-kings, which represent appropriate use of the military. These stories imply support for the offensive use of the military only when actual war-with its characteristic horrors-would not ensue. Following this logic, military interventions are just only in circumstances that do not actually occur. Confucians advocate, instead, a long-term strategy of ameliorating unjust circumstances by leveraging the credibility and influence that stems from consistently practicing genuinely benevolent governance. Passages that imply pacifistic readings of these texts are routinely dismissed by scholars as too naive to be taken seriously. Hagen argues that the relatively pacifistic position implied by these passages is not in fact naive, but is rather reasonable, and indeed should be supported, at least by contemporary Confucians.

In much social scientific literature, Polish civil society has been portrayed as weak and passive. This volume offers a much-needed corrective, challenging this characterization on both theoretical and empirical grounds and suggesting new ways of conceptualizing civil society to better account for events on the ground as well as global trends such as neoliberalism, migration, and the renewal of nationalist ideologies. Focusing on forms of collective action that researchers have tended to overlook, the studies gathered here show how public discourse legitimizes certain claims and political actions as "true" civil society, while others are too often dismissed. Taken together, they critique a model of civil society that is 'made from above'.

Presents a major case study of how agriculture and biodiversity conservation can work in harmony towards more sustainable outcomes for both the environment and local communities. Shows how Cuba has provided a unique testbed for such approaches through its specific political status and focus on traditional agricultural methods. Provides the essential background for understanding future options for agriculture and conservation in Cuba, as it emerges from economic and political isolation.

As the first volume of a two-volume set that reexamines nouns and verbs in Chinese, this book proposes the verbs-as-nouns theory, corroborated by discussions of the nature and relationship between nouns and verbs in Chinese. Seeking to break free from the shackles of Western linguistic paradigms largely based on Indo-European languages and to a great extent inappropriate for Chinese, this two-volume study revisits the nature of nouns and verbs and relevant linguistic categories in Chinese to unravel the different relationships between nouns and verbs in Chinese, English, and other languages. It argues that Chinese nouns and verbs are related inclusively rather than in the oppositional pattern found in Indo-European languages, with verbs included in nouns as a subcategory. Preliminary to the core discussion on the verbs-as-nouns framework, the author critically engages with the issues of word classes and nominalization, as well as problems with the analysis of Chinese grammar due to the noun-verb distinction. Through linguistic comparisons, following chapters look into noticeable differences between Chinese and English, the referential and predicative natures of nouns and verbs, the asymmetry of the two, and the referentiality of predicates in Chinese. The volume will be a must-read for linguists and students studying Chinese linguistics, Chinese grammar, and contrastive linguistics.

Critical Thinking in Slovakia after Socialism interrogates the putative relationship between critical thought and society through an ethnographic study of civic discourse in post-1989 Slovakia. Critical thinking is the civic virtue of a liberal democracy. Citizens who think for themselves, cooperate, and can agree to disagree are the hallmark of a self-governing society. People from undemocratic societies, however, are often believed to lack this virtue, because authoritarian regimes smother critical discourse through fear and dull critical thought through the control of information and propaganda. After the end of Communist rule in 1989, Westernagents of democratization and educational development chided the residents of the former Czechoslovakia for this deficiency, claiming that the Slovaks' inability to think critically was the reason the nation struggled to integrate with Western Europe. Critical Thinking in Slovakia after Socialism examines this putative relationship between critical thought and society through an ethnographic study of post-1989 Slovakia. Drawing on original fieldwork and anthropological theories of language and culture, Jonathan Larson uncovers patterns of social analysis and criticism in Slovak political discourse. He exposes ways in which these discursive practices have been misinterpreted and explains their underlying dynamics in Slovak society. This important volume, bringing together scholarship on East Central Europe, liberalism, education, and the public sphere, gives students of modern history, politics,and culture a fresh perspective on a skill essential to civil society. Jonathan L. Larson is visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa.

Representative democracy remains the best available form of government - and the one preferred by most EU citizens, but satisfaction with how it plays out varies greatly across the continent. Among the perceived weaknesses are high levels of political corruption, low resilience to disinformation, and out-of-touch governing elites. Yet there is some hope that direct channels for citizens to express their concerns and preferences, fact-based deliberation in representative bodies and robust mechanisms to hold governments to account can help save European democracy from the onslaught of populism. This volume draws together proposals into a framework reflecting the four cumulative criteria used by modern political theorists to assess the health of a democracy: inclusion, choice, deliberation and impact. Its expert contributors offer pragmatic ideas to strengthen representative democracy at both the national and EU level. This is the third and final book produced in the framework of the Towards a Citizens' Union project co-funded by the EU's Erasmus+ Programme. It is the product of collaboration with 20 renowned think tanks from the European Policy Institutes Network (EPIN).

Originally published in 1936 and authored by an ardent Scottish Nationalist and convert to Roman Catholicism, this concise book begins in the Gaelic era and charts the turbulent history of Catholicism in Scotland from then to the early 20th Century through the Norman Conquest of England and the coming of Saint Margaret. The contribution of the unbroken line of Stuart Kings to the national consciousness is emphasized and an outspoken account of the origins of John Knox's Presbyterian movement given. The book also discusses the persecution of Catholic missionaries in the 17th and 18th centuries.

A-state-of-the-art and comprehensive survey covering all aspects of politics in Western Europe. The volume brings together the very best scholars in the field from the UK, continental Europe and North America.

This multi-genre collection of chapters presents the dramatic transformation of English Studies in India since the early 1990s. It showcases the shift from the study of mainly British literature and language to a more versatile terrain of multilingualism, culture, performance, theory, and the literary Global South. Tracing this transition, the volume discusses themes like Indian literary history, postcolonial theory, post-pandemic challenges to literary studies, the state of Indian English drama, vernacular literature in English Studies and pedagogy, translations of feminist writers from South Asia, caste, and othering in literature, among other key themes. The volume, with contributions from eminent English Studies scholars, not only reflects the altered terrain of English Language and Literature in India but also invites readers to think about the transformative potential of the present juncture for both literary imagination and literary studies. This timely book, in honour of Professor GJV Prasad, will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English Studies, cultural studies, literature, comparative literature, translation studies, postcolonial studies, and critical theory.

With references to the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, this book offers a critical investigation into such epic issues as the end of art and the inherent laws of literature’s evolution, while conflating the two into one major argumentation. The book proceeds from Hegel's claim of "the end of art" to tackle the universal yet essential problem of literature: its legitimacy in a sociological sense. It invests Bourdieu’s sociological terms -- power, capital, habitus, field, etc. into the study of literature and art while taking on other theoretical enquiries, particularly the Marxist exploration into ideology, as well as aspects of economics and communication studies. This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of the sociology of literature, cultural studies, and those with specific interests in Chinese literature, literary and art theory.