This study explores modern Scotland and examines how Scottish politics, culture and identities have interacted within the national and international contexts in the last thirty years. It considers which voices and opinions have proven influential and defining and charts the boundaries of public conversation to and beyond the independence referendum

It is rare for a scholar to revisit the scene of earlier research with a view to evaluating how that research has stood up over time. Here David E Apter does that and more. In a lengthy new introductory chapter to this classic study of bureaucratic nationalism, he reviews the efficacy of the concepts in his original study of Uganda of almost a century ago, including some, such as consociationalism', which have entered into the mainstream of comparative politics.

A comprehensive analysis of the rise of Boko Haram from a small religious cult to a major terrorist group, placing them within the context of Nigerian politics and the international War on Terror. In 2009, Nigerian security forces stormed a religious cult by the name of Boko Haram, killing its leader and thousands of followers. Six years later, Boko Haram is an enemy to reckon with, boasting 15,000 members and taking credit for 20,000 deaths. This book looks at the successful rise of this terrorist group, probing the religious and political environment that enabled a relatively small cult to threaten a nation. The study draws on the author's fieldwork in Nigeria, where she had access to officials, activists, psychologists, and military personnel. Written in a clear and accessible manner, it offers a micro-to-macro investigation of the Boko Haram as a phenomenon. It also provides readers with an understanding of the regional dynamics that obstructed political and military cooperation among neighboring countries, enabling Boko Haram's success. This book traces the group's religious origins in the early 2000s and documents its violent political claims in Nigeria and across the border in Northern Cameroon, Niger, and Chad. Finally, it examines the impact of the international War on Terror and presents a comparative study of other contemporary terrorism movements and their networks. Takes a comprehensive approach to the political, historical, social, economic, and international dynamics that enabled the rise and transformation of Boko Haram Draws on field work in Nigeria, including interviews with military representatives, politicians, activists, psychologists, security operatives, and victims of the Boko Haram war Offers a comprehensive analysis of contemporary Nigeria at a crucial point in its history Makes an original contribution to the study of violent non-state actors by examining similarities and differences between Boko Haram and other like-minded terrorist movements

Understanding Political Islam retraces the human and intellectual development that led Francois Burgat to a very firm conviction: that the roots of the tensions that afflict the Western world's relationship with the Muslim world are political rather than ideological. In his compelling account of the interactions between personal life-history and professional research trajectories, Burgat examines how the rise of political Islam has been expressed: first in the Arab world, then in its interactions with European and Western societies. An essential continuation of his work on Islamism, Burgat's unique field research and 'political trespassing' marks an overdue challenge to the academic mainstream. -- .

Examines the ideas and organization of new Islamic, Hindu and other movements. Considers the creation of new traditions and ethnicities in these movements as well as the key themes of liberation central to many of them, such as purity and pollution. Bhatt also looks at the relationship between right wing and progressive social movements.

This book links contemporary thinking on global and regional governance to the recent experience of the Americas. It offers fresh insights into understanding the processes of order and change in the region, and in the broader international system. A particular concern is to reveal the changing contours of regional governance, whether in terms of actors, issue areas and relations with global structures.

What is the future of democracy? Is it steadily improving in scope, depth, and accountability? Is it being marginalized by economic forces? Or has it already progressed too far? This book argues that none of these assessments is right, and instead that democracy is becoming 'hyper.' An increasingly well-educated citizenry and freer flow of information contribute to the intensification of democracy, but at the same time begin to impede decision-making by contesting more and more of the cognitive preconditions that decision-making rests upon. Under hyperdemocracy, democracy begins to undermine itself. This book applies the idea of 'reflexive modernization' to democratic theory, setting out a new perspective on the challenges democracy faces.

The study of violent extremism in the wake of ISIS has largely been devoted to the process of radicalization and strategies to counter and de-radicalize extremists. However, little has been written on the subject of Diversion - early, upstream interventions aimed at deflecting individuals from a pathway of radicalization. This volume addresses this gap in scholarship by analysing the Diversion strategies being deployed worldwide, aimed at diverting or deflecting individuals, and communities, from the path of radicalization. These include Diversion methods used among social workers, teachers, counselors and the police both in relation to individuals and communities. Case studies range across the Global North and South, presented by both academic and practitioner contributors, and address different branches of radicalization, the variety of strategies used as Diversion, and the results of these interventions.

The movies that document American history during the interwar years still hold relevance today. While we may be put off by the corny sentimentality popular at the time, we feel attracted, despite our 1990s veneer of sophistication, to healthy portions of unadulterated American spirit. Americans resist encumbering themselves with political labels, Kelley asserts, content to remain simultaneously fragmented between elitism and populism, isolationism and interventionism even today, yet remain somehow united by a fundamental essence they can't quite define but readily recognize as the American can-do attitude. Using the unique vantage point of eight classic American movies--Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Magnificent Ambersons, Gabriel Over the White House, Citizen Kane, Casablanca All Quiet on the Western Front, Daily Bread, and The Fountainhead--Kelley and her colleagues explore the political ideologies thrumming through the American psyche. The stock market crash and ensuing depression proved a defining experience. For the first time, the national psyche was sent careening toward alien political ideologies; the seductiveness of communism and fascism took hold in the wreckage wrought by the Depression. American foreign policy likewise fluctuated from the isolationist stance adopted after fighting the "war to end all wars" to an interventionist response to the intensifying pressure to vanquish communist and fascist bullies. Students, scholars, and the general public will find intriguing insights on a period of national catastrophe and triumph.

While the idea of total revolution seems anachronistic today, there is increasing consensus about the importance of new forms of political, ethical, and aesthetic resistance. In the past, resistance was often motivated as a form of protest against specific institutions. Increasingly, dissent has become integrated into the fabric of modern life. This volume addresses new forms of resistance at a level that combines a rootedness in the philosophical tradition and a sensitivity to rethinking the possibility of emancipation in today's age. The work focuses on contemporary social and political philosophy from a perspective informed by critical theory. The text specifically addresses three challenges. (1) Critical theorists need to investigate in which ways resistance, conformism, and oppression oppose and constitute each other. (2) The relationship between the theory and the practice of resistance needs to be posed anew, given recent protest movements and media of protest. (3) It needs to be shown in which ways different areas of society such as the arts, religion and social media establish divergent practices of resistance. The chapters are written by scholars from Asia, Europe and North America. These experts in resistance discourse focus on practices of dissent ranging from traditional forms of civil disobedience, to more recent practices such as guerrilla protest, art, and resistance in digital networks, including social media. What unites them is a shared concern for the dimensions of political acts of resistance in an age that is characterized by a tendency to integrate and thereby neutralize those very acts.

Every American president, from Washington to Biden: Their lives, policies, foibles, and legacies, assessed with clear-eyed authority and wit.

Authors of the acclaimed Killing books, the #1 bestselling narrative history series in the world, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard begin a new direction with Confronting the Presidents.

From Washington to Jefferson, Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Kennedy to Nixon, Reagan to Obama and Biden, the 45 United States presidents have left lasting impacts on our nation. Some of their legacies continue today, some are justly forgotten, and some have changed as America has changed. Whether famous, infamous, or obscure, all the presidents shaped our nation in unexpected ways.

The authors' extensive research has uncovered never before seen historical facts based on private correspondence and newly discovered documentation, such as George Washington's troubled relationship with his mother.

In Confronting the Presidents, O’Reilly and Dugard present 45 wonderfully entertaining and insightful portraits of each president, with no-spin commentary on their achievements―or lack thereof. Who best served America, and who undermined the founding ideals? Who were the first ladies, and what were their surprising roles in making history? Which presidents were the best, which the worst, and which didn’t have much impact? How do decisions made in one era, under the pressure of particular circumstances, still resonate today? And what do presidents like to eat, drink, and do when they aren’t working―or even sometimes when they are?

These and many more questions are answered in each fascinating chapter of Confronting the Presidents. Written with O’Reilly and Dugard’s signature style, authority, and eye for telling detail, Confronting the Presidents will delight all readers of history, politics, and current affairs, especially during the 2024 election season.

A series of culture wars are being fought in America today; Lerner, Nagai, and Rothman contend that one key battleground is the nation's high school texts. The authors argue that today's textbook controversies, as exemplified in the proposed National Standards for the Study of United States and World History, reflect changes in American public philosophy and the education profession. Conventional wisdom among students of the curriculum is that the major threat to freedom of the schools comes from the religious right. While this may have been true at one time, Lerner, Nagai, and Rothman assert that the major thrust today involves the imposition on schools of the ideology of particular groups that seek to use education as a mechanism for changing society. They document the growing influence of these groups, and their supporters among educators, through an extensive quantitative content analysis of leading high school history texts over the past 40 years and a historical analysis of how this outlook and the willingness to impose it became part of educators' conventional wisdom.

The authors document the growing influence of these groups, and their supporters among educators, in two ways. First, they present an extensive quantitative content analysis of leading high school history texts over the past 40 years, demonstrating in detail the feminist and multicultural perspectives that have come to dominate them. Second, they provide a historical analysis of how this outlook and the willingness to impose it became part of educators' conventional wisdom, tracing current policies back to the influence of the Progressive education movement led by John Dewey. This controversial book will be of exceptional interest to the general public as well as to researchers and students of education, public policy, and American intellectual history.

With essays by today’s leading leftist social critics, Identity Trumps Socialism presents a rigorous and persuasive primer on the problems generated by postmodern and neoliberal challenges to the legacy of emancipatory universality. In addition to the ways in which capitalism has used racialized and gendered forms of oppression to divide the working class, today’s activism must also understand how neoliberal capitalism uses identity politics to undermine socialism. Identity Trumps Socialism advances an emancipatory left universality that addresses the limits of diversity and makes the case for the centrality of class in the struggle against global capitalist hegemony.

This book's central claim is that although Niebuhr and Morgenthau were critics of what they referred to as utopian thought, the core of their criticism constituted an attack on the inability of utopianism to produce politically stimulating and democratically mobilizing utopias. In their minds utopianism was rhetorically barren and imaginatively sterile as a political narrative, the inability of which to move and dedicate its citizenry ultimately led to conformity and homogeneity. Arguing that the same sterility is present in current visions of democracy--traditional as well as radical--the book seeks to render Niebuhr and Morgenthau's attempt at re-opening the democratic imagination relevant for contemporary purposes as well.

A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year "Insightful...a deft, textured work of intellectual history." -Foreign Affairs "A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China." -Peter Frankopan, The Spectator For most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China's role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order-a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China's radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world. "A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership's strategy has evolved across eras...At its most interesting when probing Beijing's motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past." -Wall Street Journal "The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is...original." -The Economist

A wide range of transatlantic contributors addresses Berlin as a global focal point of the Cold War, and also assess the geopolitical peculiarity of the city and how citizens dealt with it in everyday life. They explore not just the implications of division, but also the continuing entanglements and mutual perceptions which resulted from Berlin’s unique status. An essential contribution to the study of Berlin in the 20th century, and the effects - global and local - of the Cold War on a city.

Originally published in 1994 The Politics of the Welfare State looks at how the privatization and marketization of education, health and welfare services in the past decade have produced a concept of welfare that is markedly different from that envisaged when the welfare state was initially created. Issues of class, gender and ethnicity are explored in chapters that are wide ranging but closely linked. The contributors are renowned academics and policy-makers, including feminist and welfare historians, highly regarded figures in social policy, influential critics of recent educational reforms and key analysts of current reform in the health sector.

Among the violent acts perpetrated by radical Islamist groups in Europe, the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris has been one of those that has challenged established categories of public debate the most. Through a multifaceted and detailed analysis of the public discourse around the Charlie Hebdo episode in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures offers an in-depth analysis of how political groups and religious organizations have reacted to the event, which claims they have made in the public sphere, and how they have justified such claims. Drawing on newspaper sources and discourse analysis, the authors navigate the complexities caused by political violence. They develop a threefold comparison that considers how the debate differs across countries; how it evolved over time; and how it varies when one looks at mainstream media compared to social movement arenas. Based on a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the volume pays particular attention to radical left, radical right and religious actors and to issues related to migration and integration, secularism and cultural diversity, security and civil rights. In particular, they focus on the way in which transformative events act as critical junctures within different public spheres. Starting from the nefarious attacks on January 2015, this highly relevant, theoretically compelling, and methodologically sophisticated study of public debates in Europe adds substantially to the growing body of research into critical junctures as discursive turning points and gives insights into into a number of debates ranging including citizenship and political violence.

This work examines the ways in which the French left adapted, through a series of transformations, to the exigencies of presidentialism and the myths which underpin it. The role played by language in the political practice of representative democracy is emphasised. The study looks at the relationship in French political culture between language and political practice, aiming to throw new light on the role of myth in moden politics and to open up new ground in political theory concerning party politics and leadership theory. John Gaffney's previous publications include research on the inner city riots, political leadership in Britain, French political culture and political discourse.

The studies collected in this volume cover a range of topics - market reforms, social justice, ecology, nationalism, new political parties and more - that are at the centre of the revolutionary changes under way in the former Soviet bloc. Their focus on ideology - both the previous orthodoxy of Marxism-Leninism and new political and social currents of thought emerging in tandem with the transformation of these societies - provides a crucial vantage for understanding the historic changes taking place in the USSR and East Europe. The breadth of this book's subject matter is complemented by the variety of methods and approaches that it features: historical interpretation, linguist analysis, statistical analysis and political sociology.

"Turkeys Enagement with Modernity" explores how the country has been shaped in the image of the Kemalist project of nationalist modernity and how it has transformed, if erratically, into a democratic society where tensions between religion, state and society continue unabated.

This major new reference surveys political parties of importance in the Americas since 1980, with the exclusion of the United States. This one-volume work is part of "The Greenwood Historical Encyclopedia of the World's Political Parties "and has been fashioned both to update Robert J. Alexander's prize-winning two-volume set published in 1982, "Political Parties of the AmericaS," and to serve as an analysis of political development and political parties in the Western Hemisphere during the last decade, an encyclopedia that can stand on its own. Like other works in this series, this volume edited by Charles D. Ameringer is intended for college, university, institutional, and public libraries.

Following a brief introduction giving some general historical background, chapters on 49 countries in North and South America and in the Caribbean are arranged alphabetically. These chapters provide some historical information, short bibliographies, and then describe political parties and current developments of note. Parties are arranged alphabetically by their English names or translations. Internal cross-references and a full index make the volume easily accessible to researchers in different fields. A chronology points to dates of importance.

Corruption, for most of us, almost immediately evokes images of the third world especially countries like Nigeria, Mexico and India. Whilst we may concede that corruption exists in developed countries it is generally thought to be under control. Despite such widely-held views there is very little hard evidence on the actual extent of corruption in any country. This book strives to look behind impressions in an attempt to determine what factors underlie the high profile of corruption in UDCs. For an adequate understanding of the phenomenon the global character of corruption is emphasized as well as the necessity of locating within a broader process of economic and social change.