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.

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

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.

The new edition of Steve Bruce's Fundamentalism grapples with the combination of social strains and religious ideas that have produced an explosion of fundamentalist activity in the wake of 9/11.
In a direct and punchy style, the new edition of his book investigates what lies behind the actions of Al-Qaeda, suicide bombings and the 'war against terror', and also gets to grips with the continuing rise of the Christian Right in the USA. It offers new insights into the Protestant fundamentalism of the American political right-wing, looking at the influence issues such as abortion, gay rights and 'intelligent design' have had on US foreign policy and domestic politics.
Bruce's broad sociological analysis rejects the narrowly-conceived notion that fundamentalists are suffering from some kind of abnormal psychology, persuasively demonstrating fundamentalism's importance as a symptom of rapid social change.
Social science has generally focused on the social circumstances that produce extremist movements and regarded their religious ideologies as window-dressing. This study takes the religious elements of fundamentalism seriously.
Topics tackled in the book include:
* Why are some religions more likely than others to produce fundamentalism?
* Why do they differ in their willingness to use violence to pursue their goals?
* Does fundamentalism pose a serious challenge or sustainable alternative to the secular, liberal democracy of Western society?
This thought-provoking and highly topical book will be essential reading for students of any discipline drawing on the sociology of religion. It will also appeal to those beyond the academic community who want to know what fundamentalism really means today.

What can creative methods offer our understanding of military power and militarised cultures? What constitutes ‘creative research’ in military studies? And, what are some of the challenges of this type of work? This edited volume brings together authors working at the cutting edge of creative research in military studies, to explore how creativity and creative practice can shed new light on often taken for granted concepts in critical military research. In twelve empirically and conceptually rich chapters, authors from a diverse range of disciplinary fields draw on theatre, model-making, songwriting, dance, spoken word, paper making, and more, to question what military research can and should look like. As a collection, the book explores topics of central concern in military studies such as militarism, military experience, and militarised cultures, as well as more practical questions around ethics, positionality, and research relationships. This path-breaking new volume considers what exactly constitutes creativity in critical military research, while offering the tools for researchers to think anew about big questions in the field.

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.

The period between World Wars I and II was a time of turbulent political change, with suffragists, labor radicals, demagogues, and other voices clamoring to be heard. One group of activists that has yet to be closely examined by historians is World War I veterans. Mining the papers of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion (AL), Stephen R. Ortiz reveals that veterans actively organized in the years following the war to claim state benefits (such as pensions and bonuses), and strove to articulate a role for themselves as a distinct political bloc during the New Deal era.

Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill is unique in its treatment of World War I veterans as significant political actors during the interwar period. Ortiz's study reinterprets the political origins of the "Second" New Deal and Roosevelt's electoral triumph of 1936, adding depth not only to our understanding of these events and the political climate surrounding them, but to common perceptions of veterans and their organizations. In describing veteran politics and the competitive dynamics between the AL and the VFW, Ortiz details the rise of organized veterans as a powerful interest group in modern American politics.

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.

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.

The primary objective of this book is to unearth the Mosul Incident, place it in a historical narrative and introduce it to the literature. Despite creating a historical turning point, the incident has not attracted the necessary attention in neither the Ottoman nor Iraqi historiography until now. By interpreting the preferences, policies and practices associated with this particular incident, the book is engaged to analyze the Post-Constitutional power shifts, perceptions of collective violence and the origins of Arab-Kurdish Dispute. The banishment and murder of Sheikh Said Barzanji who was the family head of Sadaat al-Barzanjiyya as the most influential religious organization of region, created a critical threshold in the history of Mosul. As the urban shootout on January 5 turned into a provincial bloodshed, Kurdish Sayyids, tribes and religious orders consolidated and revolted against the Ottoman authorities. Governors who were polarized as Anti Sâdât and Pro Sâdât allegedly misconducted their offices and misguided the authorities of law enforcement and judiciary. By overcoming the historical rupture between Ottoman Mosul and Modern Iraq, the book introduces an analytical framework to associate the origins of collective violence and ethnic fragmentation experienced in today’s Iraq with the past.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author and esteemed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, an invaluable guide to the development and exercise of leadership from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The inspiration for the multipart HISTORY Channel series Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

“After five decades of magisterial output, Doris Kearns Goodwin leads the league of presidential historians” (USA TODAY). In her “inspiring” (The Christian Science Monitor) Leadership, Doris Kearns Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope.

Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others. Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader?

This book examines the nature and relationship of philosophy, science and ideology as modes of political thought. Through a survey of various important conceptions, the problem of ideology is identified as moral relativism. The inability of various inadequate contemporary accounts of political science and political philosophy to provide a solution to the problem of ideology is established. It is argued that the solution to the problem of ideology is provided only by rational political philosophy, founded on a conception of objective human nature.

This volume outlines the methods appropriate to an English School understanding of international relations and their assumptions about how knowledge of the "social" is gained. It makes clear what is involved in "an English School approach" and what such an approach delivers in the contemporary understanding of international relations.

"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.

Bavaria and German Federalism details the struggle by successive Bavarian political parties of the pre- and post-Nazi period to shape the construction of the German state in a decentralized fashion. While the Bavarian Peoples Party ultimately failed to redraw the Weimar constitution to satisfy Bavarian particularist desires, the Christian Social Union assumed the federalist mantle after 1945 and largely succeeded in helping shape western Germany into a workable federal state.

Capitalism and its Critics offers an accessible account of major theories of capitalism from the industrial revolution to the present day. The book provides a comprehensive account of the economic and social thought of key theorists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to David Harvey and Thomas Piketty. Capitalism has long been the subject of passionate debate, and today such contestations are perhaps more timely than ever. For its advocates, capitalism brings democracy and freedom and is the cornerstone of modernity and of progress. For its critics, capitalism is based on the exploitation of labour and is responsible for the destruction of the environment as well as colonialism. Whether capitalism survives the century, or whether an alternative social system emerges, may very well determine the fate of humanity. Capitalism and its Critics gives a comprehensive critical analysis of the most important theorists of capitalism, including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, F.A. Hayek, J.M. Keynes, David Harvey, and Thomas Piketty. The book discusses some of the main debates about capitalism and considers alternatives in the twenty-first century. The 12 chapters are loosely chronologically organised around the main approaches and historical phases in the history of capitalism. Central themes of the book are the ideas of capitalist crisis and of tensions between democracy and capitalism in the making of modernity. A highly readable, informative and engaging text, Capitalism and its Critics is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding capitalism and its alternatives.

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.

Russian populism, the belief that the peasantry embodied authentic Russian identity and once liberated from their poverty would lead the country to a brighter future, has animated Russian thought across the political spectrum and inspired much of Russia's world-historical literature, music and art in the 19th century. This book offers the fullest and most authoritative account of the rise, proliferation and influence of populist values and ideology in modern Russia to date. Christopher Ely explores the complete story of Russian populism. Starting from the cursed question of how to reconnect the popular masses with the Europeanized elite, he examines the populist obsession with the peasant commune as a model for a future socialist Russia. He shows how the desire for revolution led Russian radicals to flood into the countryside and later to pioneer terrorism as a form of political action. He delves into those artists influenced by populist ideals, and he tells the story of the collapse of populist optimism and its rebirth among the Socialist Revolutionary neo-populists. The book demonstrates that populism existed in forms ranging from radical socialist to religious conservative. Blending lively theoretical analysis with a wealth of primary sources and illustrations, Russian Populism provides a highly engaging overview of this complex phenomenon; it is invaluable reading for anyone interested in the momentous final decades of the Russian Empire.