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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > General
This work explains elite behaviour in authoritarian systems and proposes why elites withdraw their support for the incumbent when faced with popular uprisings. Building upon foundations drawn from institutional authoritarianism and synthesised with local context from the substantial scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa, the book argues that the elite supporting autocrats come from three distinct cadres: the military, the single-party and the personalist. Each of these cadres possesses its own distinct institutional interests and preferences towards regime change. Drawing on these interests, the study constructs a theoretical framework that is assessed through testing it against three variables. Utilising an analytic narrative, the research finds that the withdrawal of elite support is the consequence of long-term processes that see distinct cadres marginalised. First, increased incumbent preference for personalist elements destabilises regimes as the military and single-party cadres reconsider their positions. Second, neoliberal economic policies, implemented via structural adjustment, accelerated this personalisation as the state's withdrawal from the economy. This, in turn, affected the ability of the military and single-party elites to access patronage. Finally, the degree of military involvement in the formal political sphere contributes to shaping the nature of the system that replaced the incumbent regime under examination. Building upon a wide range of literature the book argues that interest realisation determines whether or not elite actors support regime change in authoritarian systems. The volume will be of interest to scholars researching politics, social sciences and the Middle East.
The stakes have never been higher in a region at the center of the world's attention. What is behind the Arab Spring and what is likely to be the outcome? In this comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and thought-provoking book, Wissam S. Yafi argues that there are four dynamics leading to inevitable change in the Arab region: geopolitical, geoeconomic, geosocial, and technological. The incumbent autocratic regimes are unable to counter these forces and change has become inevitable - but what are the alternatives? Yafi considers anarchy, neo-dictatorship, theocracy, liberalized autocracy, and democracy. Logically and carefully analyzing each, Yafi comes to the conclusion that no system will be able to support the dynamics in place except for democracy, which will alter the current, failed social contract to one that supports self-determination and self-sufficiency.
From fear and anxiety, to celebration, China's rise has provoked a variety of responses across the world. In light of this phenomenon, how are our understandings of China produced? From West to East, Mobo Gao interrogates knowledge production; rejecting the supposed objectivity of empirical statistics and challenging the assumption of a dichotomy between the Western liberal democracy and Chinese authoritarianism. By examining issues such as the Chinese Neo-Enlightenment and neoliberalism, national interest vested in Western scholarship, representations of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and the South China Sea, the book asks: how is contemporary China constructed? By dissecting the political agenda and conceptual framework of commentators on China, Gao provocatively urges those not only on the Right, but also on the Left, to be self-critical of their views on Chinese politics, economics and history.
The book provides the main principles of Nation-State Building. It explores the applications of these principles to many states, including Poland, South-Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Iraq. It also gives insight on the role of the US-led coalition in Iraq after the fall of Saddam's Regime in 2003. It covers the fields Political System, Legislation and Judiciary System, New Constitution, and Security. The author employed additional research methods to provide a deep understanding of the political situation following the changes of regime, including interviews and surveys, namely in Iraq. Finally, the book provides a method of evaluating the success or failure of the Nation-Building process of other nations by using the main principal rules of Nation-Building theories.
This book examines US-Swiss relations in the context of Swiss banking secrecy and Holocaust related claims from World War II until the end of the 1990s. During World War II, Switzerland had been purchasing Reichsbank's gold and safeguarded the assets of the victims of Nazi Germany. This deeply impacted US-Swiss relations in the 1990s, and fueled a major conflict over dormant accounts and heirless assets of Holocaust victims. The US pressured Switzerland for Holocaust restitution using economic sanctions and a negative PR campaign. This culminated in a billion-dollar settlement, a reevaluation of wartime history by the Swiss, and a blow to Switzerland's international image. This book analyzes US policy towards Switzerland as a case of projection of US economic, as opposed to military power.
This book explores a new way of thinking about diplomacy, warfare, trade, and collective goods that begins with the notion that key international actors project their domestic institutions onto the regional or global arena. Exploring the emergence, consolidation, and decay of international norms, the author puts forward a general argument designed to identify patterns across time and space, combining key insights from constructivist, liberal, classical realist, English School, and feminist thinking. By moving from institution to institution, each chapter presents a coherent story ranging from antiquity to the contemporary world allowing us to see not only the patterns, but also to begin to develop conjectures about other causal stories implicit in the narrative. The book will be used by scholars and students of international relations, international organization and law, security studies, political economy, historical sociology, regionalism, and a wide range of specific topics such as arms control, trade, migration, identity, and collective goods.
International Discourses of Authoritarian Populism provides 15 cutting-edge chapters probing into the diversity of present-day populist discourse from across the world. Not adhering to any particular school, the volume explores populism from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, with contributions characterized by heuristic openness as called for by the manifold manifestations of populism. The chapters balance theoretical and empirical studies, as well as quantitative and qualitative surveys and case studies, to offer readings on historical and new types of populism, and the politicians associated with these variates. Authors draw on a variety of print, digital, textual, and visual source materials to provide a close examination of the phenomena interconnected with populism including separatism (Catalexit), human rights and legal issues, debate rhetoric, and journalism, with many authors writing as insiders about the situation within their own country. Through its multi-disciplinarity, International Discourses of Authoritarian Populism provides fresh insights into the existing and potential dangers of populism, and a basis for further critical assessment and discussion. It will be a key resource for scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, linguistics, media and communication studies, literary studies, and history. Moreover, it will be of special interest to professionals who deal with both national and international issues of populism.
International Discourses of Authoritarian Populism provides 15 cutting-edge chapters probing into the diversity of present-day populist discourse from across the world. Not adhering to any particular school, the volume explores populism from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, with contributions characterized by heuristic openness as called for by the manifold manifestations of populism. The chapters balance theoretical and empirical studies, as well as quantitative and qualitative surveys and case studies, to offer readings on historical and new types of populism, and the politicians associated with these variates. Authors draw on a variety of print, digital, textual, and visual source materials to provide a close examination of the phenomena interconnected with populism including separatism (Catalexit), human rights and legal issues, debate rhetoric, and journalism, with many authors writing as insiders about the situation within their own country. Through its multi-disciplinarity, International Discourses of Authoritarian Populism provides fresh insights into the existing and potential dangers of populism, and a basis for further critical assessment and discussion. It will be a key resource for scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, linguistics, media and communication studies, literary studies, and history. Moreover, it will be of special interest to professionals who deal with both national and international issues of populism.
This book engages with current debates on 'planetary urbanization' and the nature of urban political theory but notably considers the implications of illiberalism on space, territory, and power. Such a focus is timely, as illiberalism (across various settings and terrains) is producing, and embedded in, increasingly complex, hybrid, multi-scalar, non-linear, and globally networked flows. Through ordinary explorations drawn from diverse empirical case studies (China, the United States, India, South Korea, and Singapore) and via mixed methodologies, the chapters in this volume seek to advance theory that moves beyond assumptions and certainties of what illiberalism is, how and where it operates, what it looks like, and how it is experienced and embodied in different contexts, offline and online. Chapters critically reflect upon themes like authoritarianism and the spatialization of illiberal power, from the grassroots up to national governments, and stress the need to move beyond normative understandings and portrayals of these terms and concepts. Presciently, this volume looks back on recent history, pre-dating the Covid-19 pandemic and some of the shocking political transformations now underway: as such, the chapters offer a valuable lens to critically consider issues like public health policies, surveillance and policing, borders and bordering, and activism and resistance. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Territory, Politics, Governance.
This book explores a new way of thinking about diplomacy, warfare, trade, and collective goods that begins with the notion that key international actors project their domestic institutions onto the regional or global arena. Exploring the emergence, consolidation, and decay of international norms, the author puts forward a general argument designed to identify patterns across time and space, combining key insights from constructivist, liberal, classical realist, English School, and feminist thinking. By moving from institution to institution, each chapter presents a coherent story ranging from antiquity to the contemporary world allowing us to see not only the patterns, but also to begin to develop conjectures about other causal stories implicit in the narrative. The book will be used by scholars and students of international relations, international organization and law, security studies, political economy, historical sociology, regionalism, and a wide range of specific topics such as arms control, trade, migration, identity, and collective goods.
The project discusses Hezbollah's political ideology and how it evolves over time and the conditions that lead to the change of ideology. The author also examines Hezbollah's relationship with the patron states, Syria and Iran. In contrast with major arguments in the literature, the book argues that political ideologies are not fixed and they evolve depending on a number of factors such as the change in context, major events like a civil war in the patron state, and, most importantly, when the change of ideology becomes linked to survival of the insurgency. This monograph will appeal to a wide range of audiences such as researchers, scholars, and graduate students in the fields of Middle Eastern studies, political studies, Islamism, and nationalism.
This text is important both as one of the most interesting contributions to the liberalism of the German Enlightenment, and as the most significant source for the ideas which John Stuart Mill popularized in his essay On Liberty. Humboldt's concern is to define the criteria by which the permissible limits of the state's activities may be determined. His basic principle, like that of Mill, is that the only justification for government interference is the prevention of harm to others. He discusses in detail the role and limits of the state's responsibility for the welfare, security and morals of its citizens. Humboldt's special achievement in this work is to enlarge our sense of what a liberal political theory might be by his particularly sensitive grasp of the complexity of our attitudes to and our need of other people. Dr Burrow has based his translation on Coulthard's version of 1854. In an important introduction, he provides a most perceptive as well as scholarly guide to Humboldt's political thought.
The Robust Federation offers a comprehensive approach to the study of federalism. Jenna Bednar demonstrates how complementary institutions maintain and adjust the distribution of authority between national and state governments. These authority boundaries matter - for defense, economic growth, and adequate political representation - and must be defended from opportunistic transgression. From Montesquieu to Madison, the legacy of early institutional analysis focuses attention on the value of competition between institutions, such as the policy moderation produced through separated powers. Bednar offers a reciprocal theory: in an effective constitutional system, institutions complement one another; each makes the others more powerful. Diverse but complementary safeguards - including the courts, political parties, and the people - cover different transgressions, punish to different extents, and fail under different circumstances. The analysis moves beyond equilibrium conceptions and explains how the rules that allocate authority are not fixed but shift gradually. Bednar's rich theoretical characterization of complementary institutions provides the first holistic account of federal robustness.
Anyone who wants to understand what militant Muslims think has
to understand what they read-and they read Sayyid Qutb, the
intellectual father of Islamic fundamentalism. Qutb, an Egyptian
literary critic and philosopher who was appalled by American
decadence, gained prominence in the Muslim Brotherhood, was
imprisoned by Nasser, and hanged in 1966. Through his death and
prolific writings he became a martyr for the cause of political
Islam. His work is virtually unknown outside the Muslim world, but
Qutb is at the heart of the intellectual rationale for jihad and
violence in the name of Islam.
The Sayyid Qutb Reader is the first collection of his selected works available to the general public. As such, this valuable introduction to Qutb's core intellectual ideas should be read by anyone who wants to understand one of the most important conflicts of our age.
This book offers the first transnational history of white nationalism in Britain, the US and the formerly British colonies of Rhodesia, South Africa and Australia from the post-World War II period to the present. It situates contemporary white nationalism in the 'Anglosphere' within the context of major global events since 1945. White nationalism, it argues, became more global in reaction to the forces of decolonisation, civil rights, mass migration and the rise of international institutions. In this period, assumptions of white supremacy that had been widely held by whites throughout the world were challenged and reformulated, as western elites professed a commitment to colour-blind ideals. The decline in legitimacy of overtly racist political expression produced international alliances among white supremacists and new claims of populist legitimation. -- .
This book examines contemporary jihad as a cult of violence and power. All jihadi groups, whether Shiite or Sunni, Arab or not, are characterized by a similar bloodlust. Murawiec characterizes this belief structure as identical to that of Europe's medieval millenarians and apocalyptics, arguing that both jihadis and their European cousins shared in a Gnostic ideology: a God-given mission endowed the Elect with supernatural powers and placed them above the common law of mankind. Although the ideology of jihad is essentially Islamic, Murawiec traces the political technologies used by modern jihad to the Bolsheviks. Their doctrines of terror as a system of rule were appropriated by radical Islam through multiple lines of communication. This book brings history, anthropology, and theology to bear to understand the mind of jihad that has declared war on the West and the world.
This book looks at how varieties of capitalism emerge over time and across different geographies, and is comprised of submissions from scholars around the globe. Covering a wide range of territories including Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia across both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this edited volume considers the roles that the state and business working together play in the emergence of different economic systems. Whilst most analyses focus on identifying different types of capitalism, the chapters in this volume instead focus on how these different types develop, the drivers of their emergence, and the people and organisations behind the developments. The geographical spread of analyses allows the reader to delve into how different countries have managed and even created their economic systems providing comparative insights into our understanding of how different national economic models develop over time. This book was originally published as a special issue of Business History.
This book deals with the main doctrines of Marxist politics. Clearly and simply written, the book explores the views of classical Marxists along with the findings of Western and Analytical Marxists. It also shows a distinction between Marxist and non-Marxist views on politics. Their points of difference as well as their common roots are thus clearly accounted for. Marxist politics is a coherent system of ideas and theories of class, class struggle, party, revolution and the state developed in response to a series of major and interrelated changes - the emergence of a capitalist economy, the rise of the modern nation-state and the development of modern science, which transformed both the society and politics. This book is intended to explore these ideas and theories. Particular emphasis has been put on the ideas and views of critical Marxists in a separate chapter. The book includes brief bibliographical details of major individual thinkers as well as an annotated bibliography for further reading. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)
What does 'autonomy' mean today? Is the Enlightenment understanding of autonomy still relevant for contemporary challenges? How have the limits and possibilities of autonomy been transformed by recent developments in artificial intelligence and big data, political pressures, intersecting oppressions and the climate emergency? The challenges to autonomy today reach across society with unprecedented complexity, and in this book leading scholars from philosophy, economics, linguistics, literature and politics examine the role of autonomy in key areas of contemporary life, forcefully defending a range of different views about the nature and extent of resistance to autonomy today. These essays are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the predicament and prospects of one of modernity's foundational concepts and one of our most widely cherished values.
Simone Weil's short life was as extraordinary as her writings. Born in 1909, she was a brilliant philosophy student in the Paris of the 1920s and colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. She fought on the anarchist side in the Spanish Civil War and died, at the age of only thirty-four, while serving with de Gaulle and the Free French in London. This life of intense activity was united with a profoundly religious outlook on life. Many consider her the best spiritual writer of our century and a true saint for modern times. Simone Weil published almost nothing during her lifetime. The publication of her complete works is only now beginning in France. They reveal a mind of amazing lucidity and depth. This biography draws on hitherto unpublished material to explain her thought in the context of her life. Its comprehensive coverage at last makes available to the public the most intriguing personality of our age.
Going beyond superficial comparisons of Kissinger and Brzezinski, this study determines their impact on US national security policy by comparing their views on world politics and on strategy and tactics for achieving national goals and by examining the consistency between their actions in office and their beliefs. Despite his attacks on Kissinger, this study found that Brzezinski shared many of Kissinger's beliefs and copied many of his actions in office. Both men's actions were profoundly shaped by their shared beliefs that, within limits, man could shape history, that Moscow's and Peking's commitment to worldwide communist expansion is the main threat to peace, and that divergent national interests threaten even allied relationships, and by their parallel conceptions of power, diplomacy, linkage, and leadership. Indeed, their similar struggles to control policy through the National Security Council and more informal structures and their handling of relations with allies, and with Moscow, and Peking underlined these shared beliefs, as well their differing conceptions of morality and leadership. Moreover, since leaving office, both Kissinger's and Brzezinski's policy proposals clea
Built around key events, from the eviction of a self-managed social centre in Copenhagen in 2007 to the Climate Summit protests in 2009, this book contributes to anthropological literature on contemporary Euro-American politics foreshadowing recent waves of public dissent. Stine Kroijer explores political forms among left radical and anarchist activists in Northern Europe focusing on how forms of action engender time. Drawing on anthropological literature from both Scandinavia and the Amazon, this ethnography recasts theoretical concerns about body politics, political intentionality, aesthetics, and time.
England has had a predominantly conservative political culture for some centuries. Yet there is a persistent, minority strand of radicalism that has challenged the practices, beliefs and structures of power of the established order. This book explores this 'radical tradition' as articulated in the twentieth century. The main currents of English radicalism range from liberal reformers, through socialist parliamentarians, to social movement activists in the peace, women's and labour movements. Despite their differing agendas, all have held their moral and political commitments to achieving a free, democratic, equal and just society in common. Moreover, all have believed, whatever their other differences, in the importance of extra-parliamentary social movements. What is it that has constituted this 'radical tradition'? Is it a coherent, distinctive and important political force in the twentieth century? And how do these ideas and practices relate to radical politics in England in the early twenty-first century? This book offers an analysis of the historical and ideological development of English radicalism from the English Civil War onwards. Richard Taylor examines how the problems of achieving radical change in England in the twentieth century were approached by the ten key figures from a range of ideological positions within the tradition: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Joan Maynard, Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Nicolas Walter. -- .
This handbook provides a unique opportunity to bring together several different strings of debates, especially useful to the growing focus on responsibility which increasingly demands interdisciplinary approaches. It focuses on practices and normativity in ways that are often overlooked by a focus on accountability. It highlights the contested meaning of responsibility. In addition to its academic purpose, it may also prove of interest to policy-makers, think tanks, policy research institutes.
Although many recent publications deal with the substance of West German external relations, none (in English at any rate) focuses heavily upon the structure and processes of foreign policy-making. Thus, by covering the latter as well as the former, this translation of Pfetsch's book fills an important gap. The author provides a detailed, thorough, and precise outline of the institutions and instruments involved in West German foreign policy formulation. "Choice" What internal functions affect foreign policy making? How do non-tangible forces, such as recent German history, public opinion, the nature of the economy, etc., play a part in overall German foreign policy? In examining these questions and others, Pfetsch provides detailed data on West German political, economic, social, and cultural performances that challenge the view that interprets relations solely as a result of international structures. West Germany in International Relations demonstrates how internal, as well international, factors shape foreign policy making. |
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