Texas is a solid red state. Or trending purple. Or soon to be blue. One thing is certain: as Texas looms ever larger in national politics, the makeup of its electorate increasingly matters. At a critical moment, as migration, immigration, and a maturing populace alter the state's political landscape, this book presents a deeply researched, data-rich look at who Texas voters are, what they want, and what it might mean for the future of the Republican and Democratic parties, the state, and the nation. Battle for the Heart of Texas goes beyond the pronouncements of leaders and pundits to reveal voters' nuanced opinions-about the 2020 Democratic primary candidates, state and national Republicans' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, and issues such as immigration and gun policy. Working with an unprecedented cache of polling figures and qualitative data from surveys and focus groups-the product of a cooperative effort between the Dallas Morning News and The University of Texas at Tyler-Mark Owens, Kenneth A. Wink, and Kenneth Bryant Jr. provide an in-depth examination of what is reshaping voter preferences across Texas, including the partisan impact of the urbanization and nationalization of state politics. Their analyses pinpoint the influence of race, media exposure, ideological diversity within the parties, and geographic variation across the state, detailing how Texas politics has changed over time. Race may not have typically defined Texas politics, for instance, but the authors find that rhetoric on policies related to race are now shaping the electorate. The diversity in civic engagement among the Latino community also emerges from the data, compounded and complicated by the growth of the Latino population of voting age. The largest red state in the country, with the second-largest population, Texas is crucial to the way we think about political change in America-and this book amply and precisely equips us to understand the bellwether state's changing politics.

A critical legal scholar uses feminist and environmental theory to sketch alternate futures for Appalachia. Environmental law has failed spectacularly to protect Appalachia from the ravages of liberal capitalism, and from extractive industries in particular. Remaking Appalachia chronicles such failures, but also puts forth hopeful paths for truly radical change. Remaking Appalachia begins with an account of how, over a century ago, laws governing environmental and related issues proved fruitless against the rising power of coal and other industries. Key legal regimes were, in fact, explicitly developed to support favored industrial growth. Aided by law, industry succeeded in maximizing profits not just through profound exploitation of Appalachia's environment but also through subordination along lines of class, gender, and race. After chronicling such failures and those of liberal development strategies in the region, Stump explores true system change beyond law "reform." Ecofeminism and ecosocialism undergird this discussion, which involves bottom-up approaches to transcending capitalism that are coordinated from local to global scales.

Social media has emerged as a powerful tool that reaches a wide audience with minimum time and effort. It has a diverse role in society and human life and can boost the visibility of information that allows citizens the ability to play a vital role in creating and fostering social change. This practice can have both positive and negative consequences on society. Examining the Roles of IT and Social Media in Democratic Development and Social Change is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of social media within community development and democracy. While highlighting topics including information capitalism, ethical issues, and e-governance, this book is ideally designed for social workers, politicians, public administrators, sociologists, journalists, policymakers, government administrators, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on social advancement and change through social media and technology.

Homegrown: The New Age of Terrorism provides students with a concise and accessible introduction to modern-day terrorism related to the motivations, tactics, and strategies of domestic acts of terror. The text is organized into eight chapters. The opening chapters introduce contemporary terrorism and extremism as it exists in the United States. A special emphasis is placed on the radicalization process that leads to extremist ideologies and the differences between random and tactical terror activities. Additional chapters cover terrorist organizations and their ideologies, sources of terrorist financing, human trafficking, and cyberterrorism. Students learn about the structure and history of extremist organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood and how these groups contribute to gang violence in both communities and correctional systems. The final chapter consists of case studies that provide an overview of high-profile terrorist attacks and promote the opportunity for classroom discussion. Designed to help students consider and develop strategies for fighting terror within the United States, Homegrown is an ideal supplemental textbook for courses in criminal justice, political science, military science, and terrorism.

Within Argentina, Juan Domingo Peron continues to be the subject of exaggerated and diametrically opposed views. A dictator, a great leader, the hero of the working classes and Argentina's "first worker"; a weak and spineless man dependent on his strongerwilled wife; a Latin American visionary; a traitor, responsible for dragging Argentina into a modern, socially just 20th century society or, conversely, destroying for all time a prosperous nation and fomenting class war and unreasonable aspirations among his client base. Outside Argentina, Peron remains overshadowed by his second wife, Evita. The life of this fascinating and unusual man, whose charisma, political influence and controversial nature continue to generate interest, remains somewhat of a mystery to the rest of the world. Peron remains a key figure in Argentine politics, still able to occupy so much of the political spectrum as to constrain the development of viable alternatives. Jill Hedges explores the life and personality of Peron and asks why he remains a political icon despite the 'negatives' associated with his extreme personalism.

Systemic and political hostility against the 'left', real and contrived, has been a key, yet under-recognized aspect of the history of the modern world for the past two hundred years. By the 1820s, the new, exploitative and destabilizing character of capitalist industrial production and its accompanying market liberalizations began creating necessities among the working classes and their allies for the new, self-protective politics of 'socialism'. But it is evident that, for the new economic system to sustain itself, such oppositional politics that it necessitated had to be undermined, if not destroyed, by whatever means necessary. Through the imperialism of the later 19th century, and with significant variations, this complex and often highly destructive dialectical syndrome expanded worldwide. Liberals, conservatives, extreme nationalists, fascists, racists, and others have all repeatedly come aggressively and violently into play against 'socialist' oppositions. In this book, Philip Minehan traces the patterns of such hostility and presents numerous crucial examples of it: from Britain, France, Germany and the United States; the British in India; European fascism, the United States and Britain as they operated in China and Indochina; from Kenya, Algeria and Iran; and from Central and South America during the Cold War. In the final chapters, Minehan addresses the post-Cold War, US-led triumphalist wars in the Middle East, the ensuing refugee crises, neo-fascism, and anti-environmentalist politics, to show the ways that the syndrome within which anti-leftist antagonism emerges, in its neoliberal phase since the 1970s, remains as self-destructive and dangerous as ever

Toleration is one of the most studied concepts in contemporary political theory and philosophy, yet the range of contemporary normative prescriptions concerning how to do toleration or how to be tolerant is remarkably narrow and limited. The literature is largely dominated by a neo-Kantian moral-juridical frame, in which toleration is a matter to be decided in terms of constitutional rights. According to this framework, cooperation equates to public reasonableness and willingness to engage in certain types of civil moral dialogue. Crucially, this vision of politics makes no claims about how to cultivate and secure the conditions required to make cooperation possible in the first place. It also has little to say about how to motivate one to become a tolerant person. Instead it offers highly abstract ideas that do not by themselves suggest what political activity is required to negotiate overlapping values and interests in which cooperation is not already assured. Contemporary thinking about toleration indicates, paradoxically, an intolerance of politics. Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics argues for toleration as a practice of negotiation, looking to a philosopher not usually considered political: Michel de Montaigne. For Montaigne, toleration is an expansive, active practice of political endurance in negotiating public goods across lines of value difference. In other words, to be tolerant means to possess a particular set of political capacities for negotiation. What matters most is not how we talk to our political opponents, but that we talk to each other across lines of disagreement. Douglas I. Thompson draws on Montaigne's Essais to recover the idea that political negotiation grows out of genuine care for public goods and the establishment of political trust. He argues that we need a Montaignian conception of toleration today if we are to negotiate effectively the circumstances of increasing political polarization and ongoing value conflict, and he applies this notion to current debates in political theory as well as contemporary issues, including the problem of migration and refugee asylum. Additionally, for Montaigne scholars, he reads the Essais principally as a work of public political education, and resituates the work as an extension of Montaigne's political activity as a high-level negotiator between Catholic and Huguenot parties during the French Wars of Religion. Ultimately, this book argues that Montaigne's view of tolerance is worth recovering and reconsidering in contemporary democratic societies where political leaders and ordinary citizens are becoming less able to talk to each other to resolve political conflicts and work for shared public goods.

This book explores the linguistic patterns of conflict, crisis and threat generation in Polish political rhetoric that have been at the heart of state-level policies since the Law and Justice (PiS) Party came to power in October 2015. Analysing a vast corpus of speeches, statements and remarks by prominent Law and Justice Party politicians, this book sheds light on internal parliamentary and presidential discourse against opponents of the government, before widening its lens to Poland's strained relations with the EU regarding refugee distribution and immigration. Drawing on theories from contemporary critical discourse studies and critical-cognitive pragmatics, the book shows how the crisis, conflict and threat elements in these discourses produce public coercion and strengthen the Party's leadership. Piotr Cap extends his argument further to examine discursive examples from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy and the UK, highlighting the correlation between the Law and Justice Party and broader socio-political and rhetorical trends in contemporary Europe. The result is an authoritative panorama of the mutual dependencies and shared discursive strategies of European right-wing groups.

Edouard Glissant was a leading voice in debates centering on the postcolonial condition and on the present and future of globalisation. Prolific as both a theorist and a literary author, Glissant started his career as a contemporary of Frantz Fanon in the early days of francophone postcolonial thought. In the latter part of his career Glissant's vision pushed beyond the boundaries of postcolonialism to encompass the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation. Sam Coombes offers a detailed analysis of Glissant's thought, setting out the reasons why Glissant's vision for a world of intercultural interaction both reflects but also seeks to provide a correction to some of the leading tendencies commonly associated with contemporary theory today.

Africa Reimagined is a passionately argued appeal for a rediscovery of our African identity. Going beyond the problems of a single country, Hlumelo Biko calls for a reorientation of values, on a continental scale, to suit the needs and priorities of Africans. Building on the premise that slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid fundamentally unbalanced the values and indeed the very self-concept of Africans, he offers realistic steps to return to a more balanced Afro-centric identity.

Historically, African values were shaped by a sense of abundance, in material and mental terms, and by strong ties of community. The intrusion of religious, economic and legal systems imposed by conquerors, traders and missionaries upset this balance, and the African identity was subsumed by the values of the newcomers. Biko shows how a reimagining of Africa can restore the sense of abundance and possibility, and what a rebirth of the continent on Pan-African lines might look like. This is not about the churn of the news cycle or party politics – although he identifies the political party as one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism. Instead, drawing on latest research, he offers a practical, pragmatic vision anchored in the here and now.

By looking beyond identities and values imposed from outside, and transcending the divisions and frontiers imposed under colonialism, it should be possible for Africans to develop fully their skills, values and ingenuity, to build institutions that reflect African values, and to create wealth for the benefit of the continent as a whole.

Value and Crisis brings together selected essays written by Alfredo Saad-Filho, one of the most prominent Marxist political economists today. This book examines the labour theory of value from a rich and innovative perspective, from which fresh insights and new perspectives are derived, with applications for the nature of neoliberalism, financialisation, inflation, monetary policy, and the contradictions, limitations and crises of contemporary capitalism.