Security relations between Japan and its East Asia neighbors have been complicated for decades. Entering the third decade of the 21st century, Japan will have to face new security challenges posed by COVID-19 and manage its current relations with the United States, China and South Korea. Mitigating local and global security threats will be one of the most critical challenges for the future. This book focuses on internal and external factors that are influencing current Japanese security policy and analyses the security issues from numerous perspectives, including social issues and their effect on security policies, bilateral relations between Japan and its partners in Asia, and the significance of the U.S.-Japan Alliance.

This book offers an original and comprehensive formulation of a new ideology critique for political analysis. Going beyond the reiterative attempts of declaring the 'death of ideology', the book - after revisiting the main developments of the theory of ideology - presents a productive critique of Habermas's theory of communicative action viewed through Slavoj Zižek's theory of ideology. Far from assuming their theories are incommensurable, the book argues that it is worth observing Zižek's theoretical endeavor as a 'supplementary' overcoming of Habermas's proposal. This will eventually show that by using a fictional notion of the Real taken from a Zižekian reading of Lacan, a new ideology critique, which affirms a universal truth for a political situation, becomes possible. This new model of ideology critique is applied to the political consensus reached in Chile's post-Pinochet.

Over the last one hundred years, the term "sovereignty" has often been associated with the capacity of leaders to declare emergencies and to unleash harmful, extralegal force against those deemed enemies. Friendly Sovereignty explores the blind spots of this influential perspective. Ted H. Miller challenges the view of sovereignty propounded by Carl Schmitt, the Weimar and Nazi-period jurist and political theorist whose theory undergirds this understanding of sovereignty. Claiming a return to concepts of sovereignty forgotten by his liberal contemporaries, Schmitt was preoccupied with the legal exceptions required, he said, to rescue polities in crisis. Much is missing from what Schmitt harvests from the past. His framework systematically overlooks another extralegal power, one that often caused consternation, even among absolutists like Thomas Hobbes. Sovereigns also made exceptions for friends, allies, and dependents. Friendly Sovereignty plumbs the history of political thought about sovereignty to illustrate this other side of the sovereign's exception-making power. At the core of this extensive study are three thinkers, each of whom stakes out a distinct position on the merits and demerits of a "friendly sovereign": the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, the seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and Seneca, the ancient Stoic and teacher of Nero. Analytically rigorous and thorough in its intellectual history, Friendly Sovereignty presents a more comprehensive understanding of sovereignty than the one typically taught today. It will be particularly useful to scholars and students of political theory and philosophy.

This comprehensive handbook examines relationships between religion, politics and ideology, with a focus on several world religions - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism - in a variety of contexts, regions and countries. Relationships between religion, politics and ideology help mould people's attitudes about the way that political systems, both domestically and internationally, are organised and operate. While conceptually separate, religion, politics and ideology often become intertwined and as a result their relationships evolve over time. This volume brings together a number of expert contributors who explore a wide range of topical and controversial issues, including gender, nationalism, communism, fascism, populism and Islamism. Such topics inform the overall aim of the handbook: to provide a comprehensive summary of the relationships between religion, politics and ideology, including basic issues and new approaches. This handbook is a major research resource for students, researchers and professionals from various disciplinary backgrounds, including religious studies, political science, international relations, and sociology.

1) This is a comprehensive book presenting the political thoughts of prominent Indian thinkers like Ambedkar, Nehru, Gandhi, Lohia etc. 2) Written by experts in the field it discusses concepts like nationalism, secularism, social and gender justice etc. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian studies across UK and USA.

Over the last four decades, Dipesh Chakrabarty's astonishingly wide-ranging scholarship has elaborated a range of important issues, especially those of modernity, identity, and politics - in dialogue with postcolonial theory and critical historiography - on global and planetary scales. All of this makes Chakrabarty among the most significant (and most cited) scholars working in the humanities and social sciences today. The present text comprises substantive yet short, academic yet accessible essays that are crafted in conversation with the critical questions raised by Chakrabarty's writings. Now, Chakrabarty holds the singular distinction of making key contributions to some of the most salient shifts in understandings of the Global South that have come about in wake of subaltern studies and postcolonial perspectives, critiques of Eurocentrism together with elaborations of public pasts, and articulations of climatic histories alongside problems of the Anthropocene. Rather than exegeses and commentaries, these original, commissioned, pieces - written by a stellar cast of contributors from four continents - imaginatively engage Chakrabarty's insights and arguments, in order to incisively explore important issues of the politics of knowledge in contemporary worlds. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in a wide variety of interdisciplinary issues across the humanities and social sciences, especially the interplay between postcolonial perspectives and subaltern studies, between man-made climate change and the human sciences, between history and theory, and between modernity and globalization.

This book analyses Brexit in the larger context of the crisis in liberal democracies and the continuing rise of 'nationalism'. With electoral verdicts favouring right-wing populists across the world, the volume argues that Brexit has become a key event in understanding global political currents, as well as emerging as a watershed moment in the current political climate. The author focuses on the underlying currents that shaped the Brexit vote and delineates the various strands of arguments that inform the current political climate. The volume also locates the deepening divide within the discourse and understanding of democracy, as well the abysmally low level of rhetoric informing the debates around it. Further, it links this up with other 'nationalist' waves across the world, including South Asia. A nuanced reading of a key event, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, especially political theory, political sociology and history.

This book traces ideological trends in China through a range of historical and comparative perspectives, spanning the ancient belief systems of Confucianism, Legalism, and Taoism to political ideologies of the present day. Chapters in this edited volume are divided into four parts: traditional Chinese ideology, ideology of the Republic, Maoism as an ideology and post Mao ideology, zoning in on specific historical periods from the Qing and Republic periods to the reform era, as well as the period after the founding of the PRC - through which Mao Zedong's political thought is notably discussed from the perspective of epistemology and the global impact of Maoism. Key topics include Sun Yat-sen as the Father of the Republic, Li Dazhao, the early Marxist theoretician, Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist Fascism, Liang Qichao's emotional appeals through liberal political discourse, Jiang Zemin's theory of 'Three Represents' de-emphasising the Marxist concept of class, Hu Jintao's theory of 'Harmonious Society' and Xi Jinping's political thought. Contributions from world-leading scholars take both comparative and critical approaches, examining not only how studies of ideology are relevant, but how Chinese ideologies have retained their own characteristics distinct to the West. As the first comprehensive study of this subject in the English language, Chinese Ideology will appeal to students and scholars of philosophy, political science, history, and Asian studies more broadly.

Ernst Bloch is perhaps best known for his subtle and imaginative investigation of utopias and utopianism, but his work also provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of western culture, politics and society. Yet, because he has not been one of easiest of writers to read his full contribution has not been widely acknowledged. Block developed a complex conceptual framework, and presented this in a prose style which many have found to verge on the impenetrable.
In this critical and accessible introduction to one of the most fascinating thinkers of the twentieth century, Vincent Geoghegan unravels much of the mystery of the man and his ideas.

Hasan al-Turabi (1932-2016) was born into a Sudanese family with a clerical and Sufi history. Whilst studying law at the University of Khartoum, he became a leader of the Islamic student movement. After earning bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of London, he achieved a PhD at the University of Sorbonne in 1964. Upon returning to Sudan to pursue an academic career at the University of Khartoum, he soon became one of the leaders of the Islamic National Front. After being imprisoned for nearly seven years, he went on to hold numerous government posts, culminating in his most influential period during the rule of 'Umar al-Bashir. He ultimately fell out of favour with the government, and faced trials and imprisonment. The Political Thought of Hasan al-Turabi identifies Turabi as arguably the leading Sudanese Islamic political thinker and activist of recent times, and sets out the main influences upon Turabi's thought. Yet it is demonstrated that Turabi was an original thinker, who digested but then adapted the thought of his predecessors. Whilst his political goal was to politically unite the Islamic world, he also strove to improve relations with the non-Muslim world. Furthermore, his political thought sought to unite the Muslims and non-Muslims of Sudan in a peaceful unity, whilst working to raise the status of the poor and women.

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.

Eric Voegelin's Political Readings fills a critical void by providing an original approach to studying the work of Eric Voegelin, one of the major political philosophers of the twenty-first century. Across six chapters, experts guide the reader from classical to modern times presenting six political philosophers who have had an impact on the life and philosophical production of Eric Voegelin. Philosophers examined include Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Hobbes, Weber and Kelsen. Through this innovative structure, the chapters collectively illustrate how Voegelin was an exceptional thinker through his engagement with political philosophers both modern and antique. The plurality of unique, academic perspectives and voices enriches our understanding of Voegelin's own thought while also encouraging a re-think of ancient and modern thinkers, and the transformation and continuity between these. Designed for students and scholars alike, Eric Voegelin's Political Readings will appeal to all those with an interest in Voegelin as well as readers familiar with classical and modern political philosophers.

This book analyses Brexit in the larger context of the crisis in liberal democracies and the continuing rise of 'nationalism'. With electoral verdicts favouring right-wing populists across the world, the volume argues that Brexit has become a key event in understanding global political currents, as well as emerging as a watershed moment in the current political climate. The author focuses on the underlying currents that shaped the Brexit vote and delineates the various strands of arguments that inform the current political climate. The volume also locates the deepening divide within the discourse and understanding of democracy, as well the abysmally low level of rhetoric informing the debates around it. Further, it links this up with other 'nationalist' waves across the world, including South Asia. A nuanced reading of a key event, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, especially political theory, political sociology and history.

For an element so firmly fixed in American culture, the frontier myth is surprisingly flexible. How else to explain its having taken two such different guises in the twentieth century - the progressive, forward-looking politics of Rough Rider president Teddy Roosevelt and the conservative, old-fashioned character and Cold War politics of Ronald Reagan? This is the conundrum at the heart of Cowboy Presidents, which explores the deployment and consequent transformation of the frontier myth by four U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Behind the shape-shifting of this myth, historian David A. Smith finds major events in American and world history that have made various aspects of the 'Old West' frontier more relevant, and more useful, for promoting radically different political ideologies and agendas. And these divergent adaptations of frontier symbolism have altered the frontier myth. Theodore Roosevelt, with his vigorous pursuit of an activist federal government, helped establish a version of the frontier myth that today would be considered liberal. But then, Smith shows, a series of events from the Lyndon Johnson through Jimmy Carter presidencies - including Vietnam, race riots, and stagflation - seemed to give the lie to the progressive frontier myth. In the wake of these crises, Smith's analysis reveals, the entire structure and popular representation of frontier symbols and images in American politics shifted dramatically from left to right, and from liberal to conservative, with profound implications for the history of American thought and presidential politics. The now popular idea that 'frontier American' leaders and politicians are naturally Republicans with conservative ideals flows directly from the Reagan era. Cowboy Presidents gives us a new, clarifying perspective on how Americans shape and understand their national identity and sense of purpose; at the same time, reflecting on the essential mutability of a quintessentially national myth, the book suggests that the next iteration of the frontier myth may well be on the horizon.

Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey explores the role of religion (Sunni, Hanefi Islam) in the transformation of Turkey under the reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP). The chapters argue that the Turkish understanding of secularism was also one of the building blocks and the constitutive elements of Turkey's modernization until the rise of the AKP. Currently, however, it seems that religion has become a new or re-born element of the new Turkey and has been transforming many areas such as: the media, the Kurdish issue, implementation of the rule of law, foreign policy and gender issues. This book therefore aims to scrutinize the question: how does a religion-based transformation in Turkey influence the raison d'etat of the state, and effect in various ways different areas such as gender, foreign policy, economy and socio-political relations of various power groups within the society? Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey will be of great interest to scholars of Religion and Politics, and governance in Turkey. It was originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

Originally published in 2002 Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam is a study of the history and consequences of the revolutionary campaign to transform culture and ritual in northern Vietnam. Based upon official documents and several years of field research in Thinh Liet Commune, a Red River delta community near Hanoi, it provides the first detailed account of the nature of revolutionary cultural reforms in Vietnam as how those reforms continue to animate contemporary socio-cultural life. The study examines the key foci of revolutionary cultural change, such as the articulation of a new moral system, the attempts to eliminate explanations that invoke supernatural causality, the creation of socialist weddings and funerals, and the development of innovation ties to commemorate war dead. By examining debates over culture, ritual, and morality that have emerged between residents, notably between men and women, and party members and non-party members, the study shows how ideas and values that preceded the revolution have entered into a creative dialogue with those that were articulated by the revolution, and how this has produced an innovative set of ritual and other practices, particularly since the relaxation of the cultural reform agenda in the post-1986 period.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the Albanian Student Movement of 1990-1991. To date, there are no thorough studies of the first year of the post-Communist transition in Albania, which constitutes the most critical period of transition. The lessons to be learned are vast and of great importance to the debates on social movements, mobilization, and transition. Renowned scholars of modern Albanian history, led by the former leader of the Albanian Student Movement, Shinasi A. Rama, provide a study of the critical role played by this movement in the political transformation of Albania from a totalitarian cult-state to a multiparty political system during 1990-1991. Their informed analyses combined with first-hand knowledge of the events during a key period of Albanian history shed light on the Student Movement, its ideology, values, contributions, and its relationship to the system and to the ruling caste. The authors come to the core conclusion that the Student Movement remained an independent player that achieved change in the political system at a crucial juncture. The End of Communist Rule in Albania is a much-needed contribution in the fields of social movements, democratization studies, Communist and Post-Communist politics, and Albanian Studies.

There are no comparable works available. This field has not been properly mapped before. Stellar international cast of contributors led by two highly respectived and well published scholars in the field of political theory and psychoanalysis. This Handbook will have global reach and will appeal to the wider field of the social sciences and humanities. This particular strand of political theory is now incorporated in many MA schemes and is widely debated within political research at large. ** when book comes out in pb **

This book analyses the response of the Indonesian state to violence against Ahmadiyah and Shi'a minority communities by foregrounding the close connections between state officials and vigilante groups, which influenced the way the post-Soeharto democratic Indonesian governments addressed the problem of violence against religious minorities. Arguing that the violence stemmed in part from the state officials' close connection with vigilante groups, and a general tendency for the authorities to forge mutual and material interests with such groups, the author demonstrates that vigilante groups were able to perpetrate violence against the minority congregations with a significant degree of impunity. While the Indonesian state has become far more democratic, accountable, and decentralized since 1998, the violence against Ahmadiyah and Shi'a communities shows a state that is still unwilling in assisting or allowing minority groups to practice their religion. The research undertaken for this book draws upon a lengthy period of ethnographic fieldwork in the communities of West Java and East Java. Research material includes in-depth interviews with community and religious leaders, state officials and security forces, and other prominent politicians. A novel approach to the problem of Islam, violence, and the state in Indonesia, the book will be of interest to researchers studying Southeast Asian Politics, Islam and Politics, Conflict Resolution, State and Violence, and Terrorism and Political Violence.

Successive waves of global protest since 1999 have encouraged leading contemporary political theorists to argue that politics has fundamentally changed in the last twenty years, with a new type of politics gaining momentum over elite, representative institutions. The new politics is frequently described as radical, but what does radicalism mean for the conduct of politics? Capturing the innovative practices of contemporary radicals, Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics brings together leading academics and campaigners to answer these questions and explore radicalism's meaning to their practice. In the thirty-five chapters written for this collection, they collectively develop a picture of radicalism by investigating the intersections of activism and contemporary political theory. Across their experiences, the authors articulate radicalism's critical politics and discuss how diverse movements support and sustain each other. Together, they provide a wide-ranging account of the tensions, overlaps and promise of radical politics, while utilising scholarly literatures on grassroots populism to present a novel analysis of the relationship between radicalism and populism. Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics serves as a key reference for students and scholars interested in the politics and ideas of contemporary activist movements.

Jane Mansbridge's intellectual career is marked by field-shifting contributions to democratic theory, feminist scholarship, political science methodology, and the empirical study of social movements and direct democracy. Her work has fundamentally challenged existing paradigms in both normative political theory and empirical political science and launched new lines of scholarly inquiry on the most basic questions of the discipline: the sort of equality democracy needs, the goods of political participation, the nature of power, the purposes of deliberation, the forms of political representation, the obstacles to collective action, and the inescapable need for coercion. The editor has focused on work in three key areas: Participation and power Mansbridge's early work on participatory democracy generated a key insight that has informed all of her subsequent work: the kind of equality we need to legitimate decisions under circumstances of common interests (equal respect) differs from the kind of equality we need when interests conflict (equal power). Deliberation and representation In the chapters in this section, Mansbridge adds nuance to democratic theory by disaggregating different modes of political representation and explicating the ways in which each can contribute to the deliberative, aggregative and expressive functions of democratic institutions. Legitimate coercion Mansbridge exemplifies a collaborative spirit through the practice of deliberative co-authorship, through which she and colleagues construct a taxonomy of procedures that can legitimize enforceable collective decisions. Essential reading for anyone interested in liberal conceptions of equality, participation, representation, deliberation, power and coercion.

Nonviolent methods of action have been a powerful tool since the early twentieth century for social protest and revolutionary social and political change, and there is diffuse awareness that nonviolence is an efficient spontaneous choice of movements, individuals and whole nations. Yet from a conceptual standpoint, nonviolence struggles to engage with key contemporary political issues: the role of religion in a post-secular world; the crisis of democracy; and the use of supposedly 'nonviolent techniques' for violent aims. Drawing on classic thinkers and contemporary authors, in particular the Italian philosopher Aldo Capitini, this book shows that nonviolence is inherently a non-systematic and flexible system with no pure, immaculate thought at its core. Instead, at the core of nonviolence there is praxis, which is impure because while it aims at freedom and plurality it is made of less than perfect actions performed in an imperfect environment by flawed individuals. Offering a more progressive, transformative and at the same time pluralistic concept of nonviolence, this book is an original conceptual analysis of political theory which will appeal to students of international relations, global politics, security studies, peace studies and democratic theory.

It is commonly observed that behind many of the political and cultural issues that we face today there are impoverished conceptions of freedom, which, according to D. C. Schindler, we have inherited from the classical liberal tradition without a sufficient awareness of its implications. Freedom from Reality presents a critique of the deceptive and ultimately self-subverting character of the modern notion of freedom, retrieving an alternative view through a new interpretation of the ancient tradition. While many have critiqued the inadequacy of identifying freedom with arbitrary choice, this book seeks to penetrate to the metaphysical roots of the modern conception by going back, through an etymological study, to the original sense of freedom. Schindler begins by uncovering a contradiction in John Locke's seminal account of human freedom. Rather than dismissing it as a mere "academic" problem, Schindler takes this contradiction as a key to understanding the strange paradoxes that abound in the contemporary values and institutions founded on the modern notion of liberty: the very mechanisms that intend to protect modern freedom render it empty and ineffectual. In this respect, modern liberty is "diabolical"-a word that means, at its roots, that which "drives apart" and so subverts. This is contrasted with the "symbolical" (a "joining-together"), which, he suggests, most basically characterizes the premodern sense of reality. This book will appeal to students and scholars of political philosophy (especially political theorists), philosophers in the continental or historical traditions, and cultural critics with a philosophical bent.