The book aims to answer the central question: "What went wrong, more precisely, in the decision chain during the reconstruction of Iraq's military institution?" The holistic character of the approach is ensured through a series of background analyses. Although most researches concluded already that Iraq's reconstruction was a failure, answering the question implied the design of an appropriate research method and data collection/analysis, in order to frame particular characteristics of the reconstruction process. Despite the complexity of the topic and theoretical Security Sector Reform principles, which can hardly be applied to Iraq's case, the thesis emphasizes on actors involved, their actions and connections between events, as part of a unique process.

Autocracies not only resist the global spread of democracy but are sources of autocratic influence and pressure. This book presents a conceptual model to understand, assess, and explain the promotion and diffusion of authoritarian elements. Employing a cross-regional approach, leading experts empirically test the concept of authoritarian gravity centers (AGCs), defined as "regimes that constitute a force of attraction and contagion for countries in geopolitical proximity." With an analysis extending across Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Asia, these AGCs are shown to be effective as active promoters (push) or as neutral sources of attraction (pull). The authors contend that the influence of exogenous factors, along with international and regional contexts for the transformation of regime types, is vital to understanding and analyzing the transmission of autocratic institutional settings, ideas, norms, procedures, and practices, thus explaining the regional clustering of autocracies. It is the regional context in which external actors can influence authoritarian processes most effectively. Authoritarian Gravity Centers is a vibrant and comprehensive contribution to the growing field of autocratization, which will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of comparative area studies, illiberalism, international politics, and studies of democracy.

Thirty years ago, a social movement helped bring down one of the most powerful British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century. For the 30th anniversary of the Poll Tax rebellion, Simon Hannah looks back on those tumultuous days of resistance, telling the story of the people that beat the bailiffs, rioted for their rights and defied a government. Starting in Scotland where the 'Community Charge' was first trialled, Can't Pay, Won't Pay immerses the reader in the gritty history of the rebellion. Amidst the drama of large scale protests and blockaded estates a number of key figures and groups emerge: Neil Kinnock and Tommy Sheridan; Militant, Class War and the Metropolitan Police. Assessing this legacy today, Hannah demonstrates the centrality of the Poll Tax resistance as a key chapter in the history of British popular uprisings, Labour Party factionalism, the anti-socialist agenda and failed Tory ideology.

Lucy Cane presents the first full-length study of Sheldon Wolin (1922-2015), an influential theorist of democracy and prescient critic of "inverted totalitarianism" in the United States. She traces the development of Wolin's thinking over sixty years, offering an overarching interpretation of his central preoccupations and shifts in perspective. Framed around themes of loss and mourning, this is not only an intellectual biography, but also a critical engagement of Wolin's work with democratic theory more broadly and an assessment of its value for addressing contemporary crises of democracy. Cane brings Wolin into conversation with other contemporary theorists, from Chantal Mouffe to Edward Said, as well as with his direct intellectual influences. She argues that his mournful tendencies continue to offer unique insight into the potential loss of local democratic cultures in an era of neoliberal precarity. At the same time, she questions whether his politics of mourning can adequately grasp the dynamics of democratic coalition-building or the value of new political movements and ideas. Sheldon Wolin and Democracy remedies a lack of interpretive studies of this key thinker, connects divergent strands of contemporary theory, and addresses urgent democratic dilemmas. It is a must read for all political theorists and others in the academy and beyond who seek to conceptualize the fate of democracy amidst the rise of right-wing populist movements in the twenty-first century.

Should we punish wrongdoers? Should we take care of the ones who suffered from wrongdoings? Although we may believe answers to these questions are obvious, they become less so when similar questions are asked under exceptional circumstances, such as armed conflicts. These answers may decide about the continuation of hostilities or their end. The stakes are high, while we can hardly ignore the need to deal with the consequences of violence generated by a conflict. This book discusses the dilemmas and challenges associated with the provision of justice in the context of the armed conflict in Ukrainian Donbas in 2014–2019.

Populism comes in many guises. Both Berlusconi's personalization of politics and the Northern League's antiimmigrant regionalist movement are viewed as examples of the phenomenon of populism. A type of leftwing populism embodied by Hugo Chavez swept across Latin America. Insurgent and antisystem movements and parties in places as different as the Netherlands, India, Norway, Thailand, Russia and the United States have experienced what have been labeled populists movements. Such varied manifestations beg the question: what is populism? The objective of this edited volume is to provide an answer by examining "the many faces of populism." The unifying element across the different explorations of the phenomenon of populism is that there is a shared genus that allows for a typology of the different faces of populism and a demarcation of what is not a form of populism.

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.

Most Americans could not fathom how Islamic terrorists could bring down the World Trade Center or an army psychiatrist could turn on his own soldiers, taking their lives in the name of his religion. How could an ex-army veteran blow up a federal building, or a Jewish doctor gun down Muslims at worship? Or how can one understand why a meditation guru would put sarin gas in a Tokyo subway? None of these incidents fit our conceptions of the benevolence of religion. More importantly, is there something inherent within religions that justifies the taking of human lives? In Few Call It War, Dr. Robert Hicks explores these questions and takes the blinders off illuminating the roots of religious violence, what religious terrorists have in common, and how they differ. He focuses on the current administration's struggle to call ISIS or ISIL what it really is: War. Hicks disagrees with the administration's slow recognition of this enemy. In reality, this war is not as unique as some might think. It is a modern explosion of ancient religious ideologies that masks its historic roots. As Hicks points out, all major religions have used violence and terrorist methodologies at some points in their histories. Few Call It War reveals how the teachings of religious founders and the sacred writings attributed to them provide rich soil from which contemporary religious clerics and ideologues gain converts. Hicks raises the crucial question often asked: "Is there any difference between a Timothy McVeigh and an Osama bin Laden?" For those making the moral equivalence arguments between various terrorists, Hicks dispels the equivalence with a clear understanding of history and religious ideologies. If one is interested in gaining an answer to the question, "Of all the religions in the world, which are most prone to using violence?" Few Call It War provides a well-reasoned answer that is well worth the read.

Most Americans could not fathom how Islamic terrorists could bring down the World Trade Center or an army psychiatrist could turn on his own soldiers, taking their lives in the name of his religion. How could an ex-army veteran blow up a federal building, or a Jewish doctor gun down Muslims at worship? Or how can one understand why a meditation guru would put sarin gas in a Tokyo subway? None of these incidents fit our conceptions of the benevolence of religion. More importantly, is there something inherent within religions that justifies the taking of human lives? In Few Call It War, Dr. Robert Hicks explores these questions and takes the blinders off illuminating the roots of religious violence, what religious terrorists have in common, and how they differ. He focuses on the current administration's struggle to call ISIS or ISIL what it really is: War. Hicks disagrees with the administration's slow recognition of this enemy. In reality, this war is not as unique as some might think. It is a modern explosion of ancient religious ideologies that masks its historic roots. As Hicks points out, all major religions have used violence and terrorist methodologies at some points in their histories. Few Call It War reveals how the teachings of religious founders and the sacred writings attributed to them provide rich soil from which contemporary religious clerics and ideologues gain converts. Hicks raises the crucial question often asked: "Is there any difference between a Timothy McVeigh and an Osama bin Laden?" For those making the moral equivalence arguments between various terrorists, Hicks dispels the equivalence with a clear understanding of history and religious ideologies. If one is interested in gaining an answer to the question, "Of all the religions in the world, which are most prone to using violence?" Few Call It War provides a well-reasoned answer that is well worth the read.

After three hundred years, the Anglo-Scottish Union is in serious difficulty. This is not because of a profound cultural divide between England and Scotland but because recent decades have seen the rebuilding of Scotland as a political community while the ideology and practices of the old unionism have atrophied. Yet while Britishness is in decline, it has not been replaced by a dominant ideology of Scottish independence. Rather Scots are looking to renegotiate union to find a new place in the Isles, in Europe, and in the world.
There are few legal, constitutional or political obstacles to Scottish independence, but an independent Scotland would need to forge a new social and economic project as a small nation in the global market-place, and there has been little serious thinking about the implications of this. Short of independence, there is a range of constitutional options for renegotiating the Union to allow more Scottish self-government on the lines that public opinion seems to favor. The limits are posed not by constitutional principles but by the unwillingness of English opinion to abandon their unitary conception of the state. The end of the United Kingdom may be provoked, not by Scottish nationalism, but by English unionism.

" The three Kentucky presidents -- Abraham Lincoln, Zachary Taylor, and Jefferson Davis -- were profoundly shaped by their experiences in Kentucky, poised as it was on the border between the North and the South, the East and the Western Frontier. Holman Hamilton asserts that these leaders were personally and politically influenced by their connections to the state. The contrasting traits of western frontiersman and southern aristocrat illuminate Kentucky's heritage and affected Taylor, Lincoln, and Davis, presidents during one of America's most troubled eras. Frontier values influenced Lincoln's and Taylor's views on the major issues of their time: extension of slavery, which they opposed, and preservation of the Union, which they supported. Davis's career reflects Southern values, leading him to favor slavery's extension and the Confederacy.

The first book in the Cultural Margins series is a 1994 study of racism and homophobia in British politics, which demonstrates the demonisation of blacks, lesbians, and gays in New Right discourse. Anna Marie Smith develops theoretical insights from literary and cultural critics, including Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Hall, and Gilroy, to produce detailed readings of two key moments in New Right discourse: the speeches of Enoch Powell on black immigration (1968-72) and the legislative campaign of the late 1980s to prohibit the promotion of homosexuality. Her analysis challenges the silence on racism and homophobia in previous studies of Thatcherism and the New Right, and shows how demonisation of lesbians and gays depends on previous demonisations of black immigrant and criminal figures. Overall, this book offers a devastating critique of racism and homophobia in late twentieth-century Britain.

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.

The re-emergence of China as an economic superpower during its systemic transition is an astonishing phenomenon. China and Post-Socialist Development is the first comprehensive attempt to frame China's advancements within the context of the East Asian developmental miracle, against the background of post-socialist transformation, asking how has it happened and where does China go from here? In this book the author argues that as China transits from central planning to market, it tries to imitate the institutions and policies of Japan and South Korea during their high growth periods of the second half of the twentieth century. China's approach - broadly in opposition to the neo-liberal doctrine - has brought impressive results, leading the author to make important predictions about the future. This book is for everybody who is interested in China, development and post-socialist transformation.

Justice and Development Party (JDP), as the sole incumbent force for the last decade and a half, has proven to be an influential political actor with its power and capability to shape-shift the domestic and foreign policy of the Republic of Turkey. Within this context, this work analyses the transformation of the Turkish society through a constructivist perspective in the context of a "transformational shift" from the "traditional" experienced throughout the JDP tenure. JDP's "new" policy orientation is scrutinized through a constructivist lens to examine the entrenched "clash of identities" between the Islamists and the secularists in Turkish politics.

Market life is increasingly conducted in the shadow of global events like 9/11, the Sub-Prime crisis and Brexit. Within International political economy (IPE) two broad positions can be discerned: either the event is 'just an event', a superficial spectacle in an otherwise straightforward story of power and hierarchy; or the event is large enough to be considered a 'crisis'. While sympathetic to such arguments, this book develops a more performative politics of the global event, arguing that the very idea of the event must be placed in question. How is the event constructed? How are market subjects performed in relation to the event? This book argues that emotional and psychological discourses of 'trauma' and 'resilience' provide an important affective register for understanding how the global event is 'known', how it is governed, and how the affective dimensions of market life might be lived. By identifying the contingent rise of these discourses, the author de-stabilises and re-politicises the apparent existential veracity of the global event. The critical possibilities and limits of the affective turn in market life can then be rendered according to classic questions of IPE: who wins, who loses, and how might it be changed? An important work for advanced scholars and students of international political economy, 'everyday and cultural political economy', crisis and resilience, as well as broader debates on globalisation.

Organized around single country studies embedded in key historical moments, this book introduces students to the shifting and varied guerrilla history of Latin America from the late 1950s to the present. It brings together academics and those directly involved in aspects of the guerrilla movement, to understand each country's experience with guerrilla warfare and revolutionary activism. The book is divided in four thematic parts after two opening chapters that analyze the tradition of military involvement in Latin American politics and the parallel tradition of insurgency and coup effort against dictatorship. The first two parts examine active guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s with case studies including Bolivia, Nicaragua, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Part 3 is dedicated to the Central American Civil Wars of the 1980s and 1990s in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Part 4 examines specific guerrilla movements which require special attention. Chapters include Colombia's complicated guerrilla scenery; the rivalling Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrillas in Peru; small guerrilla movements in Mexico which were never completely documented; and transnational guerrilla operations in the Southern Cone. The concluding chapter presents a balance of the entire Latin American guerrilla at present. Superbly accessible, while retaining the complexity of Latin American politics, Latin American Guerrilla Movements represents the best historical account of revolutionary movements in the region, which students will find of great use owing to its coverage and insights.

This bold and unabashedly utopian book advances the thesis that Marx's notion of communism is a defensible, normative ideal. However, unlike many others who have written in this area, Levine applies the tools and techniques of analytic philosophy to formulate and defend his radical, political programme. The argument proceeds by filtering the ideals and institutions of Marxism through Rousseau's notion of the 'general will'. Once Rousseau's ideas are properly understood it is possible to construct a community of equals who share some vision of a common good that can be achieved and maintained through cooperation or coordination that is at once both voluntary and authoritative. The book engages with liberal theory in order to establish its differences from Rousseauean-Marxian political theory. This provocative book will be of particular interest to political philosophers and political scientists concerned with Marxism, socialist theory and democratic theory.

Multiple crises have led many to conclude that the current economic and political system is broken. The present and future look increasingly precarious - if not outright dystopian Stephen McBride calls for radical solutions to these crises to provide a more rational and sustainable future. He critiques other potential responses which would further curtail democracy and increase the inequalities associated with neoliberal globalism. Demonstrating how mainstream ideas, powerful interests and political institutions face major challenges but block progressive alternatives, he argues that for radical transformation to succeed, institutional changes are necessary.

The state of Israel was established in 1948 as a Jewish democracy without a legal separation between religion and the state. This state-religion tension has been a central political, social, and moral issue in Israel, resulting in a theocracy-democracy cultural conflict between secular Jews and the fundamentalist ultra-orthodox-Haredi-counter-cultural community in Israel. And one of the major arenas where such conflicts are played out is the media. An expert on the construction of social and moral problems, Nachman Ben-Yehuda examines more than 50 years of media-reported unconventional and deviant behavior by the Haredi community. He finds that not only have they increased over the years, but their most salient feature is violence. This violence is not random or precipitated by some situational emotional rage-it is planned and aims to achieve political goals. Using verbal and non-verbal violence in the forms of curses, intimidations, threats, setting fires, throwing stones, beatings, staging mass violations and more, Haredi activists try to drive Israel towards a more theocratic society. Most of the struggle is focused on feuds around the state-religion status quo and the public arena. Driven by a theological notion that stipulates that all Jews are mutually responsible and accountable to the Almighty, these activists believe that the sins of the few are paid by the many. Making Israel a theocracy will, they believe, reduce the risk of transcendental penalties. Like other democracies, Israel has had to face significant theocratic and secular pressures. The political structure that accommodates these contradicting pressures is effectively a theocratic democracy. Characterized by chronic negotiations, tensions, and accommodations, it is by nature an unstable structure. However, it allows citizens with different worldviews to live under one umbrella of a nation state without tearing the social fabric apart.

Our times are not just weird, but literally surreal: we live in a paranoid, increasingly authoritarian culture in which the real, the presumed and the purported are indistinguishable strands of a dense hallucinatory web of mediated spectacles. Surrealpolitik takes up cultural theorist Mark Fisher's challenge to expose capitalist realism's 'realism' as nothing of the sort. To subject the symbolic order to a surrealist mode of inquiry is to transgress taboos, reveal biases and inconsistencies, test assumptions and investigate the extent to which the real is, like our dreams - a fungible projection of our unconscious expectations. The nexus of dreams, hyperreality, paranoia, totalitarianism, terror, art, myth and culture is where realpolitik becomes the surrealpolitik of the title.

This new volume on Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification brings together several of the most prominent social and political psychologists who are responsible for the resurgence of interest in the study of ideology, broadly defined. Leading scientists and scholars from several related disciplines, including psychology, sociology, political science, law, and organizational behavior present their cutting-edge theorizing and research. Topics include the social, personality, cognitive and motivational antecedents and consequences of adopting liberal versus conservative ideologies, the social and psychological functions served by political and religious ideologies, and the myriad ways in which people defend, bolster, and justify the social systems they inhabit. This book is the first of its kind, bringing together formerly independent lines of research on ideology and system justification.

Gathering together essays by some of the most influential modern political philosophers and theorists, War, Peace, and International Political Realism reveals the twentieth-century roots of the realist tradition and demonstrates the enduring relevance of realist insights for current international relations scholarship and foreign affairs. These essays, all of which were published in The Review of Politics, the majority during the 1940s and 1950s, reflect four major tenets of the classical realist tradition: an obligation to confront large and difficult questions about international politics, a recognition of the fundamentally tragic nature of relations among humans and states, a rejection of historical optimism, and a belief in practical morality. Keir A. Lieber provides an excellent introduction emphasizing the importance of political realism as defined by the contributors. Students and scholars of political theory, international relations, and history will welcome having these important essays in one useful volume; they are just as applicable to contemporary foreign policy challenges as they were to the crises of post-World War II international politics.

In this volume, scholars from the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union trace the rise of new national movements in the Soviet Union and the political implications of the changing relationships between the subjects of the federation. The authors offer new arguments concerning the link between political structure and nationalism, finding that Soviet policies designed to eliminate national distinctiveness frequently had the unintended result of creating new national identities. With the adoption of perestroika and glasnost, such identities have become a potent political force, impelling the Soviet Union to grapple with the contradictions between regional sovereignty and territorial integrity. The contributors also show how, in the course of this struggle, the international system has often played a critical role. It has helped shape the aspirations of non-Russian nationalist movements, which often seek integration within the world even as they pursue independence from traditional imperialist orientations, adopting a more isolationist stance centered on the creation of a specifically Russian state.