Power and Authority in Internet Governance investigates the hotly contested role of the state in today's digital society. The book asks: Is the state "back" in internet regulation? If so, what forms are state involvement taking, and with what consequences for the future? The volume includes case studies from across the world and addresses a wide range of issues regarding internet infrastructure, data and content. The book pushes the debate beyond a simplistic dichotomy between liberalism and authoritarianism in order to consider also greater state involvement based on values of democracy and human rights. Seeing internet governance as a complex arena where power is contested among diverse non-state and state actors across local, national, regional and global scales, the book offers a critical and nuanced discussion of how the internet is governed - and how it should be governed. Power and Authority in Internet Governance provides an important resource for researchers across international relations, global governance, science and technology studies and law as well as policymakers and analysts concerned with regulating the global internet.

This excellent reference source brings together hard-to-find information on the constituent units of the Russian Federation. The introduction examines the Russian Federation as a whole, followed by a chronology, demographic and economic statistics, and a review of the Federal Government. The second section comprises territorial surveys, each of which includes a current map. This edition includes surveys covering the annexed (and disputed) territories of Crimea and Sevastopol, as well as updated surveys of each of the other 83 federal subjects. The third section comprises a select bibliography of books. The fourth section features a series of indexes, listing the territories alphabetically, by Federal Okrug and Economic Area. Users will also find a gazetteer of selected alternative and historic names, a list of the territories abolished, created or reconstituted in the post-Soviet period, and an index of more than 100 principal cities, detailing the territory in which each is located.

The term multi-level governance (MLG) has emerged from its origins in EU studies in the early 1990s to become a commonly used description of politics and policy-making in a range of settings. This collection discusses seminal papers covering three waves of MLG scholarship; the first wave focuses largely on debates around Europe and the regions; the second on the nature and impact of MLG in wider settings (local, national and global) and the implications for accountability; and the third discusses MLG of different types and in new terrains (geographical or policy).

From monarchy to the world's first socialist state, from Communism to Capitalism, from mass poverty to Europe's new super rich, Russia has seen immense revolutions in just the past century, including purges, poisonings, famines, assassinations and massacres. In that time, it has also endured civil war, world war and the Cold War. But the extremes of Russian history are not restricted to the past 100 years. When Napoleon invaded in 1812, the Russians retreated, slashing and burning their own country and Moscow itself, rather than conceding defeat to Napoleon. They were victorious, but at immense cost. Russia's history is also spiked with mystery. Did Stalin shoot his wife? Who ordered the killing of Rasputin? Or the shooting of Anna Politkovskaya and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko or the Skripals in Salisbury, England? What involvement and influence did Russian intelligence have on the 2016 US Election? In addition, it is a history of appalling disasters, such as at the Chernobyl nuclear power station and the sinking of the Kursk submarine. Ranging from medieval Kievan Rus to Vladimir Putin, Dark History of Russia explores the murder, brutality, genocide, insanity and skulduggery in the efforts to seize, and then maintain, power in the Slav heartland. Illustrated with 180 colour and black-&-white photographs and artworks, Dark History of Russia is a fascinating, lively and wide-ranging story from the Mongol invasions to the present day.

Drawing on a unique interdisciplinary perspective, integrating work from translation studies and linguistics with political science and economics, and applying it to English and French versions of the same documents, this book calls attention to stark ideological differences across versions. This book sheds light on our increasingly globalized world by demonstrating the ways in which globalized discourse undergoes processes of depoliticization and marketization, in turn producing a trickle-down effect on individuals' personal identities.

This book examines the risks to freedom of expression, particularly in relation to the internet, as a result of regulation introduced in response to terrorist threats. The work explores the challenges of maintaining security in the fight against traditional terrorism while protecting fundamental freedoms, particularly online freedom of expression. The topics discussed include the clash between freedom of speech and national security; the multijurisdictional nature of the internet and the implications for national sovereignty and transnational legal structures; how to determine legitimate and illegitimate association online; and the implications for privacy and data protection. The book presents a theoretical analysis combined with empirical research to demonstrate the difficulty of combatting internet use by terror organizations or individuals and the range of remedies that might be drawn from national and international law. The work will be essential reading for students, researchers and policy makers in the areas of Constitutional law; Criminal Law, European and International law, Information and Technology law and Security Studies.

This volume covers a wide spectrum of governance issues relating to small states in a global context. While different definitions of governance are given in the chapters, most authors associate governance with the setting and implementation of policies aimed at managing a country or territory, and with the related institutional structures and interventions by political actors. Generally, good governance is associated with concepts such as policy effectiveness, accountability, transparency, control of corruption, encouragement of citizens' voice and gender equality-factors which are, in turn, linked with democracy. What emerges from the book is that the societies of small states are being re-shaped by various forces outside their control, including the globalization process and climate change, rendering their governance ever more complex. These problems are not solely faced by small states, but small country size tends to lead to a higher degree of exposure to external factors. The chapters are grouped into four sections broadly covering political, environmental, social and economic governance. Governance is influenced by many, often intertwined, factors; the division of the book into four parts therefore does not detract from the fact that governance is multifaceted, and such division was based on the primary focus of each particular study and its main disciplinary background. The expert authors have, moreover, used a variety of approaches in the studies, the subject of small states being well suited to scholarly work from different disciplines using qualitative, quantitative and mixed approaches to arrive at useful conclusions.

How we lost control of the internet-and how to win it back. The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. The Gentrification of the Internet argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people-not businesses-online.

Taking Members of the Israeli Knesset, MKs, as a case study, this book offers a comparative analysis of the role of Members of Parliament (MPs) in democracies around the world It is based on the author's own experience of working for the Knesset The book offers a comparative perspective on the MP role which will be relevant to parliamentary democracies globally The book is an innovative addition to scholarship on parliamentarism considering the centrality of MPs for a democracy's functioning This book will not only prove useful for scholars of Israeli governance and legislation but will also be of interest to scholars of parliamentarism and comparative legislative politics in general

This book explores the relevance of conspiracy theories in the modern social and political history of the Nordic countries. The Nordic countries have traditionally imagined themselves as stable, wealthy, egalitarian welfare states. Conspiracy theories, mistrust and disunity, the argument goes, happened elsewhere in Europe (especially Eastern Europe), the Middle East or in the United States. This book paints a different picture by demonstrating that conspiracy theories have always existed in the Nordic region, both as a result of structural tensions between different groups and in the aftermath of traumatic events, but seem to have become more prominent over the last 30 or 40 years. While the book covers events and developments in each of the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland), it is not a comparative country analysis. Rather, the book focuses on conspiracy theories in and about the Nordic region as a region, arguing that similarities in the trajectories of conspiratorial thinking are interesting to examine in cultural, social, and political terms. The book takes a thematic approach, including looking at states and elites; family, gender and sexuality; migration and the outside view on the Nordic region; conspiracy theories about the Nordic countries; and Nordic noir. This book will be of great interest to researchers on extremism, conspiracy theories and the politics of the Nordic countries.

* The book explores the politics and history of the Fifth Schedule areas in India, which are home to the adivasis or indigenous people * It analyses the theories of primitive accumulation and its relationship with democracy and the protection of rights * It will be of interest to researchers and students of political science, governance, development studies, sociology, minority and indigenous studies, and South Asian studies in the UK and US.

Based on mixed-methods research and ethnographic fieldwork at various sites in Italy, this book examines the relationship between expertise and activism in grassroots environmentalism. Presenting interviews with citizens, activists and experts, it considers activism surrounding infrastructure in urban areas, in connection with water management, transport, tour- ism and waste disposal. Through comparisons between different political environments, the author analyses the ways in which citizens, political activists and technical experts participate in using expertise, shedding light on the effects of this on the structure and composition of social movements, as well as the implications for the mechanisms of participation and the formation of alliances. Bridging the sociology of expertise and contentious politics, this study of the relationship between contentious expertise and democratic accountability shows how conflict transforms, rather than inhibits, expertise production into a 'contentious politics by other means'. As such, it will appeal to social scientists with interests in social movements, environmental sociology, science and technology studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

In few places, contends Professor Arango, do illusions obscure reality as they do in Spain. The Spaniard as well as the foreigner has believed and sustained the myths; the scholar as well as the poet. For the Spaniard, myth became the substitute for action in a world in which Spain was increasingly a nonparticipant. It replaced the reality of Spain

Power and Authority in Internet Governance investigates the hotly contested role of the state in today's digital society. The book asks: Is the state "back" in internet regulation? If so, what forms are state involvement taking, and with what consequences for the future? The volume includes case studies from across the world and addresses a wide range of issues regarding internet infrastructure, data and content. The book pushes the debate beyond a simplistic dichotomy between liberalism and authoritarianism in order to consider also greater state involvement based on values of democracy and human rights. Seeing internet governance as a complex arena where power is contested among diverse non-state and state actors across local, national, regional and global scales, the book offers a critical and nuanced discussion of how the internet is governed - and how it should be governed. Power and Authority in Internet Governance provides an important resource for researchers across international relations, global governance, science and technology studies and law as well as policymakers and analysts concerned with regulating the global internet.

Proposing a novel way to look at the consolidation of democratic regimes, this book presents important theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of democratic consolidation, legislative organization, and public opinion. Theoretically, Simone Wegmann brings legislatures into focus as the main body representing both winners and losers of democratic elections. Empirically, Wegmann shows that the degree of policy-making power of opposition players varies considerably between countries. Using survey data from the CSES, the ESS, and the LAPOP and systematically analyzing more than 50 legislatures across the world and the specific rights they grant to opposition players during the policy-making process, Wegmann demonstrates that neglecting the curial role of the legislature in a democratic setting can only lead to an incomplete assessment of the importance of institutions for democratic consolidation. The Power of Opposition will be of great interest to scholars of comparative politics, especially those working on questions related to legislative organization, democratic consolidation, and/or public opinion.

Hybrid forms of governance - where the central state authority does not possess a monopoly of violence and fails to exercise control - are not only an epiphenomena, but a reality likely to persist. This book explores this phenomenon drawing on examples from the Middle East and Africa. It considers the different sorts of actors - state and non-state, public and private, national and transnational - which possess power, examines the dynamics of the relationships between central authorities and other actors, and reviews the varying outcomes. The book provides an alternative view of the way in which governance has been constructed and lived, puts forward a conceptualisation of various forms of governance which have hitherto been regarded as exceptions, and argues for such forms of governance to be regarded as part of the norm.

This book studies the state of tribal education in India. India has the single largest tribal population in the world, yet the tribal community remains one of the most economically impoverished and marginalized groups in the country. The volume * Examines the educational status of the tribal population and studies developmental issues such as unemployment, illiteracy, caste discrimination, and inequality faced by the community. * Studies the implementation and execution of welfare schemes, initiatives, and reforms in place to tackle issues faced by tribal students and identifies loopholes in the various centrally sponsored schemes. * Emphasizes the importance of the Right to Education Act and presents policy implications for the educational uplift of India's very many millions of tribal people. A critical study of the Indian education system, this book will be indispensable to students and researchers of education, education policy, minority studies, indigenous studies, sociology of education, and South Asian studies.

Examines the sources behind state-local conflict to better understand where critical intergovernmental relationships may be breaking down Offers a framework for understanding possible sources behind state-local conflict, with a recognition that intergovernmental relationships have historical roots, are place-based, and dependent on context Defines the basic institutional structures and offices and addresses the intergovernmental legal environment Explores concrete issues that have become ensnared in intergovernmental conflict via case studies including environmental (plastic bags, climate change), social and constitutional (confederate statues, transgender bathrooms), and economic (living wage, affordable housing) to name a few Identifies solutions and policy tools that build upon the strengths of state and local governments, mitigate conflicts, and improve the quality of life for citizens

Among the significant repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic is escalating public questioning of the desirability and sustainability of the market economy and the societal role of business. These concerns are linked to merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, with significant disruptive consequences for stakeholder relationships and their management. This book explores these changes, moving away from the traditional focus on the financial and strategic aspects of M&A and its rational, technocratic approach. Viewing M&A activity as economic, political, and social (EPS) processes, Segal provides a dialectic understanding of stakeholder relationships around M&A activity and challenges the view that M&A activity is static, linear, and predictable. He develops a conceptual framework to enable practitioners, researchers and policymakers to identify, understand and address the stakeholder and management implications of M&A activity. This is applied to four case studies that make explicit how complex stakeholder relationships play out around M&A and how these power dynamics were managed with different balances. Useful for academics, researchers, managers, advisors, investors, analysts, and other stakeholders, this book highlights the need to understand the EPS implications and processes involved around M&A.

Technologies such as artificial intelligence have led to significant advances in science and medicine, but have also facilitated new forms of repression, policing and surveillance. AI policy has become without doubt a significant issue of global politics. The Global Politics of Artificial Intelligence tackles some of the issues linked to AI development and use, contributing to a better understanding of the global politics of AI. This is an area where enormous work still needs to be done, and the contributors to this volume provide significant input into this field of study, to policy makers, academics, and society at large. Each of the chapters in this volume works as freestanding contribution, and provides an accessible account of a particular issue linked to AI from a political perspective. Contributors to the volume come from many different areas of expertise, and of the world, and range from emergent to established authors.

This book examines the visual-sexual turn in social media discourses in the field of online activism with a particular focus on the extraordinary protest years of 2018-2020. Presenting a socially engaged theory of "tit-for-tat media" and including case-studies on activist movements such as the Euro-American alt-right, the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and revolutionary artists in China, this study reveals how visual cultures, including gendered or sexualized imagery, are utilized to influence public perception. By presenting in-depth explorations of online ethnography, interviews with activists and studies of the political histories and urban protests-environments, the volume uncovers how local artists, netizens and citizens are using media and digital imagery in contemporary activism. Covering a broad spectrum of social media content, from hyper-cute manga and cartoons to satirical pornography and sexualized hate-speech, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of media and communication studies, political communication, sexuality and gender studies.

Domingo explores the potential of cyber capabilities for small states in the Asia-Pacific, the most active region for cyber conflict. He develops a systematic explanation for why Brunei, New Zealand, and Singapore have developed or are developing cyber capabilities. Studies on cyber conflict and strategy have substantially increased in the past decade but most have focused on the cyber operations of powerful states. This book moves away from the prominence of powerful states and explores the potential of cyber capabilities for small states in the Asia-Pacific, the most active region for cyber conflict. It develops a systematic explanation of why Brunei, New Zealand, and Singapore have developed or are developing cyber capabilities despite its obscure strategic value. The book argues that the distribution of power in the region and a "technology-oriented" strategic culture are two necessary conditions that influence the development of cyber capabilities in small states. Following this argument, the book draws on neoclassical realism as a theoretical framework to account for the interaction between these two conditions. The book also pursues three secondary objectives. First, it aims to determine the constraints and incentives that affect the utilization of cyber capabilities as foreign policy instruments. Second, the book evaluates the functionality of these cyber capabilities for small states. Lastly, it assesses the implications of employing cyber capabilities as foreign policy tools of small states. This book will be an invaluable resource for academics and security analysts working on cyber conflict, military strategy, small states, and International Relations in general.

Images of striking COSATU workers, singing, marching and toyi-toying are a familiar sight for most South Africans and external observers of the country’s politics. Similarly, COSATU’s feisty general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi has become a household name, commanding respect and admiration among millions and loathing and fear among his enemies and those who are on the receiving end of his fiery political oratory.

But how much do we know about what COSATU workers think about their workplaces, their unions, politics and the economy? What influences COSATU members’ decisions to vote for a particular political party? Why has COSATU women members’ support for the ANC declined? Why do some union members think there may be good reasons to assault non-strikers and scabs during strikes? What do unionised workers think of service delivery and what role did they play in the recent spate of service delivery protests? These and many other questions are examined in this volume which is based on the fourth run of the COSATU Workers’ Survey conducted a few months before the 2009 elections.

Contrary to stereotypes reproduced in the media and other public platforms which portray trade union members as a herd led by all-powerful ‘union bosses’, COSATU’s Contested Legacy deftly presents a picture of a multifaceted organisation whose members are steeped in the traditions of internal democracy, leadership accountability and mandated decision-making. But these traditions are not static. They are fiercely contested among different groups and categories of union members – women and men; migrant and urban workers; skilled and unskilled workers; blue collar and white collar and professional workers; permanent and part-time and casual workers.