This comprehensive volume is the first systematic effort to explore the ways in which recognised states and international organisations interact with secessionist 'de facto states', while maintaining the position that they are not regarded as independent sovereign actors in the international system. It is generally accepted by policy makers and scholars that some interaction with de facto states is vital, if only to promote a resolution of the underlying conflict that led to their decision to break away, and yet this policy of 'engagement without recognition' is not without complications and controversy. This book analyses the range of issues and problems that such interaction inevitably raises. The authors highlight fundamental questions of sovereignty, conflict management and resolution, settlement processes, foreign policy and statehood. This book will be of interest to policy makers, students and researchers of international relations. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Ethnopolitics.

Conflict, Improvisation, Governance presents a carefully crafted and edited collection of first hand accounts of diverse public sector and non-profit urban practitioners facing the practical challenges of "doing democracy" in the global/local context of the interconnected major European city of Amsterdam and its region. The book examines street level democratic processes through the experiences of planning and city governance practitioners in community development, youth work, public service delivery, urban public administration, immigration and multi-cultural social policy. These profiles and case studies show widely shared challenges in global and local urban environments, and new, "bottom-up," democratic and improvisational strategies that community members and public officials alike can use to make more inclusive, democratic cities.

How have immigration and diversity shaped urban life and local governance? The Routledge Handbook to the Governance of Migration and Diversity in Cities focuses on the ways migration and diversity have transformed cities, and how cities have responded to the challenges and opportunities offered. Strengthening the relevance of the city as a crucial category for the study of migration policy and migration flows, the book is divided into five parts: * Migration, history and urban life * Local politics and political participation * Local policies of migration and diversity * Superdiverse cities * Divided cities and border cities. Grounded in the European debate on "the local turn" in the study of migration policy, as contrasted to the more traditional focus on the nation-state, the handbook also brings together contributions from North America, South America, Asia and the Middle East and contributors from a wide range of disciplines. It is a valuable resource for students and scholars working in political science, policy studies, history, sociology, urban studies and geography.

The importance of public opinion in the determination of public policy is the subject of considerable debate. Whether discussion centres on local, state or national affairs, the influence of the opinions of ordinary citizens is often assumed yet rarely demonstrated. Other factors such as interest group lobbying, party politics and developmental, or environmental, constraints have been thought to have the greater influence over policy decisions. Professors Erikson, Wright and McIver make the argument that state policies are highly responsive to public opinion, and they show how the institutions of state politics work to achieve this high level of responsiveness. They analyse state policies from the 1930s to the present, drawing from, and contributing to, major lines of research on American politics. Their conclusions are applied to central questions of democratic theory and affirm the robust character of the state institution.

Written by two of the most respected observers of New York City, this book is a comprehensive guide to city politics.

A pioneer in the field of Russian and Soviet studies in the West, Alfred J. Rieber's five decade career has focused on increasing our understanding of the Russian Empire from Peter the Great to the coming of the First World War. The Imperial Russian Project is a collection of Rieber's lifetime of work, focusing on three interconnected themes of this time period: the role of reform in the process of state building, the interaction of state and social movements, and alternative visions of economic development. This volume contains Rieber's previously published, classic essays, edited and updated, as well as newly written works that together provide a well-integrated framework for reflection on this topic. Rieber argues that Russia's style of autocratic governance not only reflected the personalities of the rulers but also the challenges of overcoming economic backwardness in a society lacking common citizenship and a cohesive ruling class. The Imperial Russian Project reveals how during the nineteenth century the tsar was obliged to operate within a changing and more complex world, reducing his options and restricting his freedom of action.

Once a group of young people (reformed street robbers) had a vision. To transform their poor divided community. But the vision was tarnished by harsh reality, violent feuds and factional strife, corrupt and ineffective leaders, and youths involved in networks of criminality.
LTarnished Vision is the story of the rise and fall of a utopian community project told against a background of crime and delinquency in a troubled neighbourhood. This vivid and authentic account of life in Satellite City' is set in the 1980s, a decade when the promises of the enterprise culture failed to deliver, and the conditions were created for a generation hooked on crime.
Tarnished Vision depicts the 1980s inner city cycle of social tragedy followed by inept societal response, followed by social tragedy. But this is not only a story for the 1980s. The message is that programmes to save the inner cities, however well-resoourced, cannot afford to ignore the destructive frustrations of urban male youths wh are involved in crime. Community action programmes can be no more than window dressing to camouflage these realities.

Since first publication in 1982, Howard Elcock's Local Government has established a reputation as a comprehensive and unbiased account of how British local government really works. This respected textbook has been completely revised and rewritten for its third edition, to take account of changes in local government and in the circumstances in which it operates. The third edition examines new management structures and accountabilities that follow the policy initiatives of the central Conservative administration. It appraises the impact of the three-pronged reform of the Thatcher years: impact on local authorities' financial resources, new structures of local government and new pressure to contract services out to the private and voluntary sectors.

This book studies how a modern monarchy transformed Bhutan into a parliamentary democracy. A political ethnography, it focuses on the historic elections of 2007-2008, and studies democracy and its transformational processes from the ground up. It draws on historical as well as contemporary theories about kingship and regime change to analyse Bhutan's nascent democratic process and reflect on the direction of political change, both at the state and local levels in the aftermath of the elections. It also presents insights into the electoral and political process by giving a first-hand account of the author's own participation in the elections and ponders on the larger political implications of this election for the region. A strong theoretical discussion situated in robust fieldwork and personal experience, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of politics, especially comparative politics and political institutions, South Asian and Himalayan Studies, political sociology and social anthropology.

Recent changes in public service industrial relations have created major public policy problems. This book introduces the main issues and theoretical perspectives of industrial relations in local government and the public services more generally. The problems of industrial relations are illustrated by case studies of a Thatcherite Conservative and a left-wing Labour Council in Britain. The author pays particular attention to the problems of sustaining management authority roles in elected public agencies. The series is designed to provide up-to-date comprehensive and authorative analyses of public policy and politics in practice and focuses on contemporary Britain. It embraces not only local and central government activity, but also central-local relations, public-sector/private-sector relations and the role of non-governmental agencies.

Local participation can and does influence the political process. Local Politics and Participation in Britain and France, first published in 1990, provides a unique comparative study of the involvement of average citizens in local politics and government between national elections. The work of Professor Mabileau and his colleagues will illuminate the nature of contemporary processes of participation at a time when the local level of government, administration and participation democracy are topics of renewed interest in all Western democracies. French and British teams explore the salient differences between the two local government systems - both of which have been reformed. Through a series of local case studies, they examine levels of individual and group participation, mobilisation into single-issue protest groups, links between councillors and the local electorate, and the importance of local context in participation patterns. Local Politics and Participation in Britain and France is a product of collaborative research carried out at the Universities of Manchester and Bordeaux. The results are based on surveys of ordinary people as well as on interviews with local leaders. They will be equally of interest to academics - students and specialists of British and French politics, local government, participation and democratic theory - and to local party workers and activists.

The last decade has seen an increase in political and ideological conflict in local government. This book analyzes this context and examines both the operation of elected local authorities and the rise of a non-directly elected local governement.

Increased flows of people, capital, and ideas across geographic borders raise urgent challenges to the existing terms and practices of politics. Comparative political theory seeks to devise new intellectual frames for addressing these challenges by questioning the canonical (that is, Euro-American) categories that have historically shaped inquiry in political theory and other disciplines. It does this byanalyzing normative claims, discursive structures, and formations of power in and from all parts of the world. By looking to alternative bodies of thought and experience, as well as the terms we might use to critically examine them, comparative political theory encourages self-reflexivity about the premises of normative ideas and articulates new possibilities for political theory and practice. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory provides an entry point into this burgeoning field by both synthesizing and challenging the terms which motivate it. Over the course of five thematic sections and thirty-three chapters, this volume surveys the field and archives of comparative political theory, bringing the many approaches to the field into conversation for the first time. Sections address geographic location as a subject of political theorizing; how the past becomes a key site for staking political claims; the politics of translation and appropriation; the justification of political authority; and questions of disciplinary commitment and rules of knowledge. Ultimately, the handbook demonstrates how mainstream political theory can and must be enriched through attention to genuinely global, rather than parochially Euro-American, contributions to political thinking.

This book analyses the process of reform that led to the formation of the London County Council; the forces that shaped it; and the role played by local and national politicians in its establishment. In the middle of the nineteenth century London was the world's largest city, and the Victorians were the first to face a task which has become familiar to other generations and other advanced societies - how to provide for its government. The divergent political and material interests within a metropolis have to be reconciled; where previously separate communities are joined together by the spread of the city, traditional local rivalries are likely to be deepened by the growing differentiation of rich and poor areas, and to take political shape. This fascinating account of the economic, social, and administrative complexities of Victorian London will appeal to all those interested in the intractable `metropolitan problem.'

Despite increasing interest in how involvement in local government can improve governance and lead to civic renewal, questions remain about participation's real impact. This book investigates participatory budgeting--a mainstay now of World Bank, UNDP, and USAID development programs--to ask whether its reforms truly make a difference in deepening democracy and empowering civil society. Looking closely at eight cities in Brazil, comparing those that carried out participatory budgeting reforms between 1997 and 2000 with those that did not, the authors examine whether and how institutional reforms take effect.
"Bootstrapping Democracy" highlights the importance of local-level innovations and democratic advances, charting a middle path between those who theorize that globalization hollows out democracy and those who celebrate globalization as a means of fostering democratic values. Uncovering the state's role in creating an "associational environment," it reveals the contradictory ways institutional reforms shape the democratic capabilities of civil society and how outcomes are conditioned by relations between the state and civil society.

The Context of Legislating provides a much-needed examination of how the rules, resources, and political conditions within and surrounding different institutions raise or lower the costs of legislating. Using data tracking over 1,100 legislators, 230 committees and 12,000 bills introduced in ten state lower chambers, Shannon Jenkins examines how political conditions and institutional rules and resources shape the arc of the legislative process by raising the costs of some types of legislative activity and lowering the costs of others. Jenkins traces these important contextual effects across the legislative process, examining bill introduction, committee processing and floor passage of bills in these legislatures. The analysis reveals that institutional variables shape the legislative process on their own, but they also have important interactive effects that shape the behavior of actors in these chambers. After tracing these effects across the legislative process, the book concludes by examining the practical implications of these analytical findings. How can the rules of institutions be designed to create effective legislatures? And what do these findings mean for those who seek to shape the policies produced by these institutions? Understanding of how the context of legislating shapes the outputs of legislatures is a critical element of understanding legislatures that has been sorely missing. An original and timely resource for scholars and students researching state legislatures and state politics.

There is often a moment in time that acts as a rallying point around a particular issue. 2015 was one of those moments for women, peace and security as numerous landmark anniversaries were celebrated in the field. Africa has, in many ways, been the global laboratory for the gender, peace and security agenda, not only because of the number of conflicts occurring on the continent but also because African regional organisations, governments and civil society organisations have been at the forefront of striving for gender equality and implementing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. This book explores gender, peace and security in Africa from multiple angles, including: the conceptual and implementation challenges and shifts around women, peace and security in Africa over the last 15 years; women’s role as combatants in national liberation forces in South Africa; the dynamics of gender in the military through the lens of Kenyan women combatants; food security through a feminist lens; and a series of case studies on the nexus between gender and security in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Somalia. This book was previously published as a special issue of the African Security Review.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Romi Sigsworth and Cheryl Hendricks

1. Women, peace and security in Africa Conceptual and implementation challenges and shifts

Cheryl Hendricks

2. The convergence and divergence of three pillars of influence in gender and security

’Funmi Olonisakin, Cheryl Hendricks and Awino Okech

3. Women combatants and the liberation movements in South Africa: Guerrilla girls, combative mothers and the in-betweeners

Siphokazi Magadla

4. Feminine masculinities in the military: The case of female combatants in the Kenya Defence Forces’ operation in Somalia

Mokua Ombati

5. Gender, feminism and food studies: A critical review

Desiree Lewis

6. A case study of gender and security sector reform in Zimbabwe

Netsai Mushonga

7. Women police in the Nigerian security sector

Tosin Akinjobi-Babatunde

8. Madagascar: Paving the way to national ‘fampihavanana’ and lasting peace

Gaby Razafindrakoto

9. Sexual and gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Yolanda Sadie

10. Kenya and Somalia: Fragile constitutional gains for women and the threat of patriarchy

Hawa Noor Mohammed

As recently as the mid-2000s, Catalonia was described and analysed by scholars as exhibiting a non-secessionist nationalism and was seen within Europe and beyond as a role model for successful devolution which had much to teach other parts of the world. The Spanish state seemed to be on a journey towards an authentic federal order and was generally admired. However, the new century has been marked by an ever-growing independence movement, with 47.8 per cent of Catalonia voting in favour of independence in September 2015. Pro-independence mobilization has produced a rupture in political relations with the rest of Spain leading to a sovereignty struggle with Madrid. This book explores how an accumulation of long-, medium- and short-term factors have produced the current situation and why the Spanish territorial model has been unable or possibly, unwilling, to respond. The Catalan question is not purely a Spanish problem: it has direct implications for the traditional nation-state model, in Europe and beyond.

Provides an in-depth assessment of the fiscal health of cities throughout the U.S. Analyzes patterns of fiscal health using a unique and most accurate data source, the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) survey Offers a solid basis of empirical evidence to help practitioners better understand the environment in which they are functioning and the policy tools they need to help advocate for change Covers trends and presents quantitative case studies

Who governs? And why? How do they govern? These remain vital questions in the politics of our small cities and towns. In this new book, author Daniel Bliss takes issue with those who believe that small towns and cities are fatally vulnerable to the pressures of a global economy. Based on in-depth analyses of small town America, this book demonstrates how political agency can address and solve real problems affecting US towns, including capital flight, industrial closures, and job losses. Bliss illustrates how small localities exercise choices - such as nurturing local businesses and developing infrastructure rather than engaging in a "race to the bottom," heavily mortgaging tax revenues to attract large box retailers and small box call centers while passively watching more productive firms and better-paying jobs slip away. Taking careful account of comparative literature as well as variations in city governments, their planning agencies, and their relations with state authorities, this book explores the ways in which local politicians and public planning bodies can mobilize local constituencies to weather global challenges and common structural problems such as unfavorable demographics, skill shortages and out-migration. Economic Development and Governance in Small Town America holds out the promise of meaningful democratic change even in unfavorable political and economic circumstances.

- Based on an empirical research project by experienced environmental health practitioners - Focuses on wider environmental health challenges in many developing countries - No published text currently available in this area

English local government is in a state of decline after 40 years of incremental but cumulative centralisation by central government. This book is the first to directly address this trend's impact upon the institution of local government, a crucial element in the democratic viability of a unitary state. The process of centralisation, and its corrosive effect on the status and responsibilities of local government, have been widely recognised and deplored among politicians and senior officers within local government, and by academics with an interest in this field. However, there has been no study exploring in detail its impact, and, equally important, suggesting ways in which the growing imbalance between the powers of central and local government should be rectified. This book fills this gap. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of local government, and more generally to those interested in what has been happening to British politics and governance.

The Sino-African Partnership portrays with rigor and clarity the relationship between China and Africa by delving into the geopolitical, geo-economic, and sociocultural dynamics that underlie the extensive and deepening "South-South" cooperation between the two. The analysis highlights China's role in the partnership by underscoring its geo-strategy, multidimensional approach, and the nature of its power projection in a continent of nation-states with differing geo-strategic importance and resource endowments. Supported by a rich texture of recent historical, political, and economic insights and interactions between China and Africa reflecting established knowledge, the book also delves deep into the impact on China of globalization imperatives following the end of the Cold War and its focus on ideological rivalry. Graduate and undergraduate students, China-Africa scholars, and general readers interested in a new perspective on the relationship between the two entities will find this essential and interesting reading. It is a unique and multidimensional examination of bilateral and multilateral cooperation, relationships, and profound development in global politics between two significant developing actors. There are new insights in this study into China's power projection into Africa and the global reactions spawned by its many activities.

American Indian nations are sovereign political entities within the United States. They have complex relationships with the federal government and increasingly with state governments. Regulatory conflict between Native nations and states has increased as Native nations have developed their own independent economies and some states have sought to assert their control over reservation territory. This book explores the intergovernmental conflict between Native nations and states, with a focus on the tension over the enforcement of state cigarette taxes for on-reservation sales. Anne F. Boxberger Flaherty asks: when do states and Native nations come to agreement, when do they disagree, and why are states sometimes willing to extend great efforts to assert their taxes on reservations? Flaherty uses a multi-method approach, with a historical review of expanding state involvement on reservations, a quantitative analysis of state enforcement of cigarette taxes on reservations, and a qualitative analysis of several specific case studies, including the potential for intergovernmental conflict over marijuana cultivation and sales on reservations to answer these questions. This book will be interest to scholars and researchers of Indigenous Politics, Native American Indian Politics, State Politics, and Intergovernmental Politics.

In City on the Line, former Baltimore budget director Andrew Kleine asks why the way government does its most important job - deciding how to spend taxpayer dollars - hasn't changed in hundreds of years. Parts memoir, manifesto, and manual, this book tells the story of Baltimore's radical departure from traditional line item budgeting to a focus on outcomes like better schools, safer streets, and stronger neighborhoods-during one of the most tumultuous decades in the city's history. Elected officials, executives, and citizens alike will be equipped to transform budgets in their city, state, or any other mission-driven organization.