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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the philosophy of John Stuart Mill has never been more relevant. Can we reconcile individual liberty with the demands of the common good? Mill's central concern was to modify the Utilitarian ethical theory of Jeremy Bentham and his father, James Mill, in a manner that would safeguard human rights. However, many philosophers - most notably John Rawls - have argued that Mill's attempt was either inconsistent or incoherent. This new reading of Mill defends him against these charges, and shows the value of his approach to the world we live in today. John Fitzpatrick argues that, properly understood, Mill's liberal utilitarianism can indeed support a system of rights rich enough to guarantee individual liberty. Combining fresh interpretations of Mill's writings on ethics, politics, and political economy with the historical Mill that can found in his autobiography, the book will be of substantial interest to a wide audience.
This book provides up-to-date coverage of the policies, strategies, and effects of suicide in war, examining this subject from societal and military perspectives to shed light on the justifications for using human beings as expendable weapons. Suicide warfare has expanded over the years and become a global phenomenon. In some parts of the world, it has become rooted in the fabric of society. Westerners often find it difficult to grasp why someone would be willing to sacrifice their life in order to take the lives of others. Suicide Warfare: Culture, the Military, and the Individual as a Weapon provides a thorough examination of the topic that enables readers to understand the justification for suicide warfare and better appreciate how the ideology of the individuals and organizations that resort to suicide warfare greatly complicates security issues in the 21st century. The book covers the policies, strategies, and effects of suicide in war, examining suicide warfare in its entirety from a theoretical standpoint, and then applying those theories to the actual manifestations of and politico-military responses to suicide warfare. The author discusses specific organizations such as Al Qaeda and the Chechen rebels, analyzing each within its societal context, military justification, individual motivation, and outcomes, and addresses principles of sociological and conflict theory to place suicide warfare in a clearer conceptual framework. The book presents case studies that allow readers to better understand abstract theories and make distinctions between individual cases of suicide warfare. Includes primary documents and statistical data Provides resources for further study
Does it really matter if a voter decides to vote-or, as a significant number of Americans do each election, not vote? Ron Hirschbein explores this issue and shows why enfranchisement cannot be understood unless it is placed in context and history. Clearly, the meaning of a vote depends upon the situation: a vote cast among the 400 of Athens or in the College of Cardinals has one significance; this is considerably different from pulling a lever every four years in a mass society of spectacles and commodities. Hirschbein also examines how voting was transformed from an expression of the political will of the Athenian polity into a sacred natural right-only to be turned to a ritual of mass society. First, Hirschbein looks at the right to vote as the centerpiece of American civic religion. He contrasts civic myths about enfranchisement with anthropological realities. Specifically he argues that, given the intractable mathematics of mass society, the chances that a single vote will determine the outcome of an election approach the infinitesimal. However, he suggests that voting plays a neglected ritual function by constructing, legitimizing, and celebrating political reality for players and spectators alike. Hirschbein then explicates the origins and evanescent meanings of enfranchisement by examining the theory and practice of voting among the citizenry of ancient Athens, medieval ecclesiastical bureaucrats, Enlightenment natural law thinkers, and the founders of the Virtuous Republic. He concludes with speculation about possible futures. A controversial and important analysis, this will be of interest to the general public as well as scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with election issues and theories of democracy.
While contemporary inquiries into the theoretical linkages between political economy and security are rare, the exploration of these connections was the cornerstone of political, social and economic philosophy during the upheavals of Enlightenment Europe. "A General Police System," a term borrowed from the late 18th century thinker Patrick Colquhoun, examines the overlapping genealogies of commerce, security, surveillance, and the problem of poverty in the works of foundational English and Continental intellectuals of the 17th to early 19th centuries. This book reviews and revives the epic project of police and critically examines the drive to classify, regulate and control populations, providing a renewed materialist contribution toward a critique of security.
Recognizing that the quality of governance is a crucial factor in the overall development of a country, experts on government ethics and law enforcement examine the principles that need to be applied to create more effective and efficient governments. While focusing on the approaches adopted by the City of New York, case studies from around the world are also given. As the essays make clear, it is difficult to over estimate the importance of authorities to set proper ethical standards and regulations while operating on the basis of transparency, predictability, and accountability. An important resource for scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with public administration issues.
On 7 March 2004, former SAS soldier and mercenary Simon Mann prepared to take off from Harare International Airport with a plane full of heavy weaponry and guns for hire. Their destination: Equatorial Guinea. Their intention: to remove one of the most brutal dictators in Africa in a privately organised coup d’etat. The plot had the tacit approval of Western intelligence agencies. It had the backing of a European government, and the endorsement of a former Prime Minister. Simon Mann had personally planned, overseen and won two wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. Everything should have gone right. Why, then, did it go so wrong? When Simon Mann was released from five years’ incarceration in some of Africa’s toughest prisons, he made worldwide headlines. Since then, he has spoken to nobody about his experiences. Now he is telling everything, including:
This book offers a comprehensive study of the dynamics of civil-military relations in Pakistan. It asks how and why the Pakistan military has acquired such a salience in the polity and how it continues to influence decision-making on foreign and security policies and key domestic political, social and economic issues. It also examines the changes within the military, the impact of these changes on its disposition towards the state and society, and the implications for peace and security in nuclearized South Asia.
This book examines the process of Spanish integration into the European Community, from 1962 when Spain under the Franco regime applied to the European Community to 1985, when democratic Spain became a member of the EEC. It aims to prove that, first the European Community was the crucial external factor determining political change in Spain, and secondly that Europeanism was a mechanism of political change, as it was the only aim which unified the whole political spectrum from the Francoist establishment to the democratic opposition.
Historians have exhaustively documented how African Americans gained access to electoral politics in the mid-1960s, but few have scrutinized what happened next, and the small body of work that does consider the aftermath of the civil rights movement is almost entirely limited to the Black Power era. In "Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics," George Derek Musgrove pushes much further, examining black elected officials' allegations of state and news media repression--what they called "harassment"--to gain new insight into the role of race in U.S. politics between 1965 and 1995. Drawing from untapped sources, including interviews he conducted with twenty-five sitting and former black members of Congress, Musgrove tells new stories and reinterprets familiar events. His cast of characters includes Julian Bond, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Alcee Hastings, Ronald Dellums, Richard Arrington, and Marion Barry, as well as white political figures like Newt Gingrich and Jefferson Sessions. Throughout, Musgrove con-nects patterns of surveillance, counterintelligence, and disproportionate investigation of black elected officials to the broader political culture. In so doing, he reveals new aspects of the surveillance state of the late 1960s, the rise of adversary journalism and good government reforms in the wake of Watergate, the official corruption crackdown of the 1980s, and the allure of conspiracy theory to African Americans seeking to understand the harass-ment of their elected leadership. Moving past the old debate about whether there was a conscious conspiracy against black officials, Musgrove explores how the perception of harassment shaped black political thought in the post-civil rights era. The result is a field-defining work by a major new intellectual voice.
The Spratly Islands have represented a potential political and military flashpoint in the South China Sea for years, involving as they do various claims by China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Taiwan. This edited volume examines the issues involved in light of confidence- building measures that new high-resolution satellite imagery can offer to this, and other, regions. Baker, Wiencek, and their contributors assess the potential role for cooperative monitoring in mitigating the risk of conflict arising from multinational disputes over the Spratly Islands. They analyze how this new generation of civilian and commercial observation satellites can be used to reduce the changes of armed conflict breaking out by providing transparency that will detect and identify politically significant activities occurring at disputed islands and reefs among the Spratlys. Of particular interest to policy makers, scholars, and other researchers involved with military issues in Asia and international security concerns.
What can be done to stop the declining numbers of women in law enforcement? If information is power, then Women Police: Portraits of Success could well reverse that trend. Author Patricia Lunneborg traveled from Anchorage to Brooklyn and points in between to conduct in-depth interviews with over 50 women officers, from small-town sergeant to the head of the Alaska State Patrol. What are their daily challenges and satisfactions? How do they balance work and family? What are their ideas for improving all aspects of the system--recruiting, training, retention, and promotion? Portraits is a powerful recruitment tool, an essential primer for women thinking about a job in law enforcement. really like, career counselors, police recruiters, and law enforcement agencies at city, state, and federal levels trying to attract more women to protect and serve. Written in a direct, personal style, this unique book belongs on library shelves in Career Counseling, Women's Studies, Society and Justice, Sociology. Where else can a woman learn if the police service is for her and the general public find out what the job is really about?
As Dan Nimmo notes in his introduction, Inside Political Campaigns "endeavors to trace the sources of professional campaign wizardry by encapsulating the theories and concepts that practitioners and scholars alike claim to guide and rationalize consultants' magical weaving of strategies, tactics, and techniques into a 'winning tapestry of political communication.'" This study presents the theoretical areas political communication consultants draw upon in making strategic and tactical decisions in political campaigns. And it provides an understanding of what motivates political consultants to choose a particular campaign strategy by explaining how various strategies work with the voting public. While the book is research-driven, its academic findings are tempered and expanded by the authors' personal political consulting experiences. The text will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners alike in political communication, advertising, public opinion, political science, political rhetoric, and campaigns and elections.
This innovative new text focuses on the politics of international security: how and why issues are interpreted as threats to international security and how such threats are managed. After a brief introduction to the field and its major theories and approaches, the core chapters systematically analyze the major issues on the contemporary international security agenda. Each is examined according to a common framework that brings out the nature of the threat and the responses open to policy makers. From war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, through environmental and economic crises, to epidemics, cyber-war and piracy, the twenty-first century world seems beset by a daunting range of international security problems. At the same time, the academic study of security has become more fragmented and contested than ever before as new actors, issues and theories increasingly challenge traditional concepts and approaches. This new edition has been heavily revised to discuss for the failings of the Obama admiration and its strategic partners on a number of different security issues, and the constant, evolving instances of turmoil the world has experienced since, whilst providing the skills students need to conduct their own research of international security issues occurring outside of this text, and for issues yet to occur. Cyber security, the 'Arab Spring' revolutions, the Ebola outbreak, and the refugee crisis are just some examples of the plethora of subjects that Smith analyses within this text. This textbook is an essential for those studying international security, whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level as part of a degree in international relations, politics, and other social sciences more generally. New to this Edition: - Chapter on cyber security - Up-to-date issues and field coverage - New 'mini-case studies' in each chapter - Updated analytical/pedagogical framework Pioneering framework for students to apply theory and empirical evidence correctly to tackle analytical and comparative tasks concerning both traditional and non-traditional security issues
Nine in ten Americans believe the media are biased. Trust in journalists ranks beneath that in lawyers, and even the media themselves regularly portray their own industry as slanted toward Democrats and liberals. These perceptions, however, do not coincide with reality, as David Niven reveals in his bold new take on an often-debated subject. "Tilt? The Search for Media Bias" presents the first comprehensive review of the charges, the evidence, and the effects, beginning with a simple but altogether overlooked premise: to measure media bias or fairness, one has to have a fair baseline with which to compare coverage. Using situations in which presidents, governors, mayors, and members of Congress from different political parties have produced the same results in office, "Tilt?" compares media coverage of Democrats and Republicans in situations in which they clearly deserved equal treatment. The lack of evidence for partisan media bias is only part of the story. The media cover allegations of bias as if their industry has already been tried and convicted, while the American people readily accepted the premise that their main sources of information are selfishly slanted toward reporters' personal political agendas. Niven's findings, unmistakable and consistent, reveal that when the output of politicians is the same, media coverage follows--a conclusion that is as provocative as it is timely and necessary.
In this penetrating study, Mohd Aarif Rather tackles the problem of the Kashmir Valley, one of the most complex situations in international politics, from the perspective of human security. The Kashmir conflict involves disputed borders between two nuclear power, India and Pakistan, and a local population that has become increasingly alienated from Indian federal rule. Kashmir has also witnessed intense militarization, resulting in various security issues, problematized identities, and disputed demarcation of frontiers. Unlike previous studies of the Kashmir conflict, Mapping Human Security Challenges departs from conventional analyses of security issues. This study moves our understanding of Kashmir to a grassroots level, and assesses the challenges posed by intensive militarisation to the ability (or inability) to lead a life as one wishes. The paradigmatic militarisation prevailing in the valley of Kashmir allows for an examination of the numerous challenges demanded by human security. Unexplored security issues frequently identified in the world today are thus central to this book.
In virtually all corners of the Western world, 1968 witnessed a highly unusual sequence of popular rebellions. In Italy, France, Spain, Vietnam, the United States, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and elsewhere, millions of individuals took matters into their own hands to counter imperialism, capitalism, autocracy, bureaucracy, and all forms of hierarchical thinking. Recent reinterpretations have sought to play down any real challenge to the socio-political status quo in these events, but Gerd-Rainer Horn's book offers a spirited counterblast. 1968, he argues, opened up the possibility that economic and political elites on both sides of the Iron Curtain could be toppled from their position of unnatural superiority to make way for a new society where everyday people could, for the first time, become masters of their own destiny. Furthermore, Horn contends, the moment of crisis and opportunity culminating in 1968 must be seen as part of a larger period of experimentation and revolt. The ten years between 1956 and 1966, characterised above all by the flourishing of iconoclastic cultural rebellions, can be regarded as a preparatory period which set the stage for the non-conformist cum political revolts of the subsequent 'red' decade (1966-1976). Horn's geographic centres of attention are Western Europe, including the first full examination of Mediterranean revolts, and North America. He placed particular emphasis on cultural nonconformity, the student movement, working class rebellions, the changing contours of the Left, and the meaning of participatory democracy. His book will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in this turbulent period and the fundamental changes that were wrought upon societies either side of the Atlantic.
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