It is impossible to overstate the ways in which Claude Lefort has influenced democratic theorizing over the past three decades. With the impact he has had on some of the 20th and 21st Centuries most notable and important Political Theorists from Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe andSlavoj Zizek to Jacques Ranciere, Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen, Lefort's thought has become both radical and liberal democracy's obligatory reference and unparalleled knot of confluence. This volume brings together scholars from around the world and offers an engaging and comprehensive investigation of Lefort's intellectual dialogues and debates, his engagement with the most relevant global political events of the past decades, and his impact on current innovations in continental political and social theory. As a result this book a vital reference point for students and scholars of Claude Lefort as well as of radical and liberal democracy in general.

The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay explores how young adults in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay make sense of the 1970s socialist projects and the ensuing years of repression in their activism, film, and literature.

This book is an anthology of work by critical media scholars, media makers, and activists who are committed to advancing social justice. Topics addressed include but are not limited to international media activist projects such as the Right to Communication movement and its corollaries; the importance of listening and enacting policies that advance democratic media; regional and local media justice projects; explorations of the challenges the era of participatory media pose to public media; youth and minority media projects and activism; ethical dilemmas posed by attempts to democratize access to media tools; the continued marginalization of feminist perspectives in international policy venues; software freedom and intellectual property rights; video activism in both historical and contemporary contexts; internet strategies for defending dissenting voices; and five accounts by prominent scholar/activists of their lifelong struggles for media justice.

Contains a study of the CIA's relationship with Congress. It encompasses the period from the creation of the Agency until 2004, the era of the DCIs, the Directors of Central Intelligence. Includes black and white photographs, an index, and a bibliography.

This book challenges some of the most basic assumptions underpinning the growing interest in religion, including: that religion is increasing and secularisation is decreasing and that religion is the main component of identity for all minority ethnic people.

When a Turkish minister of culture declares that "the Turkish military is synonymous with Turkish national identity," the embedded assumptions cry out for investigation. Altinay examines how the myth that the military is central to Turkey's national identity was created, perpetuated, and acts to shape politics. This historical and anthropological investigation probes the genesis of the myth that the Turkish nation is a military nation, traces how the ideology of militarism has been actualized through education and conscription, and reveals the implications for ethnic and gender relations. Altinay sheds light both on the process of how national identities are constructed and on the deep roots of the challenges facing Turkey as it potentially moves from being a plural to a pluralistic society.

In France in an Era of Global War, scholars re-examine experiences of French politics, occupation, empire and entanglements with the Anglophone world between 1914 and 1945. In doing so, they question the long-standing myths and assumptions which continue to surround this period, and offer new avenues of enquiry.

Entries in this dictionary focus on the people, organizations, events, and ideas that have been significant in the slightly more than two centuries of political communication in this country. The intent is to highlight those events and ideas that still have significance today--thus from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the threshold of the 21st century.

The history of political communication and how that history has repeated itself is examined in this volume. Entries arranged from A to Z, deal with freedom of the press and the major threats to freedom of the press; successful and unsuccessful political campaigns, and the changes that have occurred in political communication as well as the tradition that has emerged in the slightly more than two centuries we have been engaged in it. By offering the reader insight into the evolution of political communication as an academic field, this reference will be useful to students and scholars in the disciplines of political science, political communication, mass communication, U.S. history, and related fields, as well as academic and selected public libraries.

Considering the question of how levels of security allow state power to be increased to the point at which it infringes essential civil liberties, this book explores the creeping power of the executive and the unfeasibility of widespread use of the Human Rights Act as a bulwark against the oppressive use of state power.

Since the end of the Pinochet regime, Chilean public policy has sought to rebuild democratic governance in the country. This book examines the links between the state and civil society in Chile and the ways social policies have sought to ensure the inclusion of the poor in society and democracy. Although Chile has gained political stability and grown economically, the ability of social policies to expand democratic governance and participation has proved limited, and in fact such policies have become subordinate to an elitist model of democracy and resulted in a restrictive form of citizen participation.

During the past forty years, there has been extraordinary growth in the impact of religion on nations all over the world. The number of religious adherents has spiked, their zeal has intensified, and their political influence has expanded dramatically. Religious zeal has become the single most significant cause of conflicts between nations and of power struggles within nations. In Theocracy: Can Democracy Survive Fundamentalism, author P. J. Tierney examines political efforts by fundamentalists, particularly in the United States. Drawing upon current events, history, psychology, ethics, and the Bible, Tierney delves into some of the excesses of contemporary Christian fundamentalism in its efforts to advance the vision of a form of American theocracy. This study- defines fundamentalism, particularly Christian fundamentalism;- differentiates fundamentalism from traditional Christian renditions;- explains fundamentalism's root causes, goals, and express strategies;- describes its political evolution;- identifies fundamentalism's departures from previous Christian efforts to influence society and government;- examines its efforts and their underlying motivations through several lenses, including history, psychology, political theory, ethics, logic, current events, and the Bible;- seeks to identify some of the excesses of the contemporary Christian fundamentalist approach; and- offers other options for people of faith.Tierney offers practical suggestions for coping with the inroads of fundamentalism in order to strengthen democracy within pluralistic American society. He presents a powerful argument for the separation of religion and politics.

What policy is best for the United States to reduce the threat of Islamic extremist terrorism? Recent American presidents have applied alternative conflict resolution approaches. Clinton practiced conflict avoidance, talking tough but rarely retaliating against anti-American terrorist attacks. G. W. Bush adopted a fighter approach and the Global War on Terrorism and military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq reflect this strategy. Obama introduced a third alternative: problem solving and extending peaceful overtures while keeping up resistance. Will the strategy succeed? Feste analyzes presidential rhetoric on counterterrorism policy through the lens of issue framing, enemy aggression, self -hardship, and victimization expressed in a variety of speeches delivered by these chief executives to highlight and compare their conflict resolution strategies.

An exploration of how political violence is constructed, this book presents the life stories of individuals once committed to political transformation through violent means in Portugal. Challenging simplistic conceptualisations about the actors of violence, this book examines issues of temporality, gender and interpersonal dynamics in the study of political violence. It is the first comprehensive case study of political violence in Portugal, based on the perspectives of former militants. These are individuals from different political spheres who became convinced that they could not be mere spectators of the circumstances of their times. For them, the only viable way of making a difference was through violent acts. Applying the Dialogical Self Theory to trace the identity positions underpinning their narratives, this book not only sheds light on radicalisation and deradicalisation processes at the individual level, but also on the meso- and macro-level contexts that instigate engagement with and encourage disengagement from armed organisations. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of critical terrorism studies, political violence, European history and security studies more generally.

Patrice Lumumba's legacy continues to fire the imagination of politicians, activists, and artists. But women have been missing from accounts of the Congo's decolonization. What new ideals of masculinity and femininity were generated in this struggle? Were masculinist biases re-inscribed in later depictions of the martyred nationalist? Through analysis of Lumumba's writings and speeches, the life stories of women activists, and literary and cinematic works, "Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba" challenges male-centered interpretations of Congolese nationalism and illustrates how generic conventions both reinforced and undercut gender bias in representations of Lumumba and his female contemporaries.

While many books detail how senators and representatives operate in Washington, this one describes how they stay in power. The congressional elections of 1998 were the most expensive in history. Incumbency reelection rates were 98.3 percent in the House and 89.7 percent in the Senate, and this was a typical outcome after Watergate-era campaign reforms supposedly "reduced" the influence of money in politics. From the unique vantage of credible citizen-candidates who ran against congressional incumbents from Massachusetts to Hawaii during the 1990s, "Against Long Odds" tackles the question of why incumbents nearly always win.

These citizen-challengers learned that the system is rigged against them. Incumbents prevail through a virtual monopoly on campaign cash, lavish congressional perks, local media and business backing, intimidation of their challengers' supporters, and sometimes outright dirty tricks. This is true for Republicans and Democrats; for conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike. This account details, as no other book has, how representatives and senators are zealous participants in a system that threatens to overturn the American traditions of free elections and the free exchange of ideas. Frustrated voters often complain that, no matter which party controls Congress, nothing ever really seems to change. Merriner and Senter explain why.

"Decades of research in both political science and psychology have demonstrated that external, environmental factors influence individuals' mental processes, especially as they relate to politics. Inasmuch as such factors vary systematically across racial and ethnic groups, the political psychology of these groups warrants study, hence, the objective of this volume. We have assembled a number of papers from both psychologists and political scientists in an effort to combine both disciplines' understanding of the psychological underpinnings of Blacks' orientation to the political world. Our goal is to take lessons learned from previous research and incorporate them into new theories and utilize new data sources in an effort to create a unified study of Black political psychology"--Provided by publisher.

This book argues that the gap between the official transparency rhetoric and the censorship reality has demonstrated the discrepancy between what the Party is and what it claims to be. Such a discrepancy is manifested by the reality that the reformed news industry, a hybrid of market-oriented commercialization and party-state control, has largely failed to deliver either the voice of the disenfranchised groups or the value of journalism. To observe the discrepancy, this book investigates the role of transparency in the Chinese news media. Media transparency, which goes beyond the issue of censorship and press freedom, has been undermined by the consensus reached between the party-state and the media on political and market control. It is this mutually accommodating and benefiting scheme between power and profits that has been hollowing out the substance of the transparency rhetoric and distorting the Marxist idea of press freedom as freedom for all. This book argues that the cause of such a gap between rhetoric and reality is rooted in the disjuncture of political representation of both the party-state and the profit-seeking media.

When it comes to politics, there are five goals that voters generally agree upon. We all want a say in how we're governed, to be treated equally, a safety net when times are hard, protection from harm and to be richer in the future. So, why does politics not deliver that?

The problem is each of these five goals results in a political trap. For example, we all want a say in how we're governed, but it's impossible to have any true 'will of the people'. And we want to be richer tomorrow, but what makes us richer in the short run makes us poorer over the long haul.

In Why Politics Fails, award-winning Oxford professor Ben Ansell draws on examples from Ancient Greece through Brexit to vividly illustrate how we can escape these traps, overcome self-interest and deliver on our collective goals. Politics seems to be broken, but this book shows how it can work for everyone.

Using original empirical data and critiquing existing research, Samia Bano explores the experience of British Muslim woman who use Shari'ah councils to resolve marital disputes. She challenges the language of community rights and claims for legal autonomy in matters of family law showing how law and community can empower as well as restrict women.

This book analyses the practice of virginity testing endured by South Asian women who wished to enter Britain between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, and places this practice into a wider historical context. Using recently opened government documents the extent to which these women were interrogated and scrutinized at the border is uncovered.

In today's global culture where the internet has established itself as a main tool of communication, the global system of economy and regulations, as well as data and decisions based on data analysis, have become essential for public actors and institutions. Governments need to be updated and use the latest technologies to understand what society's demands are, and user behavioral data, which can be pulled by intelligent applications, can offer tremendous insights into this. Application of Artificial Intelligence in Government Practices and Processes identifies definitional perspectives of behavioral data science and what its use by governments means for automation, predictability, and risks to privacy and free decision making in society. Many governments can train their algorithms to work with machine learning, leading to the capacity to interfere in the behavior of society and potentially achieve a change in societal behavior without society itself even being aware of it. As such, the use of artificial intelligence by governments has raised concerns about privacy and personal security issues. Covering topics such as digital democracy, data extraction techniques, and political communications, this book is an essential resource for data analysts, politicians, journalists, public figures, executives, researchers, data specialists, communication specialists, digital marketers, and academicians.