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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
This is a story of insiders and outsiders. Author Christopher Merrett uses physical recreation as a lens through which to view the political, social, economic, and cultural history of the South African city of Pietermaritzburg. He traces successive ideologies of imperialism, colonial segregation, and apartheid to show how sport was used to keep communities apart. Sport in Pietermaritzburg was 'white sport.' After the imposition of legislation, access to recreation facilities became a powerful cause for the city's anti-apartheid coalition. Sport provided an opportunity, one of the few in a police state, for meaningful protest. Sport, Space and Segregation provides an insight into the psychology of racism.
This is the first book on U.S. policy in Angola during the 1980s. Elaine Windrich shows how the Reagan administration and U.S. media inflated the importance of Jonas Savimbi and helped inflame the civil war in Angola. Pinpointing media strengths and weaknesses in shaping and in reporting on a major crisis in Africa, this ground-breaking work analyzes Savimbi as a cold war guerrilla, the role of different media segments in the dirty war in Angola, and the right-wing influence of the Reagan and Bush administrations into the 1990s. This moving and well-researched account, providing insights into how the U.S. media covers African and Third World issues, is a good text for foreign correspondents and for courses dealing with U.S. foreign policy, journalism and communications, and with Africa. The image of the Angolan rebel leader as a freedom fighter is shown to be a product largely of the U.S. media and the collaboration of right-wing lobby groups closely linked to the Reagan and Bush administrations. The resurrection of Savimbi, who represented a lost cause after his defeat in the Angolan civil war in 1976, but who was kept alive by South African support, was due to his adoption by the Reagan administration as an ally in the crusade against Third World governments supported by the Soviet Union. The study shows how the mainstream media tended to follow the administration's agenda and right-wing views in portraying Savimbi as an ally. Windrich also explains how the Bush administration and the media have continued to support Savimbi and his rebel movement.
This book presents the raging debate on one of the most brutal political realities that India has confronted in recent years: the rising conflict between Maoist insurgent groups and the Indian State. With some of the finest writings on the subject, it brings together articles and interviews from leading authors, politicians, journalists, intellectuals, filmmakers and legal practitioners. The volume straddles between two apparently irreconcilable perspectives: (a) the view that the Maoist movement threatens the very core of democratic foundations, and should be perceived as a violent law & order situation justifying severe retaliatory measures, and (b) the counterview where Maoists are fiercely defended as revolutionaries and comrades of resistance, and the movement seen as the last-ditch struggle by those who have been abandoned over years by the State in its developmental process. The essays probe whether armed struggle is avoidable, whether the desperate desire for peace has simply been overtaken by political ideologies, and whether an inclusive developmental State policy may help restore faith in its democratic ethos. The book will be of interest to academics and students of politics, sociology, social anthropology and law. It will also be extremely useful to social workers, policymakers, politicians, bureaucrats, as well as the general reader.
Few empirical studies of Arab countries have dealt with political culture and political socialisation or focused on people's beliefs, values, and attitudes towards the government or political leaders, mainly because the regimes have been reluctant to allow opinion to be tested. The significance of this book is that it assesses the influence of state ideology on the new generation of Libyans, and examines their political culture.
This book explores one of the most serious strategic threats confronting the United States and Europe today: the advance of Islamism. Since September 11, Western governments have legitimized and empowered 'nonviolent Islamists' as representatives of Islam for all Muslims in the West, an approach that has worried Muslim moderates. "Citizen Islam" addresses the implications of this approach. This book opens with an overview of the theology and history of Islam, to show that violence and intolerance are not fundamental aspects for the religion. It then explains the growth of Islamism in Europe and in the United States before suggesting that both are finally beginning to recognize the threat posed by nonviolent Islamists. Lastly, it outlines steps that Western and Muslims leaders can take to strengthen moderate Islam and counter the threat of Islamism. Written by Zeyno Baran, a Turkish-born Muslim, "Citizen Islam" sheds a sharp light on Muslim communities in the West. It concludes that there is much that Western governments can still do to reverse the spread of Islamism. But they must act quickly.
‘Heavily sourced, crisply written and deeply alarming.’ The Times ‘This is a remarkable book with a chilling message.’ Guardian The Chinese Communist Party is determined to reshape the world in its image. Its decades-long infiltration of the West threatens democracy, human rights, privacy, security and free speech. Throughout North America and Europe, political and business elites, Wall Street, Hollywood, think tanks, universities and the Chinese diaspora are being manipulated with money, pressure and privilege. Hidden Hand reveals the myriad ways the CCP is fulfilling its dream of undermining liberal values and controlling the world.
A "highly readable and compelling" account (Science) of brainwashing’s pervasive role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries “Riveting. . . . Dimsdale . . . shows how the art of dark persuasion a generation ago led almost inevitably to today’s misinformation, cyberbullying and cultlike behavior on the Internet.â€â€”Dina Temple-Raston, Washington Post  This gripping book traces the evolution of brainwashing from its beginnings in torture and religious conversion into the age of neuroscience and social media. When Pavlov introduced scientific approaches, his research was enthusiastically supported by Lenin and Stalin, setting the stage for major breakthroughs in tools for social, political, and religious control.   Tracing these developments through many of the past century’s major conflagrations, Dimsdale narrates how when World War II erupted, governments secretly raced to develop drugs for interrogation. Brainwashing returned to the spotlight during the Cold War in the hands of the North Koreans and Chinese. In response, a huge Manhattan Project of the Mind was established to study memory obliteration, indoctrination during sleep, and hallucinogens. Cults used the techniques as well. Nobel laureates, university academics, intelligence operatives, criminals, and clerics all populate this shattering and dark story—one that hasn’t yet ended.
Despite South Africa's successful transition to democracy and lauded constitution, political freedom for the majority of South Africans remains elusive. The poor and unemployed majority are poorly represented and lack power and thus freedom. Under these conditions, the freedom of the privileged minority is also seriously impaired due to the costs of maintaining their relative security and well-being. Lawrence Hamilton is an internationally-known political theorist, who has spent ten years teaching in South African universities. In this unique book he brings ideas - political and philosophical - to the fore to understand a contemporary political conundrum. He outlines the persistent, unresolved problems characterizing contemporary South Africa: poverty and quality of life statistics that are appalling for a middle-income country, levels of inequality that make South Africa one of the most unequal places in the world, skewed economic and political representation that reproduces elites rather than generating opportunities for all and an electoral system that implements the idea of proportional representation so literally that it undermines meaningful representation. Are South Africans Free? aims not only to explain the current state of South Africa but to provide positive new directions and suggestions for institutional change. Hamilton argues that freedom as power in South Africa does not depend on good will, charity or duty, and it goes beyond the complete realization of the political and civil liberties currently safeguarded in its constitution. Such change will depend on courageous leadership, active citizenship, new forms of representation and a macroeconomic policy that offers radical redistribution of actual and potential wealth.
This book explores the connection between strong democracy and neoliberal development schemes based on the concept of 'social entrepreneurship' in Thailand and Southern India. With an original approach, this book addresses the intersection between emerging approaches to development; namely microfinance, microenterprise, and social entrepreneurship, and the ability of societies to generate their own public goods without state assistance. Utilizing observation, fieldwork, and practice in Northern Thailand and Southern India, as well as secondary sources from the southern Asia region more generally, the author examines the challenges of democratic governance and generation of public goods where civil society and democracy, as development strategies, have become less meaningful to citizens across the developing world than micro-development. The author argues that these approaches to development have impacts on development and civil society building, but do not necessarily amount to political empowerment, raising important questions for civic participation in the state when the state is no longer viewed as the locus of public goods and democratic governance. Presenting a new theoretical approach to understanding the changing paradigm of development and political participation, Democratic Governance and Social Entrepreneurship will be of interest to students and scholars of development politics, political economy and governance.
Marvel Comics has an established tradition of addressing relevant real-life issues facing the American public. With the publication of ""Civil War"" (2006-2007), a seven-issue crossover storyline spanning the Marvel universe, they focused on contemporary anxieties such as terrorism and threats to privacy and other civil liberties. This collection of new essays explores the ""Civil War"" series and its many tie-in titles from the perspectives of history, political science, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, law, philosophy and education. The contributors provide a close reading of the series' main theme - the appropriate balance between freedom and security - and discuss how that balance affects citizenship, race, gender and identity construction in 21st-century America.
The attitude we take to power is almost invariably one of distrust, never more so than when it claims to be sovereign. And yet, we have always been drawn to sovereignty. Out of fear or fascination, we accepted that it was a condition of our liberty; that to assert ourselves as free, we would have to work not against but through sovereign power. This book retraces the history of the implication of sovereignty and liberty, an implication that has shaped the way we live together, as individuals and as political beings. Shedding new light on the work of key political and constitutional thinkers, including Marsilius of Padua, Hobbes, Hegel, Kelsen, and Schmitt, it identifies the conceptual operations that created sovereignty and shows how subjection to an absolute and undivided power came to be a source of meaning. At the heart of the analysis is the idea that sovereignty made reference to and relied upon a form of faith which aligned man's political existence on law. Offering new and often controversial insights into the grounds of our attachment to sovereign power and into the crisis that is currently affecting its institutions, this book will appeal to students and scholars of law, politics, history of philosophy, and the social sciences.
This multidisciplinary edited volume explores how the spread of the 'War on Terror' has entwined matters of state sovereignty and states of war into mutually affecting relations. Pre-emptive attacks on terrorist groups in 'rogue' states, 'outsourcing' of state militancy and the mutable state of armed conflict required to wage a 'hybrid war' have increasingly been issues for the War on Terror. Moreover, such measures have seen the spread of this war to countries such as Israel, Russia, Ethiopia, and Uganda, all of whom have justified their own attacks in other nation-states as a war of 'self-defence' against terrorism. States of War since 9/11 offers a timely, innovative analysis of how the War on Terror has taken on different modes of militancy and militarisation in spreading to different nation-states and regions. Featuring a multidisciplinary line-up of eminent contributors, the book ranges in reference from the early stages of the war up to France's 2013 intervention in Mali. Part One examines the various modes of war and militarisation that have been employed in particular nation-states, including Afghanistan, Russia and Chechnya, and Israel and Palestine. Part Two examines how the war's innovations have more generally involved 'just war theory', biopolitics and sovereignty, networked battlespace, new military urbanism, citizenship, homeland security and surveillance. Overall, this book offers a fresh insight into how states have attempted to secure their own bounds by extending the boundaries of war itself. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, foreign policy and IR in general.
This book provides a qualitative analysis of post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategy undertaken by the United Kingdom and United States of America. Since 9/11, both the UK and the U.S have significantly revamped their counter-terrorism approaches. The approaches apply, to varying degrees, three key policy instruments - intelligence, law enforcement and military force. However, the success or failure of these counter-terrorism strategies has never been satisfactorily validated. Analysts and policymakers alike have assumed success due to the inability of terrorists to conduct 7/7 and 9/11, respectively, scale attacks upon each state. This assumption has existed despite the fact that it fundamentally underestimates the impact of transnational terrorism. This volume provides an in-depth qualitative assessment of the three primary policy instruments implemented to counter the transnational threat of terrorism during the period 2001-2011; an approach somewhat neglected by the current body of literature which focuses on a purely quantitative methodology. Drawing upon previously unpublished data collected from interviews with policymakers, specialists and academics, the book fills this lacuna by ascertaining and analysing both the UK's and USA's counter-terrorism strategies and developing a holistic approach to understanding these strategies. This book will be of interest to students of terrorism and counter-terrorism studies, security studies and IR in general.
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that improvements in the status of women and girls - however worthy and important in their own right - also drive the prosperity, stability, and security of families, communities, and nations. Yet despite many indicators of progress, women and girls everywhere - including countries of the developed world - continue to confront barriers to their full and equal participation in social, economic, and political life. Capturing voices and experiences from around the world, this work documents the modern history of the global women's movement - its many accomplishments and setbacks. Drawing together prominent pioneers and contemporary policymakers, activists, and scholars, the volume interrogates where and why progress has met resistance and been slowed, and examine the still unfinished agenda for change in national and international policy arenas. This history and roadmap are especially critical for younger generations who need a better understanding of this rich feminist legacy and the intense opposition that women's movements have generated. This book creates a clear and forceful narrative about women's agency and the central relevance of women's rights movements to global and national policy-making.. It is essential reading for activists and policymakers, students and scholars alike.
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that improvements in the status of women and girls - however worthy and important in their own right - also drive the prosperity, stability, and security of families, communities, and nations. Yet despite many indicators of progress, women and girls everywhere - including countries of the developed world - continue to confront barriers to their full and equal participation in social, economic, and political life. Capturing voices and experiences from around the world, this work documents the modern history of the global women's movement - its many accomplishments and setbacks. Drawing together prominent pioneers and contemporary policymakers, activists, and scholars, the volume interrogates where and why progress has met resistance and been slowed, and examine the still unfinished agenda for change in national and international policy arenas. This history and roadmap are especially critical for younger generations who need a better understanding of this rich feminist legacy and the intense opposition that women's movements have generated. This book creates a clear and forceful narrative about women's agency and the central relevance of women's rights movements to global and national policy-making.. It is essential reading for activists and policymakers, students and scholars alike.
Tibet has been occupied for over fifty years, yet no progress has been made in solving the Tibetan problem. The first serious analysis of the Tibetan independence movement, this book is also the first to view the struggle from a comparative perspective, making an overt comparison with the Indian independence movement. It rectifies the problem that the Tibetan independence movement is not taken seriously from a political perspective. The book is particularly concerned with the relationship between Buddhism and Tibetan politics and resistance, comparing this with the relationship between Hinduism and Gandhian political thought. It also expands on the limited literature concerning violent resistance in Tibet, examining guerilla warfare and the hunger strike undertaken by the Tibetan Youth Congress in 1998, rejecting the 'Shangri-la-ist' approach to Tibetan resistance.
America has lost its way. And America will fall-unless. Revolution? Oligarchy? Or homecoming? Americans are approaching a "zero hour" for the republic and its distinctive view of ordered freedom. America is caught between two revolutions and alternately suppresses and squanders freedom with a prodigal carelessness, with little understanding of the responsibilities that freedom requires. Os Guinness warns that if America abandons its distinctive ideals and ideas, we will have carved into the chronicles of history yet another example of the failure of a free society. Like other crucial times in world history, the present crisis is a "civilizational moment" and also a pivot point that could lead to national renewal. Outlining seven key foundation stones of freedom, Guinness lays out a pathway for defining and ordering freedom, righting national wrongs, and passing freedom's baton from generation to generation. Human freedom is precious and rare, and citizens who prize it must do what it takes to renew and sustain societies that are free for all of their members. America's window of opportunity is brief, and the alternative to renewal is bleak. The present moment must not be missed.
National intelligence cultures are shaped by their country's history and environment. Featuring 32 countries (such as Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Norway, Latvia, Montenegro), the work provides insight into a number of rarely discussed national intelligence agencies to allow for comparative study, offering hard to find information into one volume. In their chapters, the contributors, who are all experts from the countries discussed, address the intelligence community rather than focus on a single agency. They examine the environment in which an organization operates, its actors, and cultural and ideological climate, to cover both the external and internal factors that influence a nation's intelligence community. The result is an exhaustive, unique survey of European intelligence communities rarely discussed.
Hobbes on Legal Authority and Political Obligation develops a new interpretation of Hobbes's theory of political obligation. According to the account developed in the book, the directives issued by the sovereign as introducing authoritative requirements, so that subjects are morally obligated to obey them.
This book studies the role of the EU in peace and security as a regional actor with global aspirations, in the context of challenged and changing multilateralism. Multilateralism, governance and security are three concepts that have attracted a great deal of attention in the past decade and attempts to redefine them have produced lively conceptual debates. More recently, different strands of the literature have found common ground in the investigation of the EU's role in what has been labelled 'multilateral security governance'. Despite being frequently used, the term is yet to be fully clarified, and empirically explored. To contribute further our understanding of it, this book presents a conceptual and empirical exploration of 'multilateral security governance' and the EU's role in it. Expert contributors in the field analyze both traditional and non-traditional security areas, to investigate if and how multilateral security governance functions, and how the EU contributes (or fails to contribute) to the functioning of multilateral governance. The EU and Multilateral Security Governance will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of EU politics, security studies and governance.
Based upon a three-year multi-disciplinary international research project, "Political and Civic Participation" examines the interplay of factors affecting civic and political engagement and participation across different generations, nations and ethnic groups, and the shifting variety of forms that participation can take. The book draws upon an extensive body of data to answer the following key questions:
Together, the chapters in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of current understandings of the factors and processes which influence citizens patterns of political and civic engagement. The book draws on theoretical insights provided by a range of disciplines including Politics, Sociology, Social Policy, Psychology and Education. With contributions from leading international researchers, the book offers a uniquely authoritative and coherent overview of the field. The chapters also present a set of evidence-based recommendations for policy, practice and intervention that can be used by political and civil society actors to enhance levels of political and civic engagement, particularly among youth, women, ethnic minorities and migrants. " Political and Civic Participation" provides an invaluable resource for all those who are concerned with citizens levels of engagement including: researchers and academics in the social sciences; politicians and political institutions; media professionals; ministries of education, educational professionals and schools; youth workers and education NGOs; and leaders of ethnic minority and migrant organizations and communities."
Twenty years after NAFTA, the consensus seems to be that the regional project in North America is dead. The trade agreement was never followed up by new institutions that might cement a more ambitious regional community. The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), launched with some fanfare in 2005, was quietly discontinued in 2009. And new cooperative ventures like the US-Canada Beyond the Border talks and the US-Mexico Merida Initiative suggest that the three governments have reverted to the familiar, pre-NAFTA pattern of informal, incremental bilateralism. One could argue, however, that NAFTA itself has been buried, and yet the region somehow lives on, albeit in a form very different from regional integration in other parts of the world. A diverse group of contributors, from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with experience in academia, government service, think tanks and the private sector bring to bear a sophisticated and much needed examination of regional governance in North America, its historical origins, its connection to the regional distribution of power and the respective governments' domestic institutions, and the variance of its forms and function across different issue areas. The editors begin by surveying the literature on North American regional politics, matching up developments there with parallel debates and controversies in the broader literatures on comparative regional integration and international policy coordination more generally. Six contributors later explore the mechanisms of policy coordination in specific issue-areas, each with an emphasis on a particular set of actors, and with its own way of characterizing the relevant political and diplomatic dynamics. Chapters on the political context for regional policy coordination follow leading to concluding remarks on the future of North America. At a time when scholarly interest in North America seems to be waning, even while important and interesting political and economic developments are taking place, this volume will reinvigorate the study of North America as a region, to better understand its past, present and future.
This book traces the interplay between the public structuring and regulation of identities and the creative processes of collective identification, appropriation and evasion of identities. It deals with the ways in which individuals and social groups have developed and enacted identities as cultural resources with different degrees of public recognition and political legitimation, and how these identities have had an impact in defining the boundaries of social order and diversity.
Israel-Palestine in the Print News Media: Contending Discourses is concerned with conceptions of language, knowledge, and thought about political conflict in the Middle East in two national news media communities: the United States and the United Kingdom. Arguing for the existence of national perspectives which are constructed, distributed, and reinforced in the print news media, this study provides a detailed linguistic analysis of print news media coverage of four recent events in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in order to examine ideological patterns present in print news media coverage. The two news communities are compared for lexical choices in news stories about the conflict, attribution of agency in the discussion of conflict events, the inclusion or exclusion of historical context in explanations of the conflict, and reliance upon essentialist elements during and within print representations of Palestine-Israel. The book also devotes space to first-hand testimony from journalists with extensive experience covering the conflict from within both news media institutions. Unifying various avenues of academic enquiry reflecting upon the acquisition of information and the development of knowledge, this book will be of interest to those seeking a new approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. |
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