A natural hazard is a physical event but a disaster is a social and political phenomenon. Natural hazards are, for the most part, unavoidable and apolitical. However, they carry with them serious political, economic, and social consequences. Disasters also have adverse consequences on human rights standards. An understanding of the relationship between disasters and human rights outcomes requires knowledge of how disasters increase grievance and frustration, and impact the probability of contentious political behavior. To date, there has been little empirical or theoretical research on the specific circumstances under which disasters impact antigovernment political behavior, and even less is known of the causal chain between a natural disaster, protest activity, and human rights violations. In this book, Clair Apodaca maps a comprehensive causal model of the complex interactions between disasters and human rights violations. She claims that pre-existing inequalities and societal grievances turn a natural hazard into a disaster. A grievance-based theory of protests suggests that the underlying structural causes are social and economic group disparities, political exclusion, along with population pressures. To turn these all too common conditions into active political behavior requires a triggering event. When a damage-loss is the primary consequence of a disaster, the government and international community can compensate victims by providing rebuilding and reconstruction aid. However, when the disaster results in high numbers of fatalities, the government and international community cannot adequately compensate survivors for their losses. Grievances cannot be easily or effectively eliminated, and survivors and their supporters mobilize for change even if they are likely to face state repression. Clair Apodaca offers a unique contribution to our understanding of human rights violations. She effectively shows that there is a causal process between hazard events, protest activities, and government repression, a finding that is key to scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers working in this field.

This comprehensive study traces the transnationalization of activist networks, analyzing their changing compositions and characters and examining the roles played by the World Social Forum in this process. Comparing four of the largest global networks targeting the 'neoliberal triumvirate' of the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization: the Jubilee anti-debt campaigners Via Campesina peasant farmers Our World Is Not For Sale and the anarchistic Peoples' Global Action. Written by a scholar-activist, the book highlights that despite their diversity, these collective actors follow a similar globalizing path and that networks in which solidarity is based on a shared identity perceived as threatened by neoliberal change are gaining strength. Social forums are depicted as a fertile ground to strengthen networks and a common ground for cooperative action among them, but also a battleground over the future of the forum process, the global anti-neoliberal struggle, and 'other possible worlds' in the making. Global Activism will appeal to students and scholars interested in globalization, international relations, IPE and social movements.

Honest, objective, and informed political debates are all too rare in today's polarized and partisan climate. Public policy is increasingly driven by ideology while political spin, distortions, and even demonizing opponents by disseminating outright lies are routine practice from Washington to the local city council. Super-heated and hyper-partisan rhetoric, increasingly homogeneous political and ideological communities, and the public's spotty knowledge about our political system all undermine informed and considered responses to policy debates. This book identifies common areas of confusion or misunderstanding about our political system-clarifying many distortions of accepted history, constitutional law, economics, and science-to help readers distinguish documented facts from the different conclusions and interpretations that may be drawn from those facts. Sheila Suess Kennedy aims to create a more informed electorate and to better ground debates in fact, from Capitol Hill to the family dinner table. Talking Politics? What You Need to Know before Opening Your Mouth provides a solid starting point from which Americans can build more persuasive arguments for their preferred policies, whatever they may be, and will interest students of political science, civics, and history, from high school to undergraduates, and the general public interested in politics and informed discussion.

This timely and controversial book shows how crime, and the authorities' response to crime, became central to the peace process in Northern Ireland. At times, paramilitary activity threatened to destabilise the peace in Northern Ireland after 1998, but crime was central to maintaining capacity should the groups return to war. Over time, the reduction of crime was central to these groups' own attempts to reform and official judgements as to whether they were genuinely demobilising. The state's response to crime added controversy. Police reform produced the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the new Organised Crime Task Force signalled the importance of crime control, but the Assets Recovery Agency, supposedly the 'magic bullet' for organised crime, misfired. Law enforcement was also deeply affected by the British state's response to paramilitary crime. By 2007, peace was apparently secure and paramilitaries were 'de-criminalising', but this often chaotic process was marked with questions about the British state's adherence to the rule of law. Incorporating first-hand research in the PSNI, the book will be of interest to general readers and scholars of Irish Studies, criminology, and British and comparative politics. -- .

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.

What is symbolic representation? Since Hanna Pitkin's seminal The Concept of Representation, the symbolic has been the least studied dimension of political representation. Innovatively adopting a discursive approach, this book - the first full-length treatment of symbolic representation - focuses on gender issues to tackle important questions such as: What are women and men symbols of, and how is gender constructed in policy discourse? It studies what functions symbolic representation fulfils in the construction of gender, what social roles get legitimized in policy discourse, and how this affects power constellations, ultimately revealing much about the relation between symbolic, descriptive, and substantive representation. Emanuela Lombardo and Petra Meier draw on theories of symbolic representation and gender, as well as rich primary material about political debates on labour and care issues, partnership and reproductive rights, gender violence, and quotas. Using this original data, the authors show that reconsidering symbolic representation from a discursive perspective makes explicit issues of (in)equality embedded within particular constructions, as well as their consequences for political representation and gender equality. This important exploration raises relevant new questions regarding the representation of gender that form valuable contributions to the fields of political science, political theory, sociology, and gender studies.

Since ancient times the exercise of individual freedom has been inseparable from the expansion of the market, driven by the search for profit. This force, namely capitalism, has stimulated human aggression and creativity in ways that have produced immense benefits. As capitalism has broadened its scope in the epoch of globalisation, so these benefits have become even greater. Human beings have been liberated to an even greater degree than hitherto from the tyranny of nature, from control by others over their lives, from poverty, and from war. The advances achieved by the globalisation of capitalism have appeared all the more striking when set against the failure of non-capitalist systems of economic organisation. However, capitalist freedom is a two-edged sword.In the epoch of capitalist globalisation, its contradictions have intensified. It threatens to produce intense conflict over access to scarce resources.

Our world and the people within it are increasingly interpreted and classified by automated systems. At the same time, automated classifications influence what happens in the physical world. These entanglements change what it means to interact with governance, and shift what elements of our identity are knowable and meaningful. In this cyber-physical world, or 'world state', what is the role for law? Specifically, how should law address the claim that computational systems know us better than we know ourselves? Monitoring Laws traces the history of government profiling from the invention of photography through to emerging applications of computer vision for personality and behavioral analysis. It asks what dimensions of profiling have provoked legal intervention in the past, and what is different about contemporary profiling that requires updating our legal tools. This work should be read by anyone interested in how computation is changing society and governance, and what it is about people that law should protect in a computational world.

This volume examines the rationale, effectiveness and consequences of counter terrorism practices from a range of perspectives and cases. The book critically interrogates contemporary counter-terrorism powers from military campaigns and repression through to the prosecution of terrorist suspects, counter-terrorism policing, counter-radicalisation programmes, and the proscription of terrorist organisations. Drawing on a range of timely and important case studies from around the world including the UK, Sri Lanka, Spain, Canada, Australia and the USA, its chapters explore the impacts of counter-terrorism on individuals, communities, and political processes. The book focuses on three questions of vital importance to any assessment of counter-terrorism. First, what do counter-terrorism strategies seek to achieve? Second, what are the consequences of different counter-terrorism campaigns, and how are these measured? And, third, how and why do changes to counter-terrorism occur? This volume will be of much interest to students of counter-terrorism, critical terrorism studies, criminology, security studies and IR in general.

This volume explores the way governments endeavoured to build and maintain public support for the war in Afghanistan, combining new insights on the effects of strategic narratives with an exhaustive series of case studies. In contemporary wars, with public opinion impacting heavily on outcomes, strategic narratives provide a grid for interpreting the why, what and how of the conflict. This book asks how public support for the deployment of military troops to Afghanistan was garnered, sustained or lost in thirteen contributing nations. Public attitudes in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe towards the use of military force were greatly shaped by the cohesiveness and content of the strategic narratives employed by national policy-makers. Assessing the ability of countries to craft a successful strategic narrative, the book addresses the following key areas: 1) how governments employ strategic narratives to gain public support; 2) how strategic narratives develop during the course of the conflict; 3) how these narratives are disseminated, framed and perceived through various media outlets; 4) how domestic audiences respond to strategic narratives; 5) how this interplay is conditioned by both events on the ground, in Afghanistan, and by structural elements of the domestic political systems. This book will be of much interest to students of international intervention, foreign policy, political communication, international security, strategic studies and IR in general.

In The Blue Book of Freedom,"" R. J. Rummel asserts that democracy is the solution to the scourges that face the world. A student of war and peace for more than forty years, he has learned that democratic freedom provides a solution to the evils that have plagued mankind. ""The Blue Book of Freedom"" presents the results of his work in everyday language. The main points are: * Freedom is the way to economic and human security. * Free people never have famine. * Where people are free, political violence is minimal. * The more freedom a people enjoy, the less likely their government will murder them. * The less free the people in any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive any war between them will be. * To do away with famine, mass impoverishment, democide (the murder by a government of its own people), and war, promote freedom. * Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence and an antidote to war.""

An anthology of original essays, this book presents debates over practice, theory, and implementation of restorative justice. Attention is focused on the movement's direction toward a more holistic, community-oriented approach to criminal justice intervention.

After providing a history of the development of the juvenile court, this book explores some of the most important current controversies in juvenile justice. Original essays review major theories of juvenile delinquency, explore psychological and biological factors that may explain delinquent behavior, and examine the nexus between substance abuse and delinquency. A final chapter provides a comparative analysis.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the courtrooms of Nuremberg to the battlefields of the Gulf War, Undue Risk exposes a variety of government policies and specific cases, includingplutonium injections to unwilling hospital patients, and even the attempted recruitment of Nazi medical scientists bythe U.S. government after World War II.

'Impressive ... Fascinating' Sunday Times 'An authoritative history' Financial Times 'Gripping and richly researched' Rana Mitter A superb new history of the rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule. The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule are told with unique insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures and documents from archives in China and the West. The story sweeps the reader from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars of the 19th century to the age of globalisation and the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. It ends with the battle for democracy on the city's streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party. How did it come to this? We learn from private papers that Margaret Thatcher anguished over the fate of Hong Kong, sought secret American briefings on how to handle China and put her trust in an adviser who was torn between duty and pride. The deal they made with Beijing did not last. The Chinese side of this history, so often unheard, emerges from memoirs and documents, many new to the foreign reader, revealing how the party's iron will and negotiating tactics crushed its opponents. Yet the voices of Hong Kong people - eloquent, smart and bold - speak out here for ideals that refuse to die. Sheridan's book tells how Hong Kong opened the way for the People's Republic as it reformed its economy and changed the world, emerging to challenge the West with a new order that raises fundamental questions about progress, identity and freedom. It is critical reading for all who study, trade or deal with China.

The EU seeks to define a role for itself in power politics while remaining firm in its rejection of power politics. In order to make power compatible with the European project, EU debate has appended a number of progressive adjectives to the word "power," adjectives like "civilian" and "normative," among others. This book asks what is power, such that it can be modified, tamed, and modulated by adjectives, yet remain "powerful"? Loriaux passes EU debate on power through the mill of phenomenological and post-phenomenological analysis, juxtaposing it against writings by Machiavelli, Agamben, Thucydides, Nietzsche, Patocka, and Levinas. The book locates power in "power/play," the theatrical, staged representation of threat that generates aesthetic effect and undecidability. Power/play endows the word "power" with perlocutionary force, which the adjectives of EU "qualified" power actually enhance rather than moderate. Loriaux argues that EU discourse on power therefore risks inviting EU "exceptionalism," or risks lapsing into an expression of EU ressentiment, rather than advancing a new, progressive understanding of "power." If European Union is to remain steadfast in its opposition to power politics, it must represent itself as "anti-power." This book will be of interest to those who work in the area of EU foreign policy, as well as to those who have a more general theoretical interest in the concept of power.

This latest volume in the august Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change series carries on a long tradition of featuring only the best data-driven and multi-method research upon which useful theory can be painstakingly built. Part one focuses on old and new media platforms and their intersections with mobilization issues, highlighting protest websites and the US Tea Party movement. Part two investigates the roles elites play in advancing movement campaigns for increased rights and decreased inequalities in the US and Peru. The third section spotlights best and worst practices in conflict transformation and peacebuilding ventures in Croatia and Israel/Palestine, while the fourth section interrogates the use of consensus building processes in Local Social Forums and in the Occupy Movement. Finally, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Neil Smelser's A Theory of Collective Behavior, we close with a creative combining of Smelser's structural functionalist approach with social identity models for understanding crowd behaviors in the context of university party riots.

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.

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.