![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
This book offers an assessment of the naval policies of emerging naval powers, and the implications for maritime security relations and the global maritime order. Since the end of the Cold War, China, Japan, India and Russia have begun to challenge the status quo with the acquisition of advanced naval capabilities. The emergence of rising naval powers is a cause for concern, as the potential for great power instability is exacerbated by the multiple maritime territorial disputes among new and established naval powers. This work explores the underlying sources of maritime ambition through an analysis of various historical cases of naval expansionism. It analyses both the sources and dynamics of international naval competition, and looks at the ways in which maritime stability and the widespread benefits of international commerce and maritime resource extraction can be sustained through the twenty-first century. This book will be of much interest to students of naval power, Asian security and politics, strategic studies, security studies and IR in general.
A Turk's discovery that Armenians once thrived in his hometown leads to a groundbreaking investigation into the local dynamics of genocide. UEmit Kurt, born and raised in Gaziantep, Turkey, was astonished to learn that his hometown once had a large and active Armenian community. The Armenian presence in Aintab, the city's name during the Ottoman period, had not only been destroyed-it had been replaced. To every appearance, Gaziantep was a typical Turkish city. Kurt digs into the details of the Armenian dispossession that produced the homogeneously Turkish city in which he grew up. In particular, he examines the population that gained from ethnic cleansing. Records of land confiscation and population transfer demonstrate just how much new wealth became available when the prosperous Armenians-who were active in manufacturing, agricultural production, and trade-were ejected. Although the official rationale for the removal of the Armenians was that the group posed a threat of rebellion, Kurt shows that the prospect of material gain was a key motivator of support for the Armenian genocide among the local Muslim gentry and the Turkish public. Those who benefited most-provincial elites, wealthy landowners, state officials, and merchants who accumulated Armenian capital-in turn financed the nationalist movement that brought the modern Turkish republic into being. The economic elite of Aintab was thus reconstituted along both ethnic and political lines. The Armenians of Aintab draws on primary sources from Armenian, Ottoman, Turkish, British, and French archives, as well as memoirs, personal papers, oral accounts, and newly discovered property-liquidation records. Together they provide an invaluable account of genocide at ground level.
The role and powers of nation states are a topic of increasing debate. The transfer of competencies upwards to supra-national organizations, sideways to quasi-autonomous actors, and downwards to sub-national authorities has rguably transformed both the structure and capacity of national governments. It is within this context that the concept of multi-level governance has emerged as an approach to understanding the dynamic inter-relationship within and between different levels of governance and government. Moreover, multi-level governance is frequently interpreted as a novel analytical framework with the capacity to challenge and refine traditionally dominant approaches. Multi-Level Governance analyses the ways in which the concept has been applied across different academic and policy territories. The future of nation states vis-a-vis sub-national and supra-national organizations and the increasing fluidity of political power is clearly a fundamental issue for scholars of politics and government. New analytical frameworks that eschew traditional disciplinary boundaries and epistemological positions are needed to comprehend the changing nature of governance. In this context, the volume undertakes a critical assessment of both the potentialities and the limitations of multi-level governance.
On his way into Parliament on 2 February 1990 FW de Klerk turned to his wife Marike and said, referring to his forthcoming speech: 'South Africa will never be the same again after this.' Did white South Africa crack, or did its leadership yield sufficiently and just in time to avert a revolution? The transformation has been called a miracle, belying gloomy predictions of race war in which the white minority went into a laager and fought to the last drop of blood. Why did it happen? Professor Welsh views the topic against the backdrop of a long history of conflict spanning apartheid’s rise and demise, and the liberation movement’s suppression and subsequent resurrection. His view is that the movement away from apartheid to majority rule would have taken far longer and been much bloodier were it not for the changes undergone by Afrikaner nationalism itself. There were turning points, such as the Soweto uprising of 1976, but few believed that the transition from white domination to inclusive democracy would occur as soon – and as relatively peacefully – as it did. In effect, however, a multitude of different factors led the ANC and the National Party to see that neither side could win the conflict on its own terms. Utterly dissimilar in background, culture, beliefs and political style, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk were an unlikely pair of liberators. But both soon recognised that they were dependent on each other to steer the transformation process through to its conclusion.
How the Chinese Communist Party maintains its power by both repressing and responding to its people Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivaled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone—it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. The Party and the People explores how this paradox has helped the CCP endure for decades, and how this balance has shifted increasingly toward repression under the rule of President Xi Jinping. Delving into the tenuous binary of repression and responsivity, Bruce Dickson illuminates numerous questions surrounding the CCP’s rule: How does it choose leaders and create policies? When does it allow protests? Will China become democratic? Dickson shows that the party’s dual approach lies at the core of its practices—repression when dealing with existential, political threats or challenges to its authority, and responsiveness when confronting localized economic or social unrest. The state answers favorably to the demands of protesters on certain issues, such as local environmental hazards and healthcare, but deals harshly with others, such as protests in Tibet, Xinjiang, or Hong Kong. With the CCP’s greater reliance on suppression since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, Dickson considers the ways that this tipping of the scales will influence China’s future. Bringing together a vast body of sources, The Party and the People sheds new light on how the relationship between the Chinese state and its citizens shapes governance.
"War and Drugs" explores the relationship between military incursions and substance use and abuse throughout history. For centuries, drugs have been used to weaken enemies, stimulate troops to fight, and quell post-war trauma. They have also served as a source of funding for clandestine military and paramilitary activity. From the Opium Wars through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, themes of colonialism, capitalism, and anticommunism have constructed the foundation for the current crisis of international drug trafficking and addiction. In addition to offering detailed geopolitical perspectives, this book explores the intergenerational trauma that follows military conflict and the rising tide of substance abuse among veterans, especially from the Vietnam and Iraq-Afghan eras. Addiction specialist Bergen-Cico raises important questions about the past and challenges us to consider new approaches in the future especially to that longest of U.S. wars: the erstwhile War on Drugs.
American Girls and Global Responsibility brings together insights from Cold War culture studies, girls' studies, and the history of gender and militarization to shed new light on how age and gender work together to form categories of citizenship. Jennifer Helgren argues that a new internationalist girl citizenship took root in the country in the years following World War II in youth organizations such as Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, YWCA Y-Teens, schools, and even magazines like Seventeen. She shows the particular ways that girls' identities and roles were configured, and reveals the links between internationalist youth culture, mainstream U.S. educational goals, and the U.S. government in creating and marketing that internationalist girl, thus shaping the girls' sense of responsibilities as citizens.
One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn, New York. The recipient, who didn't know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. This was Edward Snowden's box-printouts of documents proving that the US government had built a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people-and the friend on the end of this chain was filmmaker Laura Poitras. Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via a remarkably analog network, the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices (and the friends who received and ferried the box) got drawn into the Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players. Their initially stumbling, increasingly paranoid, and sometimes comic efforts to help bring Snowden's leaks to light, and ultimately, to understand their significance, unfold in an engrossing narrative that includes emails and diary entries from Poitras. This is an illuminating essay on the status of transparency, privacy, and trust in the age of surveillance.
Yevgeni Vladimirovich Brik and James Douglas Finley Morrison were central figures in what was considered one of the most important Cold War operations in the West at the time. Their story, which involves espionage, intelligence tradecraft, intelligence service penetrations, double agent scenarios, and betrayal, is a piece of Cold War intelligence history that has never been fully told. Yevgeni Brik was a KGB deep cover illegal who had been dispatched to Canada in 1951. He settled in Verdun, Quebec. He eventually became the KGB Illegal Resident where he had responsibility for running a number of agents, one of whom was working on the CF-105, Avro Arrow. In 1953, he fell in love with a married Canadian woman to whom he revealed his true identity. She persuaded him to turn himself in, which resulted in his becoming a double agent, working for Canada. He was later betrayed by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer, James Morrison, who sought money from the KGB to pay his debts. Brik was consequently lured back to Moscow in 1955, where he was arrested, and interrogated. Convicted of treason, a traitor's fate awaited him, predictable, grim and final. Incredibly, he reappeared at a British Embassy as an old man in 1992, seeking Canada's help. He was exfiltrated by a joint Canadian / British intelligence team which was headed by Donald Mahar. He was debriefed by Mahar for several months when they returned to Canada.
This book argues that terrorism in the modern world has occurred in four "waves" of forty years each. It offers evidence-based explanations of terrorism, national identity, and political legitimacy by leading scholars from various disciplineswith contrasting perspectives on political violence. Whether violence is local or global, it tends to be both patterned and innovative. It elicits chaos, but can be understood by the application of new models or theories, depending upon the methods and data experts employ. The contributors in this volume apply their experiences and studies of terrorists, mob violence, fashions in international and political violence, religion's role in terrorism and violence, the relationship between technology and terror, a recurring paradigm of terrorist waves, nation-states struggling to establish democratic/elective governments, and factions competing for control within states - in order to make sense of both national and international acts of political violence and to ask and answer some of the most disturbing questions these phenomena present. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism, religion and violence, nationalism, sociology, war and conflict studies and IR in general.
** Includes a New Postcript 'The Chilcot Report-Early Thoughts on Military Matters'** From 2001 Britain supported the United States in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 'Victory' in such conflicts is always hard to gauge and domestic political backing for them was never robust. For this, the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were held responsible, and paid the price, but the role played by the High Command in the Ministry of Defence also bears examination. Critics have noted that the armed services were riven by internal rivalry and their leadership was dysfunctional, but the truth is more complicated. In his book Elliott explores the circumstances that led to these wars and how the Ministry of Defence coped with the challenges presented. He reveals how the Service Chiefs were set at odds by the system, almost as rivals in the making, with responsibility diffuse and authority ambiguous. The MoD concentrated on making things work, rather than questioning whether what they were being asked to do was practicable.
Throughout history and across cultures, the spy chief has been a leader of the state security apparatus and an essential adviser to heads of state. In democracies, the spy chief has become a public figure, and intelligence activities have been brought under the rule of law. In authoritarian regimes, however, the spy chief was and remains a frightening and opaque figure who exercises secret influence abroad and engages in repression at home. This second volume of Spy Chiefs goes beyond the commonly studied spy chiefs of the United States and the United Kingdom to examine leaders from Renaissance Venice to the Soviet Union, Germany, India, Egypt, and Lebanon in the twentieth century. It provides a close-up look at intelligence leaders, good and bad, in the different political contexts of the regimes they served. The contributors to the volume try to answer the following questions: how do intelligence leaders operate in these different national, institutional and historical contexts? What role have they played in the conduct of domestic affairs and international relations? How much power have they possessed? How have they led their agencies and what qualities make an effective intelligence leader? How has their role differed according to the political character of the regime they have served? The profiles in this book range from some of the most notorious figures in modern history, such as Feliks Dzerzhinsky and Erich Mielke, to spy chiefs in democratic West Germany and India.
The line dividing public life and private behavior in American politics is more blurred than ever. When it comes to questions about sex, substance abuse and family life, anything goes on the political desk in many newsrooms, including uncorroborated hearsay disguised as news. But some stories still never make it into print or on the air. What are the rules for politicians and journalists in the aftermath of WashingtonOs biggest sex scandal? Peepshow looks behind the scenes at news coverage of political scandals, analyzing what gets reported, what doesnOt, and why. The authors talk with top news editors to get a fix on what will make the evening news and what weOre likely to read about in the next campaign season. The costs of todayOs politics-by-scandal are mounting, with disaffected voters, discouraged candidates, and a news corps distracted from policy issues and substantive debate. But the forces driving Oattack journalismO have as much to do with voters and candidates as they do with what the press is organized to report. Peepshow offers an alternative view of the prurient side of election coverage, helping newsroom decision-makers and campaign managers see through the inevitable scandals of election year 2000 and gain insight into presenting a politics of public trust. CASE STUDIES include: _ South Carolina Governor David BeasleyOs denial of an unsubstantiated extramarital affair; _ Georgia gubernatorial candidate Mike Bowers' admitted affair with his secretary; _ Reporting on rumors sparked by Texas Governor George W. BushOs admission that he was once Oyoung and irresponsible;O _ Congressional affairs involving Representatives Barr, Burton, Chenoweth, Hyde and Livingston; _ The divorces of Bob Dole and John McCain; _ The outing of Arizona Rep. Jim KolbeOs and the sexuality of other members of Congress and candidates; _ Mississippi Governor Kirk FordiceOs off-again, on-again divorce; _ Coverage of Colorado Governor Roy RomerOs OaffectionateO relationship with a top aide and adviser. _ Speaker Newt GingrichOs relationship with a Hill committee aide; _ Coverage of once and possible first ladies and the children of political figures, including Chelsea Clinton and Sarah Gore; _ Reporting on unfounded rumors about Representative Bill PaxonOs retirement.
* Mexico was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 by Choice Magazine. Bloodshed connected with Mexican drug cartels, how they emerged, and their impact on the United States is the subject of this frightening book. Savage narcotics-related decapitations, castrations, and other murders have destroyed tourism in many Mexican communities and such savagery is now cascading across the border into the United States. Grayson explores how this spiral of violence emerged in Mexico, its impact on the country and its northern neighbor, and the prospects for managing it. Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled in Tammany Hall fashion for seventy-nine years before losing the presidency in 2000 to the center-right National Action Party (PAN). Grayson focuses on drug wars, prohibition, corruption, and other antecedents that occurred during the PRI's hegemony. He illuminates the diaspora of drug cartels and their fragmentation, analyzes the emergence of new gangs, sets forth President Felipe Calderi1/2n's strategy against vicious criminal organizations, and assesses its relative success. Grayson reviews the effect of narcotics-focused issues in U.S.-Mexican relations. He considers the possibility that Mexico may become a failed state, as feared by opinion-leaders, even as it pursues an aggressive but thus far unsuccessful crusade against the importation, processing, and sale of illegal substances. Becoming a "failed state" involves two dimensions of state power: its scope, or the different functions and goals taken on by governments, and its strength, or the government's ability to plan and execute policies. The Mexican state boasts an extensive scope evidenced by its monopoly over the petroleum industry, its role as the major supplier of electricity, its financing of public education, its numerous retirement and health-care programs, its control of public universities, and its dominance over the armed forces. The state has not yet taken control of drug trafficking, and its strength is steadily diminishing. This explosive book is thus a study of drug cartels, but also state disintegration.
Lesbian and gay citizens today enjoy a much broader array of rights and obligations and a greater ability to live their lives openly in both the U.S. and Canada. However, while human rights protections have been exponentially expanded in Canada over the last twenty years, even basic protections in areas such as employment discrimination are still unavailable to many in the United States. This book examines why these similar societies have produced such divergent policy outcomes, focusing on how differences between the political institutions of the U.S. and Canada have shaped the terrain of social movement and counter-movement mobilization. It analyzes cross-national variance in public policies toward lesbians and gay men, especially in the areas of the decriminalization of sodomy, the passage of anti-discrimination laws, and the enactment of measures to recognize same-sex relationships.
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.
Americans care about the public value of moral habits. They like to see virtue rewarded and vice censured, appealing as this does to the nation's deep sense that one's success rests neither in money nor in power but in one's civility. In The Soul of Civil Society Don Eberly and Ryan Streeter look beyond such abstractions as the 'voluntary sector' and superficial communitarian solutions to civic anomie to identify the pivotal role played by local voluntary associations in a civil society. Not only important for the services they provide, these 'little platoons, ' as Edmund Burke labeled them, are the public incubators of a 'new' morality, their emphasis on civic engagement at the local level central to preserving America's democratic culture on the national and international stage. More than simply championing the promise of a social renaissance, The Soul of Civil Society is essential reading for those seeking to do battle with a culturally entrenched individualism that threatens the core of America's moral vitality
Lesbian and gay citizens today enjoy a much broader array of rights and obligations and a greater ability to live their lives openly in both the U.S. and Canada. However, while human rights protections have been exponentially expanded in Canada over the last twenty years, even basic protections in areas such as employment discrimination are still unavailable to many in the United States. This book examines why these similar societies have produced such divergent policy outcomes, focusing on how differences between the political institutions of the U.S. and Canada have shaped the terrain of social movement and counter-movement mobilization. It analyzes cross-national variance in public policies toward lesbians and gay men, especially in the areas of the decriminalization of sodomy, the passage of anti-discrimination laws, and the enactment of measures to recognize same-sex relationships. For political science, sociology, and queer studies alike, this book will prove vital as movements for lesbian and gay rights continue to recast the social landscape in North America and beyond.
Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the United States immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience. Sara L. McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in American asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender- and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to American national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization, and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality. Wide-ranging and rich with human detail, Gendered Asylum uses feminist, immigration, and legal studies to engage one of the hotly debated issues of our time.
Americans care about the public value of moral habits. They like to see virtue rewarded and vice censured, appealing as this does to the nation's deep sense that one's success rests neither in money nor in power but in one's civility. In The Soul of Civil Society Don Eberly and Ryan Streeter look beyond such abstractions as the "voluntary sector" and superficial communitarian solutions to civic anomie to identify the pivotal role played by local voluntary associations in a civil society. Not only important for the services they provide, these "little platoons," as Edmund Burke labeled them, are the public incubators of a "new" morality, their emphasis on civic engagement at the local level central to preserving America's democratic culture on the national and international stage. More than simply championing the promise of a social renaissance, The Soul of Civil Society is essential reading for those seeking to do battle with a culturally entrenched individualism that threatens the core of America's moral vitality.
The whole world knows the face of the young man with the bright black eyes. He is in the process of becoming an icon, a symbol, similar to the famous photo of Che Guevara. The face is that of Raif Badawi, who was nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. Arrested in Saudi Arabia, he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and 1000 lashes - a de facto death sentence. The woman who succeeded in getting such people as Barack Obama and Prince Charles to appeal personally to the Saudi King for Badawi's release is his wife, Ensaf Haidar, who began the campaign to free her husband with a self-painted poster in front of a small church in Sherbrooke, Canada. When Raif Badawi and Ensaf Haidar fell in love with each other as adolescents, they did so in violation of every moral precept in the strictly Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. During their clandestine love affair, the young couple had no idea that, more than a decade later, Ensaf's love for Raif would attract the attention of politicians from around the world as the blogger's wife now mobilises global public opinion in an effort to save her husband from murder at the hands of the Saudi judiciary. With a courage born of desperation, she is fighting from exile in Canada to secure the release of the father of her three children, and is bringing great pressure to bear on the murderous regime in her native country. Ensaf Haidar tells Raif's and her own story: the story of their shared liberal ideas and her fight for her husband's release.
This book explores the distortion of communication online, centered around the theory that the economic policy model of online media is primarily based on the systematic manufacture of dissent. Following the media criticism tradition of Habermas and Chomsky, among others, the book shows how anger can motivate news consumption as the principle of divide-and-rule in the online media of the 21st century is systematically applied. The author posits that media addiction increases interest, therefore deliberate distortion of facts and the manufacture of dissent provide the media with a larger audience and this becomes the business model. This insightful volume will interest researchers, scholars, and students of media economics, political economy of media, digital media, propaganda, mass communication, and media literacy.
For those living in the Soviet Union, Orwell's masterpieces, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were not dystopias, but accurate depictions of reality. Here, the Orwell scholar and expert on Russian politics, Masha Karp – Russian Features Editor at the BBC World Service for over a decade – explores how Orwell's work was received in Russia, when it percolated into the country even under censorship. Suggesting a new approach to the controversial ‘Orwell’s list’ of 1949, Karp puts into context the articles and letters written by Orwell at the time. She sheds light on how the ideas of totalitarianism exposed in Orwell’s writing took root in Russia and, in doing so, helps us to understand the contemporary political reality. As Vladimir Putin's actions continue to shock the West, it is clear we are witnessing the next transformation of totalitarianism, as predicted and described by Orwell. Now, over 70 years after Orwell's death, his writing, at least as far as Russia is concerned, remains as timely and urgent as it has ever been.
Winner of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equality Award at the Business Book Awards 2021 'Underpinned by scholarship...entertaining...Legrain's book fizzes with practical ideas.' The Economist 'The beauty of diversity is that innovation often comes about by serendipity. As Scott Page observed, one day in 1904, at the World Fair in St Louis, the ice cream vendor ran out of cups. Ernest Hami, a Syrian waffle vendor in the booth next door, rolled up some waffles to make cones - and the rest is history.' Filled with data, anecdotes and optimism, Them and Us is an endorsement of cultural differences at a time of acute national introspection. By every measure, from productivity to new perspectives, immigrants bring something beneficial to society. If patriotism means wanting the best for your country, we should be welcoming immigrants with open arms. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Web Services - Concepts, Methodologies…
Information Reso Management Association
Hardcover
R9,718
Discovery Miles 97 180
Demand-Driven Web Services - Theory…
Zhaohao Sun, John Yearwood
Hardcover
R8,817
Discovery Miles 88 170
Web-Based Services - Concepts…
Information Reso Management Association
Hardcover
R18,334
Discovery Miles 183 340
Web Technologies & Applications
Sammulal Porika, M Peddi Kishore
Hardcover
|