Horizontal inequalities are root causes of violent conflict in Africa. Yet, people take actions not because of statistical data on inequalities, of which they might not be aware, but because of injustices they perceive. This volume analyses the results of original surveys with over 3,000 respondents in African cities and towns, exposing clear discrepancies between objective inequalities and people's subjective perceptions. The contributors examine experiences in country pairs and probe into the reasons why neighbouring countries, sharing common historical traits, sometimes took contrasting pathways of peace and violent conflict. Combining quantitative analysis and qualitative anatomy of historical experiences of conflict and reconciliation in Rwanda, Burundi, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria, the study brings forward a set of policy recommendations for development practitioners. This work further addresses the issue of institutional choice and reveals how sustainable power-sharing and decentralisation contribute to political stability in Africa.

This book assesses the effectiveness of Nigeria's counterterrorist policies against Boko Haram. It takes a critical review of the interventionist strategies adopted by the Nigerian government, highlights the motivations behind the choice of strategies, and proffers a deeper understanding of the factors responsible for the state's inability, thus far, to rid the country of terrorism. Specifically, it evaluates the NACTEST policy framework that guides the Nigerian state's counterterrorist strategies, which contains both hard and soft power approaches. Adopting historical and case study approaches which put the Nigerian state and occurrences of violent conflict in context, it takes cognizance of the politics of ethno-religious diversity which reinforce violent conflicts among groups and against the state, and reviews the socio-economic and political realities that led to the emergence and sustenance of Boko Haram. The volume concludes by suggesting practical policy options for combating Boko Haram and other similar armed insurrection. This book is appropriate for researchers and students interested in African politics, conflict, security, peace studies, terrorism, and counterterrorism, as well as policy makers and government departments dealing with terrorism and counterterrorism.

In the 1980s South Africa's urban townships exploded into insurrection led by youth and residents' organizations that collectively became known as the civics movement. Ironically the movement has been unable to adapt to the role of a voluntary association in the liberal polity it helped create, and has great difficulty defining any alternative role. This volume charts the rise and fall of the movement in the transition to and consolidation of democracy in South Africa.

Hudson explores the development of communists and other left forces, charting their survival and renewal after 1989. She shows how an open and democratic form of socialism has emerged which embraces environmental, gender and anti-war politics.

This volume offers scholarly perspectives on the creative and humorous nature of the protests at Gezi Park in Turkey, 2013. The contributors argue that these protests inspired musicians, film-makers, social scientists and other creative individuals, out of a concern for the aesthetics of the protests, rather than seizure of political power.

The so-called 'Cedar Revolution' in Lebanon, triggered by the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005, brought to an end three decades of Syrian military presence in the country. Here, Taku Osoegawa challenges the commonly-held claim that Lebanon and its leaders were simple puppets of the Syrian regime during the thirty years characterised as Lebanon under Syrian hegemony. Furthermore, by examining Lebanon's relations with Syria from the establishment of the Asad regime to the current violence in Syria, Osoegawa concludes that the Lebanese government has had its own reasons for aligning with Syria. As the Lebanese-Syrian relationship has had an enormous impact on the international relations of the Middle East, this book is essential reading for those interested in the contemporary regional dynamics.

This is a comprehensive exploration of theories of citizenship and inclusiveness in an age of globalization. The authors analyze democracy and the political community in a transnational context, using new critical, conceptual and normative perspectives on the borders, territories and political agents of the state.

Selected as one of the best books of 2002 by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Sun-Times

Within days after September 11, 2001, William Langewiesche had secured unique, unrestricted, round-the-clock access to the World Trade Center site. American Ground is a tour of this intense, ephemeral world and those who improvised the recovery effort day by day, and in the process reinvented themselves, discovering unknown strengths and weaknesses. In all of its aspects--emotionalism, impulsiveness, opportunism, territoriality, resourcefulness, and fundamental, cacophonous democracy--Langewiesche reveals the unbuilding to be uniquely American and oddly inspiring, a portrait of resilience and ingenuity in the face of disaster.

This book, which takes the form of a graphic novel, looks at political activism in the public landscape. It has a particular focus on the UK activist group Led by Donkeys which has, since late 2018, been running a campaign to expose hypocrisy in the political classes. Their approach to activism involves the use of large posters and other forms of public display, which highlight the gap between the rhetoric and actions of politicians, and how language and communication is used to manipulate opinion. The activism discussed in the book includes four major issues: Brexit, Trump, Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The book is both an innovative visual approach to the presentation of academic research and thought, and an exploration of how the linguistic landscape can be a key resource for the communication of political activism.

This book examines the ways in which decolonial theory has gained traction and influenced knowledge production, praxis and epistemic justice in various contemporary iterations of community psychology across the globe. With a notable Southern focus (although not exclusively so), the volume critically interrogates the biases in Western modernist thought in relation to community psychology, and to illuminate and consolidate current epistemic alternatives that contribute to the possibilities of emancipatory futures within community psychology. To this end, the volume includes contributions from community psychology theory and praxis across the globe that speak to standpoint approaches (e.g. critical race studies, queer theory, indigenous epistemologies) in which the experiences of the majority of the global population are more accurately reflected, address key social issues such as the on-going racialization of the globe, gender, class, poverty, xenophobia, sexuality, violence, diasporas, migrancy, environmental degradation, and transnationalism/globalisation, and embrace forms of knowledge production that involve the co-construction of new knowledges across the traditional binary of knowledge producers and consumers. This book is an engaging resource for scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and advanced postgraduate students who are currently working within community psychology and cognate sub-disciplines within psychology more broadly. A secondary readership is those working in development studies, political science, community development and broader cognate disciplines within the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

While much has been written on environmental politics on the one hand, and animal ethics and welfare on the other, animal politics is underexamined. There are key political implications in the increase of animal protection laws, the rights of nature, and political parties dedicated to animals.

This edited volume explores development in the so-called 'fragile', 'failed' and 'pariah' states. It examines the literature on both fragile states and their development, and offers eleven case studies on countries ranking in the 'very high alert' and 'very high warning' categories in the Fund for Peace Failed States Index.

This book provides a multidisciplinary commentary on a wide range of religious traditions and their relationship to acts of violence. Hate and violence occur at every level of human interaction, as do peace and compassion. Scholars of religion have a particular obligation to make sense out of this situation, tracing its history and variables, and drawing lessons for the future. From the formative periods of the religious traditions to their application in the contemporary world, the essays in this volume interrogate the views on violence found within the traditions and provide examples of religious practices that exacerbate or ameliorate situations of conflict.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com. This book studies the processes which lead to explosion of civil strife and tries to spell out the policy options available to address the challenges faced by post-conflict economies. It calls for a more integrated policy approach which can gradually repair trust in public institutions as it addresses the vulnerabilities and grievances that helped start the process. Usually, such societies do not have the luxury of meeting the goals of security, reconciliation and development in a measured or sequenced manner: to avoid an immediate return to violence they must begin the recovery process on all fronts simultaneously.

Development education is a radical form of learning that addresses the structural causes of poverty and injustice in the global North and South. This volume debates development education practice and the policy environment in which it is delivered. It affirmatively points to the transformative power of education as a means toward social change.

This volume addresses the proliferation of increasingly complex forms of violence, a situation now perceived to be both among the most pressing issues faced by Latin America in our times and a reality with multiple ramifications, marking the socio-political landscape of the region in decisive ways. With contributions by scholars from various fields (the social sciences, journalism, and the humanities), this book examines not only the manifestations and the effects of violence but also the social acts that surround it and make it meaningful. Violence appears here as a natural yet dramatic manifestation of how individuals organize themselves in contemporary Latin America.

This book lays out the foundation of a privacy doctrine suitable to the cyber age. It limits the volume, sensitivity, and secondary analysis that can be carried out. In studying these matters, the book examines the privacy issues raised by the NSA, publication of state secrets, and DNA usage.

This book examines how gendered agency emerges in peacebuilding contexts. It develops a feminist critique of the international peacebuilding interventions, through a study of transitional justice policies and practices implemented in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and local activists' responses to official discourses surrounding them. Extending Nancy Fraser's tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the book also advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognising women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes, are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialise before, during, and after conflict. This study establishes a new avenue of analysis for understanding responses and resistances to international peacebuilding, by offering a sustained engagement with feminist social and political theory.

The world of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) has dramatically changed during the last two decades. The author critically analyses the engagement of INGOs within the contemporary international development landscape, enabling readers to further understand INGOs involvement in the politics of social change.

This book examines memories of political violence in Chile after the 1973 coup and a 17-years-long dictatorship. Based on individual and group interviews, it focuses on the second generation children, adults today, born to parents who were opponents of Pinochets regime. Focusing on their lived experience, the intersection between private and public realms during Pinochet's politics of fear regime, and the afterlife of violence in the post-dictatorship, the book is concerned with new dilemmas and perspectives that stem from the intergenerational transmission of political memories. It reflects critically on the role of family memories in the broader field of memory in Chile, demonstrating the dynamics of how later generations appropriate and inhabit their family political legacies. The book suggests how the second generation cultural memory redefines the concept of victimhood and propels society into a broader process of recognition.

In a politically uncertain and distrusted world, citizens appear to be seeking political expression in their everyday lives and quite prominently in their consumption practices. In advanced consumer societies, the politics of consumption have come to the centre stage.
This book elaborates on the grounded perceptions, practices and problematizations of the equation of political action and market action. It presents the opportunities and hindrances of alternative forms of partaking in civic life by exploring how coffee activism presents a fruitful opportunity for citizens to participate in political life, how cultural citizenship can offer insights into the operation of everyday politics and how neoliberal narratives are framing discourses of coffee activism. The politics behind products can illuminate global tensions and engage citizens in social justice, but at the same time can confine civic action in the marketplace and anesthetise political action.

"A classic on post-Cold War Cuba. . . . Azicri evidences Cuba's expanding external relations with the papacy, the Economic Union, and Latin America and argues that Cuba has begun internal changes that could later create an all-national rather than a solely communist party. . . . This work is essential reading for D.C., Havana, and Miami--and is likely to anger all three."--"Choice"

"A masterful and provocative summary, analysis, and evaluation of political, economic, and cultural developments in Cuba, as well as the international relations of Cuba, in the tumultuous decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the process, Azicri gives a unique insight into how and why Cuban socialism, though greatly modified in the 1990s, continues to survive."--Sinan Koont, Dickinson College

Unlikely to gratify those with strong views on either side of the political divide, Azicri's study provides an intelligent, scholarly response to the current questions posed by the Cuban Revolution.

Covering the turbulent period of the 1990s, the book examines such issues as the impact on Cuba of the Soviet Union's collapse, the country's social malaise under economic scarcity, the reorganization of its economy, changes in its political system, problems in its relations with the United States, and the renaissance of Cuban religious life in the aftermath of the pope's visit.

Azicri offers an objectively researched study that addresses many of the assumptions made by partisan participants. Demonstrating how Cuba's ongoing reform process has allowed it to avoid the fate of other Soviet bloc regimes, he maintains that Havana has continually reinvented the nature of Cuban socialism. Drawing on original sources and scholarly studies from Cuba, the United States, and elsewhere, he argues that a more restrained and limited socialism is suitable to today's Cuba and explains why such a system probably will prevail beyond Castro.

Max Azicri, professor of political science at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, is the author of "Cuba: Politics, Economics and Society" and of numerous articles on Cuban politics, society, culture, and international relations.

Northern Ireland's Belfast Agreement has faced continual crises of implementation over a variety of security related issues. Too frequently analyses have neglected to study the wider changes that have occurred inside and outside Northern Ireland. These have had profound effects in changing attitudes towards violence, paramilitaries, the position of women and ideas of nationalism and sovereignty. This book places the implementation of the Belfast Agreement in a wider context to provide an analysis of why implementation has been so difficult.