The rhetoric of heroism pervades politics. Political leaders invoke their own heroic credentials, soldiers are celebrated at sporting events, ordinary citizens become state symbols (or symbols of opposition), and high profile celebrities embody a glamorized, humanitarian heroism. Using analytical tools drawn from international relations, gender studies, war studies, history, and comparative politics, this book examines the cultural and political phenomenon of heroism and its relationship to the process of creating, sustaining and challenging political communities. Arguing that heroism is socially constructed and relational, the contributors demonstrate that heroes and heroic narratives always serve particular interests in the ways that they create and uphold certain images of states and other political communities. Studying the heroes that have been sanctioned by a community tells us important things about that community, including how it sees itself, its values and its pressing needs at a particular moment. Conversely, understanding those who are presented in opposition to heroes (victims, demonized opponents), or who become the heroes of resistance movements, can also tell us a great deal about the politics of a state or a regime. Heroes are at once the institutionalization of political power, and yet amorphous--one can go from being a hero to a villain in short order. This book will appeal to scholars and students working on topics related to international relations, gender, security and war studies, comparative politics, state building, and political communities.

This book analyzes the unique psychological appeal of the airship worldwide and shows how this appeal was exploited for ulterior political purposes. They were used by Count Zeppelin to advance German militarism, American Admiral Moffett to fight US Army aviation ambitions, British Lord Thomson to foster Socialism and strengthen Empire ties, Mussolini to promote Italian Fascism, Stalin to foster world Communism, and Hitler to promote Nazi ideology. As airships roamed worldwide, they carried these political influences with them.

He Liyi belongs to one of China's minorities, the Bai, and he lives in a remote area of northwestern Yunnan Province. In 1979 his wife sold her fattest pig to buy him a shortwave radio. He spent every spare moment listening to the BBC and VOA in order to improve the English he had learned at college between 1950 and 1953. For "further practice," he decided to write down his life story in English. Humorous and unfiltered by translation, his autobiography is direct and personal, full of richly descriptive images and phrases from his native Bai language. At the time of He Liyi's graduation, English was being vilified as the language of the imperialists, so the job he was assigned had nothing to do with his education. In 1958 he was labeled a rightist and sent to a "reeducation-through-labor farm." Spirited away by truck on the eve of his marriage, Mr. He spent years in the labor camp, where he schemed to garner favor from the authorities, who nevertheless shamed him publicly and told him that all his problems "belong to contradictions between the people and the enemy." After his release in 1962, the talented Mr. He had no choice but to return to his native village as a peasant. His stratagems for survival, which included stealing "nightsoil" from public toilets and extracting peach-pit oil from thousands of peaches, personify the peasant's universal struggle to endure during those difficult years. He Liyi's autobiography recounts nearly all the major events of China's recent history, including the Japanese occupation, the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949, Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the experience of the labor camps, and changes brought about by China's dramatic re-opening to the world since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, No other book so poignantly reveals the travails of the common person and village life under China's tempestuous Communist government, which He Liyi ironically refers to as "Mr. China." Yet he describes his saga of poverty and hardship with humor and a surprising lack of bitterness. And rarely has there been such an intimate, frank view of how a Chinese man thinks and feels about personal relationships, revealed in dialogue and letters to his two wives. He Liyi's autobiography stands as perhaps the most readable and authentic account available in English of life in rural China. He Liyi's previous book is The Spring of Butterflies (London and New York, 1985), a translation of Chinese folk tales.

What do we really know about public opinion polls? Are they as flawed as conventional wisdom implies? How accurate are the polls, really? How can we spot a bad poll? Why do politicians and journalists have a love-hate relationship with polls? How do polls help us interpret history? Why has public opinion polling become so popular in other countries?In the 2000 national elections $100 million was spent on campaign polling alone. A $5 billion industry from Gallup to Zogby, public opinion polling is growing rapidly with the explosion of consumer-oriented market research, political and media polling, and controversial Internet polling. By many measures--from editorial cartoons to bumper stickers--we hate pollsters and their polls. We think of polling as hopelessly flawed, invasive of our privacy, and just plain annoying. At times we even argue that polling is illegal, unconstitutional, and downright un-American. Yet we crave the information polling provides. What do other Americans think about gun control? School vouchers? Airline performance? Or the Yankees' chances for winning another World Series? Pollsters consult with jurists on the best venue for a controversial criminal trial. They advise car manufacturers on which paint colors to use for a new model. They guide city councils in how to divide public funding across competing priorities.Ken Warren closes this book with an especially candid report card on how 13 major pollsters fared in predicting the November 2000 presidential contest and how pollsters fared in making 136 projections in congressional and gubernatorial races across the United States. Despite the wild swings of the political season most pollsters were remarkably accuratein forecasting the results. Based on extensive interviews with major pollsters and a wide examination of current polling practices and results, "In Defense of Public Opinion Polling" argues strongly that well conducted scientific polls are not only accurate, but are valuable tools in understanding society and promoting its own best interests. This book is perfectly suited for courses in communications, and political psychology.

This book examines citizens' attitudes about sexual harassment in the #MeToo era, seeking to determine how much these attitudes may have changed over the past few years. Using an innovative experimental research design, the authors look at how people react to allegations of harassment made against a fictional member of Congress. They consider whether those reactions vary with the offender's party affiliation, gender, and response to the allegations. Appropriate for students, scholars, and general readers alike, this book offers a timely analysis of an important political issue.

How racism and discrimination have been central to democracies from the classical period to today As right-wing nationalism and authoritarian populism gain momentum across the world, liberals, and even some conservatives, worry that democratic principles are under threat. In The Spectre of Race, Michael Hanchard argues that the current rise in xenophobia and racist rhetoric is nothing new and that exclusionary policies have always been central to democratic practices since their beginnings in classical times. Contending that democracy has never been for all people, Hanchard discusses how marginalization is reinforced in modern politics, and why these contradictions need to be fully examined if the dynamics of democracy are to be truly understood. Hanchard identifies continuities of discriminatory citizenship from classical Athens to the present and looks at how democratic institutions have promoted undemocratic ideas and practices. The longest-standing modern democracies -France, Britain, and the United States-profited from slave labor, empire, and colonialism, much like their Athenian predecessor. Hanchard follows these patterns through the Enlightenment and to the states and political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he examines how early political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries, devised what Hanchard has characterized as "racial regimes" to maintain the political and economic privileges of dominant groups at the expense of subordinated ones. Exploring how democracies reconcile political inequality and equality, Hanchard debates the thorny question of the conditions under which democracies have created and maintained barriers to political membership. Showing the ways that race, gender, nationality, and other criteria have determined a person's status in political life, The Spectre ofRace offers important historical context for how democracy generates political difference and inequality.

In theory, parliamentary elections are a contest between political parties whose leaders do not have a separate identity from their party in the public eye. This case study of Britain shows that this theory no longer holds; the dynamics of parliamentary elections have become more 'presidential' in the sense that the leaders of the major parties now figure more prominently on both media coverage of the campaign and in the party that voters choose at the polls. The implications for our understanding of parliamentary democracy are discussed.

Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations brings together a diverse array of critical IR scholars, political theorists, critical security studies researchers, and critical geographers to provide a series of interventions on the topic of death and death-making in global politics. Contrary to most existing scholarship, this volume does not place the emphasis on traditional sources or large-scale configurations of power/force leading to death in IR. Instead, it details, theorizes, and challenges more mundane, perhaps banal, and often ordinary modalities of violence perpetrated against human lives and bodies, and often contributing to horrific instances of death and destruction. Concepts such as "slow death," "soft killing," "superfluous bodies," or "extra/ordinary" destruction/disappearance are brought to the fore by prominent voices in these fields alongside more junior creative thinkers to rethink the politics of life and death in the global polity away from dominant IR or political theory paradigms about power, force, and violence. The volume features chapters that offer thought-provoking reconsiderations of key concepts, theories, and practices about death and death-making along with other chapters that seek to challenge some of these concepts, theories, or practices in settings that include the Palestinian territories, Brazilian cities, displaced population flows from the Middle East, sites of immigration policing in North America, and spaces of welfare politics in Scandinavian states.

How do governments that do not enjoy formal diplomatic relations use propaganda? When a government is denied recognition by the international community, it must explore every avenue of publicity available to project its image and policies. For such actors, propaganda can become diplomacy out of necessity. The Republic of China on Taiwan is such a government, and its predicament is the subject of this book. It discusses the relationship between diplomacy and propaganda from an exciting new perspective, illustrated by a fascinating case-study.

This book provides a comprehensive interpretation of the multiple manifestations of populism using Italy, the only country amongst consolidated constitutional democracies in which populist political forces have been in government on various occasions since the early 1990s, as the starting point and benchmark. Populism is a complex, multi-faceted political phenomenon which redefines many of the essential characteristics of democracy; participation, representation, and political conflict. This book considers contemporary versions of populism that pose a real challenge to representative and constitutional democracy. Contributors provide an integrative interpretation of populism and analyse its principal historical, social and politico-legal variables to provide a multi-dimensional reflection on the concept of populism, comprehensive analysis of the populist phenomenon and a theoretical and comparative perspective on the diverse political experiences of populism. Based on conceptual and interdisciplinary reflections from expert authors, this book will be of great interest to scholars and post-graduate students of cultural studies, European studies, political sociology, political science, comparative politics, political philosophy, and political theory with an interest in a comparative and interdisciplinary theory of populism and its manifestations.

This edited volume traces the rise of far right vigilante movements - some who have been involved in serious violence against minorities, migrants and other vulnerable groups in society, whereas other vigilantes are intimidating but avoid using violence. Written by an international team of contributors, the book features case studies from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, and Asia. Each chapter is written to a common research template examining the national social and political context, the purpose of the vigilante group, how it is organised and operates, its communications and social media strategy and its relationship to mainstream social actors and institutions, and to similar groups in other countries. The final comparative chapter explores some of the broader research issues such as under which conditions such vigiliantism emerges, flourishes or fails, policing approaches, masculinity, the role of social media, responses from the state and civil society, and the evidence of transnational co-operation or inspiration. This is a groundbreaking volume which will be of particular interest to scholars with an interest in the extreme right, social movements, political violence, policing and criminology.

This book examines the present and future of televised election debates, from the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debate of 1960 to the age of digital interactive multimedia. A number of contributors, from various perspectives - debate producers, participants and pundits - and from a variety of countries - Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, UK, Israel - discuss the significance of TV debates in what is the first international study of this important political phenomenon.

Polls are conducted every day all around the world for almost everything (especially during elections). But not every poll is a good one. A lot depends on the type of questions asked, how they are asked and whether the sample used is truly representative. And these are not the only aspects of a poll that should be checked. So how does one separate the chaff from the wheat? That's where Understanding Public Opinion Polls comes in. Written by a well-known author with over thirty years of experience, the book is built around a checklist for polls that describes the various aspects of polls to pay attention to if one intends to use its results. By comprehensively answering the questions in the checklist, a good idea of the quality of the poll is obtained. Features: Provides readers with a deeper understanding of practical and theoretical aspects of opinion polls while assuming no background in mathematics or statistics Shows how to determine if a poll is good or bad Provides a historical perspective and includes examples from real polls Gives special attention to online and election polls The book gives an overview of many aspects of polls - questionnaire design, sample selection, estimation, margins of error, nonresponse and weighting. It is essential reading for those who want to gain a better understanding of the ins and outs of polling including those who are confronted with polls in their daily life or work or those who need to learn how to conduct their own polls.

This volume examines how religion is intrinsically related to politics in India. Based on studies from states across the length and breadth of India, it looks at political formations that inform political discourse on the national level and maps the trajectory of religion in politics. The chapters in this volume: discuss contemporary trends in Indian politics, including Hindutva, citizenship bills and mob violence; draw on fieldwork conducted across states and regions in India on critical themes, including the role of religion in electoral process, political campaigns and voting behaviour, political and ideological mobilization, and state politics vis-a-vis religion, among minorities; focus on the emerging politics of the 21st century. The book will be a key reference text for scholars and researchers of politics, religion, sociology, media and culture studies, and South Asian studies.

This edited collection brings together scholarly works of both a theoretical and empirical nature to critically analyse the forms and functions of the contemporary celebrity activist and to examine how these intersect with the political economic structures in which celebrity activists operate. Collectively, the volume illuminates some of the inherent tensions between the ethos of solidarity and compassion that the celebrity activist works to generate on the one hand and the processes of corporate sponsorship and discourses of individualism upon which the celebrity often depends, on the other. By offering empirical case studies that situate instances of celebrity activism within specific political contexts, the collection highlights how celebrity activism intersects with some of the underlying structures of gender politics and political discourses such as neoliberalism. In addition, the volume discusses how the tensions between, for example, individualism and solidarity can raise important questions about the authenticity of individual celebrity activists and how individual celebrity activists work, with varying degrees of success, to obfuscate such tensions and obscure the potential contradictions of their work. This book will be of great interest to students and academics within the fields of politics, international development, political communication, social movements, activism studies, and celebrity culture.

Focusing on freedom of speech, this text deals with the perennial problem of how a small country should react in the face of pressure threatening its sovereignty. Should it give way or resist? The author describes in detail how the Soviet Union operated both overtly and covertly in the propaganda war and discusses the reactions of the West, the United States, Great Britain, West Germany and Sweden.

The role of money in the U.S. electoral process has become more and more controversial in recent years. Following the Buckley ruling and other legislation in 1996, candidates and political parties are free to raise virtually unlimited "soft" money, making money perhaps the most significant factor in a campaign's success. In Moey Rules, Anthony Gierzynski theorizes that, under our current system of financing elections, our political process has tilted too far in favor of political freedom, at the expense of political equality. Gierzynski examines the historical roots of the campaign finance dilemma, demonstrates its effects on the local, state, and national levels, and projects the long-term outcomes for American politics.

This text concerns the origins, organization and method of British, American and Soviet propaganda during the 1950s. It discusses propaganda's international and domestic dimensions, and charts the development of a shared Cold War culture. The book demonstrates how the structures of propaganda which were organized at this time endured, giving shape and meaning to the remaining years of the Cold War.

A comprehensive analysis of the role that prison policy can play in the reduction of terrorism, this book examines the experience of three western Europe jurisdictions: Northern Ireland, Italy and the Spanish Basque Country. It looks at the role of the prisons both as tools for counter-insurgency and as part of a process of conflict resolution. It looks in detail at each jurisdiction and then compares the experience of the three conflicts.

Conventional warfare-clashes between large military forces-defined twentieth-century power. But today, facing a dominant American military, principal adversaries Russia, China and Iran, have adopted a new style of competition. Cyber attacks, covert action, proxy conflicts, information and disinformation campaigns, espionage and economic coercion-these are the tools of irregular or asymmetric warfare, which will increasingly reshape international politics. In Three Dangerous Men, defence expert Seth G. Jones profiles pioneers of irregular warfare in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran who adapted American techniques and made huge gains without waging traditional warfare. Drawing on interviews with dozens of US military, diplomatic and intelligence officials, such as CIA directors Michael Hayden and David Petraeus, the author demonstrates why the US abandoned its own irregular capabilities and is thus steadily losing ground to its global adversaries. Jones argues the US must significantly alter how it thinks about-and engages in-competition before it is too late.

This inspiring tale of grit and determination sprinkled with humor, wit, and a taste of irony is the story of Winifred Bryan Horner's journey from a life of domesticity on the family farm after World War II to becoming an Endowed Professor. Her compelling story is one of a woman's fight for equal rights and her ultimate success at a time when women were openly deemed "less than" men in the professional world. Winifred, a professional writer and consummate storyteller known to friends and family as Win, always assumed she would write her own memoir. But after retiring from teaching, she found that she could never find the time or inspiration to sit down and record the pivotal stories of her remarkable 92 years of life. Colleague and mentee Elaine J. Lawless devised a plan to interview Win about her life and allow her to tell stories with the intention that Win would edit the transcriptions into her memoir. Over four months, Elaine visited Win on Wednesdays to interview her about her life. Sadly, just one week after the conclusion of the final interview, Win unexpectedly passed away, before Elaine could give her the final transcripts. With the support of Win's family, Elaine set out to finish this book on Win's behalf. Win's story is one that will inspire and resonate with women as they continue to work toward equality in the world.

This inspiring tale of grit and determination sprinkled with humor, wit, and a taste of irony is the story of Winifred Bryan Horner's journey from a life of domesticity on the family farm after World War II to becoming an Endowed Professor. Her compelling story is one of a woman's fight for equal rights and her ultimate success at a time when women were openly deemed "less than" men in the professional world. Winifred, a professional writer and consummate storyteller known to friends and family as Win, always assumed she would write her own memoir. But after retiring from teaching, she found that she could never find the time or inspiration to sit down and record the pivotal stories of her remarkable 92 years of life. Colleague and mentee Elaine J. Lawless devised a plan to interview Win about her life and allow her to tell stories with the intention that Win would edit the transcriptions into her memoir. Over four months, Elaine visited Win on Wednesdays to interview her about her life. Sadly, just one week after the conclusion of the final interview, Win unexpectedly passed away, before Elaine could give her the final transcripts. With the support of Win's family, Elaine set out to finish this book on Win's behalf. Win's story is one that will inspire and resonate with women as they continue to work toward equality in the world.

What do cities tell us about power? How does power shape cities? These are the main questions answered by a multidisciplinary set of eminent urban scholar in crisp articles on capital cities from around the world, from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Jakarta to Moscow. Focus is on contemporary cities and their manifestations and representations of power, though often with a historical grounding, and the collection also includes an example of archaeological urban analysis, from northern Mesopotamia. Through its variety of approaches by leading scholars of the field, and its variety of cities with their different histories and their diverse national contexts and political organization the book gives a uniquely insightful and easily accessible world overview of cities of power. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Urban Sciences.

"This book has no scholarly equivalent in English." . Choice

The Nazis saw film as a major vehicle for both indoctrination and escapist pacification of the "masses"; in fact, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels tried to create a German counter-Hollywood. This highly acclaimed study, by one of Germany's leading commentators and authors on cultural policy, analyses the pictorial and spoken language of the various film genres in the Third Reich, including news reels, documentaries, feature and "cultural" films. It shows how a powerful and sinister propaganda machine emerged which, by deploying a wide range of psychological techniques, exerted a strong fascination on the masses. These methods were so successful that they continue to serve as models for totalitarian regimes to this day.

Public speaking is a much coveted yet difficult art. This book illustrates the use of various linguistic devices and persuasive strategies with examples from the speeches of powerful orators in history. It systematically draws on the various approaches to public speaking and persuasive discourse to present new insights and techniques. The volume: Critically examines strategies of persuasive oratory. Draws on extensive investigation of a corpus of famous public speeches in history. Focuses on the needs of those who want to brush up their public speaking skills. The volume will be a key reference for aspiring civil servants, lawyers, business and corporate professionals, and politicians. It will be of great interest to scholars of linguistics, and political and business communication.