What role does the concept of political knowledge have in democratic theory? What according to democratic theorists should the ordinary citizen know about politics? What do empirical studies about political knowledge teach us? And why should we care what people know about politics in the first place?
By asking these important questions, this book offers the reader a quick yet comprehensive overview of the steps that have been taken toward understanding the concept of citizen knowledge in democratic theory over the past several decades. The book summarizes and explains the essentials of a vast body of literature while the empirical studies offer data on a number of Western democracies. Furthermore, the reader is taken through the theoretical foundations of political knowledge from Ancient Greece to modern representative democracy. Clear and concise, the book offers a cutting edge insight into our current understanding of citizen knowledge in democratic theory.

"Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!" - Richard Crossman, "Diaries Vol. 1". As a politician and personality, Richard Crossman was anything but the deferential public servant he mocked so concisely. This revealing biography of the dedicated radical Labour politician offers the most complete picture of his colourful life and demonstrates many fascinating connections between his political thinking and the formation of New Labour. Richard Crosssman served as an MP from 1945 until shortly before his death in 1974 and is remembered as a fiery speaker, dedicated leftist and author of the controversial three-volume "Diaries of a Cabinet Minister" - published in the face of strong legal opposition from the government.This comprehensive new biography explores the connections between his personal history and his political convictions. His life not only highlights a formative period in British politics but also gives insights into contemporary British politics. Crossman's life not only highlights a formative period in British politics, but also gives insights into contemporary British politics. Weaving together the private and public, Honeyman unveils a politician who fought with dedication for his political beliefs while persistently trying to shake up the organisation of the Labour party. Over the course of his twenty-five years in Parliament, Crossman held various position, including Leader of the House of Commons, Chairman of the Labour Party, and Secretary of State for Social Services.In this new biography, Victoria Honeyman places Crossman in the context of his party and his times while also examining his impact on the development of the Labour party. Often dismissed as fickle, this portrait of Crossman reveals an intellectual politician who worked with conviction for the improvment of his party and country. His life not only highlights a formative period in British politics, but also gives insights into contemporary British politics. Crossman's chief interests included social democracy, international relations and constitutional reform. This biography details his tireless work on these issues and assesses his impact. Rather than the Crossman of popular myth, Honeyman has uncovered a dedicated politician who made serious intellectual contributions to his party's policy and whose influence is still felt today. This biography is essential reading for anyone interested in British contemporary political history.

This book considers the historical role of the communist movement in its global context. It covers both the ruling and non-ruling communist parties, from Europe to Asia and Latin America. It provides an overview of political developments during the period since 1945, and examines the ideology and culture of the movement.

The book opens with an assessment of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This was a time characterized by the spread of Soviet influence in Europe, communist-inspired colonial revolt, the Cold War and the use by Stalin of terror as an instrument of rule. The author then considers such issues as the process of destalinization after 1953, the hopes raised by Soviet technological breakthroughs, the pressures from the West in a bipolar world, and the schism in the communist world following the dispute between Soviet and Chinese leaderships.

The second part of the book examines the successes and failures of the various communist regimes and their impact on the non-ruling communist parties. It also considers the spread of communist influence in the developing world. The book charts the breakdown in the Soviet bloc from the 1980s and, finally, it assesses the extent to which the collapse of communism by the 1990s was inevitable.

For more than forty years, Western policymakers defined communism as the central threat to international peace and stability. They responded by confronting it with a counterbalancing threat of force, and pursuing a strategy of containment. With the collapse of communism, the challenge to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic community has changed. Soviet expansionism has been supplanted by powerful, internal forces arising out of the clash of competing ethnic nationalisms. This challenge, argues Steven L. Burg, cannot be met by force alone, or neutralized through a strategy of containment. It requires Western states to act decisively to influence the internal political development of the post- communist states themselves.

Burg surveys the challenges that the ethnic diversity in Eastern Europe present to domestic stability, international peace, and American interests, and suggests policies and practices by which the United States and its allies might contribute to the consolidation of peace in the region. He provides a concise explanation and analysis of the issues, evaluates the usefulness of scholarly approaches to the resolution of ethnic conflicts, and offers a strategy of what he calls preventive engagement by which policymakers may prevent conflicts such as the one that destroyed the former Yugoslavia.

War or Peace? offers clear and direct recommendations to guide both interested citizens and national policymakers as they attempt to grapple with the complexities of ethnic and nationalist politics in Europe.

Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, America and the Pacific, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Libertarianism: For and Against offers dueling perspectives on the scope of legitimate government. Tibor R. Machan, a well-known political philosopher with libertarian convictions, argues for a minimal government devoted solely to protecting individual rights to life, liberty, and property. Stressing the sovereignty of each individual, Machan argues in favor of limiting democracy's scope and against the redistribution of wealth, or any other sort of taxation. In opposition to libertarianism, philosopher Craig Duncan defends democratic liberalism, which aims to ensure that all citizens have fair access to a life of dignity. This requires measures to protect equality of opportunity, as well as measures to ensure all have access to a decent minimum standard of living. In a dynamic exchange of arguments, critiques, and rebuttals, the two philosophers cut to the heart of this important debate, articulating and defending competing conceptions of such core values as political freedom and equality.

At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of German children were sent to the front lines in the largest mobilisation of underage combatants by any country before or since. Hans Dunker was just one of these children. Identified as gifted aged 9, he left his home in South America in 1937 in pursuit of a 'proper' education in Nazi Germany. Instead, he and his schoolfriends, lacking adequate training, ammunition and rations, were sent to the Eastern Front when the war was already lost in the spring of 1945. Using her father's diary and other documents, Helene Munson traces Hans' journey from a student at Feldafing School to a soldier fighting in Zawada, a village in present-day Czech Republic. What is revealed is an education system so inhumane that until recently, post-war Germany worked hard to keep it a secret. This is Hans' story, but also the story of a whole generation of German children who silently carried the shame of what they suffered into old age.

In the 1960s Britain wound up its overseas empire. What had once covered a quarter of the world's surface was no more. This marked a new beginning for people in those former colonies, but its impact on those in Britain was less clear. This book addresses the effects of the end of empire on the British public in a way never before done, arguing that the end of empire had a profound impact on Britons, shaping the way they saw their place in the world, their society and the ethnic and racial boundaries of their nation. This study contends that the radical, extra-parliamentary, left wing is central to understanding how British public opinion was shaped on these issues. Focussing on some of the most influential and controversial organisations of the 1960s - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the National Union of Students and the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement - this book illuminates their central importance in constructing post-imperial Britain.

This book comprises 17 chapters derived from new research papers presented at the 7th International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography, held in Oxford from 13 to 15 September 2018 and jointly organized by the ICA Commission on Topographic Mapping and the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. The overall conference theme was 'Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea'. The book presents a breadth of original research undertaken by internationally recognized authors in the field of historical cartography and offers a significant contribution to the development of this growing field and to many interdisciplinary aspects of geography, history and the geographic information sciences. It is intended for researchers, teachers, postgraduate students, map librarians and archivists.

Accounts of the relationships between states and terrorist organizations in the Cold War era have long been shaped by speculation, a lack of primary sources and even conspiracy theories. In the last few years, however, things have evolved rapidly. Using a wide range of case studies including the KGB's Abduction Program, Polish Military Intelligence and North Korea's 'Terrorism and Counterterrorism', this book sheds new light on the relations between state and terrorist actors, allowing for a fresh and much more insightful assessment of the contacts, dealings, agreements and collusion with terrorist organizations undertaken by state actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This book presents the current state of research and provides an assessment of the nature, motives, effects, and major historical shifts of the relations between individual states and terrorist organizations. The articles collected demonstrate that these state-terrorism relationships were not only much more ambiguous than much of the older literature had suggested but are, in fact, crucial for the understanding of global political history in the Cold War era.

This work seeks to take a fresh look at the contentious question of the longevity and popularity of Mussolini's regime in Italy. In particular, it draws upon new research to challenge what has been the most influential paradigm over the last couple of decades, namely, the interpretation of Italian fascism as a consensual dictatorship.

This history provides the first book-length study and the first county-level analysis of social and political change in the Taihang Base Area during the key years of the War of Resistance to Japan, which was instrumental in the establishment of the PeopleOs Republic of China. David Goodman explores revolution as process, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party was successful because of its management of revolutionary incrementalism. In particular, he examines the roles and interactions of a variety of groups, highlighting the activities of urban intellectuals, teachers, and peasant small-holders as agents of change. Based on new sources of information_including materials from the Taihang Base Area recently republished by the CCP, documentation and reports from the Taiyuan Archive that have not been made publicly available, and interviews with veterans of the Taihang Base Area_this meticulously researched work deepens our understanding of the social and political origins of the Chinese revolution by considering how both the rural population and the CCP adapted and changed within that process.

This is a history not of an Enlightenment but rather the Enlightenment-the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. Its principal protagonists, rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of history, and statecraft, it is conventionally believed to have taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law. The book is intensely empirical even as it is sly situated within current theoretical debates about imperial geographies of history. The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how legal documents were made, fresh interpretations of the intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the colonies-far more often than peninsular Spaniards-sued superiors at an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century. Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined them in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of the modern West.

A collection of Robert Sobukwe’s political writings, speeches and court testimonies supplemented by an account of his years in Kimberley following his release from Robben Island.

There are several accounts of Robert Sobukwe’s courageous role in contesting South Africa’s system of apartheid and of his incarceration on Robben Island after the Anti-Pass Campaign that led to the tragic events of Sharpeville in March 1960. Far less attention has been paid to the years the leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress spent in Kimberley, between 1969 and 1978, after his release from the Island.

Darkest Before Dawn, the follow-up to Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, captures the story of the post-prison years of Sobukwe’s life. This latest compilation complete with a biographical narrative by the editors and enriched with images from Sobukwe’s life in this period of his life demonstrates the many challenges Sobukwe faced as well as his continued political resolve to fight for an end to apartheid. This is captured in the many meetings he had in spite of banning orders and letters he exchanged with friends and admirers, including the celebrated novelist Bessie Head whose letters to Sobukwe are published here for the first time. Sobukwe continued to meet political allies, such as Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, he pursued a legal career and played host to international visitors. The portrait of Sobukwe that emerges is that of a highly ethical man, a figure of dignity and fortitude, and a wise elder whose commitment to the people of Africa and to the vision of Pan-Africanism who remained undeterred, despite his being forced to live, in his final years, under near impossible conditions. To do justice to Sobukwe’s legacy, his intellectual contribution and his unfailing desire to pursue liberation for the African people, we need to view his biography against the backdrop of his words.

Darkest Before Dawn includes a definitive collection of his political writings, speeches, unpublished court testimonies, interviews with Gail Gerhart and Joe Thloloe, and expansive annotations by the compilers. The book ends with a reflective essay which highlights the ongoing pertinence of Sobukwe’s legacy.

Helen Graham here brings together leading historians of international renown to examine 20th-century Spain in light of Franco's dictatorship and its legacy. Interrogating Francoism uses a three-part structure to look at the old regime, the civil war and the forging of Francoism; the nature of Franco's dictatorship; and the 'history wars' that have since taken place over his legacy. Social, political, economic and cultural historical approaches are integrated throughout and 'top down' political analysis is incorporated along with 'bottom up' social perspectives. The book places Spain and Francoism in comparative European context and explores the relationship between the historical debates and present-day political and ideological controversies in Spain. In part a tribute to Paul Preston, the foremost historian of contemporary Spain today, Interrogating Francoism includes an interview with Professor Preston and a comprehensive bibliography of his work, as well as extensive further readings in English. It is a crucial volume for all students of 20th-century Spain.

This study, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and the London School of Economics and Political Science, analyzes the ethnopolitical situation in Russia and the other republics of the former Soviet Union, particularly the southern tier states. Respected Russian scholar Georgiy Mirsky provides an insider's look at the historical nature of the Russian and Soviet empires, the development of ethnic and nationalistic identities within those empires, and the present-day situation with regard to hot and cold ethnic conflicts within and around Russia. This important work will be of interest to scholars and policymakers in comparative politics, international relations, and Russian and Slavic studies.

Troy analyses how the understanding of religion in Realism and the English School helps in working towards the greater good in international relations, studying religion within the overall framework of international affairs and the field of peace studies.

Drawing on the writings of diverse authors, including Jean Baker Miller, Bell Hooks, Mary Daly, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire and Ignacio Martin-Baro, as well as on women's experiences, this book aims to develop a 'liberation psychology'; which would aid in transforming the damaging psychological patterns associated with oppression and taking action to bring about social change. The book makes systematic links between social conditions and psychological patterns, and identifies processes such as building strengths, cultivating creativity, and developing solidarity.

The concept of utopia is generally attributed to Thomas More, whose fictional work, "Utopia" (1516), presents a place that is at once ideal and imaginary. The term means both a good place and no place, and More's work has inspired numerous political philosophers, religious leaders, and literary figures for nearly five centuries. Utopian ventures are worth close attention to help understand why some fail and others succeed, and they offer hope for an improved life on earth. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to utopian communities and their founders. While other volumes look at literary utopias or examine utopias in only one country, this work examines utopias from antiquity to the present and surveys utopian efforts around the world. Multidisciplinary in nature, the book draws on anthropology, religion, philosophy, political science, history, sociology, and literature.

Included are more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries. Roughly half are short descriptions of utopian ventures and the rest are brief biographical sketches of individuals who were involved. Each entry is followed by a list of sources, and the volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography. The entries draw on a wide range of activities and institutions: from abodes of love to conservation groups; from hippie communes and fantastic entertainments to caravans and residential settlements; from garden cities to children's schools; from business schemes to spiritual encampments; from religious communities to unrealizable schemes. Entries were chosen for their illustrative value and origin and include several dystopias, literary and real, which provide an additional context for the utopian communities.

This book addresses prominent debates in Western Europe and the United States on themes as seemingly diverse as national identity and nostalgia, migration and integration, gender relations and 'caring communities'. At the most fundamental level, all of these debates deal with the right to belong and the ability to 'feel at home'. The book examines what has happened to the 'home feelings' of the majority under the influence of the two major revolutions of our times: the gender revolution and increased mobility due to globalization. It analyzes how 'home' has been politicized, examines the risks of this politicization, as well as exploring alternative home-making strategies that aim to transcend the 'logic of identities' where one group's ability to feel at home comes at the expense of other groups.

In 2007, the Pontine Marshes, are very much part of the Italian national landscape. A traveller who takes a Eurostar train from Rome to Naples will pass through the marshes, which are a marshland only in name (Agro Pontino in Italian). It is hard to see the landscape of the Pontine Marshes and to simultaneously cast a historical eye back eighty years to when the area was avoided by people. It is hard to realize, today, that the Pontine Marshes were the focus for an extraordinary national land reclamation and urbanization project during Mussolini's fascist regime. Between 1930 and 1939, the marshes became the target of massive national investment, internal migration (often non-voluntary) and engineering work. In the 1930s, the Pontine Marshes became key protagonists in national culture: featured in newsreels, newspapers and propaganda, they became a metaphor for the regime's modernizing drive and ambition to create a new Italy where one had not been able to exist before. In particular, the regime's planners clamored to create New Towns in the reclaimed marshes; these were to be planned along fascist lines, and populated with selected colonists from the north. Written by an Oxford University professor Federico Caprotti, this book is about the Pontine Marshes project and brings together cohesive strands of research which have not appeared alongside one another before. For example, the book explores the architectural and urban planning aspects of the totalitarian minds which devised and built the New Towns; the lived experience of the 'colonists' who were forced to populate the new cities; the technological aspects which made the project possible, such as the fight against malaria, seen by fascism to be a 'non-totalitarian' disease; and finally, the promotion of the Pontine Marshes project through the press and film. Mussolini Cities will be a welcome addition for collections in Geography and Italian Studies.

In contrast to Thomas Jefferson's yeoman myth, Sarson's groundbreaking analysis of the early national Upper South, Thomas Jefferson's own home region, uncovers extensive inequality, landlessness, and poverty, and often antagonistic relationships between planters, yeoman, artisans, tenants, wage-workers, indentured servants, slaves, and free blacks. With detailed analysis of particular localities, this book explores economic and social life across a region encompassing the tobacco-planting regions of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. It simultaneously takes a cis-Atlantic approach, examining the impacts on local life of the Revolutionary War, non-intercourse and embargoes, the War of 1812, and the structure of the international tobacco trade.

States without former colonies, it has been argued, were intensely involved in colonial practices. This anthology looks at Switzerland, which, by its very strong economic involvements with colonialism, its doctrine of neutrality, and its transnationally entangled scientific community, constitutes a perfect case in point.

In 1929, tens of thousands of south eastern Nigerian women rose up against British authority in what is known as the Women's War. This book brings togther, for the first time, the multiple perspectives of the war's colonized and colonial participants and examines its various actions within a single, gendered analytical frame.