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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political science & theory
This book focuses on the theme of counter-surveillance in art
through a multi-faceted engagement with the highly controversial
Norwegian play Ways of Seeing. Denounced by the prime minister and
subject to a police investigation, the play gained notoriety when
it featured footage showing the homes of the country's financial
and political elite as part of its scenography. The book provides a
thorough consideration of the work's reception context before
elucidating its relation to the politics of neoliberalism. What is
foregrounded in this analysis are, first, the use of an aesthetics
of sousveillance to visualize the material infrastructure of racism
and right-wing populism, second, the tangled interrelations of art
and law, third, questions of censorship and artistic freedom, and
fourth, the promotion of an alternative mode of political
governance - grounded in feminism and ecological awareness -
through the example of the Rojava experiment.
War and conflict continually plague many nations around the world
and have led to mass causalities, a shortage of resources, and
political turmoil. To eradicate this ongoing issue, individuals,
companies, and governments need to establish a fundamental change
in the distribution of the world's assets, resources, and ideals.
Marketing Peace for Social Transformation and Global Prosperity is
a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the
development of programs and campaigns destined to impose and
sustain ideas that lead to conflict resolution. Through analyzing
and proposing various peace marketing campaigns, it showcases how
individuals and corporations can employ various tactics to enhance
and achieve political, social, and individual peace and promote the
sustainability of resources and education. Highlighting topics such
as civic engagement, conflict management, and symbolism, this book
is ideally designed for policymakers, business leaders,
professionals, theorists, researchers, and students.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of historical and
international debates on the theory of "labor money" or "labor
notes." These debates exist in a triangular context of market
socialism, communism (community-based socialism), and local
currency, joining numerous socialists, anarchists, and Marx and
Engels. Labor note theory encompasses theoretical, ideological, and
practical doctrines aimed at designing a fair and desirable
labor-based market or non-market economy by reforming the monetary
and credit system. This theory was considered an unfeasible utopian
idea in the context of orthodox Marxism, which is typically based
on a historical study of surplus value doctrines. However, this
book eschews Marx's critique of "labor money" that limits the
debate regarding a concrete alternative society, and instead
proposes practical and gradual approaches to social reform by
scrutinizing the primary sources of labor money theories and
practical experiences and reconstructs their theoretical
relationships.
Since 2018, the China-US trade dispute has been escalating. Science
and technology (S&T) and innovation are not only the underlying
areas of trade dispute between the two largest economic powers, but
also the critical factors in determining whether China can win this
'trade war'. Notably, after the 'ZTE event' and 'Huawei event',
spotlight has been placed on the gap between the two countries in
S&T. This book will introduce the competitiveness in S&T (a
multifaceted concept) and its evaluation index. This is followed by
a comparison of differences in S&T development in China and the
United States, in the areas of human resources, financial
resources, scientific research, technological innovation and
internationalization, based on detailed and authoritative
statistical data, as well as in-depth analysis of high-tech
industries, such as the equipment manufacturing and information and
communications technology.
This book aims to gather the insight of leading experts on
corruption and anti-corruption studies working at the scientific
frontier of this phenomenon using the multidisciplinary tools of
data and network science, in order to present current theoretical,
empirical, and operational efforts being performed in order to curb
this problem. The research results strengthen the importance of
evidence-based approaches in the fight against corruption in all
its forms, and foster the discussion about the best ways to convert
the obtained knowledge into public policy. The contributed chapters
provide comprehensive and multidisciplinary approaches to handle
the non-trivial structural and dynamical aspects that characterize
the modern social, economic, political and technological systems
where corruption takes place. This book will serve a broad
multi-disciplinary audience from natural to social scientists,
applied mathematicians, including law and policymakers.
New from the No.1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Prisoners of
Geography; We feel more divided than ever.; This riveting analysis
tells you why.; Walls are going up. Nationalism and identity
politics are on the rise once more. Thousands of miles of fences
and barriers have been erected in the past ten years, and they are
redefining our political landscape. ; There are many reasons why we
erect walls, because we are divided in many ways: wealth, race,
religion, politics. In Europe the ruptures of the past decade
threaten not only European unity, but in some countries liberal
democracy itself. In China, the Party's need to contain the
divisions wrought by capitalism will define the nation's future. In
the USA the rationale for the Mexican border wall taps into the
fear that the USA will no longer be a white majority country in the
course of this century.; Understanding what has divided us, past
and present, is essential to understanding much of what's going on
in the world today. Covering China; the USA; Israel and Palestine;
the Middle East; the Indian Subcontinent; Africa; Europe and the
UK, bestselling author Tim Marshall presents a gripping and
unflinching analysis of the fault lines that will shape our world
for years to come.
This book addresses emancipatory narratives from two main sites in
the colonial world, the Indian and southern African subcontinents.
Exploring how love and revolution interrelate, this volume is
unique in drawing on theories of affect to interrogate histories of
the political, thus linking love and revolution together. The
chapters engage with the affinities of those who live with their
colonial pasts: crises of expectations, colonial national
convulsions, memories of anti-colonial solidarity, even shared
radical libraries. It calls attention to the specific and singular
way in which notions of 'love of the world' were born in a precise
moment of anti-colonial struggle: a love of the world for which one
would offer one's life, and for which there had been little
precedent in the history of earlier revolutions. It thus offers new
ways of understanding the shifts in global traditions of
emancipation over two centuries.
This book explores the substance and strategies of democracy
promotion conducted by the Visegrad Group states (V4) - the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. As these states are
currently deemed to face democratic backsliding over thirty years
after their own democratic transformations, the book discusses how
democracy promotion is related to the four countries' understanding
of liberalism and democracy and to their political cultures. It
also addresses the question of what motivates the V4 states to
engage in the politically sensitive activities of democracy
assistance and how they intend to share their own experience and
know-how of the democratic transformation process. The book
concludes by discussing the possible future developments in the
respective states' democracy promotion agendas. Examining the
strategies, substance, and the domestic discourse related to the
Visegrad states' democracy promotion policies, the book presents a
much-needed reflection on a niche subject in the foreign policy
agendas of these post-communist states for academics and
practitioners alike.
Why do voters support different parties at elections when given the
opportunity of casting two votes to elect the same representative
body? This book relaxes common assumptions in the voting behaviour
literature to provide an in-depth study of split-ticket voting
across ten established and non-established democracies. It proposes
an original framework and combines a theoretical investigation with
a purely methodological analysis to test the reliability of the
predictive models. The broader picture that emerges is the one of a
'simple' voter with 'sophisticated' preferences. Parties still
function as the principal cue for voting, but voters appear
sophisticated in that they often like more than one party or choose
candidates regardless of their party affiliation. Despite
mixed-member systems being one of the most complicated electoral
systems of all, there is no evidence supporting the conclusion that
voters are not able to cope with the complexity of the electoral
rules.
'The most important book of 2022.' Dr. Robert Malone Desmet's work
on mass formation theory was brought to the world's attention on
The Joe Rogan Experience and in major alternative news outlets
around the globe. Read this book to get beyond the sound bites! In
The Psychology of Totalitarianism, world-renowned Professor of
Clinical Psychology Mattias Desmet deconstructs the societal
conditions that allow collective hypnosis to take hold. By
analysing the global pandemic, he identifies the phenomenon of
'mass formation' and illustrates how humanity is being forcibly,
unconsciously led into a reality of technocratic totalitarianism,
which aggressively excludes alternative views and relies on
destructive groupthink, vilifying non-conformist thought as
'dissident.' Building on Hannah Arendt's essential work on
totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Desmet offers a
sharp critique of the cultural 'groupthink' that existed
pre-pandemic but has steadily and inexorably advanced during the
Covid crisis. He cautions against the dangers of our current
societal landscape, media consumption, and reliance on manipulative
technologies, offering simple solutions - both individual and
collective - to prevent the willing sacrifice of our ability to
think critically. The Psychology of Totalitarianism serves as an
indispensable and fundamental guide to understanding this key
moment in history. 'Mattias Desmet's [theory of mass formation
hypnosis] is great. . . . Once I kind of started to look for it, I
saw it everywhere.' Eric Clapton
Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary
perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book
provides comparative insights to understand the contingent
complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and
among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on
the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents
are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving
across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By
historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and
global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity,
authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international
relations that support or undermine different instances of
Chineseness and its representations. It seeks to rescue the present
from the past by presenting case studies of contingent encounters
that produce the ideas, practices, and identities that become the
categories nations need to justify their existence. The dynamic,
fluid representations of Chineseness illustrate that it has never
been an undifferentiated whole in both space and time. Through
physical movements and inherited knowledge, agents of Chineseness
have deployed various interpretive strategies to define and
represent themselves vis-a-vis the local, regional, and global in
their respective temporal experiences. This book will be relevant
to students and scholars in Chinese studies and Asian studies more
broadly, with a focus on identity politics, migration, popular
culture, and international relations. "The Chinese overseas often
saw themselves as caught between a rock and a hard place. The
collection of essays here highlights the variety of experiences in
Southeast Asia and China that suggest that the rock can become a
huge boulder with sharp edges and the hard places can have deadly
spikes. A must read for those who wonder whether Chineseness has
ever been what it seems." Wang Gungwu, University Professor,
National University of Singapore. "By including reflections on
constructions of Chineseness in both China itself and in various
Southeast Asian sites, the book shows that being Chinese is by no
means necessarily intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept,
while at the same time highlighting the incongruities and tensions
in the escapable relationship with China that diasporic Chinese
subjects variously embody, expressed in a wide range of social
phenomena such as language use, popular culture, architecture and
family relations. The book is a very welcome addition to the
necessary ongoing conversation on Chineseness in the 21st century."
Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western
Sydney University.
Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci are two of the most important
Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. This book explores the
similarities and the differences between their philosophical and
political theories. The first and second chapters deal with a still
under-investigated aspect of Trotsky's thought, i.e. his
reflections on the issue of hegemony. The third chapter focuses on
Gramsci's critique of Trotsky in his Prison Notebooks, analysing
Gramsci's knowledge of Trotsky's positions as well as the scope and
limits of Gramsci's critique. The fourth chapter consists of a
critical rereading of Perry Anderson's essay Antinomies of Antonio
Gramsci, originally published in 1976 and republished in 2017 and
an analysis of the book Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of
Stalinism by Emanuele Saccarelli. The result is an investigation
that offers new insight into both Trotsky's and Gramsci's thought,
while proposing a new point of view from which to interpret
revolutionary theory and strategy in the contemporary scenario. One
of the main topics addressed throughout the three essays is the
specific position of the problem of hegemony in a theory of
permanent revolution, demonstrating that Trotsky had a particular
understanding of the question of hegemony and that Gramsci, in
turn, introduced a concept of hegemony that is closely associated
with an idea of permanent revolution, such that the dynamics of the
relationship between democratic struggles and socialist struggles
presented in both theories are very similar.
This book explores presidential justifications of every major
American military conflict from the War of 1812 to the Second Gulf
War. It generates two important findings. First, presidents employ
a specific standard (the Necessity Standard) publicly to justify
decisions to go to war, and privately to make decisions regarding
war and peace. The Necessity Standard holds that major military
force should be used if no viable alternatives are available to
protect vital interests or discharge duties. Second, when
addressing the Necessity Standard, presidents have disclosed
military and security policies that vary considerably in their
patience with alternatives and their definitions of vital interests
and duties. The book concludes by characterizing wars, categorizing
presidential policies, and outlining how the central position of
the Necessity Standard in the American politics of war and peace
might affect policymaking processes, conflict management, and the
public's perceptions of wars and foreign policy.
This book argues that contemporary liberal democracy is reaching a
crisis. Brendan Sweetman contends that this crisis arises from a
contentious pluralism involving the rise of incommensurable
worldviews that emerge out of the absolutizing of freedom over time
in a democratic setting. This clash of worldviews is further
complicated by a loss of confidence in reason and by the practical
failure of public discourse. A contributory factor is the growing
worldview of secularism which needs to be distinguished from both
the process of secularization and the concept of the secular state.
After describing the crisis, and exploring these themes, and also
rejecting proposed solutions from recent liberal political theory,
Sweetman develops an approach to pluralist disagreement which
requires a re-envisioning of the relationship between religion,
secularism and politics, and which allows a limited place for all
worldviews in the state, including religious worldviews. Engaging
with the work of Philip Kitcher, Robert Audi, John Rawls, A.C.
Grayling, Martin Luther King, Cecile Laborde, John Stuart Mill,
John Locke, and Plato, Sweetman's approach is a formidable
innovation in the quest to maintain a free and fair society.
Contains selected famous speeches and orations of Daniel Webster,
to illustrate his genius and character as a lawyer, statesman,
Senator, negotiator, patriot, and citizen. An introcustory essay
describes and explains the man as a master of English style.
This book focuses on the domains of moral philosophy, political
philosophy, and political theory within African philosophy. At the
heart of the volume is a call to imagine African political
philosophy as embodying a needs-based political vision. While
discourses in African political philosophy have fixated on the
normative framework of human rights law to articulate demands for
social and global justice, this book charts a new frontier in
African political thought by turning from 'rights' to 'needs.' The
authors aim to re-orient discourses in African philosophy beyond
the impasse of rights-based confrontations to shift the
conversation toward needs as a cornerstone of African political
theory.
This book examines contemporary English drama and its relation to
the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British policy since
1979. The London stage has emerged as a key site in Britain's
reckoning with neoliberalism. On one hand, many playwrights have
denounced the acquisitive values of unfettered global capitalism;
on the other, plays have more readily revealed themselves as
products of the very market economy they critique, their production
histories and formal innovations uncomfortably reproducing the
strategies and practices of neoliberal labour markets. Stage
Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London thus arrives at a
usefully ambivalent political position, one that praises the
political power of the theatre - its potential as a form of
resistance to the neoliberal rationality that rides roughshod over
democratic values - while simultaneously attending to the
institutional bondage that constrains it. For, of course, the
theatre itself everywhere straddles the line of capitulating to the
marketization of our cultural life.
This book is a complete presentation of the most important themes
of Theodor W. Adorno's critical theory, and of its relevance for
the understanding of the modern society. After an Introduction,
which traces Adorno's biographical and intellectual profile, the
book is structured in three parts. The first is devoted to
theoretical philosophy, and in particular to the concepts of
philosophy, negative dialectics and metaphysics, and his aim is to
clarify the Adornian understanding of such difficult concepts. The
second is devoted to the main themes of Adorno's social theory: the
concept of domination, the relationship with Marxism, the theory of
the decay of the individual, the critique of mass manipulation. The
third part is devoted to aesthetics and culture criticism, and
entails a conclusion in which the author outlines a confrontation
between the Adornian and the Habermasian critique of modernity.
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