"Governing the Commonwealth" provides middle-school students with an introduction to Virginia's government: its structure, processes, powers, and scope. The middle-school civics curriculum requires teachers to cover Virginia's government, and there has not been a useful text to do this until now.

Robert Dudley has written an accessible guide to Virginia's government that not only covers the overall structure but also provides information about Virginia's constitution and the history of the people and the land. Each chapter includes two highlighted sections--"Why It Matters" and "How It's Done in the Other States"--that allow students to deepen their understanding and make comparisons to other locations. Amy Smith, a veteran Fairfax County Public Schools teacher, assisted the author with this book to ensure that it would be understood by the students and that it covered current Virginia Standards of Learning requirements.

In addition, Smith prepared a teacher's guide to assist all teachers--especially new ones--with the process of implementing the text in the classroom. For each chapter, the teacher's guide includes a general overview, chapter objectives, in-class activities, and much more. This book will be useful to all middle schools in Virginia, homeschoolers, and the general public, including aspiring citizens looking for a basic introduction to Virginia's government, how it works, and its historical development.

Distributed for George Mason University Press

The Handbook for Leaders

"The Prince" is often regarded as the first true leadership book. It shocked contemporary readers with its ruthless call for fearless and effective action. With simple prose and straightforward logic, Machiavelli's guide still has the power to surprise and inform anyone hoping to make their way in the world.

This keepsake edition includes an introduction by Tom Butler-Bowdon, drawing out lessons for managers and business leaders, and showing how "The Prince" remains vital reading for anyone in the realm of business or politics.

A Republic of Europeans looks at the changing routes and conditions of the European polity from a liberal republican angle, proposing an innovative regulative ideal for Europe's future. The book assesses the prospects for uniting diverse publics into a composite polity with its own sense of `demos-hood'. It also places Europe's normative evolution in the wider context of an ordered global plurality made up of highly interrelated actors. In examining whether the European Union has reached a point which might be telling of an end state, the book offers a depiction of the whole as an `organized synarchy' of entwined sovereignties, arguing that the envisaged transition from a synarchy of co-sovereigns to a self-identifying citizenry requires the constitution of a `Republic of Europeans'. A polity which, corresponding to the liberal republican vision of `many peoples, one demos', regulates contemporary forms of pluralism, which the authors approach as instances of a `civic polyculturalism'. Offering new understandings on Europe's normative evolution, this book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students in politics, Government, European studies, international relations, international organization and political theory. Doctoral students, postdoctoral and advanced researchers, as well as policy-makers in government and international organizations, will also find much to interest them in this book.

In 2011, as the Arab uprisings spread across the Middle East, Jordan remained more stable than any of its neighbors. Despite strife at its borders and an influx of refugees connected to the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS, as well as its own version of the Arab Spring with protests and popular mobilization demanding change, Jordan managed to avoid political upheaval. How did the regime survive in the face of the pressures unleashed by the Arab uprisings? What does its resilience tell us about the prospects for reform or revolutionary change? In Jordan and the Arab Uprisings, Curtis R. Ryan explains how Jordan weathered the turmoil of the Arab Spring. Crossing divides between state and society, government and opposition, Ryan analyzes key features of Jordanian politics, including Islamist and leftist opposition parties, youth movements, and other forms of activism, as well as struggles over elections, reform, and identity. He details regime survival strategies, laying out how the monarchy has held out the possibility of reform while also seeking to coopt and contain its opponents. Ryan demonstrates how domestic politics were affected by both regional unrest and international support for the regime, and how regime survival and security concerns trumped hopes for greater change. While the Arab Spring may be over, Ryan shows that political activism in Jordan is not, and that struggles for reform and change will continue. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with a vast range of people, from grassroots activists to King Abdullah II, Jordan and the Arab Uprisings is a definitive analysis of Jordanian politics before, during, and beyond the Arab uprisings.

Hannah Arendt's last philosophical work was an intended three-part project entitled "The Life of the Mind." Unfortunately, Arendt lived to complete only the first two parts, "Thinking" and "Willing." Of the third, "Judging," only the title page, with epigraphs from Cato and Goethe, was found after her death. As the titles suggest, Arendt conceived of her work as roughly parallel to the three "Critiques" of Immanuel Kant. In fact, while she began work on "The Life of the Mind," Arendt lectured on "Kant's Political Philosophy," using the" Critique of Judgment" as her main text. The present volume brings Arendt's notes for these lectures together with other of her texts on the topic of judging and provides important clues to the likely direction of Arendt's thinking in this area.

This authoritative book addresses the greatest challenge facing the International Criminal Court since its historic establishment in 1998: reconciling the demand for justice for the most serious crimes known to humanity with the promotion of sustainable peace in conflict areas around the world. In describing and analyzing this challenge, Errol Mendes demonstrates that the Court is a product of centuries of global efforts to integrate peace with justice. Focusing on two important prosecutions involving indictments of the president and other senior officials of Sudan and a savage rebel group in Northern Uganda, the author argues that the choice between peace and justice is not a zero sum game. Based on knowledge and experience obtained during his time as a visiting professional at the Court, the author combines insights from Court leaders with his own analysis in his call for greater international cooperation with the Court in fulfilling its mandate and overcoming other obstacles that threaten its work into the future. Scholars and students of criminal justice, international studies, political science and human rights, as well as civil society groups, government officials and those working with international justice organizations, will find in this book a unique and sophisticated perspective on this complex dilemma.

The Great Plains has long been home to unconventional and leading-edge politics, from the fiery Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to the country's first female U.S. representative and first female governor to the nation's only single-house state legislature. Great Plains Politics provides a lively tour of the Great Plains region through the civic and political contributions of its citizens, demonstrating the importance of community in the region. Great Plains Politics profiles six men and women who had a profound impact on the civic and community life of the Great Plains: Wilma Mankiller, the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and a political activist at both the local and the national levels; Virginia Smith, an educator from Nebraska who served as a U.S. representative in Congress; Junius Groves, an African American farmer and community builder from Kansas; George McGovern, a South Dakota senator whose 1972 presidential campaign galvanized widespread grassroots support; Robert Dole, a Kansas congressman and longtime senator as well as the Republican candidate for U.S. president in 1988; and Harriet Elizabeth Byrd, the first African American elected as a state representative in Wyoming. The lives of these individuals illustrate the robust and enduring civic and community involvement of inhabitants of the Great Plains and presage a hopeful continuation of its storied political tradition.

The British General Election of 2017 is the definitive and authoritative account of one of the most dramatic elections in British history. Throwing aside her natural caution, Theresa May called a snap election and was widely expected to crush Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party. Her gamble backfired spectacularly as the Conservatives lost their Commons majority to a resurgent Labour led by one of the most unconventional politicians to lead a major British political party. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, with unparalleled access to all the key players, The British General Election of 2017 offers a revelatory guide to what really happened. The 20th edition in this prestigious series of books dating back to 1945, it is designed to appeal to everyone - from Westminster insiders and politics students to the wider general public.

Perspectives on the Security of Singapore: The First 50 Years explores the security of Singapore in the last 50 years and its possible trajectories into the future. This volume brings together the diverse perspectives of a team of academics with different expertise, ranging from history to political science to security studies with a common interest in Singapore. The book is further boosted by the recollections of key civil servants involved with foreign affairs and defence, such as S R Nathan, Peter Ho, Bilahari Kausikan and Philip Yeo.

Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings -- in technology, empire, and industrialization -- are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty.Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known work on the weakening of religion, Hermeneutic Communism realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought.

This thoroughly revised and updated second edition of Civil Service Systems in Western Europe presents a comprehensive overview of the important issues in modern bureaucracies and provides a comparative analysis of the civil service systems of various Western European nations. Country-specific case studies - based on neo-institutional frameworks and underpinned by extensive empirical research - are presented by the expert contributors. The specific nature and development of civil service systems is emphasized, and special attention is paid to the current features of each national civil service. Each chapter has been reworked to include new material and topics, and new chapters on Denmark, France and the United Kingdom have been included. Combining both theoretical and empirical studies, this book will prove to be invaluable to scholars and students of public administration, political science and international affairs, as well as to civil servants, politicians and policymakers.

Perspectives on the Security of Singapore: The First 50 Years explores the security of Singapore in the last 50 years and its possible trajectories into the future. This volume brings together the diverse perspectives of a team of academics with different expertise, ranging from history to political science to security studies with a common interest in Singapore. The book is further boosted by the recollections of key civil servants involved with foreign affairs and defence, such as S R Nathan, Peter Ho, Bilahari Kausikan and Philip Yeo.

Scholarship of multi-level governance has developed into one of the most innovative themes of research in political science and public policy. This accessible Handbook presents a thorough review of the wide-ranging literature, encompassing various theoretical and conceptual approaches to multi-level governance and their application to policy-making in domestic, regional and global contexts. The importance of multi-level governance in specific policy areas is highlighted, and the contributors - an international group of highly renowned scholars - report on the ways in which their field of specialization is or may be affected by multi-level governance and how developments could affect its conceptualization. European integration is considered from its unique standpoint as the key catalyst in the development of multi-level approaches, and the use of multi-level governance in other parts of the world, at both domestic and regional levels, is also considered in detail before focus is shifted towards global governance. The Handbook concludes with a presentation of six policy fields and instruments affected by multi-level governance, including: social policy, environmental policy, economic policy, international taxation, standard-setting and policing. This comprehensive Handbook takes stock of the vast array of multi-level governance theory and research developed in subfields of political science and public policy, and as such will provide an invaluable reference tool for scholars, researchers and students with a special interest in public policy, regulation and governance.

This book proposes a new institutional constructivist model, for social scientific and legal enquiries, based on the interrelations within the social and political world and the application of change in EU laws and politics. Much of the research conducted in social sciences and law examines the diverse activities of individuals and collectivities and the role of institutions in the social and political world. Although there exist many vantage points from which one can gain entry into understanding how agents in the world act, interact, shape and bear the world, socio-legal scientific epistemology has found monism and dualism to be convincing models. This book argues that current models do not capture the complexity of our micro-worlds, macro-worlds and meso-worlds. Nor can they account for the forms and patterns of socio-legal change. Mind, time and change are brought together in an attempt to contribute to socio-legal epistemology and to enhance its toolkit.

Measurement and targets have been widely criticised as distorting policy and engendering gaming - yet they continue to be widely used in government. This book offers an original new account explaining the persistent appeal of performance measurement. It argues that targets have been adopted to address a crisis of trust in politics, through creating more robust mechanisms of accountability and monitoring. The book shows that such tools rarely have their intended effect. Through an in-depth analysis of UK targets on immigration and asylum since 2000, it shows that far from shoring up trust, targets have engendered cynicism and distrust in government. Moreover, they have encouraged intrusive forms of monitoring and reform in public administration, with damaging consequences for trust between politicians and civil servants. Despite these problems, performance measurement has now become embedded in techniques of public management. It has also become normalised as a way of framing policy problems and responses. Thus despite their acknowledged problems, targets are likely to retain their allure as techniques of political communication and governance.

Much of the media coverage and academic literature on Russia suggests that the justice system is unreliable, ineffective and corrupt. But what if we look beyond the stereotypes and preconceptions? This volume features contributions from a number of scholars who studied Russia empirically and in-depth, through extensive field research, observations in courts, and interviews with judges and other legal professionals as well as lay actors. A number of tensions in the everyday experiences of justice in Russia are identified and the concept of the 'administerial model of justice' is introduced to illuminate some of the less obvious layers of Russian legal tradition including: file-driven procedure, extreme legal formalism combined with informality of the pre-trial proceedings, followed by ritualistic format of the trial. The underlying argument is that Russian justice is a much more complex system than is commonly supposed, and that it both requires and deserves a more nuanced understanding.

This authoritative book addresses the greatest challenge facing the International Criminal Court since its historic establishment in 1998: reconciling the demand for justice for the most serious crimes known to humanity with the promotion of sustainable peace in conflict areas around the world. In describing and analyzing this challenge, Errol Mendes demonstrates that the Court is a product of centuries of global efforts to integrate peace with justice. Focusing on two important prosecutions involving indictments of the president and other senior officials of Sudan and a savage rebel group in Northern Uganda, the author argues that the choice between peace and justice is not a zero sum game. Based on knowledge and experience obtained during his time as a visiting professional at the Court, the author combines insights from Court leaders with his own analysis in his call for greater international cooperation with the Court in fulfilling its mandate and overcoming other obstacles that threaten its work into the future. Scholars and students of criminal justice, international studies, political science and human rights, as well as civil society groups, government officials and those working with international justice organizations, will find in this book a unique and sophisticated perspective on this complex dilemma.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women is an incendiary attack on the place of women in 18th-century society.

Often considered to be the earliest widely-circulated work of feminism, the book is a powerful example of what can be achieved by creative thinkers – people who refuse to be bound by the standard ways of thinking, or to see things through the same lenses that everyone else uses. In the case of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft’s independent thinking went directly against the standard assumptions of the age regarding women.

During the seventeenth century and earlier, it was an entirely standard point of view to consider women as, largely speaking, uneducable. They were widely considered to be men’s inferiors, incapable of rational thought. They not only did not need a rational education – it was assumed that they could not benefit from one. Wollstonecraft, in contrast, argued that women’s apparent triviality was a direct consequence of society failing to educate them. If they were not men’s equals, it was the fault of a society that refused to treat them as such. So radical was her message that it would take until the 20th century for her views to become truly accepted.

In what has become the era of the mass shooting, we are routinely taken to scenes of terrible violence. Often neglected, however, is the long aftermath, including the efforts to effect change in the wake of such tragedies. On April 16, 2007, thirty-two Virginia Tech students and professors were murdered. Then the nation's deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman, the tragedy sparked an international debate on gun culture in the United States and safety on college campuses. Experiencing profound grief and trauma, and struggling to heal both physically and emotionally, many of the survivors from Virginia Tech and their supporters put themselves on the front lines to advocate for change. Yet since that April, large-scale gun violence has continued at a horrifying pace. In After Virginia Tech, award-winning journalist Thomas Kapsidelis examines the decade after the Virginia Tech massacre through the experiences of survivors and community members who advocated for reforms in gun safety, campus security, trauma recovery, and mental health. Undaunted by the expansion of gun rights, they continued their national leadership despite an often-hostile political environment and repeated mass violence. Kapsidelis also focuses on the trauma suffered by police who responded to the shootings, and the work by chaplains and a longtime police officer to create an organization dedicated to recovery. The stories Kapsidelis tells here show how people and communities affected by profound loss ultimately persevere long after the initial glare and attention inevitably fade. Reaching beyond policy implications, After Virginia Tech illuminates personal accounts of recovery and resilience that can offer a ray of hope to millions of Americans concerned about the consequences of gun violence.

Perhaps no work of history written in the 20th century has done more to undermine an existing consensus and cause its readers to re-evaluate their own preconceptions than has Jonathan Riley-Smith's revisionist account of the motives of the first crusaders.

Riley-Smith's thesis – based on extensive original research and firmly rooted in his refusal to uncritically accept the evidence or reasoning of earlier historians – is that the majority of the men who travelled to the east on crusade in the years 1098-1100 were primarily motivated by faith. This finding, which ran directly counter to at least four centuries of consensus that other motives, not least greed for land, were more important, has helped to stimulate exciting reappraisals of the whole crusading movement. Riley-Smith backed it up with forensic examination of the key crusader-inspiring speech delivered by Pope Urban II, looking to clarify the meanings of five competing contemporary accounts in order to understand how an initially simple, and rather confused, appeal for help became a sophisticated rationale for the concept of ‘just war.’

A classic study of statesmanship and power politics, "The Prince" is one of the most influential books ever written. Used by businessmen and political leaders through the ages, Machiavelli's shrewd and insightful text presents strategies that some of history's greatest rulers have borrowed to achieve their goals.A beautifully illustrated, colourful collector's edition which will look good on anybody's shelf or coffee table as well as making an ideal gift.

Public choice theory sheds light on many aspects of legislation, regulation, and constitutional law and is critical to a sophisticated understanding of public policy. The editors of this landmark addition to the law and economics literature have organized the Handbook into four main areas of inquiry: foundations, constitutional law and democracy, administrative design and action, and specific statutory schemes. The original contributions, authored by top scholars in the field, provide helpful introductions to important topics in public choice and public law while also exploring the institutional complexity of American democracy. Beginning with a critical introduction to the core tenets of public choice theory and concluding with comprehensive analyses of drug safety, energy regulation, and environmental law, the Handbook provides differing points of view on the foundations of these and a range of related subjects, including: direct democracy and its financial implications, the functioning of electoral processes, judicial behavior, and the structural differences between presidential and parliamentary systems. The Handbook's knowledgeable contributors offer a rich, realistic view of how public policy is made that is accessible to a broad range of readers. Summarizing much of the key literature in a range of major topics and framing that literature for open debates and further research, the Handbook is ideal for students and scholars of law, political science, and economics.

A broad-ranging and pluralistic textbook which highlights the rich variety of approaches to studying politics. Written by an international team of experts, this fully revised fourth edition offers cutting-edge coverage from fundamental to contemporary issues. Integrating guides to further reading and clear examples of how research methods can be applied, it enables readers to feel confident about taking their study of politics forward. An ideal foundation for study and research in political science, this textbook will be essential to students at any stage of their degree. It serves as core reading on undergraduate and postgraduate political analysis, theory and method courses. In addition, in demonstrating how independent research is undertaken in political science, the book allows students and early career researchers to begin thinking about formulating their own research agendas.