Civics and citizenship focus on providing students with the disposition and tools to effectively engage with their government. Critical literacy is necessary for responsible citizenship in a world where the quantity of information overwhelms quality information and misinformation is prevalent. Critical Literacy Initiatives for Civic Engagement is an essential reference source that discusses the intersection of critical literacy and citizenship and provides practical ways for educators to encourage responsible citizenship in their classrooms. Featuring research on topics such as language learning, school governance, and digital platforms, this book is ideally designed for professionals, teachers, administrators, academicians, and researchers.

This book provides an expanded conceptualization of legalization that focuses on implementation of obligation, precision, and delegation at the international and domestic levels of politics. By adding domestic politics and the actors to the international level of analysis, the authors add the insights of Kenneth Waltz, Graham Allison, and Louis Henkin to understand why most international law is developed and observed most of the time. However, the authors argue that law-breaking and law-distorting occurs as a part of negative legalization. Consequently, the book offers a framework for understanding how international law both produces and undermines order and justice. The authors also draw from realist, liberal, constructivist, cosmopolitan and critical theories to analyse how legalization can both build and/or undermine consensus, which results in either positive or negative legalization of international law. The authors argue that legalization is a process over time and not just a snapshot in time.

The aim of the present volume is to discuss the notion of constitution from the perspectives of history of political thought. Its scholarly intention is to go beyond the approach concentrating on the formal understanding of constitution and bring forward more complex historical and philosophic-political interpretations. Our point of departure was the need to revive the somehow neglected distinction between the idea of constitution as an act of conscious law-giving activity and the notion of constitution conceived as the set of fundamental political rules derived from the very nature of political regime and its historical development.

In this book, translated into English for the first time, Lelio Demichelis takes on a modern perspective of the concept/process of alienation. This concept-much more profound and widespread today than first described and denounced by Marx-has largely been forgotten and erased. Using the characters of Narcissus, Pygmalion and Prometheus, the author reinterprets and updates Marx, Nietzsche, Anders, Foucault and, in particular, critical theory and the Frankfurt School views on an administered society (where everything is automated and engineered, manifest today in algorithms, AI, machine learning and social networking) showing that, in a world where old and new forms of alienation come together, man is increasingly led to delegate (i.e. alienate) sovereignty, freedom, responsibility and the awareness of being alive.

This study considers the multidimensional nature of the construction of the active civil society in the post-totalitarian reality of Central and Eastern Europe, covering the period of systemic transformations in the region in 1989 to the EU accession of 2004. The analysis was carried out using a multidisciplinary research perspective which incorporates historical, sociological, and legal insights, as well as those from political science. The volume illustrates the dynamic character of the process of constructing an active civil society process in a broader comparative perspective against the background of post-totalitarian societies, Germany and Italy, which underwent the process of democratic transformation in 1945 and went on to actively forge the European Community in the 1950s.

This book addresses the possibilities of analyzing the modern international through the thought of Michel Foucault. The broad range of authors brought together in this volume question four of the most self-evident characteristics of our contemporary world-'international', 'neoliberal', 'biopolitical' and 'global'- and thus fill significant gaps in both international and Foucault studies. The chapters discuss what a Foucauldian perspective does or does not offer for understanding international phenomena while also questioning many appropriations of Foucault's work. This transdisciplinary volume will serve as a reference for both scholars and students of international relations, international political sociology, international political economy, political theory/philosophy and critical theory more generally.

Why do people adopt different political ideologies? How can seemingly equal intellects, presented with the same facts and circumstances disagree so vehemently over how society should be structured? What psychological undercurrents guide people to adopt Conservative or Liberal political beliefs, and where did they come from?

The answer lies in a well known concept in biology, termed r/K Selection Theory. r/K Theory examines how all populations tend to adopt one of two psychologies as a means of adapting their behavior to the presence or absence of environmental resources. The two strategies, termed r and K, each correlate perfectly with the psychologies underlying Liberalism and Conservatism.

One strategy, named the r-strategy, imbues those who are programmed with it to be averse to all peer on peer competition, embrace promiscuity, embrace single parenting, and support early onset sexual activity in youth. Obviously, this mirrors the Liberal philosophy's aversion to individual Darwinian competitions such as capitalism and self defense with firearms, as well as group competitions such as war. Likewise, Liberalism is tolerant of promiscuity, tolerant of single parenting, and more prone to support early sex education for children and the sexualization of cultural influences. Designed to exploit a plethora of resources, one will often find this r-type strategy embodied within prey species, where predation has lowered the population's numbers, and thereby increased the resources available to it's individuals.

The other strategy, termed the K-strategy, imbues those who pursue it with a fierce competitiveness, as well as tendencies towards abstinence until monogamy, two-parent parenting, and delaying sexual activity until later in life. Obviously, this mirrors Conservatism's acceptance of all sorts of competitive social schemes, from free market capitalism, to war, to individuals owning and carrying private weapons for self defense. Conservatives also tend to favor abstinence until monogamy, two parent parenting with an emphasis upon "family values," and children being shielded from any sexualized stimuli until later in life. This strategy is found most commonly in species which lack predation, and whose population's have grown to the point individuals must compete with each other for the limited environmental resources that they are rapidly running out of.

Meticulously substantiated with the latest research in fields from neurobiology to human behavioral ecology, this work offers an unprecedented view into not just what governs our political battles, but why these battles have arisen within our species in the first place. From showing how these two strategies adapt in other more complex species in nature, to examining what genetic and neurostructural mechanisms may produce these divergences between individuals, to showing what this theory indicates our future may hold, this work is the most thorough analysis to date of just why we have two political ideologies, why they will never agree, and why we will tend to become even more partisan in the future.