A provocative series of essays from the former Supreme Court judge and Sunday Times-bestselling author.

Across the globe, democracy is in crisis - in the UK alone, it has been rocked by Brexit, the pandemic and successive attempts by governments to bypass legal norms. But how did this happen, and where might we go from here? Jonathan Sumption cuts through the political noise with acute analysis of the state of democracy today - from the vulnerabilities of international law to the deepening suppression of democracy activism in Hong Kong, and from the complexities of human rights legislation to the defence of freedom of speech.

Timely, incisive and wholly original, Challenges of Democracy applies the brilliance of 'the cleverest man in Britain' to the most urgent and far-reaching political issue of our day.

From Louis Brandeis to Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas, the nomination of federal judges has generated intense political conflict. With the coming retirement of one or more Supreme Court Justices--and threats to filibuster lower court judges--the selection process is likely to be, once again, the center of red-hot partisan debate.
In Advice and Consent, two leading legal scholars, Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal, offer a brief, illuminating Baedeker to this highly important procedure, discussing everything from constitutional background, to crucial differences in the nomination of judges and justices, to the role of the Judiciary Committee in vetting nominees. Epstein and Segal shed light on the role played by the media, by the American Bar Association, and by special interest groups (whose efforts helped defeat Judge Bork). Though it is often assumed that political clashes over nominees are a new phenomenon, the authors argue that the appointment of justices and judges has always been a highly contentious process--one largely driven by ideological and partisan concerns. The reader discovers how presidents and the senate have tried to remake the bench, ranging from FDR's controversial "court packing" scheme to the Senate's creation in 1978 of 35 new appellate and 117 district court judgeships, allowing the Democrats to shape the judiciary for years. The authors conclude with possible "reforms," from the so-called nuclear option, whereby a majority of the Senate could vote to prohibit filibusters, to the even more dramatic suggestion that Congress eliminate a judge's life tenure either by term limits or compulsory retirement.
With key appointments looming on the horizon, Adviceand Consent provides everything concerned citizens need to know to understand the partisan rows that surround the judicial nominating process.

Why do some countries appear to be far more centralized than others? In some countries local government has responsibility for a wide range of public services, while in others these services are delivered by national and other non-local bodies. Moreover national government oversees the operation of local government with varying degrees of stringency. In addition, local politicians in some countries seem to have greater influence over their national counterparts than those in others. The answer to this question can be found in the distinctive patterns of development experienced in southern and northern Europe. Differences in national-local relations also have direct implications for patterns of policy-making at the local level. This book examines the legal and political bases of relationships between national and local government in Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, and Spain, and assesses the causes and consequences of differences in such relationships.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. Tackling the complex issues surrounding what shapes a person's vote, this cutting-edge Advanced Introduction analyses the main findings in current research on electoral behavior to provide a comprehensive understanding of electoral choice. Key Features: Treats the voting decision as the cumulation of a lifetime of learning Studies global voting examples, from Europe and the Anglo-American democracies to newly democratic states Places the act of voting in context to cover all dimensions of the voting decision, examining the causes of an individual's vote and how that interacts with the design of the country's institutions Considers the ideological effects of short-term factors like issues and leaders which dominate election campaigns, and long-term factors like social backgrounds, looking at how class and economic interests can influence voters Analysing the incentives behind party loyalties and political participation, this Advanced Introduction will be an invaluable guide for students and scholars interested in political and electoral behavior and comparative politics.

Let us rewrite our history; A history that speaks of Africa as experienced by Africans. Let us rewrite our history that speaks of ubuntu traditions, isintu practices and umuntu/abantu as central pillars of society. Let us rewrite a narrative that speaks isintu sethu - setso sa rona, isintu - setso sa rona as a 'Set of Rules' for all practices in society. Twenty-five years after the delivery of political democracy, the Edenic projects of nonracialism and the Rainbow Nation have failed because there was no fuller appreciation of what is meant by ubuntu. Ubuntu consists of three integral parts: first, amasiko, which consists of traditions, norms and customs; isintu: rituals, performances and practices that help with the embodiment of ubuntu; and umuntu, the performer and practitioner of isintu and bearer of the ubuntu value system as a state of being and identity. The version of ubuntu that was used and applied immediately after 1994 for engendering nationbuilding should have initially been focused on rebuilding the Black social groups before there were attempts at rebuilding all races, through the defunct Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and forging social cohesion through short-term sporting codes such as the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Such an understanding of ubuntu, exemplified above, came across as sanitised and a quick fix that could not undo centuries of dehumanisation, as characterised by apartheid. By definition and practice, that is anathema to ubuntu since it depreciated the value systems and performances of isintu of the majority population and defiled the humanity of both the Black people and their white counterparts. Isintu ought to be regarded as a tool of inculcation of rules, norms and traditions that structure limits and help with the embodiment of ubuntu. This book regards it as well suited for solving the impasse currently witnessed in South Africa. It is only with the inclusion of the analysis and discussion of isintu that ubuntu may be understood and reveal its performative prowess in the production of identities and a variety of capitals meant to sustain the societies of sub-Saharan Africa. Needless to say, some aspects of ubuntu may well be suitable for export as representative of humanism or critical humanism. However, the system of ubuntu needs to be properly rationalised before it can be chopped down and paraded as a universal tool. The tendency of parading ubuntu as a universal tool of humanism has tended to weaken it along with individuals whose bodies and geographies are a locus for cultivation identities and diverse forms of capital that help enact and sustain local value systems. This book presents the true meaning of ubuntu, which has its roots in communitarian societies and their value systems. As part of an international benchmark on the viability of local value systems as a conceptual framework for performances of production aimed at a fulfilled citizenry, the book compares ubuntu to its counterpart value systems of Confucianism in China and Jantelagen in Sweden.

Two Weeks in November is the thrilling, surreal, unbelievable and often very funny true story of four would-be enemies – a high-ranking politician, an exiled human rights lawyer, a dangerous spy and a low-key white businessman turned political fixer – who team up to help unseat one of the world’s longest serving dictators, Robert Mugabe.

What begins as an improbable adventure destined for failure, marked by a mixture of bravery, strategic cunning and bumbling naiveté, soon turns into the most sophisticated political-military operation in African history. By virtue of their being together, the unlikely team of misfit rivals is suddenly in position to spin what might have been seen as an illegal coup into a mass popular uprising that the world – and millions of Zimbabweans – will enthusiastically support.

Impeccably researched, deftly written, and told in the style of a political thriller, Two Weeks in November is Ocean’s 11 meets Game of Thrones: a real-world life or death chess match for the future of a country where the political endgame is never a forgone conclusion.

From one of America's most respected journalists and modern historians comes the highly acclaimed, "splendid" (The Washington Post) biography of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States and Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian. Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure-ridiculed and later revered-with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people. Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the twenty-first. "One of the best in a celebrated genre of presidential biography," (The Washington Post), His Very Best traces how Carter evolved from a timid, bookish child-raised mostly by a Black woman farmhand-into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer writing passionate, never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-nineties. This "important, fair-minded, highly readable contribution" (The New York Times Book Review) will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.

The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities.
Featuring a cast of leading scholars working at the intersection of political science and American history, The Unsustainable American State is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. Collectively, the book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the contributors show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, they contend, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.

In this incisive and thought-provoking book, Francois Venter illuminates the issues arising from the fact that the current language of constitutional law is strongly premised on a particular worldview rooted in the history of the states around the North Atlantic Ocean. Highlighting how this terminological hegemony is being challenged from various directions, Venter explores the problem that all constitutional comparatists face: that they all must use the same words to express different meanings. Offering a compact but comprehensive constitutional history, Venter investigates the ways in which the standard vocabulary does not fit comfortably in many contemporary constitutional orders, as well as examining how its cogency is increasingly being questioned. Chapters contextualize comparative constitutional methods to demonstrate how the language choices made by comparatists are shaped by their own perspectives, arguing that careful explanation of the meanings attached to constitutional terms is imperative in order to be persuasive or even understood. Tackling the foundational elements of the field, this book will be a critical read for constitutional scholars across the globe. It will also be of interest to high-level practitioners of constitutional law and political scientists for its investigation of terminology that is crucial to their work.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This Research Agenda documents and establishes the thinking of leading scholars in the field of political marketing and related sub-fields, also encompassing additional social science disciplines that intersect at the crossroads of political marketing. Chapters address the complexity of how politicians and political parties leverage trust, credibility, and expertise across their policy positions, and how citizens formulate their attitudes and opinions. Contributors focus on the new challenges and opportunities for political parties and politicians around the globe when communicating about complex issues, such as science and technology. This Research Agenda will be an essential resource for political marketing researchers and practitioners looking to explore how marketing tactics may be used to shape, guide, and manage public opinion and policy discourse.

This thought-provoking book addresses the legal questions raised by the nexus between the rule of law and areas of limited statehood, in which the State lacks the ability to exercise the full depth of its governmental authority. Working from an international law perspective, it examines the implications of limited statehood for the traditional State-based framing of the international legal order. Featuring original contributions written by renowned international scholars, chapters investigate key issues arising at the junction between domestic and international rule of law and areas of limited statehood, as well as the alternative modes of governance that develop therein, both with and without the approval of the State. Contributors discuss the impact of contested sovereignty on the rule of law, international responsibility with regard to rebel governance in these areas, and the consequences of limited statehood for international peace and security. This book will be useful for students and scholars of international law and international relations, particularly those working on sovereignty and statehood, non-state actors, State responsibility, and the rule of law. It will also appeal to practitioners and policy-makers working in these same fields in either State or global governance apparatus.

In his #1 New York Times bestseller, former Vice President Dick Cheney delivers a forty-year portrait of American politics and shares unyielding reflections on his role as one of the most steadfast and influential statesmen in the history of our country.In his enlightening and provocative memoir--a stately page-turner with flashes of surprising humor, remarkable candor, and powerful resonance--former Vice President Dick Cheney takes readers through his experiences as family man, policymaker, businessman, and politician during years that shaped our collective history. Eyewitness to events at the highest levels, Dick Cheney brings to life scenes from past and present: He chronicles his coming-of-age as a high school athlete in Casper, Wyoming, and courting homecoming queen Lynn Vincent, his future wife. He describes driving through the White House gates just hours after the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon, to manage the Ford transition. He portrays his response to the national crisis of 9/11, when he conveyed orders from the White House bunker to shoot down a hijacked airliner if it would not divert. And he reveals how his political vision has endured through his extraordinary ascent to the heights of American public life as: * The youngest White House Chief of Staff, under President Gerald Ford * Congressman from Wyoming who worked closely with President Ronald Reagan * Secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush, overseeing the U.S. military during Operation Desert Storm and the resolution of the Cold War * CEO of the international Fortune 500 company Halliburton * The first U.S. vice president to serve out his term of office in the twenty-first century. Working with George W. Bush from the onset of the global war on terror, he was--and remains--an outspoken proponent of taking every step necessary to defend the nation.