Events in the post Cold War era have challenged the notions of realism and realpolitik, with an upsurge in intrastate conflicts involving other actors than just the state. During this period, the international community has witnessed the limitations of the tenets of realism for addressing disastrous civil wars or ethno-political conflicts internal to the states. Largely because of this, and alongside the emerging field of conflict resolution in western countries, transitional conflict resolution mechanisms emerged with characteristic multi-track diplomacy orientations for solving national problems within African countries. By the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, several African countries, including South Africa, Burundi and Sierra Leone resorted to either a Truth and Reconciliation Commission or an international tribunal to handle violence and restore peace and justice. In the same period, other African countries opted for what was called 'national conference' to solve their national problems and transform conflict into an opportunity for structural change. In February 1990, the Republic of Benin, a small nation-state in West Africa, achieved peace through a national conference. The national conference in Benin was a national gathering for crisis resolution through social debates on critical issues facing the nation, and political decision making for constructive changes. As a pioneer, Benin led the political change movement of the national conference and was later followed by eight other African countries namely, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Mali, Niger, Togo, the Central African Republic, and the former Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. To date, most of the existing literature on the subject explores the phenomenon of national conference as something of a prelude to political transition to multipartyism and democracy. Part of the literature depicts the national conference as a civil coup d'etat, and recommends its institutionalization as a system for democratic transitions. This book takes a different approach by conceptualizing the national conference phenomenon as a multi-track diplomacy tool or as a process for conflict transformation and peacemaking. Building upon theories of conflict and conflict resolution, the author analyzes the national conference as a unique diplomatic approach to transforming national crisis, which expands the scope of strategies for peacemaking. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jacques KOKO is an Adjunct Professor in the Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, USA, where he teaches "Peacemaking and peacekeeping," "Conflict and Displacement in Africa," and "Ethnopolitical conflict." A Beninois, Professor Koko has worked as a Senior Social Analyst with the Institut Africain pour le Developpement Economique et Social (INADES) in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and as an Associate Researcher with the Universite Nationale d'Abomey Calavi in Cotonou (Benin). Correlatively with his teaching position at Seton Hall University, he currently serves as a Senior Political Analyst for Americans for Informed Democracy. He publishes in both English and French.

Any contemporary state presents itself as committed to the "rule of law", and this notion is perhaps the most powerful political ideal within the current global discourse on legal and political institutions. Despite being a contested concept, the rule of law is generally recognised as meaning that government is bound in all its actions by fixed and public rules, and that these rules respect certain formal requirements and are enforced by an independent judiciary. This book focuses on formal legality and the question of how to achieve good laws-a topic that was famously addressed by the 18th century enlightened thinkers, but also by prominent legal scholars of our time. Historically, the canon of "good legislation" demanded generality, publicity and accessibility, and comprehensibility of laws; non-retroactivity; consistency; the possibility of complying with legal obligations and prohibitions; stability; and congruency between enacted laws and their application. All these are valuable ideals that should not be abandoned in today's legal systems, particularly in view of the silent revolution that is transforming our legality-based "states of law" into jurisdictional states. Such ideals are still worth pursuing for those who believe in representative democracy, in the rule of law and in the dignity of legislation. The idea for the book stemmed from the author's parliamentary and governmental experience; he was responsible for the Government of Spain's legislative co-ordination from 1982 to 1993, which were years of intensive legislative production. The more than five hundred laws (and thousands of decrees) elaborated in this period profoundly changed all sectors of the legal order inherited from Franco's dictatorship, and laid the foundations of a new social and democratic system. For an academic, this was an exciting experience, which offered a unique opportunity to put the theory of legislation to the test. Reflecting and elaborating on this experience, the book not only increases scholarly awareness of how laws are made, but above all, improves the quality of legislation and as a result the rule of law.

Written by a team of experts, this text introduces all of the main competing theoretical approaches to the study of the state, including pluralism, Marxism, institutionalism, feminism, green theory and more. A brand new 'issues' section enables readers to apply these key concepts and theoretical approaches to important developments in the state today. This new edition offers: - Coverage of all key empirical and theoretical developments in the field, with analysis of the impact of globalisation, global financial upheavals, Brexit, Covid-19 and social movements such as Black Lives Matter - A wide range of voices, perspectives, contemporary and historical examples, giving readers a holistic overview of the field, as well as deeper dives into key issues - Brand new chapters on sovereignty, security, territory, capital, nationalism and populism - Guided further reading suggestions at the end of each chapter Providing both a firm grounding in the key concepts and critical engagement with contemporary controversies and debates, this text is ideal for those studying all aspects of the state.

Electronic participation is an emerging and growing research area that makes use of internet solutions to enhance citizens' participation in government processes in order to provide a fair and efficient society. This book examines recommender-system technologies and voting advice applications as tools to enable electronic citizen participation during election campaigns. Further, making use of fuzzy classification, it provides an evaluation framework for eParticipation. A dynamic voting advice application developed for the 2017 Ecuador national election serves as a real-world case study to introduce readers to the practical implementation and evaluation issues. The book concludes with a comprehensive analysis of the 2017 election project based on altmetrics, Google Analytics and statistics from the case study.

Paul Cavill offers a major reinterpretation of early Tudor constitutional history. In the grand "Whig" tradition, the parliaments of Henry VII were a disappointing retreat from the onward march towards parliamentary democracy. The king was at best indifferent and at worst hostile to parliament; its meetings were cowed and quiescent, subservient to the royal will. Yet little research has tested these assumptions.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Cavill challenges existing accounts and revises our understanding of the period. Neither to the king nor to his subjects did parliament appear to be a waning institution, fading before the waxing power of the crown. For a ruler in Henry's vulnerable position, parliament helped to restore royal authority by securing the good governance that legitimated his regime. For his subjects, parliament served as a medium through which to communicate with the government and to shape--and, on occasion, criticize--its policies. Because of the demands parliament made, its impact was felt throughout the kingdom, among ordinary people as well as among the elite. Cooperation between subjects and the crown, rather than conflict, characterized these parliaments.
While for many scholars parliament did not truly come of age until the 1530s, when-freed from its medieval shackles-the modern institution came to embody the sovereign nation state, in this study Henry's reign emerges as a constitutionally innovative period. Ideas of parliamentary sovereignty were already beginning to be articulated. It was here that the foundations of the "Tudor revolution in government" were being laid.

This timely work offers a clear and thorough assessment of how Roma make sure their voice is heard and addresses the difficulty in determining who legitimately represents this heterogeneous transnational minority community. The book argues that Roma are a transnational minority that, as such, requires transnational representation structures to complement domestic political representation structures. After explaining the relationship between representation and political participation within the context of ethnic mobilization, the book then evaluates representation structures and Roma participation in Romania, Hungary, and in the transnational political context. Analytically, the book presents a multidisciplinary approach that draws from the literature on minority rights, citizenship, international relations, and social movements. Empirically, it describes two domestic political contexts and a transnational one. An engaging, informative, and accessible text, Who Speaks for Roma? sheds light on the key challenges facing Roma across Europe today and will be a timely reference for anyone interested in minority politics, political participation, political representation, and human rights.

This book captures Malaysia's foreign policy over the first fifty years and beyond since the date of the country's formal independence in 1957. The author provides "macro-historical" narratives of foreign policy practices and outcomes over distinct time periods under the tenures of the five prime ministers. One chapter delves into relations with immediate neighbouring states and another chapter analyses the political economy of foreign policy. A postscript deals with the transition of foreign policy beyond the fifth decade. The concluding chapter suggests that Malaysian middlepowermanship has been in the making in foreign policy practice being particularly evident since the Mahathir years. Employing a critical-constructivist approach throughout the study, the author posits that foreign policy should be appreciated as outcomes of socio-political-economic processes embedded within a Malaysian political culture. In terms of broad policy orientations, Malaysian foreign policy over five decades has navigated over the terrains of neutralism, regionalism, globalization and Islamism. However, the critical engagement of civil society in foreign policy construction remains a formidable challenge.

In June 2010, Greg Fettig began a battle that would ultimately change the course of his life. Already involved in the Tea Party movement in Indiana, he started a campaign to target an icon of Washington elitism, six-term US Senator Richard Lugar, and ultimately oust him from power. He had no idea that the eighteen-month journey ahead would be fraught with twists and turns, bribes, threats, attacks, deception, and betrayal.

An inside look into the dark underbelly of politics, "Tea Party on Safari" takes you behind the scenes of one battle in an all-out war for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Fettig, along with fellow Tea Party patriot Monica Boyer, united under the banner of constitutional conservatism and set out to reclaim the Republican Party by purging it of RINOs-and they started with Senator Lugar.

Voting Lugar out of office remained their goal, and they pursued it with steady resolve. With Fettig and Boyer at the helm, the unified Tea Party waged the largest grass roots political campaign ever conducted in the young movement's history, seeking to send shockwaves of fear to the Washington, DC, establishment of both national political parties.

Writing with warmth and humor, Connie Schultz reveals the rigors, joys, and absolute madness of a new marriage at midlife and campaigning with her husband, Sherrod Brown, now the junior senator from Ohio. She describes the chain of events leading up to Sherrod's decision to run for the Senate (he would not enter the fray without his wife's unequivocal support), and her own decision to step down from writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning column during the course of one of the nation's most intensely watched races. She writes about the moment her friends in the press became not so friendly, the constant campaign demands on her marriage and family life, and a personal tragedy that came out of the blue. Schultz also shares insight into the challenges of political life: dealing with audacious bloggers, ruthless adversaries, and political divas; battling expectations of a political wife; and the shock of having staffers young enough to be her children suddenly directing her every move. Connie Schultz is passionate and outspoken about her opinions-in other words, every political consultant's nightmare, and every reader's dream.
"[Schultz is] a Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist with a mordant wit. . . . The [campaign memoir] genre takes on new life."
"-The Washington Post Book World"
"With her characteristic wit and reportorial thoroughness, [Schultz] describes the behind-the-scenes chaos, frustration and excitement of a political campaign and the impact it has on a candidate's family."
"-Minneapolis Star Tribune"
"Witty and anecdotal, whether read by a Democrat or a Republican."
"-Deseret Morning News"
"Frank and feisty . . . a spunky tribute to the survival of one woman's spirit under conditions in which it might have been squelched."
"-The Columbus Dispatch"

Wiefek presents evidence of a link between individual-level economic concerns and political opinion. Conceptualizing economic anxiety by applying social psychological theory to the distinct characteristics of the new American economy, she presents evidence that this postindustrial economic anxiety shapes beliefs and policy opinions, above and beyond ideology, partisanship, and income. Journalists and political commentators have written extensively on the political consequences of the strains created by the transformation of the U.S. economy over the last thirty years. Yet, the individual-level anxiety accompanying America's transition to a postindustrial, globalized economy has not been explored in any systematic way. In fact, what clear empirical evidence we do have strongly suggests that citizens do not link their personal fortunes to their political opinions. Wiefek argues that the way in which political scientists normally go about looking for these connections misses what citizens experience in their daily lives, particularly their emotional reactions. The measures commonly used by political scientists do not tap the specific features of America's post-1973 economic transformation or the anxiety, insecurity, and fear it engenders. Wiefek presents a conceptualization of economic anxiety that draws upon psychological, sociological, economic, and political science theories and findings, and the distinct nature of the new economy. Using data from a mail survey, she estimates the impact of economic anxiety and presents strong evidence of its predictive power on political opinion. She concludes with a discussion of the political implications of these findings and argues that the progressive political potential of shared anxieties will require reversing the anti-government bias endemic to our current public dialogue.

Women as Global Leaders is the second volume in the new Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice book series published for the International Leadership Association by IAP. Global leadership is an emerging area of research, with only a small but growing published literature base. More specifically, the topic of women's advances and adventures in leading within the global context is barely covered in the existing leadership literature. Although few women are serving in global leadership roles in corporate and non-profit arenas, and as heads of nations, that number is growing (e.g., Indira Nooyi at PepsiCo, Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as president of Liberia, Angela Merkel as chancellor of Germany). The purpose of this volume is to provide the reader with current conceptualizations and theory related to women as global leaders, recent empirical investigations of the phenomenon, analysis of effective global leadership development programs, and portraits of women who lead, or have led, in a global role. The volume is divided into four sections. The first section covers the state of women as global leaders, containing chapters by Joyce Osland and Nancy Adler, pioneers in the field of global and/or women's leadership. The second section describes approaches to women's global leadership. The third section offers an analysis of programs that are useful in developing women as global leaders, with the final section profiling women as global leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, Nobel Laureate Malala Yousfazai, and Golda Meir. As Barbara Kellerman noted in the Foreword, "this book...should be understood as a collection whose time has come, precisely because women now have opportunities to lead that are far more expansive than they were even in the recent past. Though their numbers remain low, they are able in some cases to exercise leadership not only as outsiders, but also as insiders, from the very positions of power and authority to which men forever have had access."

This original and ambitious work looks anew at a series of intellectual debates about the meaning of democracy. Clive Barnett engages with key thinkers in various traditions of democratic theory and demonstrates the importance of a geographical imagination in interpreting contemporary political change. Debates about radical democracy, Barnett argues, have become trapped around a set of oppositions between deliberative and agonistic theories - contrasting thinkers who promote the possibility of rational agreement and those who seek to unmask the role of power or violence or difference in shaping human affairs. While these debates are often framed in terms of consensus versus contestation, Barnett unpacks the assumptions about space and time that underlie different understandings of the sources of political conflict and shows how these differences reflect deeper philosophical commitments to theories of creative action or revived ontologies of "the political." Rather than developing ideal theories of democracy or models of proper politics, he argues that attention should turn toward the practices of claims-making through which political movements express experiences of injustice and make demands for recognition, redress, and re pair. By rethinking the spatial grammar of discussions of public space, democratic inclusion, and globalization, Barnett develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the crucial roles played by geographical processes in generating and processing contentious politics.

"Nigeria's Stumbling Democracy and its Implications for Africa's Democratic Movement" is the first book to recount and analyze Nigeria's controversial general elections of April 2007. Because Nigeria's immense and diverse population of 140 million people and its wealth of natural resources make it a microcosm of Africa, Nigerian politics are an ideal case study and bellwether by which to view and understand African politics and the ongoing democratic experiments on the continent. Ten leading scholars of Nigerian and African politics, variously based in Nigeria, the US, and Europe, contribute original chapters commissioned by Professor Okafor to provide an account at once deep and comprehensive of what went wrong with these disputed presidential, federal, and state elections; together with their implications for the future of the democratic movement, both in Nigeria and in Africa as a whole.

Although the 2007 general elections resulted in the first-ever handover of political power from one civilian government to another in the history of Nigeria, by which the two-term Christian president Olusegun Obasanjon was succeeded by a Muslim, Alhaji Musa Yar'Adua, they were condemned by internal and international watchdogs for pervasive vote-rigging, violence, intimidation, and fraud which were, as this book documents, perpetrated by and with the connivance of the nation's security forces. The disappointment of continental hopes that these elections might finally break with Nigeria's history of tainted elections has grave repercussions for the democracy movement not only in Nigeria but throughout Africa-as seen in the knock-on effect upon the disastrous general elections in Kenya later the same year.

THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA: THE POLITICS OF PERSUASION provides the first comprehensive treatment of why Obama's rhetorical strategies were so effective during the 2008 presidential campaign, during the first four years of his presidency, and once again during the 2012 presidential campaign. From his "Yes We Can" speech, to his "More Perfect Union Speech," to his Cairo "New Beginnings" speech, candidate-Obama-turned-President-Obama represents what a skilled rhetorician can accomplish within the public sphere. Contributors to the collection closely analyze several of Obama's most important speeches, attempting to explain why they were so rhetorically effective, while also examining the large discursive structures Obama was engaging: a worldwide financial crisis, political apathy, domestic racism, Islamophobia, the Middle East peace process, Zionism, and more. THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA will appeal to politically engaged, intelligent readers, scholars of rhetoric, and anyone interested in understanding how the strategic use of language in highly charged contexts-how the art of rhetoric-shapes our world, unites and divides people, and creates conditions that make social change possible. For those new to the formal study of rhetoric, editors Matthew Abraham and Erec Smith include a glossary of key terms and concepts. Contributors include Matthew Abraham, Rene Agustin De los Santos, David A. Frank, John Jasso, Michael Kleine, Richard Marback, Robert Rowland, Steven Salaita, Courtney Jue, Erec Smith, and Anthony Wachs. "From the inspiring slogans and speeches of his campaign to the eloquent successes and failures of his presidency, Barack Obama has been extravagantly praised and sarcastically criticized for the distinctive power of his rhetoric. The essays in this collection persuasively analyze that rhetoric in all its specific tactics and general strategies, in its idealist yearnings and its pragmatic compromises, in its ambitious strivings and its political obstacles. THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA is a must read for anyone interested in how political rhetoric works-and doesn't-in twenty-first-century America." -STEVEN MAILLOUX, President's Professor of Rhetoric, Loyola Marymount University "A readable yet critically engaging collection, THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA offers a robust look at the deft rhetorical strategies deployed by the first African American President. Moving beyond sentimental, hypercritical or otherwise dismissive readings of his oratory, these essays explore how Obama's speeches have addressed substantive issues, such as globalization, the American dream, political gridlock, the legacy of racism and religious bigotry. This book will appeal to rhetorical scholars and laypersons alike." -DAVID G. HOLMES, Professor of English, Pepperdine University "By confronting topics often avoided in politically correct discourse-including religious identity, racial belonging and the cultural politics of difference- THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA doesn't hesitate to engage divisive and difficult issues; producing some of the most challenging, insightful and provocative perspectives to date." -RHEA LATHAN, Assistant Professor of English, Florida State University

This work is a unique single source for information on the foreign policy-wars, treaties, initiatives, and doctrines-of all 43 presidents of the United States. From George Washington's isolationism to the Monroe Doctrine of hemispheric right to domination to Teddy Roosevelt's imperialism through George W. Bush's global war against terror, U.S. foreign policy has charted a varied course. As the area where the president has the most freedom of action, foreign policy can, and often does, change precipitously, according to the incumbent's view of the world. No other branch of government rivals the president's role in America's rise from liberal republic to global superpower. This work brings together the scholarship of leading historians and political scientists to present in-depth examination of the foreign policy of each president of the United States. This thorough presentation covers all aspects of international relations; although the work is not primarily interpretive, it does not shy from pointing out both notable successes and failures. The book's 43 essays present quick access to the whole of the history of American foreign policy. 42 essays-one per president-from leading historians and political scientists Primary source documents such as Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address, John L. O'Sullivan on manifest destiny, and James K. Polk's war message A detailed chronology provides a convenient overview of the whole history of American foreign policy A bibliography following each section gives access to additional resources for more extensive research