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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government
Known around the world as a bastion of machismo and Catholicism, Latin America in recent decades has emerged as the undisputed gay rights leader of the Global South. More surprising yet, nations such as Argentina have surpassed more "developed" nations like the United States and many European states in extending civil rights to the homosexual population. Setting aside the role of external factors and conditions in pushing gay rights from the Developed North to the Global South - such as the internationalization of human rights norms and practices, the globalization of gay identities, and the diffusion of policies such as "gay marriage" - Out in the Periphery aims to "decenter" gay rights politics in Latin America by putting the domestic context front and center. The intention is not to show how the "local" has triumphed the "global" in Latin America. Rather the book suggests how the domestic context has interacted with the outside world to make Latin America an unusually receptive environment for the development of gay rights. Omar Encarnacion focuses particularly on the role of local gay rights organizations, a long-neglected social movement in Latin America, in filtering and adapting international gay rights ideas. Inspired by the outside world but firmly embedded in local politics, Latin American gay activists have succeeded in bringing radical change to the law with respect to homosexuality and, in some cases, as in Argentina, in transforming society and the culture at large.
In the last decade, science in the United States has become
increasingly politicized, as government officials have been accused
of manipulating, distorting, subverting, and censoring science for
ideological purposes. Political gamesmanship has played a major
role in many different areas of science, including the debate over
global climate change, embryonic stem cell research, government
funding of research, the FDA's approval process, military
intelligence related to Iraq, research with human subjects, and the
teaching of evolution in public schools.
Political theory, from antiquity to the present, has been divided over the relationship between the requirements of justice and the limitations of persons and institutions to meet those requirements. Some theorists hold that a theory of justice should be utopian or idealistic-that the derivation of the correct principles of justice should not take into account human and institutional limitations. Others insist on a realist or non-utopian view, according to which feasibility-facts about what is possible given human and institutional limitations-is a constraint on principles of justice. In recent years, the relationship between the ideal and the real has become the subject of renewed scholarly interest. This anthology aims to represent the contemporary state of this classic debate. By and large, contributors to the volume deny that the choice between realism and idealism is binary. Rather, there is a continuum between realism and idealism that locates these extremes of each view at opposite poles. The contributors, therefore, tend to occupy middle positions, only leaning in the ideal or non-ideal direction. Together, their contributions not only represent a wide array of attractive positions in the new literature on the topic, but also collectively advance how we understand the difference between idealism and realism itself.
Americans often look back on Paris between the world wars as a
charming escape from the enduring inequalities and reactionary
politics of the United States. In this bold and original study,
Brooke Blower shows that nothing could be further from the truth.
She reveals the breadth of American activities in the capital, the
lessons visitors drew from their stay, and the passionate responses
they elicited from others. For many sojourners-not just for the
most famous expatriate artists and writers- Paris served as an
important crossroads, a place where Americans reimagined their
position in the world and grappled with what it meant to be
American in the new century, even as they came up against
conflicting interpretations of American power by others.
In September of 2010, the Daily Mail Reporter announced "Anti-immigration party formed from skinhead movement seizes balance of power in Sweden." A politics of skinhead protest, expressed through White Power Music and an explicitly nationalistic subgenre known as Viking Rock, has relied on its music to voice opposition to immigration and multiculturism. Often labeled "neo-Nazis" or "right-wing extremists," these actors shook political establishments throughout Sweden, Denmark, and Norway during the 1980s and 1990s by rallying around white power music and skinhead subculture. More recently, however, these groups methodically revised their presentation in an effort to refashion themselves as upstanding, intelligent champions of love and human diversity, and once again using music to do so. In Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism, author Benjamin Teitelbaum explores this transformation of anti-immigrant, anti-liberal activism in the Nordic countries as it manifests in thought and sound. As his fieldwork in Sweden overlapped with Anders Behring Breivik's attacks in 2011, Teitelbaum observed the radical nationalist movement at a particularly sensitive moment. Offering a rare ethnographic glimpse into controversial and secretive political movements, Lions of the North investigates changes in the music nationalists make and patronize, reading their surprising new music styles as attempts to escape stereotypes and fashion a new image for themselves. Teitelbaum's work reveals organized opposition to immigration and multiculturalism in Scandinavia to be a scene in flux, populated by individuals with diverse understandings of themselves, their cause, and the significance of music. Ultimately, he uncovers the ways in which nationalists use music to frame themselves as agents of justice, an image that is helping to propel these actors to unprecedented success in societies often considered the most tolerant in the world. A timely and powerful work of interdisciplinary ethnomusicology, Lions of the North will appeal to a wide audience, from scholars in the humanities to those in political science.
Early work in conflict resolution and peace research focused on why wars broke out, why they persisted, and why peace agreements failed to endure. Later research has focused on what actions and circumstances have actually averted destructive escalations, stopped the perpetuation of destructive conduct, produced a relatively good conflict transformation, or resulted in an enduring and relatively equitable relationship among former adversaries. This later research, which began in the 1950s, recognizes that conflict is inevitable and is often waged in the name of rectifying injustice. Additionally, it argues that damages can be minimized and gains maximized for various stakeholders in waging and settling conflicts. This theory, which is known as the constructive conflict approach, looks at how conflicts can be waged and resolved so they are broadly beneficial rather than mutually destructive. In this book, Louis Kriesberg, one of the major figures in the school of constructive conflict, looks at every major foreign conflict episode in which the United States has been involved since the onset of the Cold War to analyze when American involvement in foreign conflicts has been relatively effective and beneficial and when it has not. In doing so he analyzes whether the US took constructive approaches to conflict and whether the approach yielded better consequences than more traditional coercive approaches. Realizing Peace helps readers interested in engaging or learning about foreign policy to better understand what has happened in past American involvement in foreign conflicts, to think freshly about better alternatives, and to act in support of more constructive strategies in the future.
In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Grim" conquered Egypt and
brought his empire for the first time in history into direct
contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the
decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more
engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar
region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic
ideological, military and commercial challenge to the Portuguese
Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes
of maritime Asia.
Since its formation the European Union has expanded beyond all expectations, and this expansion seems set to continue as more countries seek accession and the scope of EU law expands, touching more and more aspects of its citizens' lives. The EU has never been stronger and yet it now appears to be reaching a crisis point, beset on all sides by conflict and challenges to its legitimacy. Nationalist sentiment is on the rise and the Eurozone crisis has had a deep and lasting impact. EU law, always controversial, continues to perplex, not least because it remains difficult to analyse. What is the EU? An international organization, or a federation? Should its legal concepts be measured against national standards, or another norm? The Oxford Handbook of European Union Law illuminates the richness and complexity of the debates surrounding the law and policies of the EU. Comprising eight sections, it examines how we are to conceptualize EU law; the architecture of EU law; making and administering EU law; the economic constitution and the citizen; regulation of the market place; economic, monetary, and fiscal union; the Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice; and what lies beyond the regulatory state. Each chapter summarizes, analyses, and reflects on the state of play in a given area, and suggests how it is likely to develop in the foreseeable future. Written by an international team of leading commentators, this Oxford Handbook creates a vivid and provocative tapestry of the key issues shaping the laws of the European Union.
In writing about international affairs in the 1960s, historians have naturally focused on the Cold War. The decade featured perilous confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union over Berlin and Cuba, the massive buildup of nuclear stockpiles, the escalation of war in Vietnam, and bitter East-West rivalry throughout the developing world. Only in recent years have scholars begun to realize that there is another history of international affairs in the 1960s. As the world historical force of globalization has quickened and deepened, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges that we face today - inequality, terrorism, demographic instability, energy dependence, epidemic disease, massive increases in trade and monetary flows, to name just a few examples - asserted themselves powerfully during the decade. The administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson confronted tectonic shifts in the international environment and perhaps even the beginning of the post-Cold War world. While the ideologically infused struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union was indisputably crucial, new forces and new actors altered international relations in profound and lasting ways. This book asks how the Johnson administration responded to this changing landscape. To what extent did U.S. leaders understand the changes that we can now see clearly with the benefit of hindsight? How did they prioritize these issues alongside the geostrategic concerns that dominated their daily agendas and the headlines of the day? How successfully did Americans grapple with these long-range problems, with what implications for the future? What lessons lie in the efforts of Johnson and his aides to cope with a new and inchoate agenda of problems? This book reconsiders the 1960s and suggests a new research agenda predicated on the idea that the Cold War was not the only - or perhaps even the most important - feature of international life in the period after World War II.
The Republican Party is best understood as the vehicle of an ideological movement whose leaders prize commitment to conservative doctrine; Republican candidates primarily appeal to voters by emphasizing broad principles and values. In contrast, the Democratic Party is better characterized as a coalition of social groups seeking concrete government action from their allies in office, with group identities and interests playing a larger role than abstract ideology in connecting Democratic elected officials with organizational leaders and electoral supporters. Building on this core distinction, Asymmetric Politics investigates the most consequential differences in the organization and style of the two major parties. Whether examining voters, activists, candidates, or officeholders, Grossman and Hopkins find that Democrats and Republicans think differently about politics, producing distinct practices and structures. The analysis offers a new understanding of the rise in polarization and governing dysfunction and a new explanation for the stable and exceptional character of American political culture and public policy.
NGOs headquartered in the North have been, for some time, the most visible in attempts to address the poverty, lack of political representation, and labor exploitation that disproportionally affect women from the global South. Feminist NGOs and NGOs focusing on women's rights have been successful in attracting funding for their causes, but critics argue that the highly educated elites from the global North and South who run them fail to question or understand the power hierarchies in which they operate. In order to give depth to these criticisms, Sara de Jong interviewed women NGO workers in seven different European countries about their experiences and perspectives on working on gendered issues affecting women in the global South. Complicit Sisters untangles and analyzes the complex tensions women NGO workers face and explores the ways in which they negotiate potential complicities in their work. Weighing the women NGO workers' first-hand accounts against critiques arising from feminist theory, postcolonial theory, global civil society theory and critical development literature, de Jong brings to life the dilemmas of "doing good." She considers these workers' ideas about "sisterhood," privilege, gender stereotypes, feminism, and the private/public divide, and she suggests avenues for productive engagement between these and the inevitable tensions and complexities in NGO work.
This book provides an introduction to the American legal system for a broad readership. Its focus is on law in practice, on the role of the law in American society, and how the social context affects the living law of the United States. It covers the institutions of law creation and application, law in American government, American legal culture and the legal profession, American criminal and civil justice, and civil rights. Clearly written, the book has been widely used in both undergraduate and graduate courses as an introduction to the legal system; it will be useful, too, to a general audience interested in understanding how this vital social system works. _ This new edition, which keeps the same basic structure of earlier editions, has been revised and brought up to date, reflecting the way the legal system has adapted to the complex new world of the twenty-first century.
This volume of essays explores the long-unstudied relationship between religion and human security throughout the world. The 1950s marked the beginning of a period of extraordinary religious revival, during which religious political-parties and non-governmental organizations gained power around the globe. Until now, there has been little systematic study of the impact that this phenomenon has had on human welfare, except of a relationship between religious revival to violence. The authors of these essays show that religion can have positive as well as negative effects on human wellbeing. They address a number of crucial questions about the relationship between religion and human security: Under what circumstances do religiously motivated actors tend to advance human welfare, and under what circumstances do they tend to threaten it? Are members of some religious groups more likely to engage in welfare-enhancing behavior than in others? Do certain state policies tend to promote security-enhancing behavior among religious groups while other policies tend to promote security-threatening ones? In cases where religious actors are harming the welfare of a population, what responses could eliminate that threat without replacing it with another? Religion and Human Security shows that many states tend to underestimate the power of religious organizations as purveyors of human security. Governments overlook both the importance of human security to their populations and the religious groups who could act as allies in securing the welfare of their people. This volume offers a rich variety of theoretical perspectives on the nuanced relationship between religion and human security. Through case studies ranging from Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan, to the United States, Northern Ireland, and Zimbabwe, it provides important suggestions to policy makers of how to begin factoring the influence of religion into their evaluation of a population's human security and into programs designed to improve human security around the globe.
The al-Qaeda Franchise asks why al-Qaeda adopted a branching-out strategy, introducing seven franchises spread over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. After all, transnational terrorist organizations can expand through other organizational strategies. Forming franchises was not an inevitable outgrowth of al-Qaeda's ideology or its U.S.-focused strategy. The efforts to create local franchises have also undermined one of al-Qaeda's primary achievements: the creation of a transnational entity based on religious, not national, affiliation. The book argues that al-Qaeda's branching out strategy was not a sign of strength, but instead a response to its decline in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Franchising reflected an escalation of al-Qaeda's commitments in response to earlier strategic mistakes, leaders' hubris, and its diminished capabilities. Although the introduction of new branches helped al-Qaeda create a frightening image far beyond its actual capabilities, ultimately this strategy neither increased the al-Qaeda threat, nor enhanced the organization's political objectives. In fact, the rise of ISIS from an al-Qaeda branch to the dominant actor in the jihadi camp demonstrates how expansion actually incurred heavy costs for al-Qaeda. The al-Qaeda Franchise goes beyond explaining the adoption of a branching out strategy, also exploring particular expansion choices. Through nine case studies, it analyzes why al-Qaeda formed branches in some arenas but not others, and why its expansion in some locations, such as Yemen, took the form of in-house franchising (with branches run by al-Qaeda's own fighters), while other locations, such as Iraq and Somalia, involved merging with groups already operating in the target arena. It ends with an assessment of al-Qaeda's future in light of the turmoil in the Middle East, the ascendance of ISIS, and US foreign policy.
Transnational Cooperation: An Issue-Based Approach presents an analysis of transnational cooperation or collective action that stresses basic concepts and intuition. Throughout the book, authors Clint Peinhardt and Todd Sandler identify factors that facilitate and/or inhibit such cooperation. The first four chapters lay the analytical foundations for the book, while the next nine chapters apply the analysis to a host of exigencies and topics of great import. The authors use elementary game theory as a tool for illustrating the ideas put forth in the text. Game theory reminds us that rational actors (for example, countries, firms, or individuals) must account for the responses by other rational actors. The book assumes no prior knowledge of game theory; all game-theoretic concepts and analyses are explained in detail to the reader. Peinhardt and Sandler also employ paired comparisons in illustrating the book's concepts. The book is rich in applications and covers a wide range of topics, including superbugs, civil wars, money laundering, financial crises, drug trafficking, terrorism, global health concerns, international trade liberalization, acid rain, leadership, sovereignty, and many others. Students, researchers, and policymakers alike have much to gain from Transnational Cooperation. It is a crossover book for economics, political science, and public policy.
While gender and race often are considered socially constructed, this book argues that they are physiologically constituted through the biopsychosocial effects of sexism and racism. This means that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race and feminist philosophy need to examine not only the financial, legal, political and other forms of racist and sexism oppression, but also their physiological operations. Examining a complex tangle of affects, emotions, knowledge, and privilege, The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression develops an understanding of the human body whose unconscious habits are biological. On this account, affect and emotion are thoroughly somatic, not something "mental " or extra-biological layered on top of the body. They also are interpersonal, social, and can be transactionally transmitted between people. Ranging from the stomach and the gut to the hips and the heart, from autoimmune diseases to epigenetic markers, Sullivan demonstrates the gastrointestinal effects of sexual abuse that disproportionately affect women, often manifesting as IBS, Crohn's disease, or similar functional disorders. She also explores the transgenerational effects of racism via epigenetic changes in African American women, who experience much higher pre-term birth rates than white women do, and she reveals the unjust benefits for heart health experienced by white people as a result of their racial privilege. Finally, developing the notion of a physiological therapy that doesn't prioritize bringing unconscious habits to conscious awareness, Sullivan closes with a double-barreled approach for both working for institutional change and transforming biologically unconscious habits. The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression skillfully combines feminist and critical philosophy of race with the biological and health sciences. The result is a critical physiology of race and gender that offers new strategies for fighting male and white privilege.
First published in Afrikaans as "Als Is Nie Net Swart En Wit Nie, this expanded memoir probes some of the most pivotal issues facing South Africa today: race, ‘othering’, unremembering, identity, gangsterism, addiction, and the process of making meaning of a society that has become unhinged from its moorings. Malvory Adams is an author and veteran journalist who served as an editorial executive at mainstream newspapers such as City Press, Sowetan, Die Burger, Beeld and Son. At present, he plies his trade as a News Bulletin Writer at Afrikaanse TV-Nuus on SABC2. Away from the newsroom, he is the singer-songwriter MeZZo. He walks with the reader through a lion-hearted personal lens and through the purgatory of his travelogue, which starts 15 years before his birth in the tiny Eastern Cape hamlet of Breidbach. He dramatically recounts how his German grandfather robbed him of his grandparents. Premised on that epoch-making deed, he takes the reader on a painful journey of uprooting, an agonising coming of age, and the intricacies of navigating cultural belongings and a bloodline concoction. Next, he plummets horrifyingly into a netherworld of alcoholism culminating in a spine-chilling desperate act. On this treacherous odyssey to restoration and redemption, the veils of darkness lift, and he now lives in a world that is not stark black and white but where the grey mitigates the storms.
Conservative evangelicalism has transformed American politics,
disseminating a sometimes fearful message not just through
conventional channels, but through subcultures and alternate modes
of communication. Within this world is a "Religion of Fear," a
critical impulse that dramatizes cultural and political conflicts
and issues in frightening ways that serve to contrast "orthodox"
behaviors and beliefs with those linked to darkness, fear, and
demonology. Jason Bivins offers close examinations of several
popular evangelical cultural creations including the Left Behind
novels, church-sponsored Halloween "Hell Houses," sensational comic
books, especially those disseminated by Jack Chick, and anti-rock
and -rap rhetoric and censorship. Bivins depicts these fascinating
and often troubling phenomena in vivid (sometimes lurid) detail and
shows how they seek to shape evangelical cultural identity.
It can be said of South Asia what has long been said of its great epic poem, the Mahabharata: "there is nothing in it that cannot be found elsewhere in the world and nothing in the world that cannot be found there." South Asia's historic trans-regional connections to the wider world include the trade between its most ancient civilization with Sumer and central Asia, the diffusion beyond its shores of three of the world's major religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism), its cultural encounters with the Greeks, Islam, European imperialism, the spread of it cuisine (from crystalized sugar to "curry"), and its architecture (including the world's most recognized building, the Taj Mahal). While these connections have insured that South Asia has always loomed large in the consideration of the world's collective past, its societies are currently undergoing a transformation that may enable them to rival the United States and China as the world's largest economy. This study employs accessible language and an engaging narrative to provide insight into how world historical processes, from changes in environment to the movement of peoples and ideas, have shaped and continue to shape the history of South Asia and its place in the wider world.
In the first decade of the 21st century, five rising powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) formed an exclusive and informal international club, the BRICS. Although neither revolutionaries nor extreme revisionists, the BRICS perceive an ongoing global power shift and contest the West's pretensions to permanent stewardship of the existing economic order. Together they have exercised collective financial statecraft, employing their expanding financial and monetary capabilities for the purpose of achieving larger foreign policy goals. This volume examines the forms and strategies of such collective financial statecraft, and the motivations of each individual government for collaborating through the BRICS club. Their cooperative financial statecraft takes various forms, ranging from pressure for "inside reforms" of either multilateral institutions or global markets, to "outside options" exercised through creating new multilateral institutions or jointly pushing for new realities in international financial markets. To the surprise of many observers, the joint actions of the BRICS are largely successful. Although each member has its unique rationale for collaboration, the largest member, China, controls resources that permit it the greatest influence in intra-club decision-making. The BRICS cooperate due to both common aversions (for example, resentment over being perennial junior partners in global economic and financial governance and resistance to infringements on their autonomy due to U.S. dollar dominance and financial power) and common interests (such as obtaining greater voice in international institutions, as the IMF). The group seeks reforms, influence, and enhanced leadership roles within the liberal capitalist global system. Where blocked, they experiment with parallel multilateral institutions in which they are the dominant rule-makers. The future of the BRICS depends not only on their bargaining power and adjustment to market players, but also on their ability to overcome domestic impediments to sustainable economic growth, the basis for their international influence.
How can "Speaking Rights to Power" construct political will to respond to human rights abuse worldwide? Examining dozens of cases of human rights campaigns, this book shows how carefully crafted communications build recognition, solidarity, and social change. Alison Brysk presents an innovative analysis of the politics of persuasion, based in the strategic use of voice, framing, media, protest performance, and audience bridging. Building on twenty years of research on five continents, this comprehensive study ranges from Aung San Suu Kyi to Anna Hazare, from Congo to Colombia, and from the Arab Spring to Pussy Riot. It includes both well-chronicled campaigns, such as the struggle to end violence against women, as well as lesser-known efforts, including inter-ethnic human rights alliances in the U.S. Brysk compares relatively successful human rights campaigns with unavailing struggles. Grounding her analysis in the concrete practice of human rights campaigns, she lays out testable strategic guidance for human rights advocates. Speaking Rights to Power addresses cutting edge debates on human rights and the ethic of care, cosmopolitanism, charismatic leadership, communicative action and political theater, and the role of social media. It draws on constructivist literature from social movement and international relations theory, and it analyzes human rights as a form of global social imagination. Combining a normative contribution with judicious critique, this book shows not only that human rights rhetoric matters-but how to make it matter more.
The Company-State rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the mid-eighteenth century. Taking seriously the politics and political thought of the early Company on their own terms, it explores the Company's political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to warmaking and colonial plantation. Tracing the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, this book reveals how Company leadership wrestled not simply with the bottom line but with typically early modern problems of governance, such as: the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationship between law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, commerce, religion, territory, and the sea. The Company-State thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, "commercial" and "imperial" eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a "trading world" of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, The Company-State offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of "globalization," this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century.
Nine days that set the course of a nation... Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela has been free for three years and is in slow-moving power-sharing talks with President FW de Klerk when a white supremacist shoots Mandela’s popular young heir apparent, Chris Hani, in the hope of igniting an all-out civil war. Will he succeed in plunging South Africa into chaos, safeguarding apartheid for perhaps years to come? Or can Mandela and de Klerk overcome their differences and mutual suspicion and calm their followers, plotting a way forward? In The Plot to Save South Africa, acclaimed South African journalist Justice Malala recounts the riveting story of the next nine days – never before told in full – revealing rarely seen sides of both Mandela and de Klerk, the fascinating behind-the-scenes debates within each of their parties over whether to pursue peace or war, and their increasingly desperate attempts to restrain their supporters despite mounting popular frustrations. Flitting between the points of view of over a dozen characters on all sides of the conflict, Justice Malala offers an illuminating look at successful leadership in action… and a terrifying reminder of just how close a country we think of today as a model for racial reconciliation came to civil war. |
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