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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government
The Uses of Social Investment provides the first study of the welfare state, under the new post-crisis austerity context and associated crisis management politics, to take stock of the limits and potential of social investment. It surveys the emergence, diffusion, limits, merits, and politics of social investment as the welfare policy paradigm for the 21st century, seen through the lens of the life-course contingencies of the competitive knowledge economy and modern family-hood. Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, the volume revisits the intellectual roots and normative foundations of social investment, surveys the criticisms that have leveled against the social investment perspective in theory and policy practice, and presents empirical evidence of social investment progress together with novel research methodologies for assessing socioeconomic 'rates of return' on social investment. Given the progressive, admittedly uneven, diffusion of the social investment policy priorities across the globe, the volume seeks to address the pressing political question as to whether the social investment turn is able to withstand the fiscal austerity backlash that has re-emerged in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
In Quality Peace, leading peace researcher Peter Wallensteen offers a broad analysis of peacebuilding, isolating what does and not work when settling conflicts. The book uses statistical analysis to compare two war outcomes-negotiated settlement and victory- in the post-Cold War era. Wallensteen finds that if peace is to last, three conditions must be met: a losing party must retain its dignity; security and the rule of law must be ensured for all; and the time horizon for the settlement must be long enough to ensure a sense of normalcy. Wallensteen breaks down the components of all of these conditions and applies them to interstate conflicts, civil wars in which rebels are aiming to take over the entire state, and separatist rebellions. He also delves into the issue of world order and the significance of major power relations for local peace efforts. Thus, the work provides a remarkable understanding of how different types of war outcomes deal with post-war conditions. Sharply argued and comprehensive, Quality Peace will invigorate peace research and stimulate peace practice, becoming an authoritative work in the field.
Looking at political mobilization in the years leading up to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, one can notice a stark disparity between the number of people who participated in online organizing and the number of individuals who protested in the streets. During one silent demonstration organized by the We are all Khaled Said Facebook page in 2010, when the numbers in the streets were limited, one activist posted, "Where are the people who said they were coming? Where are the 10,000 men and women?" For years prior to the Arab Spring, opposition activists in Egypt organized protests with limited success. So why and how did thousands of Egyptian citizens suddenly take to the streets against the Mubarak regime in January 2011? Contesting the Repressive State not only answers this question, but asks specifically why and how people who are not part of political movements choose to engage or not engage in anti-government protest under repressive regimes. The central argument is that individuals are rational actors and their decisions to protest or not protest are based on the intersection of three factors: political opportunity structures, mobilizing structures, and framing processes (or the way in which the media presents particular issues). In turn, specific situations and frames trigger emotion in people, and it is this emotion that drives people to protest. Each chapter looks at a different facet of the revolutionary process (grievances, online participation, media framing, government violence) and identifies a relationship between key structural factors in each and the emotional responses they produce. Contesting the Repressive State is based on 170 interviews conducted in Egypt, during the Arab Spring, both with people who participated in street protests and those who did not. Ultimately, Kira D. Jumet explores how social media, violent government repression, changes in political opportunities, and the military influenced individual decisions to protest or not protest.
Following the end of the Cold War, the economic reforms in the early 1990s, and ensuing impressive growth rates, India has emerged as a leading voice in global affairs, particularly on international economic issues. Its domestic market is fast-growing and India is becoming increasingly important to global geo-strategic calculations, at a time when it has been outperforming many other growing economies, and is the only Asian country with the heft to counterbalance China. Indeed, so much is India defined internationally by its economic performance (and challenges) that other dimensions of its internal situation, notably relevant to security, and of its foreign policy have been relatively neglected in the existing literature. This handbook presents an innovative, high profile volume, providing an authoritative and accessible examination and critique of Indian foreign policy. The handbook brings together essays from a global team of leading experts in the field to provide a comprehensive study of the various dimensions of Indian foreign policy.
Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality-of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now-broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials-do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence. It also explains what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.
This study explores the dynamic relations between cultural forms and political formations in some urban cultural movements. The analysis is based on a detailed study of the structure and development of the London Notting Hill Carnival, widely described as Europe's biggest street festival. Started in 1966 as a small-scale, multi-ethnic local festival, it grew into a massive West-Indian dominated affair that over the years occasioned violent confrontations between black youth and the police. The carnival developed and mobilized a homogenous and communal West-Indian culture that helped in the struggle against rampant racism. The celebration is contrasted with other carnival movements, such as California's 'Renaissance Pleasure Faire'. Analytically, this is a follow-up to Cohen's earlier studies of the relations between drama and politics in some urban religious, ethnic and elitist movements in Africa. The conclusion focuses on the processes underlying the transformation of rational political strategies into non-rational cultural forms.
This lively and accessible new edition provides a uniquely broad-ranging introduction to the governance and politics of Pacific Asia. Thematically structured around the key institutions and issues, it is genuinely comparative in its approach to the whole region. A range of representative countries (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines) are used as key case examples throughout and each of them is subject to a detailed full-page country profile. This diverse region is a fascinating area for study. Politics in Pacific Asia provides a framework to form a coherent understanding of the region's politics; it balances persistent patterns with the latest developments and general characteristics with the differing cultures, histories and institutions of individual countries.
Conventional wisdom holds that China's burgeoning economic power
has reduced the United States to little more than a customer and
borrower of Beijing. The rise of China, many feel, necessarily
means the decline of the West--the United States in particular.
The first major volume to place U.S.-centered labor history in a transnational or U.S.-in-the-world focus, Workers Across the Americas collects the newest work of leading Canadianist, Caribbeanist, and Latin American specialists, as well as U.S. historians. As distinct from comparative histories built around the integrity of their nation-state subjects, these essays highlight both the supra- or sub-national aspect of selected topics without ignoring the power of nation-states themselves as historical forces. Indeed, the transnational focus opens new avenues for understanding changes in the concepts, policies and practice of states, their interactions with each other and their populations, and the ways in which the popular classes resist, react, and use both nation-state and non-state entities to advance their interests. What does this transnational turn encompass? And what are its likely perils as well as promise as a framework for research and analysis? To address these questions six eminent scholars (John French, Julie Greene, Neville Kirk, Aviva Chomsky, Dirk Hoerder, and Vic Satzewich) lead off the volume with their own critical commentaries on the very project of transnational labor history. Their responses effectively offer a tour of explanations, tensions, and cautions in the evolution of a new arena of research and writing. Thereafter, Workers Across the Americas groups fifteen research essays around themes of Labor and Empire, Indigenous Peoples and Labor Systems, International Feminism and Reproductive Labor, Labor Recruitment and Immigration Control, Transnational Labor Politics, and Labor Internationalism. Topics range from military labor in the British Empire to coffee workers on the Guatemalan/Mexican border to the Atlantic white slavery traffic to the role of the International Labor Organization in attempting to set common labor standards. Leading scholars-including Camille Guerin-Gonzalez, Alex Lichtenstein, Nelson Lichtenstein, Colleen O'Neill, Premilla Nadasen, and Bryan Palmer-introduce each section and also make recommendations for further reading.
Traditional analyses of global security cannot explain the degree to which there is "governance" of important security issues - from combatting piracy to curtailing nuclear proliferation to reducing the contributions of extractive industries to violence and conflict. They are even less able to explain why contemporary governance schemes involve the various actors and take the many forms they do. Juxtaposing the insights of scholars writing about new modes of governance with the logic of network theory, The New Power Politics offers a framework for understanding contemporary security governance and its variation. The framework rests on a fresh view of power and how it works in global politics. Though power is integral to governance, it is something that emerges from, and depends on, relationships. Thus, power is dynamic; it is something that governors must continually cultivate with a wide range of consequential global players, and how a governor uses power in one situation can have consequences for her future relationships, and thus, future power. Understanding this new power politics is crucial for explaining and shaping the future of global security politics. This stellar group of scholars analyzes both the networking strategies of would-be governors and their impacts on the effectiveness of governance and whether it reflects broad or narrow concerns on a wide range of contemporary governance issues.
One of the world's most ancient and enduring civilizations, Iran has long played a central role in human events and continues to do so today. This book traces the spread of Iranian culture among diverse populations ranging from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and along the Silk Roads as far as China, from prehistoric times up to the present day. From paradise gardens and Persian carpets to the mystical poetry of Rumi and Hafez, Iran's contributions have earned it a place among history's greatest and most influential civilizations. Encompassing the fields of religion, literature and the arts, politics, and higher learning, this book provides a holistic history of this important culture.
Although millions of Russians lived as serfs until the middle of the nineteenth century, little is known about their lives. Identifying and documenting the conditions of Russian serfs has proven difficult because the Russian state discouraged literacy among the serfs and censored public expressions of dissent. To date scholars have identified only twenty known Russian serf narratives. Four Russian Serf Narratives contains four of these accounts and is the first translated collection of autobiographies by serfs. Scholar and translator John MacKay brings to light for an English-language audience a diverse sampling of Russian serf narratives, ranging from an autobiographical poem to stories of adventure and escape. Autobiography (1785) recounts a highly educated serf s attempt to escape to Europe, where he hoped to study architecture. The long testimonial poem News About Russia (ca. 1849) laments the conditions under which the author and his fellow serfs lived. In The Story of My Life and Wanderings (1881) a serf tradesman tells of his attempt to simultaneously escape serfdom and captivity from Chechen mountaineers. The fragmentary Notes of a Serf Woman (1911) testifies to the harshness of peasant life with extraordinary acuity and descriptive power. These accounts offer readers a glimpse, from the point of view of the serfs themselves, into the realities of one of the largest systems of unfree labor in history. The volume also allows comparison with slave narratives produced in the United States and elsewhere, adding an important dimension to knowledge of the institution of slavery and the experience of enslavement in modern times."
The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment for granting black men the right to vote but not women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this? In a lively narrative of insider politics, betrayal, deception, and personal conflict, Fighting Chance offers fresh answers to this question and reveals that racism was not the only cause, but that the outcome also depended heavily on money and political maneuver. Historian Faye Dudden shows that Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, believing they had a fighting chance to win woman suffrage after the Civil War, tried but failed to exploit windows of political opportunity, especially in Kansas. When they became most desperate, they succeeded only in selling out their long-held commitment to black rights and their invaluable friendship and alliance with Frederick Douglass. Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history.
Modern states claim rights of jurisdiction and control over particular geographical areas and their associated natural resources. Boundaries of Authority explores the possible moral bases for such territorial claims by states, in the process arguing that many of these territorial claims in fact lack any moral justification. The book maintains throughout that the requirement of states' justified authority over persons has normative priority over, and as a result severely restricts, the kinds of territorial rights that states can justifiably claim, and it argues that the mere effective administration of justice within a geographical area is insufficient to ground moral authority over residents of that area. The book argues that only a theory of territorial rights that takes seriously the morality of the actual history of states' acquisitions of power over land and the land's residents can adequately explain the nature and extent of states' moral rights over particular territories. Part I of the book examines the interconnections between states' claimed rights of authority over particular sets of subject persons and states' claimed authority to control particular territories. It contains an extended critique of the dominant "Kantian functionalist " approach to such issues. Part II organizes, explains, and criticizes the full range of extant theories of states' territorial rights, arguing that a little-appreciated Lockean approach to territorial rights is in fact far better able to meet the principal desiderata for such theories. Where the first two parts of the book concern primarily states' claims to jurisdiction over territories, Part III of the book looks closely at the more property-like territorial rights that states claim - in particular, their claimed rights to control over the natural resources on and beneath their territories and their claimed rights to control and restrict movement across (including immigration over) their territorial borders.
Risk and Hyperconnectivity brings together for the first time three paradigms: new risk theory, neoliberalization theory, and connectivity theory, to illuminate how the kaleidoscope of risk events in the opening years of the new century has recharged a neoliberal battlespace of media, economy, and security. Hoskins and Tulloch argue that hyperconnectivity is both a conduit of risk and a form of risk in itself, and that it alters the ways in which we experience events and remember them. Through interdisciplinary dialogue and case study analysis they offer original perspectives on the key questions of risk of our age, including: What is the path to a balance between individual privacy and state (or corporate) security? Is hyperconnectivity itself a new risk condition of our time? How do remembering and forgetting shape citizen insecurity and cultures of risk, and legitimize neoliberal governance? How do journalists operate as public intellectuals of risk? Through probing a series of risk events that have already scarred the twenty-first century, Hoskins and Tulloch show how both established and emergent media are central in shaping past, present and future horizons of neoliberalism, while also propelling wide pressure for its alternatives on those ranging from economics students worldwide to potential political leaders cultivated by austerity policies.
The thirteen essays by Allen Buchanan collected here are arranged
in such a way as to make evident their thematic interconnections:
the important and hitherto unappreciated relationships among the
nature and grounding of human rights, the legitimacy of
international institutions, and the justification for using
military force across borders. Each of these three topics has
spawned a significant literature, but unfortunately has been
treated in isolation. In this volume Buchanan makes the case for a
holistic, systematic approach, and in so doing constitutes a major
contribution at the intersection of International Political
Philosophy and International Legal Theory.
This book examines the importance of the Glorious Revolution and the passing of the Toleration Act to the development of religious and intellectual freedom in England. Most historians have considered these events to be of little significance in this connection. From Persecution to Toleration focuses on the importance of the Toleration Act for contemporaries, and also explores its wider historical context and impact. Taking its point of departure from the intolerance of the sixteenth century, the book goes on to emphasize what is here seen to be the very substantial contribution of the Toleration Act for the development of religious freedom in England. It demonstrates that his freedom was initially limited to Protestant Nonconformists, immigrant as well as English, and that it quickly came in practice to include Catholics, Jews, and anti-Trinitarians. Contributors: John Bossy, Patrick Collinson, John Dunn, Graham Gibbs, Mark Goldie, Ole Peter Grell, Robin Gwynn, Jonathan I. Israel, David S. Katz, Andrew Pettegree, Richard H. Popkin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Nicholas Tyacke, and B. R. White.
Islamophobia has been on the rise since September 11, as seen in
countless cases of discrimination, racism, hate speeches, physical
attacks, and anti-Muslim campaigns. The 2006 Danish cartoon crisis
and the controversy surrounding Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg
speech have underscored the urgency of such issues as image-making,
multiculturalism, freedom of expression, respect for religious
symbols, and interfaith relations.
Again and again people turn to music in order to assist them make sense of traumatic life events. Music can help process emotions, interpret memories, and create a sense of collective identity. While the last decade has seen a surge in academic studies on trauma and loss in both the humanities and social sciences, how music engages suffering has not often been explored. Performing Pain uncovers music's relationships to trauma and grief by focusing upon the late 20th century in Eastern Europe. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a cultural preoccupation with the meanings of historical suffering, particularly surrounding the Second World War and the Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and filmmakers repeatedly negotiated themes related to pain and memory, truth and history, morality and spirituality both during glasnost and the years prior. In the copious amount of scholarship devoted to cultural politics during this era, the activities of avant-garde composers stands largely silent. Performing Pain considers how works by Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Part, and Henryk Gorecki musically address contemporary concerns regarding history and suffering through composition, performance, and reception. Drawing upon theories from psychology, sociology, literary and cultural studies, this book offers a set of hermeneutic essays that demonstrate the ways in which people employ music in order to make sense of historical traumas and losses. Seemingly postmodern compositional choices-such as quotation, fragmentation, and stasis-provide musical analogies to psychological and emotional responses to trauma and grief. The physical realities of embodied performance focus attention on the ethics of pain and representation while these works' inclusion as film music interprets contemporary debates regarding memory and trauma. Performing Pain promises to garner wide attention from academic professionals in music studies as well as an interdisciplinary audience interested in Eastern Europe and aesthetic articulations of suffering.
Why has the Chinese government sometimes allowed and sometimes repressed nationalist, anti-foreign protests? What have been the international consequences of these choices? Anti-American demonstrations were permitted in 1999 but repressed in 2001 during two crises in US-China relations. Anti-Japanese protests were tolerated in 1985, 2005, and 2012 but banned in 1990 and 1996. Protests over Taiwan, the issue of greatest concern to Chinese nationalists, have never been allowed. To explain this variation in China's response to nationalist mobilization, Powerful Patriots argues that Chinese and other authoritarian leaders weigh both diplomatic and domestic incentives to allow and repress nationalist protests. Autocrats may not face electoral constraints, but anti-foreign protests provide an alternative mechanism by which authoritarian leaders can reveal their vulnerability to public pressure. Because nationalist protests are costly to repress and may turn against the government, allowing protests demonstrates resolve and increases the domestic cost of diplomatic concessions. Repressing protests, by contrast, sends a credible signal of reassurance, facilitating diplomatic flexibility and signaling a willingness to spend domestic political capital for the sake of international cooperation. To illustrate the logic, the book traces the effect of domestic and diplomatic factors in China's management of nationalist protest in the post-Mao era (1978-2012) and the consequences for China's foreign relations.
As the world shifts away from the unquestioned American hegemony that followed in the wake of the Cold War, the United States is likely to face new kinds of threats and sharper resource constraints than it has in the past. However, the country's alliances, military institutions, and national security strategy have changed little since the Cold War. American foreign and defense policies, therefore, should be assessed for their fitness for achieving sustainable national security amidst the dynamism of the international political economy, changing domestic politics, and even a changing climate. This book brings together sixteen leading scholars from across political science, history, and political economy to highlight a range of American security considerations that deserve a larger role in both scholarship and strategic decision-making. In these chapters, scholars of political economy and the American defense budget examine the economic engine that underlies U.S. military might and the ways the country deploys these vast (but finite) resources. Historians illuminate how past great powers coped with changing international orders through strategic and institutional innovations. And regional experts assess America's current long-term engagements, from NATO to the chaos of the Middle East to the web of alliances in Asia, deepening understandings that help guard against both costly commitments and short-sighted retrenchments. This interdisciplinary volume sets an agenda for future scholarship that links politics, economics, and history in pursuit of sustainable security for the United States - and greater peace and stability for Americans and non-Americans alike.
The World Heritage Convention (WHC) is the most comprehensive and widely ratified among UNESCO treaties on the protection of cultural and natural heritage. The Convention establishes a system of identification, presentation, and registration in an international List of cultural properties and natural sites of outstanding universal value. Throughout the years the WHC has progressively attained almost universal recognition by the international community, and even the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has recently considered sites inscribed in the World Heritage List as "values especially protection by the international community." Besides, the WHC has been used as a model for other legal instruments dealing with cultural heritage, like the recently adopted (2003) Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. During its more than 30 years of life, the Convention has undergone extensive interpretation and evolution in its scope of application. Operational Guidelines, which are the implementing rules governing the operation of the Convention, have been extensively revised. New institutions such as the World Heritage Centre, have been established. New links, with the World Bank and the United Nations, have developed to take into account the economic and political dimension of world heritage conservation and management. However, many legal issues remain to be clarified. For example, what is the meaning of "outstanding universal value" in the context of cultural and natural heritage? How far can we construe "universal value" in terms of representivity between the concept of "World Heritage" and the sovereignty of the territorial state? Should World Heritage reflect a reasonable balance between cultural properties and natural sites? Is consent of the territorial state required for the inscription of a World Heritage property in the List of World Heritage in Danger? What is the role of the World Heritage Centre in the management of the WHC? No comprehensive work has been produced so far to deal with these and many other issues that have arisen in the interpretation and application of the WHC. This Commentary is intended to fill this gap by providing article by article analysis, in the light of the practice of the World Heritage Committee, other relevant treaty bodies, as well as of State parties and in the hope that it may be of use to academics, lawyers, diplomats and officials involved in the management and conservation of cultural and natural heritage of international significance.
This work examines that of the 20th-century German philosopher, Eric Voegelin, from a theological viewpoint. It includes a comparison to the philosophy of the Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan. Voegelin's thought is claimed to be as relevant to theology as it is to political science and history. |
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