Now in its fifth edition, Politics: The Basics explores the systems, movements and issues at the cutting edge of modern politics. A highly successful introduction to the world of politics, it offers clear and concise coverage of a range of issues and addresses fundamental questions such as:

• Why does politics matter?

• Why obey the state?

• What are the key approaches to power?

• How are political decisions made?

• What are the current issues affecting governments worldwide?

Accessible in style and topical in content, the fifth edition has been fully restructured to reflect core issues, systems and movements that are at the centre of modern politics and international relations. Assuming no prior knowledge in politics, it is ideal reading for anyone approaching the study of politics for the first time.

Table of Contents

Illustrations Preface Ackowledgements 1. Politics 2. Power 3. Systems 4. Ideologies 5. States 6. Global 7. Mechanisms 8. Policies 9. Challenges References Index

Political risk was first introduced as a component for assessing risk not directly linked to economic factors following the flow of capital from the US to Europe after the Second World War. However, the concept has rapidly gained relevance since, with both public and private institutions developing complex methodologies designed to evaluate political risk factors and keep pace with the internationalization of trade and investment. Continued global and regional economic and political instability means a plethora of different actors today conduct a diverse range of political risk analyses and assessments. Starting from the epistemological foundations of political risk, this books bridges the gap between theory and practice, exploring operationalization and measurement issues with the support of an empirical case study on the Arab uprisings, discussing the role of expert judgment in political forecasting, and highlighting the main challenges and opportunities political risk analysts face in the wake of the digital revolution.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Political risk as a social science concept

2. Thinking about a theoretical framework

3. From theory to practice: a case study of the Arab Spring

4. Forecasting political events: issues and techniques

5. The cross-cutting role of expert judgment

6. The impact of the digital revolution on political risk analysis and assessment

Concluding remarks

Ethical concerns are among the most common problems public administrators face, yet the issues are often complex, and the correct choices are not always clear. Living up to the public trust is much more than just an act of compliance. It also involves perceiving, preventing, avoiding, and resolving accusations of illegal or unethical behavior, including appearances of inappropriate behavior. Ethics Moments in Government: Cases and Controversies examines how to identify, assess, and resolve the ethical issues and dilemmas that often confront those who govern the cities, counties, states, and federal agencies throughout America.

Real Situations, Real Advice

Providing a one-stop resource for all those who must contend with thorny ethical issues, this volume presents case studies that vary in complexity and context and are based on real situations. Each case scenario is followed by discussion questions and case assessments by expert practitioners who describe how they would handle the situation. Using a "total immersion" technique, the book encourages readers to be reflexive and analytical in addressing the problems presented and arriving at appropriate solutions. A supplemental CD is included which contains PowerPoint® slide presentations, articles, workshop programs, tests, and links to organizations.

For many of the scenarios presented in this volume, there are no easy answers. Practical guidance on reasoning through difficult decision-making situations enables public administrators to acquire the ethical knowledge, skills, abilities, and instincts that will ultimately help them gain the trust of their citizens and advance in their careers.

Table of Contents

Getting Started

Understanding Ethics and Governance

Becoming Ethically Competent

Practicing Ethics—Many Faces

Professionalism and Ethics

Encouraging Ethical Behavior

Building Organizations of Integrity

Ethics in the Workplace

Lessons Learned Along the Journey

The Complete Ethical Manager

Bibliography

Appendices

Index

Warfare in the first half of the 20th century was fundamentally and irrovocably altered by the birth and subsequent development of air power. This work assesses the role of air power in changing the face of battle on land and sea. Utilizing late-1990s research, the author demonstrates that the phenomenon of air power was both a cause and a crucial accelerating factor contributing to the theory and practice of total war. For instance, the expansion of warfare to the homefront was a direct result of bombing and indirectly due to the extent of national economic mobilization required to support first rate air power status. In addition, the move away from the principle of total war with the onset of the Cold War and the replacement of air power by ICBMs is thoroughly examined. This work should provide students of international history, war studies, defence and strategic studies with an insight into 20th-century warfare.

Table of Contents

1 Air power in the age of total war 2 The birth of air power 3 The First World War, 1914–18 4 The development of air power doctrine and theory, 1918–39 5 Global air power, 1918–39 6 The war in Europe, 1939–45 7 The war in the Far East, 1937–45 8 Air power and the post-war world 9 Conclusions

The global economy is dominated by a powerful set of established and emerging capitalisms, from the long-standing capitalist economies of the West to the rising economies of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. An understanding of capitalism is therefore fundamental to understanding the modern world. Capitalism: The Basics is an accessible introduction to a variety of capitalisms and explores key topics such as:

the history of major capitalist economies;

the central role played by both states and markets in the global economy;

the impact of capitalism on wages, workers and welfare;

approaches to the analysis of capitalism, and choices for capitalism’s future.

Examining capitalism from both above and below, featuring a range of case studies from around the globe, and including a comprehensive glossary, this book is the ideal introduction for students studying capitalism.

Table of Contents

1. What is Capitalism? 2. Capitalism from Above 3. Capitalism from Below 4.Capitalism in Contention 5. Capitalism and its Consequences 6. Capitalism and its Future

This text starts by explaining the fundamental goal of good political science research—the ability to answer interesting and important questions by generating valid inferences about political phenomena. Before the text even discusses the process of developing a research question, the authors introduce the reader to what it means to make an inference and the different challenges that social scientists face when confronting this task. Only with this ultimate goal in mind will students be able to ask appropriate questions, conduct fruitful literature reviews, select and execute the proper research design, and critically evaluate the work of others.

The authors' primary goal is to teach students to critically evaluate their own research designs and others’ and analyze the extent to which they overcome the classic challenges to making inference: internal and external validity concerns, omitted variable bias, endogeneity, measurement, sampling, and case selection errors, and poor research questions or theory. As such, students will not only be better able to conduct political science research, but they will also be more savvy consumers of the constant flow of causal assertions that they confront in scholarship, in the media, and in conversations with others.

Three themes run through Barakso, Sabet, and Schaffner’s text: minimizing classic research problems to making valid inferences, effective presentation of research results, and the nonlinear nature of the research process. Throughout their academic years and later in their professional careers, students will need to effectively convey various bits of information. Presentation skills gleaned from this text will benefit students for a lifetime, whether they continue in academia or in a professional career.

Several distinctive features make this book noteworthy:

A common set of examples threaded throughout the text give students a common ground across chapters and expose them to a broad range of subfields in the discipline.

Box features throughout the book illustrate the nonlinear, "non-textbook" reality of research, demonstrate the often false inferences and poor social science in the way the popular press covers politics, and encourage students to think about ethical issues at various stages of the research process.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Section I: Establishing the Framework. 1: The Challenge of Inference. 2: The Research Question. 3: Linking Theory and Inference. Section II: A Menu of Approaches. 4: The Challenge of Descriptive Inference. 5: Experiments. 6: Large-n Observational Studies. 7: Small-n Observational Studies. 8: Conclusion

First published in France in 1947, Humanism and Terror is a vital work of political philosophy by one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. Attempting to understand what he called the "dislocated world" that followed immediately after the Second World War—including his own, divided France—Merleau-Ponty asks a fundamental question: how did Marxism and humanism come apart?

Through a fascinating reading of Arthur Koestler's famous novel, Darkness at Noon, an allegory of the Stalinist show trials and purges of the 1930s, Merleau-Ponty weighs up the costs of a regime of permanent revolution and false confessions. His profound and controversial point, however, is that the purges were the inevitable outcome of abandoning crucial subjective elements of Marx’s theory of history, with the result that "humanism is suspended and government is terror."

As we again confront the reality of authoritarianism, political polarisation and curtailing of human freedom, the dislocated world brilliantly depicted by Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror sends a powerful and articulate message that continues to resonate today.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by William McBride.

Table of Contents

Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition William McBride

Author's Preface

Part 1: Terror

1. Koestler's Dilemmas

2. Bukharin and the Ambiguity of History

3. Trotsky's Rationalism

Part 2: The Humanist Perspective

4. From the Proletarian to the Commissar

5. The Yogi and the Proletarian

Conclusion.

Index

John Gray is the bestselling author of such books as Straw Dogs and Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern whichbrought a mainstream readership to a man who was already one of the UK's most well respected thinkers and political theorists.

Gray wrote Enlightenment’s Wake in 1995 – six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and six years before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Turning his back on neoliberalism at exactly the moment that its advocates were in their pomp, trumpeting 'the end of history' and the supposedly unstoppable spread of liberal values across the globe, Gray’s was a lone voice of scepticism. The thinking he criticised here would lead ultimately to the invasion of Iraq. Today, its folly might seem obvious to all, but as this edition of Enlightenment’s Wake shows, John Gray has been trying to warn us for some fifteen years – the rest of us are only now catching up with him.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition Preface Acknowledgements 1. Against the new liberalism 2. Notes toward a definition of the political thought of Tlon 3. Toleration: a post-liberal perspective 4. Enlightenment, illusion and the fall of the Soviet state 5. The post-communist societies in transition 6. Agnostic liberalism 7. The undoing of conservatism 8. After the new liberalism 9. From post-liberalism to pluralism 10. Enlightenment's Wake Notes Index