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Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921–1985
By Larry E. Holmes. 2024
In Win or Else, Larry E. Holmes shows us how Soviet football culture regularly disregarded official ideological and political imperatives…
and skirted the boundaries between socialism and capitalism. In the early 1920s, the Soviet press denounced football as a bourgeois sport that was injurious to both mind and body. Within that same decade, however, it blew up, becoming the most popular spectator sport in the USSR and growing into a fiercely competitive business with complex regional and national bureaucracies, a strong international presence, and a conviction that victory on the field was also a victory of Soviet supremacy. Writing as both historian and fan, Holmes focuses his study on the provincial Kirov team Dinamo from 1979 to 1985, when the club played at both its worst and its best. Spurred by a dismal 1979 season, the team's administrators and regional authorities had two options: obey Moscow's edict to reduce expenditures on professional sports or seek out new—and often illicit—funding sources to fill out a team of champions. Drawing on rich archival materials as well as newspapers and interviews with former players, Win or Else reveals the foundations of Soviet sports culture—and the hazards that teams faced both in victory and in loss.A powerful case for why majority rule—not representation—is the defining feature of democratic politicsThe idea that democratic governance rests on…
active self-rule by citizens plays surprisingly little part in current theories of democracy, which instead stress the importance of representation by elected, appointed, or randomly selected bodies such as legislatures, courts, and juries. This would have astonished eighteenth-century theorists of democracy, who viewed universal suffrage and majoritarian voting as the sole criteria for democratic politics. Active and Passive Citizens defends the view of these earlier thinkers, asserting that individual agency is the very essence of democracy.In this provocative and lucidly argued book, Richard Tuck draws on the distinction made by the Abbé Sieyès, a leading political theorist of the French Revolution, between &“active&” citizens (the electorate) and &“passive&” ones (those who are represented by the institutions of the state). Tuck traces our current representative view of democracy to Sieyès and contrasts him with Rousseau, a theorist of active self-rule by the people. Tuck argues that modern theories of democracy have effectively turned us into passive citizens and calls for a renewal of a majoritarian democracy that realizes the full potential of active citizenship.Based on the prestigious Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University&’s Center for Human Values, Active and Passive Citizens is edited and introduced by Stephen Macedo and includes commentary by political theorists Simone Chambers, Joshua Cohen, John Ferejohn, and Melissa Schwartzberg.The Age of Grievance
By Frank Bruni. 2024
From bestselling author and longtime New York Times columnist Frank Bruni comes a lucid, powerful examination of the ways in…
which grievance has come to define our current culture and politics, on both the right and left.The twists and turns of American politics are unpredictable, but the tone is a troubling given. It&’s one of grievance. More and more Americans are convinced that they&’re losing because somebody else is winning. More and more tally their slights, measure their misfortune, and assign particular people responsibility for it. The blame game has become the country&’s most popular sport and victimhood its most fashionable garb. Grievance needn&’t be bad. It has done enormous good. The United States is a nation born of grievance, and across the nearly two hundred and fifty years of our existence as a country, grievance has been the engine of morally urgent change. But what happens when all sorts of grievances—the greater ones, the lesser ones, the authentic, the invented—are jumbled together? When people take their grievances to lengths that they didn&’t before? A violent mob storms the US Capitol, rejecting the results of a presidential election. Conspiracy theories flourish. Fox News knowingly peddles lies in the service of profit. College students chase away speakers, and college administrators dismiss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. Benign words are branded hurtful; benign gestures are deemed hostile. And there&’s a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground, and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive. How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward.Beyond Mestizaje: Contemporary Debates on Race in Mexico
By Tania Islas Weinstein. 2024
Racism has historically been a taboo topic in Mexico. This is largely due to the nationalist project of mestizaje which contends…
that because all Mexicans are racially mixed, race is not a salient political issue. In recent years, however, race and racism have become important topics of debate in the country’s public sphere and academia. This book introduces readers to a sample of these diverse and sometimes conflicting views that also intersect with discussions of class. The activists and scholars included in the volume come from fields such as anthropology, linguistics, history, sociology, and political science. Through these diverse epistemological frameworks, the authors show how people in contemporary Mexico interpret the world in racial terms and denounce racism.Sustainable Spaces in Arid and Semiarid Zones of Mexico (The Latin American Studies Book Series)
By Liliana Lizárraga-Mendiola, Carlos Alfredo Bigurra-Alzati, Gabriela A. Vázquez-Rodríguez. 2024
This book portrays interesting aspects of communities where livability, comfort, materials, and traditional construction procedures are part of the cultural…
context. The book is focused on the importance of incorporating environmental criteria and sustainable infrastructure to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals and to improve the population's quality of life in arid and semi-arid zones of the Global South. This book constitutes an introduction to the sustainable construction of livable spaces for undergraduate and postgraduate students, although professionals of the construction industry and urban policy makers will also find this work valuable.The Rise of Mental Vulnerability at Work: A Socio-Historical and Cultural Analysis
By Ari Väänänen. 2024
Since the 1960s, a major mental health crisis has emerged among Western working populations. By analysing the development of various…
occupational cultures and using extensive data sources, this book captures the history of mental vulnerability in working life. Through a study spanning several decades, the book develops a new understanding of how mental vulnerability has evolved through changes to our working lives and socio-cultural being. It shows how our current knowledge about work, disability and the psyche is influenced by our time and provides intertwining conceptual frameworks and alternatives to current canonised knowledge about mental health in working life.Modern Slavery in Global Context: Human Rights, Law, and Society
By Elizabeth A. Faulkner. 2024
This thought-provoking collection brings together academics from a range of disciplines to examine modern slavery. It illustrates how different disciplinary…
positions, methodologies and perspectives form and clash together through a kaleidoscopic view to contribute a unique insight into critical modern slavery studies. Providing a platform to critique the legal, ideological and political responses to the issue, experts interrogate the construct of modern slavery and the anti-trafficking discourse which have dominated contemporary responses to and understandings of exploitation. Drawing on a range of global real-world examples, this is a vital contribution to the study of modern slavery.Understanding and Improving Public Management Reforms
By Thomas Elston. 2024
Why do top-down reforms to public services so often over-promise and under-deliver? Using five concepts from psychology, economics and organisational…
sociology, Thomas Elston addresses this pressing question of good governance. Rather than focusing on the challenge of implementation, Understanding and Improving Public Management Reforms reveals how flawed policy design is often the major contributor to reform failure. Cognitive bias, restrictive social institutions and inattention to ‘quiet costs’ during the policy-making process are essential to explaining the poor track record of reforms to date – and point the way towards better decision-making in future. Written for policy professionals, service managers, students and researchers alike, this concise, practical and multidisciplinary study draws on varied examples to help reconceive the perennial problem of public management reform – and to propose new solutions.Street-Level Bureaucracy in Weak State Institutions
By Rik Peeters, Gabriela Lotta, and Fernando Nieto-Morales. 2024
In this book, street-level bureaucracy scholars from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America analyse the conditions…
that shape frontline work and citizens´ everyday experience of the state. Institutional factors such as political clientelism, resource scarcity, social inequality, job insecurity, and systemic corruption affect the way street-level bureaucrats enforce rules and implement policies. Inadvertently, they end up implementing inequities in citizens’ access to rights and services — despite efforts to repair organisational deficiencies and broker relations between vulnerable citizens and a distant state. This book illuminates these realities and challenges and provides unique insights into critical themes such as resource scarcities, bureaucratic corruption, control practices, and the complexities of dealing with vulnerable population groups.The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism
By Luis F. Alvarez Leon. 2024
Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism,…
we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine, Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem. He develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez Leon shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.Mexican American women reached across generations to develop a bridging activism that drew on different methods and ideologies to pursue…
their goals. Marisela R. Chávez uses a wealth of untapped oral histories to reveal the diverse ways activist Mexican American women in Los Angeles claimed their own voices and space while seeking to leverage power. Chávez tells the stories of the people who honed beliefs and practices before the advent of the Chicano movement and the participants in the movement after its launch in the late 1960s. As she shows, Chicanas across generations challenged societal traditions that at first assumed their place on the sidelines and then assigned them second-class status within political structures built on their work. Fueled by a surging pride in their Mexican heritage and indigenous roots, these activists created spaces for themselves that acknowledged their lives as Mexicans and women. Vivid and compelling, Chicana Liberation reveals the remarkable range of political beliefs and life experiences behind a new activism and feminism shaped by Mexican American women.The War Against Ukraine and the EU: Facing New Realities
By Claudia Wiesner, Michèle Knodt. 2024
This open access book aims at discussing the manifold consequences that the War against Ukraine bears for the European Union…
and EU Studies. It takes stock of the fact that the Russian Attack on Ukraine and the ensuing War not only affects the Global Order, but also has challenged a number of established narratives and convictions for the European Union and its member states. The EU now needs to position itself in the changing world order. Concretely it needs to deal with a number of membership applications, internal and external challenges to liberal democracy, and the development of its strategic autonomy in a number of decisive policy fields. The book convenes experienced scholars, with chapters covering the following themes and fields: Theories, approaches and concepts in EU studies and IR; the EU and the changing European and Global Order; the War and defence of liberal democracy; Membership Politics; Energy Policy.This book is a comprehensive exploration of endogenous community building, aiming to investigate how to create a vibrant, service-integrated, and…
sustainable community through collective impact approaches. It’s a guide to social innovation that combines theory and practical application. In terms of theory, it constructs concepts such as endogenous community, endogenous design system, life project platform and enabling ecosystem. In practice, it offers design methods and a toolkit for collective impact to enhance community resilience and capacity through service co-creation. This book provides readers with a systematic guide to endogenous community design, ranging from conceptual understanding and theoretical models to practical methodologies. Its aim is to build a sociotechnical system from the bottom-up to address complex issues.This book is ideal for community leaders, government officials, NGOs, urban planners, social innovators, and anyone passionate about sustainable community development.Reflecting the growing interest of historians in memory studies, this edited collection examines the relationship between memory and global social…
movements from 1848 to the present. For a long time, there has been little attempt by historians to consider memory and social activism in an integrated, systematic, and comparative way. However, in recent years, scholars have demonstrated that social movements rely on collective memories to assert claims, mobilize supporters, and legitimize their political visions, while also helping to further shape collective memories. This book delves into the synergies between memory studies and social movements, exploring how social movements have been constructing and creating memories of their own activity, how specific landscapes of memory have influenced social movements, and how activists have used memory as a cultural resource to further their own goals and ambitions. The case studies presented cover a range of different types of political activism, including the fights for workers’, gay, feminist, and pacifist rights, as well as ecological, urban, and far-right movements across the globe, portraying the diverse interrelations that exist between social movements and collective memory.1948: A History Of The First Arab-israeli War
By Benny Morris. 2008
This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of…
the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab sidewhere the archives are still closedis illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials. Morris stresses the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great PowersBritain, the United States, and the Soviet Unionin shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.Americans At War 1975-1986: An Era Of Violent Peace
By Daniel P. Bolger. 1988
Discusses American military capabilities and operations undertaken since the end of the Vietnam War, detailing the tactics, the planning, the…
leadership, and the political realities that lead to the rise of the "limited engagement."Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Ser.)
By Manfred B. Steger. 2023
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring We live today in an interconnected world in which ordinary people can become instant…
online celebrities to millions of fans thousands of miles away, in which religious leaders can influence billions globally, in which humans are altering the climate and environment, in which new infectious diseases spread across continents at lightning speed, and in which complex social forces are increasingly impacted by digital technology. This is globalization. In the sixth edition of his bestselling Very Short Introduction, Manfred B. Steger offers concise definitions of pertinent key terms and concepts. He provides an accessible overview of the long history of globalization followed by an examination of its major dimensions: economic, political, cultural, ideological, and ecological. He also engages the hotly contested question of whether it is, ultimately, a good or a bad thing. From climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, resurgent nationalism to global social media, trade wars to China's growing global profile, Russia's expansionism to renewed fears of nuclear conflicts, he explores today's unprecedented levels of planetary integration and disruption. About The Series: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.Janesville: An American Story
By Amy Goldstein. 2017
* Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year * Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize *…
800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 * An Economist Best Book of 2017 * A Business Insider Best Book of 2017 * &“A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience&” (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post)—an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its main factory shuts down—but it&’s not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up. Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation&’s oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America&’s biggest political issues. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it&’s so hard in the twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class. &“Moving and magnificently well-researched...Janesville joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and analysis&” (Jennifer Senior, The New York Times). &“Anyone tempted to generalize about the American working class ought to meet the people in Janesville. The reporting behind this book is extraordinary and the story—a stark, heartbreaking reminder that political ideologies have real consequences—is told with rare sympathy and insight&” (Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine).They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent
By Sarah Kendzior. 2022
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE “Every sentence delivered. The pathos of truth-seeking left me thinking of Herman…
Melville."—Timothy Snyder, #1 New York Times bestselling author of On TyrannyNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING author Sarah Kendzior delves into the difference between conspiracy and conspiracy theory, "deftly separat[ing] fact from fiction in a conspiracy-addled nation" (VANITY FAIR).Conspiracy theories are on the rise because officials refuse to enforce accountability for real conspiracies. Uncritical faith in broken institutions is as dangerous as false narratives peddled by propagandists.The truth may hurt—but the lies will kill us.They Knew discusses conspiracy culture in a rapidly declining United States struggling with corruption, climate change, and other crises. As the actions of the powerful remain shrouded in mystery—“From Norman Baker to Jeffrey Epstein, Iran-Contra to January 6" (VF)—it is unsurprising that people turn to conspiracy theories to fill the informational void. They Knew exposes the tactics these powerful actors use to placate an inquisitive public.Here, for the first time, Kendzior blends her signature whip-smart prose and eviscerating arguments with lyrical and intimate examinations of the times and places that haunt American history. "America is a ghost story," writes Kendzior, as she unearths decades of buried history, providing an essential and critical look at how to rebuild our democracy by confronting the political lies and crimes that have shaped us.International Human Rights and Local Courts: Human Rights Interpretation in Indonesia (Routledge Research in Human Rights Law)
By Aksel Tømte, Eko Riyadi. 2024
This book addresses the technicalities of how international human rights law can be applied at the domestic level through a…
case study of the human rights methodology of the Indonesian judiciary. Numerous international human rights treaties have been ratified by States parties all around the world. However, local implementation has proven a difficult task for national authorities with every State struggling to realize rights to varying degrees. This reveals a gap between the standards of human rights as envisaged by the law and those experienced by rights holders at the local level. This work analyses how Indonesian courts interpret and apply human rights. It discusses the position of human rights within specific areas of Indonesian law: constitutional law, criminal law and private law. It analyses how courts have dealt with specific cases within these fields of law. Its key contribution lies in its detailed attention to the role of the Indonesian judiciary in implementing human rights, as well as to the influence of international law, and the role that actors other than the judiciary play in this process. It also incorporates international comparative perspectives. The book will be of particular interest to human rights scholars concerned with national judiciaries’ role in human rights implementation, and to scholars, judges, civil society actors and legal practitioners working with law and human rights in Indonesia.