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Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come
By John Daniel Davidson. 2024
This book sets up a rich intercultural dialogue between the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault, and that of…
key African thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe, Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, Tsenay Serequeberhahn, and Henry Odera Oruka.The book challenges western-centric visions of an African future by demonstrating the richness of thought that can be found in African and Afrodiasporic philosophy. The book shows how thinkers such as Serequeberhan have criticised the inconsistencies in Kant’s work, whereas others such as Wiredu, Gyekye, Appiah and Mbembe have referenced his work more positively and developed progressive political concepts such as the metanational state; partial cosmopolitanism and Afropolitanism. The book goes on to consider how Mbembe and Mudimbe have responded to Foucault’s ideas in deciphering the various Western, African and Afrodiasporic discourses of knowledge on Africa. The book concludes by considering various theories of intercultural exchange, from Gyekye’s cultural borrowing, to Appiah’s conversation across boundaries, Wiredu’s cross cultural dialogue, Mbembe’s thinking outside the frame, Serequeberhan’s dialogue at a distance, and Oruka’s call for global re-distribution and a new ecophilosophical attitude to safeguard human existence on the planet.This book invites us all to engage in intercultural dialogue and mutual respect for different cultural creations. It will be an important read for researchers in Philosophy wherever they are in the world.United Nations Peacekeeping and the Principle of Non-Intervention: A TWAIL Perspective
By Jennifer Giblin. 2024
Using a unique application of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), this book provides a critical, interdisciplinary, examination of…
the contemporary practice of UN peacekeeping.Is peacekeeping intervention? Since its conception in the mid-1950s, peacekeeping has significantly evolved from traditional, lightly armed, passive operations to robust, multi-dimensional stabilisation peacekeeping operations. This raises questions as to whether this is simply a natural evolution of peacekeeping or whether it marks an expansion of the concept beyond its boundaries, pushing it into the realm of peace enforcement or intervention. In response, this book examines the frameworks which govern UN peacekeeping and seeks to understand the relationship between peacekeeping and the principle of non-intervention. Providing practical examples from the United Nations’ operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and drawing upon interviews with key international actors including UN personnel, the book explores the boundaries of peacekeeping, contending that peacekeeping, at times, becomes a form of intervention. This, the book argues, is detrimental both to the concept of peacekeeping and to the host state, and it concludes by offering a series of recommendations to re-affirm peacekeeping’s boundaries and amplify the effectiveness of contemporary peacekeeping. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in international law, international relations, politics, history and criminology.Home and International Law: Dispossession, Displacement and Resistance in Everyday Life
By Henrietta Zeffert. 2024
This book is about home and international law. More specifically, it is about the profound, and frequently devastating, transformations of…
home that are happening almost everywhere in the world today and what international law has to do with them. Through three stories of home – the desert home, the lake home and the city home – this book traces how the everyday operations of international law shape the material, affective and imaginative experience of home. It argues that international law’s ‘homemaking work’ is characterised by acts of domination, practices of resistance and the production of unhomely spaces. However, the book also considers whether and how the liberatory potential of international law could be unlocked through the metaphor of home. This book draws from fieldwork conducted by the author in Palestine, Cambodia and the United Kingdom. It takes a global socio-legal approach to home and international law, informed by feminist political theory, feminist geography, home studies and contemporary critical approaches to international law. It is the first academic work to examine the relationship between home and international law. This book’s global socio-legal approach to home and international law will be of interest to those teaching and studying in international law, socio-legal studies, legal pluralism and legal geography.Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America
By Brian Judge. 2024
How did neoliberalism arise? Faced with the crises of the 1970s, a coalition of neoliberal intellectuals, conservative politicians, and business…
interests carried out a vast project of walling off the economy from democracy, ensuring the dominance of finance—or so the conventional story goes. Democracy in Default offers a new perspective on the birth of neoliberalism, showing that this common narrative confuses cause and effect. Financialization was not the offspring of deregulation but the mechanism that allowed neoliberalism to take root.Brian Judge argues that financialization was a nearly spontaneous response to a crisis within liberalism. He examines how liberalism disavows the problem of distributive conflict, leaving it vulnerable when those conflicts erupt. When the postwar growth engine began to slow, finance promised a way out of the resulting political impasse, allowing liberal democracies to depoliticize questions of distribution and sustain the existing social and economic order. Elected officials were not simply captured or co-opted but willingly embraced financial solutions to their political problems. Unleashing the financial imperative to generate monetary returns, however, ushered in an all-encompassing transformation. Vivid case studies—the bankruptcy of Stockton, California; the investment strategy of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System; and the 2008 financial crisis—illustrate how the priorities of financial markets radically altered liberal democratic governance. Recasting the political and economic transformations of the past half century, Democracy in Default offers a bracing new account of the relationship between neoliberalism and financialization.An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America
By Matthew Stewart. 2024
How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders’…
oligarchy in the Civil War. This is a story about a dangerous idea—one which ignited revolutions in America, France, and Haiti; burst across Europe in the revolutions of 1848; and returned to inflame a new generation of intellectuals to lead the abolition movement—the idea that all men are created equal. In their struggle against the slaveholding oligarchy of their time, America’s antislavery leaders found their way back to the rationalist, secularist, and essentially atheist inspiration for the first American Revolution. Frederick Douglass’s unusual interest in radical German philosophers and Abraham Lincoln’s buried allusions to the same thinkers are but a few of the clues that underlie this propulsive philosophical detective story. With fresh takes on forgotten thinkers like Theodore Parker, the excommunicated Unitarian minister who is the original source of some of Lincoln’s most famous lines, and a feisty band of German refugees, philosopher and historian Matthew Stewart tells a vivid and piercing story of the battle between America’s philosophical radicals and the conservative counterrevolution that swept the American republic in the first decades of its existence and persists in new forms up to the present day. In exposing the role of Christian nationalism and the collusion between northern economic elites and slaveholding oligarchs, An Emancipation of the Mind demands a significant revision in our understanding of the origins and meaning of the struggle over slavery in America—and offers a fresh perspective on struggles between democracy and elite power today.Greece, Turkey, NATO and the Cyprus Issue 1973–1988: Enemies Allied (Europa Regional Perspectives)
By Andreas Stergiou. 2024
The volume examines one of the most sensitive issues in the contemporary diplomatic history of the eastern Mediterranean, namely, the…
nexus between Greece, Turkey, the Cyprus problem and NATO in the crucial period between 1973 and 1988. Beginning with the emergence of the Aegean dispute in 1973 and ending with the most comprehensive attempt to date to solve the Greek–Turkish conflict in the wake of the Davos rapprochement process in 1988. The analysis in this book goes back to developments that occurred in the first half of the 20th century.A young South Asian American woman's story of reconnecting with her identity, family, and heritage through sustainable farmingIn 2012, 25-year-old…
Jackie Moyer—the daughter of a forbidden marriage between a white American father and a Punjabi American mother—leased 10 acres of land in Gold Hill, California, and embarked on a career in organic farming. With a fractured relationship to her heritage, Moyer saw an opportunity for repair when she learned of a nearly lost heirloom wheat variety called Sonora.Sonora wasn&’t just an heirloom wheat strain; it was her own cultural heirloom. Its history can be traced back to Punjab, the Indian state where Moyer&’s own roots are planted. In growing the grain on her farm, she began to uncover the multigenerational story of her family&’s resilience.From California to Punjab, the past to the present, Jackie maps her personal story atop the entangled histories of wheat cultivation and the rise of the organic farming movement. With a passion for dismantling the exploitative big-agriculture industry, she examines how the development of high-yielding varieties and chemical fertilizers has harmed our relationship with food, the planet, and each other.Braiding memoir with historical inquiry, On Gold Hill explores the complexities of the immigrant experience, illuminates the ways colonialism and capitalism constrain our food system, and investigates what it means to lose—and to reclaim—one&’s heritage.Takeover
By Timothy W. Ryback. 2024
From the internationally acclaimed author of Hitler's Private Library, a dramatic recounting of the six critical months before Adolf Hitler…
assumed power, when the Nazi leader teetered between triumph and ruin.In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler's National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and a path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes. As membership hemorrhaged and financial backers withdrew, the Nazi Party threatened to fracture. Hitler talked of suicide. The New York Times declared he was finished. Yet somehow, in a few brief weeks, he was chancellor of Germany.In fascinating detail and with previously un-accessed archival materials, Timothy W. Ryback tells the remarkable story of Hitler's dismantling of democracy through the democratic process. He provides a fresh perspective and insights into Hitler's personal and professional lives in these months, in all their complexity and uncertainty-backroom deals, unlikely alliances, stunning betrayals, an ill-timed tax audit, and a fateful weekend that changed our world forever. Above all, Ryback makes clear why a wearied Hindenburg, who disdained the "Bohemian corporal," ultimately decided to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933.Within weeks, Germany was no longer a democracy.Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance
By Melinda Cooper. 2024
A thorough investigation of the current combination of austerity and extravagance that characterizes government spending and central bank monetary policyAt…
the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance.Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be its sole setting. Beyond the zero-sum game of direct claims on state budgets lies a realm of indirect government spending that escapes the naked eye. Capital gains are multiply subsidized by a tax system that reserves its greatest rewards for financial asset holders. And for all its airs of haughty asceticism, the Federal Reserve has become adept at facilitating the inflation of asset values while ruthlessly suppressing wages. Neoliberalism is as extravagant as it is austere, and this paradox needs to be grasped if we are to challenge its core modus operandi.Melinda Cooper examines the major schools of thought that have shaped neoliberal common sense around public finance. Focusing, in particular, on Virginia school public choice theory and supply-side economics, she shows how these currents produced distinct but ultimately complementary responses to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. With its intellectual roots in the conservative Southern Democratic tradition, Virginia school public choice theory espoused an austere doctrine of budget balance. The supply-side movement, by contrast, advocated tax cuts without spending restraint and debt issuance without guilt, in an apparent repudiation of austerity. Yet, for all their differences, the two schools converged around the need to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending. Together, they drove a counterrevolution in public finance that deepened the divide between rich and poor and revived the fortunes of dynastic wealth.Far-reaching as the neoliberal counterrevolution has been, Cooper still identifies a counterfactual history of unrealized possibilities in the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. She concludes by inviting us to rethink the concept of revolution and raises the question: Is another politics of extravagance possible?The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics #208)
By Elizabeth N. Saunders. 2024
How elites shape the use of force in American foreign policyOne of the most widely held views of democratic leaders…
is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders&’ Game sheds light on this enduring puzzle, arguing that the primary constraints on decisions about war and peace come from elites, not the public.Elizabeth Saunders focuses on three groups of elites—presidential advisers, legislators, and military officials—to show how the dynamics of this insiders&’ game are key to understanding the use of force in American foreign policy. She explores how elite preferences differ from those of ordinary voters, and how leaders must bargain with elites to secure their support for war. Saunders provides insights into why leaders start and prolong conflicts the public does not want, but also demonstrates how elites can force leaders to change course and end wars.Tracing presidential decisions about the use of force from the Cold War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saunders reveals how the elite politics of war are a central feature of democracy. The Insiders&’ Game shifts the focus of democratic accountability from the voting booth to the halls of power.Conservativism: A Cultural-Psychological Exploration (SpringerBriefs in Psychology)
By Enno Freiherr von Fircks. 2024
The present work discusses the phenomenon of conservativism from a qualitative, cultural-psychological perspective. As such, the text breaks with current…
mainstream research about political ideologies wanting to assess a political culture within the simple administration of a questionnaire. The SpringerBrief will oppose such a perspective trying to assess how the conservative-minded person will structure space and time in peculiar ways. In the first part of the study, participants were invited to reflect about how they preserve or conserve meaning in various activities whereas the second part of the study tried to shed light onto how something preservable or conservable comes into being and what it actually makes it preservable. Here, an autoethnographic study revealed that something becomes meaningfully preservable when it satisfies multiple demands of the Self as well as of the environment. Readers will realize the insufficiency of the positivistic attitude analyzing conservativism from a simple quantitative perspective, and researchers are shown how political ideologies or cultures can be assessed ecologically – something that has not yet been undertaken. This leads to an appeal for scientists to study the phenomenon of conservativism more wholistically.Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 (Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe)
By Rosamund Johnston. 2024
In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the…
dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment. Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia—one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest—by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.Public Scholarship in Communication Studies
By Thomas J. Billard, Silvio Waisbord, Amy Jordan, Rachel Kuo, Philip M Napoli, Chad Raphael, Paula Gardner, Holley Wilkin, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Sue Robinson, Yidong Wang, Elaine Almeida, Aymar Jean Christian, Stacey L Connaughton, Susan Mancino, Daniel Kreiss, Shannon C McGregor, Danielle K Brown, Todd P Newman, Becca Beets, Larry Gross. 2024
Prometheus brought the gift of enlightenment to humanity and suffered for his benevolence. This collection takes on scholars’ Promethean view…
of themselves as selfless bringers of light and instead offers a new vision of public scholarship as service to society. Thomas J Billard and Silvio Waisbord curate essays from a wide range of specialties within the study of communication. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the contributors use approaches from critical meditations to case studies to how-to guides as they explore the possibilities of seeing shared knowledge not as a gift to be granted but as an imperative urging readers to address the problems of the world. Throughout the volume, the works show that a pivot to ideas of scholarship as public service is already underway in corners of communication studies across the country. Visionary and provocative, Public Scholarship in Communication Studies proposes a needed reconsideration of knowledge and a roadmap to its integration with community. Contributors: Elaine Almeida, Becca Beets, Thomas J Billard, Danielle K. Brown, Aymar Jean Christian, Stacey L. Connaughton, Paula Gardner, Larry Gross, Amy Jordan, Daniel Kreiss, Rachel Kuo, Susan Mancino, Shannon C. McGregor, Philip M. Napoli, Todd P. Newman, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Chad Raphael, Sue Robinson, Silvio Waisbord, Yidong Wang, and Holley WilkinThe Death Penalty as State Crime: Who Can Kill?
By Laura L. Finley. 2024
This book offers a new perspective on the death penalty in the US, examining capital punishment as state crime or…
state-produced harm. It addresses the death penalty, showing how the state not only authorizes a system and a practice that tortures human beings, but is also aware of its deep flaws and chooses not to address them.Building on the vast literature on state crime together with case examples and interviews with activists seeking to abolish the death penalty, this book offers a new and innovative critique of state punishment in the US. It draws on a range of issues and topics such as arbitrariness, inadequate counsel, racial bias, mental illness, innocence, conditions on death row, the protocols, and the equipment used for executions. It emphasizes the need for abolition of the death penalty and highlights efforts being made to do so, with a focus on successful elements of abolition campaigns.The Death Penalty as State Crime is essential reading for all those engaged with capital punishment, human rights, and state crime, and will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars and political scientists alike.Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America
By David McCormick. 2023
Discover a groundbreaking vision for how to unlock America&’s full potential for greatness from one of the country&’s foremost conservative…
leaders: David McCormick, the former CEO of Bridgewater Associates. It&’s easy to be pessimistic about the state of our country these days, but as McCormick explains, if the true test of a great country is its capacity for self-renewal, the United States of America stands apart. Our country has continually defeated grave threats and overcome domestic divisions when the odds have been stacked against us. That&’s the American story, and we can do it again. Drawing on decades of leadership in business, the military, and government, McCormick issues a call for visionary, servant leadership and outlines a conservative agenda for American renewal that would expand access to the American Dream, ensure U.S. technological supremacy, confront China, and revive the restless, courageous, and indefatigable spirit that dwells within the American heart. This book is a must read for those who care deeply about the future of America. McCormick, a former candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022, argues the path forward is treacherous and uncertain. It will undoubtedly test our resilience and place in the world. But if we commit ourselves to renewal, America's best days are yet to come.This book is a concise but comprehensive guide to the history, present and possible futures of carbon capture and storage…
policy and action in the United Kingdom (UK).There have been multiple failed starts, promises and “last chances” for carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Europe, North America, China and Australia, but thus far it has repeatedly collided with the political and economic realities that the technology is too expensive and complicated to gain and keep policymakers’ support. However, in the UK that might be changing, with explicit government support for CCS to help decarbonise industry. Set within the broader context of global interest in CCS, this book first outlines the technologies involved in the types of capture technology, transport options and storage options in the UK. It then briefly introduces an overarching policy analysis framework (John Kingdon’s multiple streams approach) and uses it to give an account of the long history of CCS interest and efforts in three chapters covering the 1970s to 2002, 2003 to 2015 and 2016 to the present day. Marc Hudson focusses on the various arguments made for the introduction of CCS, and the slowly shifting coalitions of actors who make those arguments, while contrasting these with the perspectives of those opposed to CCS.This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and policymakers researching and working in the field, as well as the related areas of energy policy, energy transitions and climate change.Freedom Undone: The Assault on Liberal Values and Institutions in Hong Kong (Asia Shorts)
By Michael C. Davis. 2024
What happens when liberal constitutional institutions are undone? Can Freedom survive the loss of separation of powers with the associated…
legal and political accountability? The Chinese Communist Party has been at the forefront in its disdain for liberal institutions and promoting illiberal alternatives. This disdain placed Hong Kong people on the frontlines of the global struggle for freedom. Since its handover from Britain, Hong Kong has felt the brunt of China’s illiberal agenda, recently with increased intensity since the crackdown in 2019 and Beijing’s imposition of a National Security Law in 2020. Thousands have been jailed and a city famous for vigorous protests has been silenced. Professor Michael Davis, a close observer who taught human rights and development in the city for three decades, takes us on the constitutional journey of both the city’s vigorous defense of freedom and its repressive undoing—a painful loss for Hong Kong and a lesson for the world.The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention
By Marsha Henry. 2024
In The End of Peacekeeping, Marsha Henry makes use of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks to expose peacekeeping as an…
epistemic power project in need of abolition. Drawing on critical concepts from Black feminist thought, and from postcolonial and critical race theories, Henry shows how contemporary peacekeeping produces gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies.The book’s intersectional analysis of peacekeeping is based on data amassed through more than fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork on peacekeeping missions and training centers around the world, including interviews with UN peacekeepers, humanitarian aid personnel, and local populations. Henry demonstrates how focus on the policy and practice of peacekeeping has obscured the geopolitical knowledge project at peacekeeping’s root, allowing its harms to persist unquestioned by mainstream scholarship. Arguing that we must recover critical theoretical contributions that have been sidelined within the field, she brings the insights of feminist and postcolonial scholarship to bear on peacekeeping studies, whose production of empirical data and evidence continues to provide the justification and foundation for policy and global governance actions.Revealing that peacekeeping is not the benign, apolitical project it is often purported to be, this book encourages readers to imagine and enact alternative futures to peacekeeping.Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden
By Marvin Olasky. 2024
What makes a leader truly great? Is it simply a matter of management style and personality? Or is it character…
that matters most? Moral Visions takes an insightful look into America&’s leaders of the past to answer these questions and demonstrates that values and moral convictions are critical to the strength of a nation.Supposedly, we learn about the candidates for the highest office through a series of tests called &“debates,&” which are instead an exchange of soundbites. We can&’t know whether an aspirant to the presidency has the ability to ask good questions or only a suave or belligerent ability to answer them. Moral Vision is a human-interest introduction to American history through studies of nineteen leaders: presidents, almost presidents, a tycoon, a crusading journalist, and even a leading 19th century abortionist. Its lessons can help voters sort through the candidates in 2024 and beyond by measuring them against previous leaders—none of whom was faultless. It shows how the deepest views often grow out of religious belief and influence political goals, racial prejudices, sexual activities, uses of power, and senses of service. In his 1789 inaugural address, George Washington pledged that &“the foundation for national policy will be laid in the sure and immutable principles of private morality.&” Marvin Olasky shows how 19th-century leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland partly upheld and partly ignored that promise, and 20th-century leaders like Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton tried to &“compartmentalize&” the private and the public. An extensively updated version of The American Leadership Tradition, Moral Vision is for anyone tired of today&’s textbook tendencies to submerge the role of individuals as big economic and demographic waves roll in. History is more than statistics, economics, and group identities. Human beings are more than paper boats riding the rainfall into gutters.