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The European Union and the New Trade Politics (ISSN)
By John Peterson & Alasdair R. Young. 2007
The politics of international trade have changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Advances in technology have spurred a new…
kind of 'trade' involving transfers of components and materials across borders but within firms. Trade in services, foreign direct investment and sales by affiliates of foreign-owed companies have grown more rapidly than trade in goods, making national rules and regulations more significant barriers to trade. The effects of 'non-trade' policies on trade have engaged new actors in trade politics, not least in the European Union (EU). The emergence of a more active bloc of developing countries alongside a vibrant international civil society, including environmental and consumer groups and ministries, have made trade politics increasingly lively, complex, and challenging for the EU. Meanwhile, the World Trade Organization has become not only a primary focus for EU trade policy but also a lightning rod for protest, a powerful 'legaliser' of trade diplomacy, and an arena where it is often difficult, even impossible, to separate private from public interests.The European Union and the New Trade Politics provides a state of the art analysis of how the EU shapes and is shaped by the 'new' trade politics. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Journal of European Public Policy.Attitudes, Poverty and Agency in Russia and Ukraine
By Ann-Mari Sätre and Ildikó Asztalos Morell. 2016
One of the main ideas behind this book was to trace continuities from the Soviet time to post-Soviet Russia. There…
are many similarities between Russia and Ukraine, indicating such a continuation. Russia and Ukraine had a lot in common in terms of culture, language and history, partly also because of their common origin. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, the two independent countries chose different routes of development. This makes it possible to distinguish between the effects of politics/reforms on the one hand, and the impacts from the Soviet system on the other. After some more or less chaotic development paths in the 1990s, showing clear differences between the two countries, and before the contemporary conflict broke out in Eastern Ukraine (2013), they had once again more similarities in terms of political leadership and policies in general. The chapters in this book focus on Ukraine and on two regions in Russia: Nizhny Novgorod and Archangelsk. Contributors look at attitudes towards poverty and poor people; strategies of the poor; and policies against poverty. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.Migration and Divided Societies (ISSN)
By Chris Gilligan, Susan Ball. 2014
The study of 'divided societies' has focused, historically, on either ethnic divides in colonial (or post-colonial) societies or on developed…
Western democracies which have ethnic power-sharing Government structures. The study of divided societies emerged historically at a moment when there was a growing interest in the study of immigration and inter-ethnic relations in developed industrial nations. These two sets of literature―on divided societies and on immigration and inter-ethnic relations―have developed largely in isolation from each other. Both sets of literature have also tended to focus on inter-ethnic relations, and have paid much less attention to migration. This edited collection sets out to fill this gap in the literature through examining migration and ethnic division. The case studies examined include developed industrial nations (Canada and Norway), a post-colonial country (Kenya) and three cases which feature regularly in the 'divided societies' literature (Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Israel). Taken together, these case-studies suggest ways in which migration intersects with and complicates ethnic divides in 'divided societies'. This book was published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.Nigeria at Fifty: The Nation in Narration
By Ebenezer Obadare, Wale Adebanwi. 2011
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and biggest democracy, celebrates her fiftieth year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the…
cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. This book frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How does the social composition of interest and power illuminate the actualities and narratives of the Nigerian crisis? How have the choices made by Nigerian leaders structured, and/or have been structured by, the character of the Nigerian state and state-society relations? In what ways is Nigeria’s mono-product, debt-ridden, dependent economy fed by ‘the politics of plunder’? And what are the implications of these questions for the structural relationships of production, reproduction and consumption?This book confronts these questions by making state-centric approaches to understanding African countries speak to relevant social theories that pluralize and complicate our understanding of the specific challenges of a prototypical postcolonial state.This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.Legislative Lobbying in Context: The Policy and Polity Determinants of Interest Group Politics in the European Union (ISSN)
By Jan Beyers, Caelesta Braun and Heike Klüver. 2016
The lack of previous research into political interest groups and taking into account policy-specific and institutional context characteristics is largely…
due to research designs that have been primarily focused on a small number of policy debates, with the result that contextual characteristics were largely held constant. This book brings together articles from different modules that are part of a larger European Collaborative Research Project, INTEREURO, carried out by research teams in nine different countries under the auspices of the European Science Foundation. The main goal of the book is to analyse strategies, framing and influence processes for a set of 125 legislative proposals submitted by the European Commission, in an effort to better understand the involvement of interest organizations in the decision-making process of the EU. Contributors draw on sophisticated and innovative policy-driven samples of interest group mobilization, allowing them to account systematically for how policy-specific and institutional context factors shape mobilization, lobbying strategies and influence of interest groups on public policy debates in the EU. In this way, the book makes an important contribution to the study of interest groups in the EU and represents the breadth of positions taken in the current literature. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.Agency Governance in the EU (ISSN)
By Berthold Rittberger and Arndt Wonka. 2012
The rapid proliferation of EU agencies represents one of the most significant changes to the EU’s organisational set-up in past…
decades. At the same time, this development has significantly affected regulatory policy-making in the EU.This volume assembles the most renowned scholars in the field to address the key themes and challenges that agency governance in the EU poses to effective and legitimate policy-making. The first theme addresses the causes and dynamics of the creation and design of regulatory bodies in EU governance, focusing not only on EU agencies but also on alternatives to the agency format, such as regulatory networks. Second, once agencies are established, the book goes on to explore the consequences and trajectories of agency governance. How effective and autonomous are EU agencies? How does EU agency governance transform existing patterns of executive governance in the EU? Third, the book addresses the design of EU agencies as independent, non-majoritarian institutions poses pressing questions with a view to their legitimacy and accountability.The volume appeals to scholars and practitioners interested in the development and transformation of executive governance in the EU.This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.Youth in the Former Soviet South: Everyday Lives between Experimentation and Regulation (ISSN)
By Stefan B. Kirmse. 2012
This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of youth, in all its diversity, in Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus.…
It brings together a range of academic perspectives, including media studies, Islamic studies, the sociology of youth, and social anthropology. While most discussions of youth in the former Soviet South frame the younger generation as victims of crisis, as targets of state policy, or as holy warriors, this book maps out the complexity and variance of everyday lives under post-Soviet conditions. Youth is not a clear-cut, predictable life stage. Yet, across the region, young people’s lives show forms of experimentation and regulation. Male and female youth explore new opportunities not only in the buzzing space of the city, but also in the more closely monitored neighbourhood of their family homes. At the same time, they are constrained by communal expectations, ethnic affiliation, urban or rural background and by gender and sexuality. While young people are more dependent and monitored than many others, they are also more eager to explore and challenge. In many ways, they stand at the cutting edge of globalization and post-Soviet change, and thus they offer innovative perspectives on these processes. This book was published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.Peace Operations and Human Rights
By Ray Murphy and Katarina Månsson. 2008
The protection and promotion of human rights is an integral part of contemporary international peacekeeping operations. It is also a…
controversial aspect of peace operations at both an institutional and operational level. By bringing together a wide range of practitioners and academic scholars, this special issue addresses key contemporary legal, political and operational challenges to human rights protection. This book was previously published as a special issue of the leading journal International Peacekeeping.This book discusses the European Union’s approach to governance reform in its development assistance relationships with various groups of developing…
countries. A group of expert authors outline the general features of the position on governance taken by the EU, which is currently the major multilateral donor of development assistance, and discuss the implementation of EU policies in a set of cases: the group of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), Southeastern Europe, Central Asia, the Euro-Mediterranean, Latin America and fragile states.The contributions to the book argue that the EU’s position on governance reform, particularly since the adoption of the European Consensus on Development in 2005, has had distinctly neoliberal overtones. The EU’s governance-related strategies have been instrumental to deepening market-based reform in aid-receiving countries. Policies on state-building adopted by the EU reflect mainly the interests of and ideas embraced by the EU and its member states. To an important extent, the rhetoric accompanying EU policies does not match with the political and social dynamics inherent in governance structures on the ground in many of its aid-recipient partner countries.This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.Post-colonial struggles for a democratic Southern Africa: Legacies of Liberation
By Carolyn Bassett and Marlea Clarke. 2016
National liberation, one of the grand narratives of the twentieth century, has left a weighty legacy of unfulfilled dreams. This…
book explores the ongoing struggle for legitimate, accountable political leaders in postcolonial Southern Africa, focussing on dilemmas arising when ex-liberation movements form the governments. While the spread of multi-party democracy to most countries in the region is to be celebrated, democratic practice often has been superficial - a limited, elitist politics that relies on the symbols of the liberation struggle to legitimate de facto one-party rule and authoritarian practices. Using country cases from Tanzania, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Zambia, the collection explores three subthemes relevant to postcolonial governance in Southern Africa: how the struggle for liberation shapes the character of political transformation, the nature of rule in one-party dominant states headed by former liberation movements, and the processes of governance and resistance in post-liberation contexts.This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.Neoliberalizing the University: Implications for American Democracy
By Sanford F. Schram. 2016
This collection brings together essays to address the crisis of Higher Education today, focusing on its neoliberalization. Higher Education has…
been under assault for several decades as neoliberalism’s preference for market-based reforms sweeps across the US political economy. The recent push for neoliberalizing the academy comes at a time when it is ripe for change, especially as it continues to confront growing financial pressure, particularly in the public sector. The resulting cutbacks in public funding, especially to state universities, led to a variety of debilitating changes: increases in tuition, growing student debt, more students combining working and schooling, declining graduation rates for minorities and low-income students, increased reliance on adjuncts and temporary faculty, and most recently growing interest in mass processing of students via online instruction. While many serious questions arise once we begin to examine what is happening in higher education today, one particularly critical question concerns the implications of these changes on the relationship of education to as yet still unrealized democratic ideals. The 12 essays collected in this volume create important resources for students, faculty, citizens and policymakers who want to find ways to address contemporary threats to the higher education-democracy connection. This book was originally published as a special issue of New Political Science.Language, Ethnic Identity and the State
By William Safran and Jean A. Laponce. 2005
This new study powerfully asserts the pivotal importance of the interplay between language and ethnicity, which is often underestimated as…
a component for political stability. These leading scholars present five key case studies of South Africa, Algeria, Canada, Latvia and Senegal. All five countries are multilingual nations where language has been a central political issue that has challenged their unity and stability.These studies are underpinned by two general, comparative and theoretical discussions, which analyse how scholars consider social class and economic factors to be the primary sources for political cohesion or of malcontent with the system and the new avenues opened by a focus on issues of langauge. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of linguistics, language, politics and sociology. This is a special issue of the leading journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.Twenty Years of Euro-Mediterranean Relations (Routledge Studies in Mediterranean Politics)
By Richard Youngs. 2016
The creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership in 1995 was seen, at the time, as a forward-thinking foreign policy which would…
strengthen ties between Europe and the Mediterranean Arab states. Since that time, however, almost none of this initial ambition has been translated into positive, successful policy.Twenty years on from the creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (now the Union for the Mediterranean), this book collects some of the most influential articles published in the Mediterranean Politics journal since 1995 – and suggests what these articles tell us about the state of relations between Europe and the Middle East. The selection of articles gives a sense of the way in which analytical debate has changed in the journal’s lifetime, a lifetime which has seen the journal at the forefront of academic study on a variety of issues in the Mediterranean region. As such, the selection is naturally a reflection of the different periods from which the articles are taken, and, taken together, they paint a picture of how the Euro-Mediterranean partnership has been reshaped over time.New Histories of South Africa's Apartheid-Era Bantustans
By Shireen Ally and Arianna Lissoni. 2017
The bantustans – or ‘homelands’ – were created by South Africa’s apartheid regime as ethnically-defined territories for Africans. Granted self-governing…
and ‘independent’ status by Pretoria, they aimed to deflect the demands for full political representation by black South Africans and were shunned by the anti-apartheid movement. In 1972, Steve Biko wrote that ‘politically, the bantustans are the greatest single fraud ever invented by white politicians’. With the end of apartheid and the first democratic elections of 1994, the bantustans formally ceased to exist, but their legacies remain inscribed in South Africa’s contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic landscape. While the older literature on the bantustans has tended to focus on their repressive role and political illegitimacy, this edited volume offers new approaches to the histories and afterlives of the former bantustans in South Africa by a new generation of scholars. This book was originally published as various special issues of the South African Historical Journal.Decidim, a Technopolitical Network for Participatory Democracy: Philosophy, Practice and Autonomy of a Collective Platform in the Age of Digital Intelligence (SpringerBriefs in Political Science)
By Xabier E. Barandiaran, Antonio Calleja-López, Arnau Monterde, Carol Romero. 2024
This Open Access book explains the philosophy, design principles, and community organization of Decidim and provides essential insights into how…
the platform works. Decidim is the world leading digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, built entirely and collaboratively as free software, and used by more than 500 institutions with over three million users worldwide. The platform allows any organization (government, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood, or cooperative) to support multitudinous processes of participatory democracy. In a context dominated by corporate-owned digital platforms, in the era of increasing social structuring via Artificial Intelligence, Decidim stands as a public or community owned platform for collective human intelligence. Yet, the project is much more than its technological features. Decidim is in itself a crossroad of the various dimensions of the networked society, a detailed practical map of its complexities and conflicts. The authors distinguish three general dimensions of the project: (1) the political - shedding light on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies and organizations, (2) the technopolitical - explaining how this technology is democratically designed and managed to produce and protect certain political effects, and (3) the technical - presenting the conditions of production, operation, and success of the project. This book systematically covers those three levels in an academically sound, technologically consistent, and politically innovative manner. Serving as a useful resource and handbook for the use of Decidim, it will not only appeal to students and scholars interested in participatory and digital democracy but also to professionals, policy-makers, and a wider audience interested in learning more about the Decidim platform. This is an open access book.The European Union and the Black Sea: The State of Play
By Sinem Akgul Acikmese and Dimitrios Triantaphyllou. 2016
The idea for this book is derived from the scantiness of academic references on the European Union’s policies towards the…
Black Sea, relative to this region’s officially stated significance for the EU. Even though the EU plays a vital role in Black Sea political agendas, the EU’s cooperation with the region is not extensively covered by academic discussions and literature. This is mostly due to the fact that the EU’s focus on foreign affairs is mainly associated with the Balkans, as part the current and potential expansion, and the Middle East, as a direct consequence of the upheaval of the Arab Spring. The Black Sea region is crucially important for the EU because of the opportunities and challenges that the region presents, both politically and socio-economically. Contributions to this book mostly focus on specific issues of EU–Black Sea cooperation, from conflict to the environment to democracy, and how these particular relationships are perceived within the region as well as through the lenses of stakeholders such as Russia, Turkey, and the USA. Overall, the collection focuses on projecting a more efficient role and a holistic strategy for the EU in its approach towards the Black Sea region, testifying to the need for a strong EU presence. For this reason, the Black Sea area remains ‘the neighbourhood too close to, yet still far from, the European Union’. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.Comparative Perspectives on the Substance of EU Democracy Promotion
By Anne Wetzel, Jan Orbie, Fabienne Bossuyt. 2017
This book examines the substance of European Union (EU) democracy promotion by comparing it with norms of governance that other…
international actors promote, among them the United Nations, the United States, the Central and East European EU member states, Russia, China and non-governmental organizations. It aims is to gain a better understanding of the EU’s democracy promotion agenda and to learn more about the (in)distinctiveness of the norms diffused by the EU. Building on a common conceptual chapter, the contributions follow different theoretical approaches and research designs, and focus on a diversity of case studies. The book concludes that in comparison with other international actors, the EU’s conceptual approach to democracy promotion is diffuse, which in turn makes the EU a particularly flexible but also ‘technical’ democracy promoter when it comes to implementation. At the same time, there are limits to flexibility at the level of concepts and frames. This indicates a distinct character of the substance of EU democracy promotion, which can be linked to the nature of the EU polity.This book was published as a special issue of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy: The Quest for Democracy (ISSN)
By Helene Sjursen. 2012
This book reorients the study of European foreign and security policy towards the question of democracy. Blending insights from international…
relations and democratic theory, it aims to enhance our understanding of the issues at stake. The main structures, the institutional setting and the procedures that govern decision-making in this domain are examined. In this way, the book supplements studies with a more traditional focus on the substance of foreign policy. What are the democratic challenges in this distinct field of policy-making?The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union (EU) is usually assumed to be intergovernmental. Contributors to this book examine the extent to which a move beyond intergovernmentalism has taken place, how this manifests itself, and what may be the democratic implications. While the EU’s international outlook testifies to a quest for democracy, the institutions and procedures that govern decision-making are found wanting.This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.Markets and Development: Civil Society, Citizens and the Politics of Neoliberalism (ISSN)
By Toby Carroll and Darryl S.L. Jarvis. 2016
Markets and Development presents a series of critical contributions focused on the political relationship between citizens, civil society, and neoliberal…
development policy’s latest form. The dramatic increase of ‘access to finance’ investments, newly gender-sensitive approaches to building neoliberal labour markets, the universal promotion of public-private partnerships, and the ‘development financing’ of extractive industries, have all seen citizens, social movements, and NGOs variously engaged in, and against, neoliberalism like never before. The precise form that this engagement takes is conditioned by both the perceived and real opportunities, and the risks, of an agenda which seeks to intern ‘emerging’ and ‘frontier markets’ deep within a concretising world market, with transformative repercussions for both those involved and, notably, for state-society relations. The contributors to this volume focus on essential aspects of the contemporary neoliberal development agenda and its relationship to and with citizens and civil society, tackling questions related to the roles that various actors within civil society in the underdeveloped world are playing under late capitalism, and how these roles relate to current efforts to establish and extend markets, and market society more broadly, in a neoliberal image. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.After Lisbon: National Parliaments in the European Union (ISSN)
By Katrin Auel and Thomas Christiansen. 2016
The role of national parliaments in EU matters has become an important subject in the debate over the democratic legitimacy…
of European Union decision-making. Strengthening parliamentary scrutiny and participation rights at both the domestic and the European level is often seen as an effective measure to address the perceived ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU – the reason for affording them a prominent place in the newly introduced ‘Provisions on Democratic Principles’ of the Union (in particular Article 12 TEU). Whether this aim can be met, however, depends crucially on the degree to which, and the manner in which, national parliaments actually make use of their institutional rights. This volume therefore aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the activities of national parliaments in the post-Lisbon Treaty era. This includes the ‘classic’ scrutiny of EU legislation, but also parliamentary involvement in EU foreign policy, the use of new parliamentary participation rights of the Lisbon Treaty (Early Warning System), their role regarding the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis, and the, so far under-researched, role of parliamentary administrators in scrutiny processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.