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Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory (Routledge International Handbooks)
By Gerard Delanty, Stephen P. Turner. 2012
The triangular relationship between the social, the political and the cultural has opened up social and political theory to new…
challenges. The social can no longer be reduced to the category of society, and the political extends beyond the traditional concerns of the nature of the state and political authority. This Handbook will address a range of issues that have recently emerged from the disciplines of social and political theory, focusing on key themes as opposed to schools of thought or major theorists. It is divided into three sections which address: the most influential theoretical traditions that have emerged from the legacy of the twentieth century the most important new and emerging frameworks of analysis today the major theoretical problems in recent social and political theory. The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory encompasses the most up-to-date developments in contemporary social and political theory, and as such is an essential research tool for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers, working in the fields of political theory, social and political philosophy, contemporary social theory, and cultural theory.The Shanghai Massacre: China's White Terror, 1927
By Phil Carradice. 2018
On 19 February 1927, the city of Shanghai fell silent as a general strike gripped the factories of the industrial…
district. A magnet for foreign traders and businessmen (British, French, American, then later Japanese), by the 1920s the pursuit of profit had produced one of the most cosmopolitan cities that the world has ever seen. Known as the Whore of the Orient, Shanghai was a melting pot where every imaginable experience or luxury from East or West could be enjoyed. But in 1927, the citys wealth was under threat: advancing from Guangzhou in the south of China was a Guomindang army, backed by the Soviet Union and in alliance with the Chinese Communist Party, which seemed to be a clear danger to the businessmen of Shanghai.However, the armys commander, Chiang Kai-shek, a conservative, was tiring of his allies. Plotting with Shanghais most influential gangster, Chiang planned to rid himself of the Communists once and for all. The stage was set for a bloodletting in the streets of the city of Shanghai.Sierra Leones eleven-year guerrilla war that left 200,000 people dead was brief, bloody and mindlessly brutal. It was also the…
second African war in which mercenaries were hired to counter some of the worst atrocities that Africa had on offer. By the time it ended in 2002, several groups of mercenaries including an air wing equipped with a pair of ageing Mi-24 helicopter gunships and backed by the British Army and the Royal Navy played significant roles in quelling the bush rebellion.It was an idiosyncratic war, which started with the Foday Sankohs Revolutionary United Front (RUF) chanting the slogan No more slaves, no more masters, power and wealth to the people and ended with a series of battles for control for Sierra Leones diamond mines in the interior. By then the Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor and Libyas Muammar Gadaffi were the prime movers for the rebel cause, one of the reasons why anyone deemed to be the enemy doctors, journalists, civil servants, missionaries, nuns and teachers was slaughtered.The war gradually deteriorated into some of the most barbaric violence seen in any African struggle and which sometimes included cannibalism, with an army of 11,000 child soldiers some as young as nine or ten high on drugs rounding up entire neighbourhoods to machine-gun them en masse or burn them alive in their homes. Amputations of limbs of women, the very young and the very old were commonplace.Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage that Spawned America's Social Justice Warriors
By Mark T. Mitchell. 2020
Today's social justice movement is rooted in a toxic combination of what Nietzsche called &“the will to power&” and Puritanism, which…
manifests itself in self-righteous moral absolutism. For Nietzsche, life is nothing but the will to power: the attempt to assert oneself against others who are motivated by the same headlong drive. The Puritan is motivated by a quest for moral and political purity. It is impossible to adequately grasp the revolutionary impulses of the radical left today without taking into account the complex dynamics of this rather surprising union. This compelling and thoroughly original analysis of the social justice movement will change the way history records the development and effects the movement.How do armies fight and what makes them victorious on the modern battlefield? In Divided Armies, Jason Lyall challenges long-standing…
answers to this classic question by linking the fate of armies to their levels of inequality. Introducing the concept of military inequality, Lyall demonstrates how a state's prewar choices about the citizenship status of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned discrimination or, worse, violence, undermines interethnic trust, fuels grievances, and leads victimized soldiers to subvert military authorities once war begins. The higher an army's inequality, Lyall finds, the greater its rates of desertion, side-switching, casualties, and use of coercion to force soldiers to fight.In a sweeping historical investigation, Lyall draws on Project Mars, a new dataset of 250 conventional wars fought since 1800, to test this argument. Project Mars breaks with prior efforts by including overlooked non-Western wars while cataloguing new patterns of inequality and wartime conduct across hundreds of belligerents. Combining historical comparisons and statistical analysis, Lyall also marshals evidence from nine wars, ranging from the Eastern Fronts of World Wars I and II to less familiar wars in Africa and Central Asia, to illustrate inequality's effects.Sounding the alarm on the dangers of inequality for battlefield performance, Divided Armies offers important lessons about warfare over the past two centuries—and for wars still to come.Windows onto Jewish Legal Culture Volume 1: Fourteen Exploratory Essays
By Hanina Ben-Menahem, Arye Edrei, Neil S. Hecht. 2012
This book opens windows onto Jewish legal culture, by offering fourteen exploratory essays, each of which focuses on an aspect…
of Jewish law, broadly understood. Each chapter is a self-contained journey, as it were, into a feature of the Jewish legal landscape. In other words, rather than taking a structural approach, and attempting to neatly circumscribe and define ‘every’ element of Jewish law, Windows onto Jewish Legal Culture takes a dynamic and holistic approach, describing diverse manifestations of Jewish legal culture, without seeking to fit them into a single structure. Given this approach, readers have a number of options: they can focus on those chapters of particular interest to them; read the chapters in whatever order appeals to them; or go through the chapters in order. Reading even a handful of chapters should provide the reader with a good sense of the mind-set characteristic of Jewish legal thinking. Jewish legal culture spans two millennia, and evolved in geographic centers that were often very distant from one another both geographically and socio-culturally. It encompasses the Talmud and talmudic literature, the law codes, the rulings of rabbinical courts, the responsa literature, extra-judicial decisions taken by judges and communal leaders, study of the law in talmudic academies, the local study hall, and the home. But Jewish legal culture reaches well beyond legal and quasi-legal institutions; it addresses, and is reflected in, every aspect of daily life, from meals and attire to interpersonal and communal relations. The book gives the reader a taste of the tremendous weight of Jewish legal culture within Jewish life. Windows onto Jewish Legal Culture is divided into five sections. The opening section presents two distinguishing features of Jewish legal culture, namely, its toleration and even encouragement of controversy, and its preference for formalistic formulations. These features are often misunderstood, and been subjected to severe critique. Indeed, Jewish legal culture is often parodied as nit-picking, hair-splitting, argument for the sake of argument. Exploring Jewish legal culture’s partiality to controversy and formalism in its proper context, however, yields a very different picture. The second section, "Law and Ethics," gives readers a first-hand look at the way Jewish legal culture relates to three moral issues of importance to any society: equity, charity, and euthanasia. The third section focuses on the judicial process, a central topic in the general analysis of law, and even more so in Jewish law, where the judicial branch takes precedence over the legislative. The fourth section addresses questions pertaining to the role of the individual in the administration of justice—self help, and the individual’s obligation to defend himself and others against a pursuer. The closing section is devoted to private law, exploring the interface between Jewish legal culture and free market competition, unjust enrichment, agency, and labor law. This book will appeal to students at the advanced level, scholars, and interested laypeople; the primary target audience is academic. It is suitable for use as a textbook.Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote
By Craig Fehrman. 2020
&“One of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years.&” —Thomas Mallon, The Wall Street Journal…
&“Fun and fascinating…It&’s witty, charming, and fantastically learned. I loved it.&” —Rick Perlstein Based on a decade of research and reporting, Author in Chief tells the story of America&’s presidents as authors—and offers a delightful new window into the public and private lives of our highest leaders. Most Americans are familiar with Abraham Lincoln&’s famous words in the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet few can name the work that helped him win the presidency: his published collection of speeches entitled Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln labored in secret to get his book ready for the 1860 election, tracking down newspaper transcripts, editing them carefully for fairness, and hunting for a printer who would meet his specifications. Political Debates sold fifty thousand copies—the rough equivalent of half a million books in today&’s market—and it reveals something about Lincoln&’s presidential ambitions. But it also reveals something about his heart and mind. When voters asked about his beliefs, Lincoln liked to point them to his book. In Craig Fehrman&’s groundbreaking work of history, Author in Chief, the story of America&’s presidents and their books opens a rich new window into presidential biography. From volumes lost to history—Calvin Coolidge&’s Autobiography, which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929—to ones we know and love—Barack Obama&’s Dreams from My Father, which was very nearly never published—Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works. Presidential books have made an enormous impact on American history, catapulting their authors to the national stage and even turning key elections. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson&’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the first presidential book to influence a campaign, and John Adams&’s Autobiography, the first score-settling presidential memoir, Author in Chief draws on newly uncovered information—including never-before-published letters from Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—to cast fresh light on the private drives and self-doubts that fueled our nation&’s leaders. We see Teddy Roosevelt as a vulnerable first-time author, struggling to write the book that would become a classic of American history. We see Reagan painstakingly revising Where&’s the Rest of Me?, a forgotten memoir in which he sharpened his sunny political image. We see Donald Trump negotiating the deal for The Art of the Deal, the volume that made him synonymous with business savvy. Alongside each of these authors, we also glimpse the everyday Americans who read them. Combining the narrative felicity of a journalist with the rigorous scholarship of a historian, Fehrman delivers a feast for history lovers, book lovers, and everybody curious about a behind-the-scenes look at our presidents.The growth of rights defence movements in China reflects the increasing capacity of Chinese citizens to shape their own civic…
discourse in order to achieve diverse goals. Rights defence campaigns have taken novel forms which are unprecedented in China, including the use of the Internet by rights campaigners, the development of rights entrepreneurs, and the selection of representatives and leaders in rights defence campaigns. Defending Rights in Contemporary China offers the first comprehensive analysis of the emergence and development of notions of rights defence, or weiquan, in China. Further, it shows that rights defence campaigns reflect the changing lives and priorities of Chinese citizens, both urban and rural, and the changing distribution of power in China. The Chinese government first used rights defence to promote the law and protect the rights of the weak. But the use of rights defence strategies by private citizens, and lawyers also demonstrates changing power structures – in areas as diverse as private property rights, rights for the handicapped, corruption claims and grievances with officials. In this book, Jonathan Benney argues that the idea of rights defence has gone from being a tool of the government to being a tool to attack the party-state, and explores the consequences of this controversial activist movement. This book offers essential insight into the development of rights in contemporary China and will be highly relevant for students, scholars and specialists in legal developments in Asia as well as anyone interested in social movements in China.Trade, Poverty, Development: Getting Beyond the WTO's Doha Deadlock (Global Institutions)
By James Scott, Rorden Wilkinson. 2012
This work seeks to look beyond the seemingly endless deadlock in the WTO’s Doha round of trade negotiations that began…
in November 2001 and were first scheduled to conclude by January 1, 2005. As well as offering an incisive analysis of the ills of the round, with particular attention directed at the poorest and least developed countries, the book expands on how the round could be moved forward elaborating on the Statement on the Doha Development Agenda that was negotiated in Johannesburg . The work as a whole provides the reader with a critical analysis of the implications of the negotiations for development and poverty reduction as well as proposals for moving beyond the current impasse. The volume brings together contributions from serving and former ambassadors to the WTO, key practitioners, and civil society representatives along with those of leading scholars. Each chapter explores an area of critical importance to the round; and together they stand as an important contribution to debates not only about the Doha round but also about the role of trade in the amelioration of poverty in the poorest countries.Federalism, Secession, and the American State: Divided, We Secede (Routledge Studies in North American Politics)
By Lawrence M. Anderson. 2012
One important tradition in political science conceives of the Civil War in the United States serving as the functional equivalent…
of the English and French Revolutions, bringing with it the victory of liberal democratic industrialism over aristocratic agriculturalism. From this perspective, the Civil War is notable for its impact on the American state. Surprisingly however, little attention has been paid to the distinguishing features of this historic rupture in American politics. Through primary source research and the re-analysis of the rich historical literature about the antebellum era and the causes of the Civil War, Lawrence A. Anderson explores the relationship between federalism and the movement for secession in the United States during the pre-civil war era. Focusing primarily on South Carolina, Anderson carefully revisits theory on institutional analysis of political development to expose what caused secession in the United States.Rejecting Compromise: Legislators' Fear of Primary Voters
By Daniel M. Butler, Sarah E. Anderson, Laurel Harbridge-Yong. 2020
Legislative solutions to pressing problems like balancing the budget, climate change, and poverty usually require compromise. Yet national, state, and…
local legislators often reject compromise proposals that would move policy in their preferred direction. Why do legislators reject such agreements? This engaging and relevant investigation into how politicians think reveals that legislators refuse compromise - and exacerbate gridlock - because they fear punishment from voters in primary elections. Prioritizing these electoral interests can lead lawmakers to act in ways that hurt their policy interests and also overlook the broader electorate's preferences by representing only a subset of voters with rigid positions. With their solution-oriented approach, Anderson, Butler, and Harbridge-Yong demonstrate that improving the likelihood of legislative compromise may require moving negotiations outside of the public spotlight. Highlighting key electoral motives underlying polarization, this book is an excellent resource for scholars and students studying Congress, American politics, public policy, and political behavior.Liberalism is a critically important topic in the contemporary world as liberal values and institutions are in retreat in countries…
where they seemed relatively secure. Lucidly written and accessible, this book offers an important yet neglected Russian aspect to the history of political liberalism. Vanessa Rampton examines Russian engagement with liberal ideas during Russia's long nineteenth century, focusing on the high point of Russian liberalism from 1900 to 1914. It was then that a self-consciously liberal movement took shape, followed by the founding of the country's first liberal (Constitutional-Democratic or Kadet) party in 1905. For a brief, revelatory period, some Russians - an eclectic group of academics, politicians and public figures - drew on liberal ideas of Western origin to articulate a distinctively Russian liberal philosophy, shape their country's political landscape, and were themselves partly responsible for the tragic experience of 1905.Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change
By Jan Teorell, John Gerring, Michael Coppedge, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Staffan I. Lindberg, Adam Glynn, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim. 2020
Varieties of Democracy is the essential user's guide to The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), one of the most ambitious…
data collection efforts in comparative politics. This global research collaboration sparked a dramatic change in how we study the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy. This book is ambitious in scope: more than a reference guide, it raises standards for causal inferences in democratization research and introduces new, measurable, concepts of democracy and many political institutions. Varieties of Democracy enables anyone interested in democracy - teachers, students, journalists, activists, researchers and others - to analyze V-Dem data in new and exciting ways. This book creates opportunities for V-Dem data to be used in education, research, news analysis, advocacy, policy work, and elsewhere. V-Dem is rapidly becoming the preferred source for democracy data.The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump
By Andrew G. McCabe. 2019
The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!On March 16, 2018, just twenty-six hours before his scheduled retirement from the organization…
he had served with distinction for more than two decades, Andrew G. McCabe was fired from his position as deputy director of the FBI. President Donald Trump celebrated on Twitter: "Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy."In The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, Andrew G. McCabe offers a dramatic and candid account of his career, and an impassioned defense of the FBI's agents, and of the institution's integrity and independence in protecting America and upholding our Constitution.McCabe started as a street agent in the FBI's New York field office, serving under director Louis Freeh. He became an expert in two kinds of investigations that are critical to American national security: Russian organized crime—which is inextricably linked to the Russian state—and terrorism. Under Director Robert Mueller, McCabe led the investigations of major attacks on American soil, including the Boston Marathon bombing, a plot to bomb the New York subways, and several narrowly averted bombings of aircraft. And under James Comey, McCabe was deeply involved in the controversial investigations of the Benghazi attack, the Clinton Foundation's activities, and Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.The Threat recounts in compelling detail the time between Donald Trump's November 2016 election and McCabe's firing, set against a page-turning narrative spanning two decades when the FBI's mission shifted to a new goal: preventing terrorist attacks on Americans. But as McCabe shows, right now the greatest threat to the United States comes from within, as President Trump and his administration ignore the law, attack democratic institutions, degrade human rights, and undermine the U.S. Constitution that protects every citizen. Important, revealing, and powerfully argued, The Threat tells the true story of what the FBI is, how it works, and why it will endure as an institution of integrity that protects America.UN Security Council: Practice and Promise (Global Institutions)
By Edward C. Luck. 2012
Written by best-selling author Edward C. Luck, this new text is broad and engaging enough for undergraduates, sophisticated enough for…
graduates and lively enough for a wider audience interested in the key institutions of international public policy. Looking at the antecedents of the UN Security Council, as well as the current issues and future challenges that it faces, this new book includes: historical perspectives the founding vision procedures and practices economic enforcement peace operations and military enforcement human security proliferation and WMD terrorism reform, adaptation and change.Over two billion people still live under authoritarian rule. Moreover, authoritarian regimes around the world command enormous financial and economic…
resources, rivaling those controlled by advanced democracies. Yet authoritarian regimes as a whole are facing their greatest challenges in the recent two decades due to rebellions and economic stress. Extended periods of hardship have the potential of introducing instability to regimes because members of the existing ruling coalition suffer welfare losses that force them to consider alternatives, while previously quiescent masses may consider collective uprisings a worthwhile gamble in the face of declining standards of living. Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability homes in on the economic challenges facing authoritarian regimes through a set of comparative case studies that include Iran, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Malaysia, Indonesia, Jordan, Russia, the Eastern bloc countries, China, and Taiwan—authored by the top experts in these countries. Through these comparative case studies, this volume provides readers with the analytical tools for assessing whether the current round of economic shocks will lead to political instability or even regime change among the world’s autocracies. This volume identifies the duration of economic shocks, the regime’s control over the financial system, and the strength of the ruling party as key variables to explain whether authoritarian regimes would maintain the status quo, adjust their support coalitions, or fall from power after economic shocks.Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein
By John G. Gunnell. 2020
When social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual and practical authority, they typically assume…
that truth, reality, and meaning are to be found outside rather than within our conventional discursive practices. John G. Gunnell argues for conventional realism as a theory of social phenomena and an approach to the study of politics. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s critique of “mentalism” and traditional realism, Gunnell argues that everything we designate as “real” is rendered conventionally, which entails a rejection of the widely accepted distinction between what is natural and what is conventional. The terms “reality” and “world” have no meaning outside the contexts of specific claims and assumptions about what exists and how it behaves. And rather than a mysterious source and repository of prelinguistic meaning, the “mind” is simply our linguistic capacities. Taking readers through contemporary forms of mentalism and realism in both philosophy and American political science and theory, Gunnell also analyzes the philosophical challenges to these positions mounted by Wittgenstein and those who can be construed as his successors.Routledge Handbook of Arctic Security
By Marc Lanteigne, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Horatio Sam-Aggrey. 2020
The Routledge Handbook of Arctic Security offers a comprehensive examination of security in the region, encompassing both state-based and militarized notions…
of security, as well as broader security perspectives reflecting debates about changes in climate, environment, economies, and societies. Since the turn of the century, the Arctic has increasingly been in the global spotlight, resulting in the often invoked idea of “Arctic exceptionalism” being questioned. At the same time, the unconventional political power which the Arctic’s Indigenous peoples hold calls into question conventional ideas about geopolitics and security. This handbook examines security in this region, revealing contestations and complementarities between narrower, state-based and/or militarized notions of security and broader security perspectives reflecting concerns and debates about changes in climate, environment, economies, and societies. The volume is split into five thematic parts: • Theorizing Arctic Security • The Arctic Powers • Security in the Arctic through Governance • Non-Arctic States, Regional and International Organizations • People, States, and Security. This book will be of great interest to students of Arctic politics, global governance, geography, security studies, and International Relations.Focusing on Kenya’s path-breaking mobile money project M-Pesa, this book examines and critiques the narratives and institutions of digital financial…
inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality, arguing for a politics of redistribution to guide future digital financial inclusion projects. One of the most-discussed digital financial inclusion projects, M-Pesa facilitates the transfer of money and access to formal financial services via the mobile phone infrastructure and has grown at a phenomenal rate since its launch in 2007 to reach about 80 per cent of the Kenyan population. Through a socio-legal enquiry drawing on feminist political economy, law and development scholarship and postcolonial feminist debate, this book unravels the narratives and institutional arrangements that frame M-Pesa’s success while interrogating the relationship between digital financial inclusion and gender equality in development discourse. Natile argues that M-Pesa is premised on and regulated according to a logic of opportunity rather than a politics of redistribution, favouring the expansion of the mobile money market in preference to contributing to substantive gender equality via a redistribution of the revenue and funding deriving from its development. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in Global Political Economy, Socio-Legal Studies, Gender Studies, Law & Development, Finance and International Relations.Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving
By Caitlyn Collins. 2019
A moving, cross-national account of working mothers’ daily lives—and the revolution in public policy and culture needed to improve themThe…
work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and stress is constant. Social policies don’t help. Of all Western industrialized countries, the United States ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies: No federal paid parental leave. The highest gender wage gap. No minimum standard for vacation and sick days. The highest maternal and child poverty rates. Can American women look to European policies for solutions? Making Motherhood Work draws on interviews that sociologist Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country.Taking readers into women’s homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, Collins shows that mothers’ desires and expectations depend heavily on context. In Sweden—renowned for its gender-equal policies—mothers assume they will receive support from their partners, employers, and the government. In the former East Germany, with its history of mandated employment, mothers don’t feel conflicted about working, but some curtail their work hours and ambitions. Mothers in western Germany and Italy, where maternalist values are strong, are stigmatized for pursuing careers. Meanwhile, American working mothers stand apart for their guilt and worry. Policies alone, Collins discovers, cannot solve women’s struggles. Easing them will require a deeper understanding of cultural beliefs about gender equality, employment, and motherhood. With women held to unrealistic standards in all four countries, the best solutions demand that we redefine motherhood, work, and family.Making Motherhood Work vividly demonstrates that women need not accept their work-family conflict as inevitable.