Download or read book The Making and Unmaking of Democracy written by Theodore K. Rabb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For every citizen of the world, there is no more urgent issue than the spread of democracy. Democracy is what the WTO-protestors are calling for; it's the main concern of human rights advocates; and it's only long-term way to end terrorism. But how does democracy spread? What can be done to encourage and support. This remarkable new collection brings together some of the best minds in variety of fields to discuss the conditions that promote and sustain, or undermine and extinguish democratic institutions and ideas. Spanning political thought from ancient Athens to contemporary sub-Saharan Africa, the contributors develop an outline of how democracy develops. Several key factors emerge: Democratic transitions are always heavily shaped by the ideas and practices of past regimes (like tribal traditions in Africa), international political and economic pressure to liberalize (as in Asia) and current economic conditions. The quality of democracy is almost always improved by the elimination of religion as the center of the state, by the move from democracy as protection of the individual from the state to democracy as enhancer of rights, and by the progression from a focus on the individual to a focus on the community. Expansive in its coverage and fundamental in its significance, The Making and Unmaking of Democracy is a volume to learn from, argue against, and expand upon.

Download or read book The Ends of Resistance written by Alix Olson and published by . This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the rise of Donald Trump and other right-wing authoritarians worldwide, we have been told to "resist." But this kind of opposition looks surprisingly like restoring the status quo. Under the banner of resistance, liberals and progressives have encouraged voting for Democrats, reading the mainstream media, trusting the science, putting up yard signs, buying the right products, and celebrating a "return to normal." How was "resistance" diluted, and where can we find alternative forms of resistance for present and future struggles? Alix Olson and Alex Zamalin offer a clear-eyed critical account of how neoliberalism has redefined resistance to thwart social movements and consolidate power. Elites have domesticated and coopted some once-radical concepts and practices into "restorative resistance" that bolsters support for an unjust social order while marginalizing, racializing, and criminalizing many others. Olson and Zamalin argue that true resistance to racial neoliberalism must instead be deeply antirestorative: collective, horizontal, counterhegemonic, radically democratic insurrectionary movements that cannot be redirected into shoring up the existing order. This "unruly world-building"--exemplified by Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous activism at Standing Rock, and more--pushes us to live, think, and dream beyond profit maximization, democratic civility, and individual freedom. Powerfully and accessibly written with manifesto-like urgency, The Ends of Resistance shows how marginalized voices and social movements deepen our thinking for confronting power.

Download or read book Democratic Transition in the Middle East written by Larbi Sadiki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular uprisings and revolts across the Arab Middle East have often resulted in a democratic faragh or void in power. How society seeks to fill that void, regardless of whether the regime falls or survives, is the common trajectory followed by the seven empirical case studies published here for the first time. This edited volume seeks to unpack the state of the democratic void in three interrelated fields: democracy, legitimacy and social relations. In doing so, the conventional treatment of democratization as a linear, formal, systemic and systematic process is challenged and the power politics of democratic transition reassessed. Through a close examination of case studies focusing on Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, this collection introduces the reader to indigenous narratives on how power is wrested and negotiated from the bottom up. It will be of interest to those seeking a fresh perspective on democratization models as well as those seeking to understand the reshaping of the Arab Middle East in the lead-up to the Arab Spring.

Download or read book The Making and Unmaking of Democracy written by Theodore K. Rabb and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book Fragile Victory written by James E. Cronin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the history of liberal order and democratic politics since the 1930s explains ongoing threats to democracy and international order The liberal democratic order that seemed so stable in North America and Western Europe has become precarious. James E. Cronin argues that liberalism has never been secure and that since the 1930s the international order has had to be crafted, redeployed, and extended in response to both victories and setbacks. Beginning with the German and Japanese efforts in the 1930s to establish a system based on empire, race, economic protectionism, and militant nationalism, Cronin shows how the postwar system, established out of a revulsion at the ideas of fascism, repeatedly reinvented itself in the face of the Cold War, anticolonial insurgencies, the economic and political crises of the 1970s, the collapse of communism, the rise of globalization, and the financial crisis of 2008. Cronin emphasizes the links between internal and external politics in sustaining liberal order internationally and the domestic origins and correlates of present difficulties. Fragile Victory provides the context necessary to understand such diverse challenges as the triumph of Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of populism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Download or read book Neither Settler nor Native written by Mahmood Mamdani and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities. In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

Download or read book Democracy in Chains written by Nancy MacLean and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

Download or read book Making and Unmaking Nations written by Scott Straus and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Grawmeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, 2018 Winner of the Joseph Lepgold Prize Winner of the Best Books in Conflict Studies (APSA) Winner of the Best Book in Human Rights (ISA) In Making and Unmaking Nations, Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes place—and, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies—how leaders make their nations—shape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence. Grounded in Straus's extensive fieldwork in contemporary Africa, the study of major twentieth-century cases of genocide, and the literature on genocide and political violence, Making and Unmaking Nations centers on cogent analyses of three nongenocide cases (Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal) and two in which genocide took place (Rwanda and Sudan). Straus's empirical analysis is based in part on an original database of presidential speeches from 1960 to 2005. The book also includes a broad-gauge analysis of all major cases of large-scale violence in Africa since decolonization. Straus's insights into the causes of genocide will inform the study of political violence as well as giving policymakers and nongovernmental organizations valuable tools for the future.

Download or read book The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community 1910 1950 written by James R. Lothian and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the engagement of interwar Catholic writers and artists both with modernity and with the political and economic upheavals in England and continental Europe.

Download or read book The Unmaking of Israel written by Gershom Gorenberg and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prominent Israeli journalist GershomGorenbergoffers a penetrating and provocativelook at how the balance of power in Israel has shifted toward extremism,threatening the prospects for peace and democracy as the Israeli-Palestinianconflict intensifies. Informing his examination using interviews in Israel andthe West Bank and with access to previously classified Israeli documents, Gorenberg delivers an incisive discussion of the causes andtrends of extremism in Israel’s government and society. Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The AmazingAdventures of Kavalier and Clay, writes, "until I read The Unmaking of Israel, I didn't think it could bepossible to feel more despairing, and then more terribly hopeful, about Israel,a place that I began at last, under the spell of GershomGorenberg's lucid and dispassionate yet intenselypersonal writing, to understand."

Download or read book Nested Nationalism written by Krista A. Goff and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of "their" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista A. Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR. Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, Nested Nationalism explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.

Download or read book Making and Unmaking Authoriarian Peru written by Catherine M. Conaghan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper Professor Conaghan reconstructs the last five years of Alberto Fujimori, drawing on Vladi-videos coming out on a weekly basis. It examines how the plan to re-elect President Alberto Fujimori deepened authoritarianism in Peru and how the opposition's struggle against re-election reshaped the political landscape and laid the groundwork for a surprising opening to to regime transition.

Download or read book Where Power Stops written by David Runciman and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Theresa May, and Donald Trump: each had different motivations, methods, and paths, but they all sought the highest office. And yet when they reached their goal, they often found that the power they had imagined was illusory. Their sweeping visions of reform faltered. They faced bureaucratic obstructions, but often the biggest obstruction was their own character. However, their personalities could help them as much as hurt them. Arguably the most successful of them, LBJ showed little indication that he supported what he is best known for - the Civil Rights Act - but his grit, resolve, and brute political skill saw him bend Congress to his will. David Runciman tackles the limitations of high office and how the personal histories of those who achieved the very pinnacles of power helped to define their successes and failures in office. These portraits show what characters are most effective in these offices. Could this be a blueprint for good and effective leadership in an age lacking good leaders?

Download or read book The Making and Unmaking of A Revolutionary Family written by Hamilton and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2003-04-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In mid-April 1814, the Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had reason to brood over his family's decline since the American Revolution. The once-sumptuous world of the Virginia gentry was vanishing, its kinship ties crumbling along with its mansions, crushed by democratic leveling at home and a strong federal government in Washington, D.C. Looking back in an effort to grasp the changes around him, Randolph fixated on his stepfather and onetime guardian, St. George Tucker. The son of a wealthy Bermuda merchant, Tucker had studied law at the College of William and Mary, married well, and smuggled weapons and fought in the Virginia militia during the Revolution. Quickly grasping the significant changes--political democratization, market change, and westward expansion--that the War for Independence had brought, changes that undermined the power of the gentry, Tucker took the atypical step of selling his plantations and urging his children to pursue careers in learned professions such as law. Tucker's stepson John Randolph bitterly disagreed, precipitating a painful break between the two men that illuminates the transformations that swept Virginia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing upon an extraordinary archive of private letters, journals, and other manuscript materials, Phillip Hamilton illustrates how two generations of a colorful and influential family adapted to social upheaval. He finds that the Tuckers eventually rejected wider family connections and turned instead to nuclear kin. They also abandoned the liberal principles and enlightened rationalism of the Revolution for a romanticism girded by deep social conservatism. The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family reveals the complex process by which the world of Washington and Jefferson evolved into the antebellum society of Edmund Ruffin and Thomas Dew.

Download or read book Torture and Democracy written by Darius Rejali and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.

Download or read book In Search of Democracy written by Larry Diamond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book evaluates the global status and prospects of democracy, with an emphasis on the quality of democratic institutions and the effectiveness of governance as key conditions for stable democracy. Bringing together a wide range of the author’s work over the past three decades, it advances a framework for assessing the quality of democracy and it analyzes alternative measures of democracy. Drawing on the most recent data from Freedom House, it assesses the global state of democracy and freedom, as of the beginning of 2015, and it explains why the world has been experiencing a mild but now deepening recession of democracy and freedom since 2005. A major theme of the book across the three decades of the author’s work is the relationship between democratic quality and stability. Democracies break down, Diamond argues, not so much because of economic factors but because of corrupt, inept governance that violates individual rights and the rule of law. The best way to secure democracy is to ensure that democracy is accountable, transparent, genuinely competitive, respectful of individual rights, inclusive of diverse forms and sources of participation, and responsive to the needs and aspirations of ordinary citizens. Viable democracy requires not only a state that can mobilize power to achieve collective goals, but also one that can restrain and punish the abuse of power—a particularly steep challenge for poor countries and those with natural resource wealth. The book examines these themes both in broad comparative perspective and with a deeper analysis of historical trends and future prospects in Africa and Asia,. Concluding with lessons for sustaining and reforming policies to promote democracy internationally, this book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in democracy, as well as politics and international relations more generally.

Download or read book Why Not Me written by Al Franken and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-09-02 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic rise and dizzying fall of Al Franken, the first Jewish president of the United States. From the first days of the Franken campaign as the candidate pledges 'to walk the state of New Hampshire, diagonally and then from side to side' as Al, aided by his covering sex addict and alcoholic deputy campaign manager, stuns the pundits by defeating Al Gore for the democratic nomination, then is swept into office carrying all fifty states. But from that moment of triumph it's downhill all the way...