Download or read book Deadly Indifference written by Michael D. Brown and published by Taylor Trade Publications. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At last, former Under Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Brown—infamously praised by President George W. Bush for doing a "heckuva job" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—tells his side of the response to one of the greatest natural disasters to occur in the United States. Without making excuses for anyone, least of all the President of the United States or himself, Brown describes in detail what ultimately turned out to be the largest federal response to a natural disaster in U.S. history.
Download or read book The Republic Unsettled written by Mayanthi L. Fernando and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.
Download or read book The Politics of Presence written by Anne Phillips and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most hotly-contested debates in contemporary democracy revolves around issues of political presence, and whether the fair representation of disadvantaged groups requires their presence in elected assemblies. Representation as currently understood derives its legitimacy from a politics of ideas, which considers accountability in relation to declared policies and programmes, and makes it a matter of relative indifference who articulates political preferences or beliefs. But what happens to the meaning of representation and accountability when we make the gender or ethnic composition of elected assemblies an additional area of concern? In this innovative contribution to the theory of representation - which draws on debates about gender quotas in Europe, minority voting rights in the USA, and the multi-layered politics of inclusion in Canada - Anne Phillips argues that the politics of ideas is an inadequate vehicle for dealing with political exclusion. But rejecting any essentialist grounding to group identity or group interest, she also argues against any either/or choice between ideas and political presence. The politics of presence then combines with contemporary explorations of deliberative democracy to establish a different balance between accountability and autonomy. Series description Oxford Political Theory presents the best new work in contemporary political theory. It is intended to be broad in scope, including original contributions to political philosophy, and also work in applied political theory. The series contains work of outstanding quality with no restriction as to approach or subject matter. The series editors are David Miller and Alan Ryan. `the latest, thoughtful contribution in Anne Phillip's ongoing enquiry into issues of equality, gender and democracy...an excellent contribution to democratic theory'. Political Studies
Download or read book Indifference to Difference written by Madhavi Menon and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indifference to Difference organizes around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that, in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and practice of being indifferent to difference. Such a politics would be based on the superabundance of desire and its inability to settle into identity. Madhavi Menon shows that if we turn to another kind of universalism—not one that insists we are all different but one that recognizes we are all similar in our powerlessness to contain desire—then difference no longer becomes the focus of our identity. Instead, we enter the worlds of desire. Following up on ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, Menon argues that what is most queer about indifference is not that it gives us queerness as an identity but that it is able to change queerness into a resistance of ontology. Firmly committed to the detours of desire, queer universalism evades identity. This polemical book demonstrates that queerness is the condition within which we labor. Our desires are not ours to be owned; they are indifferent to our differences.
Download or read book The Social Production of Indifference written by Michael Herzfeld and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-10 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Michael Herzfeld argues that 'modern' bureaucratically regulated societies are no more 'rational' or less 'symbolic' than the societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. Drawing primarily on the example of modern Greece and utilizing other European materials, he suggests that we cannot understand national bureaucracies divorced from local-level ideas about chance, personal character, social relationships and responsibility. He points out that both formal regulations and day-to-day bureaucratic practices rely heavily on the symbols and language of the moral boundaries between insiders and outsiders; a ready means of expressing prejudice and of justifying neglect. It therefore happens that societies with proud traditions of generous hospitality may paradoxically produce at the official level some of the most calculated indifference one can find anywhere.
Download or read book Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong The Paradox of Activism and Depoliticization written by Lam Wai-man and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the widely held belief that Hong Kong's political culture is one of indifference. The term "political indifference" is used to suggest the apathy, naivete, passivity, and utilitarianism of Hong Kong's people toward political life. Taking a broad historical look at political participation in the former colony, Wai-man Lam argues that this is not a valid view and demonstrates Hong Kong's significant political activism in thirteen selected case studies covering 1949 through the present. Through in-depth analysis of these cases she provides a new understanding of the nature of Hong Kong politics, which can be described as a combination of political activism and a culture of depoliticization.
Download or read book An Empire of Indifference written by Randy Martin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this significant Marxist critique of contemporary American imperialism, the cultural theorist Randy Martin argues that a finance-based logic of risk control has come to dominate Americans’ everyday lives as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Risk management—the ability to adjust for risk and to leverage it for financial gain—is the key to personal finance as well as the defining element of the massive global market in financial derivatives. The United States wages its amorphous war on terror by leveraging particular interventions (such as Iraq) to much larger ends (winning the war on terror) and by deploying small numbers of troops and targeted weaponry to achieve broad effects. Both in global financial markets and on far-flung battlegrounds, the multiplier effects are difficult to foresee or control. Drawing on theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Achille Mbembe, Martin illuminates a frightening financial logic that must be understood in order to be countered. Martin maintains that finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking (investors) and those who cannot do so, who are considered “at risk.” He contends that modern-day American imperialism differs from previous models of imperialism, in which the occupiers engaged with the occupied to “civilize” them, siphon off wealth, or both. American imperialism, by contrast, is an empire of indifference: a massive flight from engagement. The United States urges an embrace of risk and self-management on the occupied and then ignores or dispossesses those who cannot make the grade.
Download or read book Never a Matter of Indifference written by Peter Berkowitz and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors reveal how public policy in the United States has weakened the institutions of civil society that play a critical role in forming and sustaining the qualities of mind and character crucial to democratic self-government. The authors show what can be done, consistent with the principles of a free society, to establish a healthier relationship between public policy and character.
Download or read book A Preface to Politics written by Walter Lippmann and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most incisive comment on politics to day is indifference. When men and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise, the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts. Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile of the people who do not care. I have put forward a preliminary sketch for a theory of politics, a preface to thinking. Like all speculation about human affairs, it is the result of a grapple with problems as they appear in the experience of one man. For though a personal vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal language, it is well never to forget that all philosophies are the language of particular men.
Download or read book The Politics of Necessity written by Elke Zuern and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2011-02-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of apartheid in South Africa broke down political barriers, extending to all races the formal rights of citizenship, including the right to participate in free elections and parliamentary democracy. But South Africa remains one of the most economically polarized nations in the world. In The Politics of Necessity Elke Zuern forcefully argues that working toward greater socio-economic equality—access to food, housing, land, jobs—is crucial to achieving a successful and sustainable democracy. Drawing on interviews with local residents and activists in South Africa’s impoverished townships during more than a decade of dramatic political change, Zuern tracks the development of community organizing and reveals the shifting challenges faced by poor citizens. Under apartheid, township residents began organizing to press the government to address the basic material necessities of the poor and expanded their demands to include full civil and political rights. While the movement succeeded in gaining formal political rights, democratization led to a new government that instituted neo-liberal economic reforms and sought to minimize protest. In discouraging dissent and failing to reduce economic inequality, South Africa’s new democracy has continued to disempower the poor. By comparing movements in South Africa to those in other African and Latin American states, this book identifies profound challenges to democratization. Zuern asserts the fundamental indivisibility of all human rights, showing how protest movements that call attention to socio-economic demands, though often labeled a threat to democracy, offer significant opportunities for modern democracies to evolve into systems of rule that empower all citizens.
Download or read book Invested Indifference written by Kara Granzow and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as “indifferent” to high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true. Invested Indifference makes a startling counter-argument: that what we see as societal unresponsiveness doesn’t come from an absence of feeling but from an affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable. Kara Granzow demonstrates that mechanisms such as the law, medicine, and control of land and space have been used to entrench violence against Indigenous people in the social construction of Canadian nationhood.
Download or read book National Indifference and the History of Nationalism in Modern Europe written by Maarten Van Ginderachter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National indifference is one of the most innovative notions historians have brought to the study of nationalism in recent years. The concept questions the mass character of nationalism in East Central Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Ordinary people were not in thrall to the nation; they were often indifferent, ambivalent or opportunistic when dealing with issues of nationhood. As with all ground-breaking research, the literature on national indifference has not only revolutionized how we understand nationalism, over time, it has also revealed a new set of challenges. This volume brings together experienced scholars with the next generation, in a collaborative effort to push the geographic, historical, and conceptual boundaries of national indifference 2.0.
Download or read book Raced Markets written by Lisa Tilley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite rich archives of work on race and the global economy, most notably by scholars of colour and Global South intellectuals, the discipline of Political Economy has largely avoided an honest confrontation with how race works within the domains it studies, not least within markets. By way of corrective, this book draws together scholarship on the material function of race at various scales in the global political economy. The collective provocation of the contributors to this volume is that race has been integral to the formation of capitalism – as extensively laid out by the racial capitalism literature – and takes on new forms in the novel market spaces of neoliberalism. The chapters within this volume also reinforce that the current political conjuncture, marked by the ascension of neo-fascist power, cannot be defined by an exceptional intrusion of racism, nor can its racism be dismissed as epiphenomenal. Raced Markets will be of great value to scholars, students, and researchers interested in political economy and racial capitalism as well as those willing to explore how race takes on new forms in the novel market spaces of contemporary neoliberalism. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the New Political Economy.
Download or read book Panic and Indifference written by P. J. Giffen and published by Canadian Centre. This book was released on 1991 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism written by Wendy Brown and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.
Download or read book Political Concepts written by Richard Bellamy and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a sophisticated analysis of central political concepts in the light of recent debates in political theory. It introduces readers to some of the main interpretations, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses, including a broad range of the main concepts used in contemporary debates on political theory. It tackles the principle concepts employed to justify any policy or institution and examines the main domestic purposes and functions of the state. It goes on to study the relationship between state and civil society and finally looks beyond the state to issues of global concern and inter-state relations.
Download or read book Bugsplat written by Bruce Cronin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do states who are committed to the principle of civilian immunity and the protection of non-combatants end up killing and injuring large numbers of civilians during their military operations? Bugsplat explains this paradox through an in-depth examination of five conflicts fought by Western powers since 1989. It argues that despite the efforts of Western military organizations to comply with the laws of armed conflict, the level of collateral damage produced by Western military operations is the inevitable outcome of the strategies and methods through which their military organizations fight wars. Drawing on their superior technology and the strategic advantage of not having to fight on their own territory, such states employ highly-concentrated and overwhelming military force against a wide variety of political, economic, and military targets under conditions likely to produce high civilian casualties. As a result, collateral damage in western-fought wars is largely both foreseeable and preventable. The book title is derived from the name of a computer program that had been used by the Pentagon to calculate probable civilian casualties prior to launching air attacks.
