Download or read book The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar written by Bertolt Brecht and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary historical novel presents an aspiring scholar's efforts to write an idealized life of Julius Caesar twenty years after his death. But the historian abandons his planned biography, confronted by a baffling range of contradictory views. Was Caesar an opportunist, a permanently bankrupt businessman who became too big for the banks to allow him to fail – as his former banker claims? Did he stumble into power while trying to make money, as suggested by the diary of his former slave? Across these different versions of Caesar's career in the political and economic life of Rome, Brecht wryly contrasts the narratives of imperial progress with the reality of grasping self-interest, in a sly allegory that points to the Weimar Republic and perhaps even to our own times. Brecht reminds his readers of the need for constant vigilance and critical suspicion towards the great figures of the past. In an echo of his dramatic theories, the audience is confronted with its own task of active interpretation rather than passive acceptance -- we have to work out our own views about Mr Julius Caesar. This edition is translated by Charles Osborne and features an introduction and editorial notes by Anthony Phelan and Tom Kuhn.

Download or read book European Integration and the Nationalities Question written by John McGarry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly topical examination of the effect of European integration on relations between states and minority nations. This new collection brings together the leading specialists in the field, and covers a wide range of cases, from Northern Ireland in the West, to Estonia and Latvia in the East, and Cyprus in the South-East. The contributors assess how European integration has affected the preparedness of states to accommodate minorities across a range of fundamental criteria, including: enhanced rights protection; autonomy; the provision of a voice for minorities in the European and international arena; and the promotion of cross-border cooperation among communities dissected by state frontiers. The comprehensive chapters stress the importance of the nationality question, and the fact that, contrary to the hopes and beliefs of many on the left and right, it is not going to go away. Beginning with an introductory essay that summarizes the impact of European integration on the nationalities question, this accessible book will be of strong interest to scholars and researchers of politics, nationalism, ethnic conflict and European studies.

Download or read book The Cosmic Conspiracy written by Stan Deyo and published by . This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Germany and the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union written by A. Miskimmon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-09-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study assesses the influence of German policy makers on EU policy and the impact of EU membership on foreign policy making at the national level. The book concludes that limitations remain on the Europeanization of German foreign and security policy and Germany's ability to play a leading role in military crisis management.

Download or read book Blue Angel written by Francine Prose and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award Finalist from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose—now the major motion picture Submission “Screamingly funny … Blue Angel culminates in a sexual harassment hearing that rivals the Salem witch trials.” —USA Today It's been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative writing program, has published a novel. It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. And, better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Deliciously risque, Blue Angel is a withering take on today's academic mores and a scathing tale that vividly shows what can happen when academic politics collides with political correctness.

Download or read book The Second Bush Presidency written by Amit Gupta and published by Pearson Education India. This book was released on 2006 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relations of the United States with India, China, and Europe, Canada, and South America.

Download or read book In Putin s Footsteps written by Nina Khrushcheva and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Putin’s Footsteps is Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler’s unique combination of travelogue, current affairs, and history, showing how Russia’s dimensions have shaped its identity and culture through the decades. With exclusive insider status as Nikita Khrushchev’s great grand-daughter, and an ex-pat living and reporting on Russia and the Soviet Union since 1993, Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler offer a poignant exploration of the largest country on earth through their recreation of Vladimir Putin’s fabled New Year’s Eve speech planned across all eleven time zones. After taking over from Yeltsin in 1999, and then being elected president in a landslide, Putin traveled to almost two dozen countries and a quarter of Russia’s eighty-nine regions to connect with ordinary Russians. His travels inspired the idea of a rousing New Year’s Eve address delivered every hour at midnight throughout Russia’s eleven time zones. The idea was beautiful, but quickly abandoned as an impossible feat. He correctly intuited, however, that the success of his presidency would rest on how the country’s outback citizens viewed their place on the world stage. Today more than ever, Putin is even more determined to present Russia as a formidable nation. We need to understand why Russia has for centuries been an adversary of the West. Its size, nuclear arsenal, arms industry, and scientific community (including cyber-experts), guarantees its influence.

Download or read book The Obama Syndrome written by Tariq Ali and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written early in 2010 and initially published in September 2010, The Obama Syndrome predicted the Obama administration’s historic midterm defeat. But unlike myriad commentators who have since pinned responsibility for that Democratic Party collapse on the “reform” president’s lack of firm resolve, Ali’s critique located the problem in Obama’s notion of reform itself. Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency by promising to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and his economic team brought the architects of the financial crisis into the White House. Small wonder then that the “War on Terror”—torture in Bagram, occupation in Iraq, appeasement in Israel, and escalation in Pakistan—continues. And that Wall Street and the country’s biggest corporations have all profited at the expense of America’s working class and poor. Now a thoroughly updated paperback continues the story through the midterms, including a trenchant analysis of the Tea Party, and Obama’s decision to continue with his predecessor’s tax cuts for the rich. Ali asks whether—in the absence of a progressive upheaval from below—US politics is permanently mired in moderate Republicanism. Already called “a comprehensive account” of the problems with Obama (The Huffington Post), this new edition is sure to provide a more “powerful boost to Obama dissenters on the left” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Download or read book Reconstructing Human Rights written by Joe Hoover and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a human-rights world. The language of human-rights claims and numerous human-rights institutions shape almost all aspects of our political lives, yet we struggle to know how to judge this development. Scholars give us good reason to be both supportive and sceptical of the universal claims that human rights enable, alternatively suggesting that they are pillars of cross-cultural understanding of justice or the ideological justification of a violent and exclusionary global order. All too often, however, our evaluations of our human-rights world are not based on sustained consideration of their complex, ambiguous and often contradictory consequences. Reconstructing Human Rights argues that human rights are only as good as the ends they help us realise. We must attend to what ethical principles actually do in the world to know their value. So, for human rights we need to consider how the identity of humanity and the concept of rights shape our thinking, structure our political activity and contribute to social change. Reconstructing Human Rights defends human rights as a tool that should enable us to challenge political authority and established constellations of political membership by making new claims possible. Human rights mobilise the identity of humanity to make demands upon the terms of legitimate authority and challenges established political memberships. In this work, it is argued that this tool should be guided by a democratising ethos in pursuit of that enables claims for more democratic forms of politics and more inclusive political communities. While this work directly engages with debates about human rights in philosophy and political theory, in connecting our evaluations of the value of human rights to their worldly consequences, it will also be of interest to scholars considering human rights across disciplines, including Law, Sociology, and Anthropology.

Download or read book The Extreme Centre written by Tariq Ali and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the centre ground Since 1989, politics has been a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market. In this urgent and wideranging case for the prosecution, Tariq Ali looks at the people and events that have informed this development across the world. It is an investigation that reaches its logical conclusion with the presidency of Donald Trump, the success of En Marche! in France, and the dominance of Merkel’s Germany throughout Europe. In this fully updated edition of The Extreme Centre, Ali considers recent events that suggest, despite everything, that there is room for hope. He finds promise in Latin America and at the edges of Europe. Emerging parties in Scotland, Greece, and Spain, formed out of the 2008 crisis, are offering new promise for democracy. Even in the UK, with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, there are indications that the hegemony of the centre may be weaker than imagined.

Download or read book Open Borders written by Reece Jones and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Border control continues to be a highly contested and politically charged subject around the world. This collection of essays challenges reactionary nationalism by making the positive case for the benefits of free movement for countries on both ends of the exchange. Open Borders counters the knee-jerk reaction to build walls and close borders by arguing that there is not a moral, legal, philosophical, or economic case for limiting the movement of human beings at borders. The volume brings together essays by theorists in anthropology, geography, international relations, and other fields who argue for open borders with writings by activists who are working to make safe passage a reality on the ground. It puts forward a clear, concise, and convincing case for a world without movement restrictions at borders. The essays in the first part of the volume make a theoretical case for free movement by analyzing philosophical, legal, and moral arguments for opening borders. In doing so, they articulate a sustained critique of the dominant idea that states should favor the rights of their own citizens over the rights of all human beings. The second part sketches out the current situation in the European Union, in states that have erected border walls, in states that have adopted a policy of inclusion such as Germany and Uganda, and elsewhere in the world to demonstrate the consequences of the current regime of movement restrictions at borders. The third part creates a dialogue between theorists and activists, examining the work of Calais Migrant Solidarity, No Borders Morocco, activists in sanctuary cities, and others who contest border restrictions on the ground.

Download or read book The Politics of Fear written by Ruth Wodak and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far-right populist politics have arrived in the mainstream. We are now witnessing the shameless normalization of a political discourse built around nationalism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, antisemitism and Islamophobia. But what does this change mean? What caused it? And how does far-right populist discourse work? The Politics of Fear traces the trajectory of far-right politics from the margins of the political landscape to its very centre. It explores the social and historical mechanisms at play, and expertly ties these to the "micro-politics" of far-right language and discourse. From speeches to cartoons to social media posts, Ruth Wodak systematically analyzes the texts and images used by these groups, laying bare the strategies, rhetoric and half-truths the far-right employ. The revised second edition of this best-selling book includes: A range of vignettes analyzing specific instances of far-right discourse in detail. Expanded discussion of the "normalization" of far-right discourse. A new chapter exploring the challenges to liberal democracy. An updated glossary of far-right parties and movements. More discussion of the impact of social media on the rise of the far-right. Critical, analytical and impassioned, The Politics of Fear is essential reading for anyone looking to understand how far-right and populist politics have moved into the mainstream, and what we can do about it.

Download or read book Human Rights Futures written by Stephen Hopgood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With authoritarian states and global culture wars threatening human rights, this volume weighs hopes the for effective human rights advocacy.

Download or read book In AI We Trust written by Helga Nowotny and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI – and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us. At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care. As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.

Download or read book Another Cosmopolitanism written by Seyla Benhabib and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-09 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these two important lectures, distinguished political philosopher Seyla Benhabib argues that since the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, we have entered a phase of global civil society which is governed by cosmopolitan norms of universal justice -- norms which are difficult for some to accept as legitimate since they are in conflict with democratic ideals. In her first lecture, Benhabib argues that this tension can never be fully resolved, but it can be mitigated through the renegotiation of the dual commitments to human rights and sovereign self-determination. Her second lecture develops this idea in detail, with special reference to recent developments in Europe (for example, the banning of Muslim head scarves in France). The EU has seen the replacement of the traditional unitary model of citizenship with a new model that disaggregates the components of traditional citizenship, making it possible to be a citizen of multiple entities at the same time. The volume also contains a substantive introduction by Robert Post, the volume editor, and contributions by Bonnie Honig (Northwestern University), Will Kymlicka (Queens University), and Jeremy Waldron (Columbia School of Law).

Download or read book The Churchill Complex written by Ian Buruma and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From one of its keenest observers, a brilliant, witty journey through the "special relationship" between England and America which has done so much to shape the world, from World War 2 to Brexit, through the lens of the fateful bonds between President and Prime Minister"--

Download or read book We the People of Europe written by Étienne Balibar and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We, the People of Europe?, he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "transnational citizenship" from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship. Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "European apartheid," or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "internal borders" nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates.