Browse

This book gathers a group of political actors and academics who believe that a radically more active citizenship is a worthy aim. They spell out how it can be achieved in their particular area of concern, looking at the obstacles and how they might be overcome. Together, they show us how we can realise the dream of a citizen culture and the benefits that it would bring for democracy in the United Kingdom. The first and final chapters set the tone, respectively, on civic republicanism today and political identity. Other chapters consider active citizenship in relation to: Labour government policy; Scottish devolution; public services; gender equality; schools; multiculturalism; integrating immigrants; lifelong learning; Europe and international understanding; young people and Scottish independence.

This book asks why, from some moment onwards, ‘Europe’ and ‘the rest of the world’ entered into a particular relationship. This relationship was not merely one of domination but one that was conceived as a kind of superiority; more specifically, as an ‘advance’ in historical time. Toward this end, the book first analyses the emergence of this Atlantic modernity, then proceeds to compare aspects of contemporary Southern modernity, focusing on Brazil, Chile and South Africa. Finally, it explores the dynamics of contemporary modernity worldwide, looking at the relationship between past oppression and injustice and expectations for future freedom and justice. The book firmly links the history of Europe to world history, situating European modernity in its global context.

Most commentators agree that human rights today are in crisis. Virtually everywhere one looks, there is violence, deprivation and oppression, which human rights norms – prominent as they are in the global order – seem powerless to prevent. This book investigates the roots of the current crisis through the thought of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. While Agamben is critical of human rights, he nevertheless opens up crucial thresholds and lines of enquiry – biopolitics, the sovereign state of exception, and ‘bare life’ – which human rights theory and practice must come to grips with. The authors contend that any renewal of the human rights project today must involve breaking decisively with the traditional coordinates of Western political thought, which has come to see politics in terms of the activity of sovereign states and law-making – and as confined to the public domain. Instead, it must affirm an alternative political ontology based around notions of statelessness, inoperativeness, and the realization of the freedom and community that we already live. This alternative politics of human rights is developed through innovative approaches to language, gesture, and the image, and through key encounters with not only with Agamben, but also Arendt, Esposito, Bataille, Nancy and Benjamin.

Citizenship is widely understood in binary statist terms: inclusion/exclusion, past/present, particularism/universalism, with the emphasis on how globalisation brings such binaries into sharp focus and exacerbates them. This book highlights the limitations of this position and of current debate, and explores the possibility that citizenship is being reconfigured in contemporary political life beyond binary state-oriented categories. Aoileann Ní Mhurchú uses critical resources found in poststructural, psychoanalytic and postcolonial thought to think in new ways about citizenship-subjectivity in a globalized world, drawing on a range of thinkers including Julia Kristeva, Homi Bhabha and Michel Foucault. Using the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum as a lens and focusing on experiences of intergenerational migrants (the children born to migrants), she highlights the necessity of a more sophisticated understanding of citizenship which takes into account how some people get caught between state-sovereign categories, and provides a robust theoretical discussion about how citizenship increasingly involves overlapping, ambiguous traces of us and them, inclusion and exclusion, particularism and universalism which confound easy categorisation. In doing so it raises questions about how citizenship is understood in time and space. In this way Ambiguous Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration contributes to the growing and dynamic interdisciplinary field of critical citizenship studies (CCS), which explores new forms of political identity and belonging in a globalising world.

The book explores the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. By emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind' President Obama challenged the Washington foreign policy establishment and its strategic vision of liberal hegemony from within.Highlighting the identity performing function and discursive construction of grand strategy, the book demonstrates how the geopolitical identity of American exceptionalism is linked to the conduct of an activist and interventionist foreign policy, resulting in a dominant grand strategy of American primacy and global military pre-eminence. An intertextual framework of analysis is used to examine the political performance and validity of this dominant identity-policy link, and the success of countering discourses of cooperative engagement and restraint under the Obama presidency. The nexus of geopolitical identity and national security is traced through a multidimensional perspective that considers the common sense status of popular culture and media, the expertise of Washington think tanks and foreign policy experts, and the political decisions taken in the White House and the Pentagon.From an in-depth analysis of various competing discourses of national security and foreign policy, the book concludes that American grand strategy under Obama no longer represented a coherent and consistent equation of material resources and political ends, but a contested discursive space, where identity and policy no longer matched. This resulted in the conflicted and contradictory nature of the Obama Doctrine.

Only the right has recognized the potency of the American left. The book explains why others have underestimated the left in the USA, citing the relative absence of a free press in America, the disposition of the left to deny its own existence in the name of pragmatism, and the left’s fallacy that the right is always wrong, and thus in error in pointing to the left’s impact. The book sets forth the achievements of the left. These achievements include the welfare state, critiques of and sometimes effective opposition to militarism, the reshaping of American culture, crusades for black rights and civil liberties, the awakening of America to the dangers of fascism, and great public enterprizes such as the New York and New Jersey Port Authority. The book shows how the socialists of the Old Left gave way by the 1960s to the anti-war militants of the New Left, and how they in turn gave way to a “Newer Left” that advocated a host of additional causes such as gay rights and multiculturalism. Final chapters show how the post-2000 Bush administration succumbed to the “socialist” nationalization it professed to condemn, and how Barack Obama was a president for the left.

This book addresses a critical question embedded within a heated debate about the ‘failure’ of American intelligence in a post 9/11 age: have Western experts in some fundamental way failed to understand the dynamics, leaders and culture of the Middle East? Looking back in recent history through a series of seminal case studies culminating in Sadat’s dramatic assassination, this monograph explores whether, how and why the most knowledgeable and powerful intelligence agencies in the world have been so notoriously caught off guard in this region. The story begins after the tripartite invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956 which triggered a ripple of ideological and geopolitical transformations that continue to shape the politics and borders of the modern Middle East. Revolutions swept across Syria, Iraq and Yemen; the three devastating Arab-Israeli wars ravaged the holy lands; and finally, a fraught and contested bilateral treaty bound Egypt and Israel to uneasy peace. The West and the Soviet Union vied for control over the Middle East’s destiny through its political centre, Egypt. The transition from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar el Sadat witnessed the decline of an ardently anti-imperialist Arab nationalism, supplanted by a radical quest to realign Egypt’s identity towards the Western world. As revolutionary turmoil and conflict continue to unfold throughout the Middle East today, The Arab World and Western Intelligence is the untold story of how the British and American intelligence services have anticipated and reacted to crisis and upheaval in the region’s recent history.

The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is the longest-running dispute in Eurasia. This study looks beyond tabloid tropes of ‘frozen conflict’ or ‘Russian land-grab’, to unpack both unresolved territorial issues left over from the 1990s and the strategic rivalry that has built up around them since then. Unstable and overlapping conceptions of homeland have characterised the Armenian and Azerbaijani republics since their first emergence in 1918. Seventy years of incorporation into the Soviet Union did not resolve these issues. As they emerged from the Soviet collapse in 1991, Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought for sovereignty over Nagorny Karabakh, leading to its secession from Azerbaijan, the deaths of more than 25,000 people and the forced displacement of more than a million more. Since then, the conflict has evolved into an ‘enduring rivalry’, a particularly intractable form of long-term militarised competition between two states. Combining perspectives rarely found in a single volume, the study shows how these outcomes became intractably embedded within the regime politics, strategic interactions and international linkages of post-war Armenia and Azerbaijan. Far from ‘frozen’, this book demonstrates how more than two decades of dynamic conceptions of territory, shifting power relations, international diffusion and unsuccessful mediation efforts have contributed to the resilience of this stubbornly unresolved dispute – one of the most intractable of our times.

Through a series of case studies, this book reveals new details of how Britain used American aircraft and integrates this with broader British statecraft and strategy. It challenges conceptions that Britain was strategically reliant on the United States and reveals a complicated, asymmetrical dependency between the wartime allies. Aircraft were at the heart of British supply diplomacy with the United States in the Second World War and were at the forefront of the Roosevelt administration's policy of aiding the Anglo-French alliance against Germany. They were the largest item in British purchasing in the United States in 1940, a key consideration in the Lend-Lease of 1941 and a major component of several wartime conferences between Churchill and Roosevelt.

In one of the first volumes assessing the full two terms of the George W. Bush presidency, this book has gathered the work of leading American and European scholars. In fifteen chapters, authorities offer assessments of the Bush administration's successes and failures. Extensive attention is paid to Bush's foreign policy, including ‘The War on Terror’, but the focus is broadened to absorb not only the Bush Doctrine and its repercussions, but also his trade and homeland security policies. The president's domestic leadership in economics and social policy is investigated, as are his dealings as president with the other institutions of the U.S. political system.

This edited collection tackles subjects that have arisen as a result of new capabilities to collect, analyse and use vast quantities of data using complex algorithms. Questions tackled include what is wrong with targeted advertising in political campaigns, whether echo chambers really are a matter of genuine concern, what is the impact of data collection through social media and other platforms on questions of trust in society and is there a problem of opacity as decision-making becomes increasingly automated? The contributors consider potential solutions to these challenges and discuss whether an ethical compass is available or even feasible in an ever more digitized and monitored world. The editors bring together original research on the philosophy of big data and democracy from leading international authors, with recent examples and case references – including the 2016 Brexit Referendum, the Leveson Inquiry and the Edward Snowden leaks – and combine them in one authoritative volume at time of great political turmoil.

The Biopolitics of Stalinism is the first book to investigate Soviet socialism from a biopolitical perspective. While canonical theories of biopolitics of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have focused on liberal and fascist rationalities of biopolitics, the case of Stalinism exemplifies an alternative mode of biopolitics, oriented less towards protecting life than towards transforming it in accordance with a transcendent ideal of communism. The book reconstructs this rationality in the early Stalinist project of the Great Break (1928-1932) and its subsequent modifications during the High Stalinist period. It then addresses the question of biopolitics on the level of the subject, tracing the way how the ‘new Soviet person’ was to be constructed in governmental practices and the role violence and terror played in this construction. On the basis of this reconstruction of the Stalinist rationality of biopolitics, this book also contributes to the theoretical debate on affirmative biopolitics, advancing a new interpretation of the relation between ideas and lives in political practice. Bringing the fields of biopolitics and Soviet studies together, this book will be of interest to a wide readership in political theory, history, sociology and cultural studies.

This book presents a distinctive theoretical approach to the problem of borders in the study of global politics. It turns from current debates about the presence or absence of borders between states to consider the possibility that the concept of the border of the state is being reconfigured in contemporary political life. The author uses critical resources found in poststructuralist thought to think in new ways about the relationship between borders, security and sovereign power, drawing on a range of thinkers including Agamben, Derrida and Foucault. He highlights the necessity of a more pluralised and radicalised view of what borders arel, and where they might be found, and uses the problem of borders to critically explore the innovations and limits of poststructuralist scholarship.

What is the connection between inclusion, exclusion and identity? This book argues that the politics of inclusion and identity should be studied as struggles over the representations of the identities involved. The book engages with a range of debates and themes including Britishness, race, the nature and role of Islam in British society, homelessness and social justice, and it adopts a post-structuralist approach to the theoretical and practical issues surrounding inclusion, exclusion and identity. The argument is developed through careful analyses of cases from the last four decades of British multiculturalism. Each chapter deals with a concept and practice of inclusion: equality, recognition, tolerance and hospitality. Each chapter also deals with one or more cases: Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s different versions of Britishness, the legal case Mandla; the debate between Bhikhu Parekh and Brian Barry; newspaper coverage and debates about Begum, X v Y, Playfoot and Watkins-Singh, which all concerned school uniforms and religious symbols and clothing; and Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good. The book makes a contribution to empirical debates about the nature of British multiculturalism as well as theoretical debates about inclusion, identity and representation. It is informed by post-structuralist political theory, particularly Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse and hegemony and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction.

This sympathetic restatement of C. B. Macpherson's ideas provides an overview of Macpherson's theory of possessive individualism and critique of liberal democracy. The book suggests that criticism of Macpherson has been misplaced and asks whether his theories should now be given more prominence by political theorists. This is the first book to deal comprehensively with the issues surrounding Macpherson's work; previous studies have used him as a point of departure rather than the focus of detailed analysis, and none have included an overall assessment of his thought.

This book reinterprets the history of Chile, the CIA and the Cold War. It blends national, regional, and world-historical trends from Chile -- from the appearance of its labor movement in the late nineteenth century to the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in the late twentieth -- into both the inter-American and transatlantic communities. It argues that Chileans made their own history as highly engaged internationalists while reassessing American and other foreign-directed intelligence operations in Chile and southern South America while recontextualizing and reassessing United States, particularly CIA, influence.

Taking declassified and publicly available sources this book provides an insight into the evolution of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1947 to the Trump Presidency. Focusing on a mix of case studies historic case studies such as The Berlin Tunnel, and The Cuban Missile Crisis. As well as discussing the internal changes and evolution of the organisation from planning covert actions, to adapting to, using and developing technology to aid in intelligence collection and analysis. The book also talks to key individuals that have shaped the organisation at different points in its history as well as how different Presidents have used the Agency to deliver political decisions. The book is balanced in its presentation of successes and failures, the latter often times more well known: Iraq being perhaps the best known example. The use of declassified documentation elevates this from being another history of the Central Intelligence Agency, into an insightful window into a famous yet secret organisation with a global brand.

This book is an historical introduction to the varieties of citizenship in Britain, starting in the Middle Ages and bringing the story right up to the present day. Both the status and understanding of citizenship in practice and the theoretical and advisory writings on the subject are introduced, and their inter-relationships are explored. Among the key themes to be examined are: local and national strata; the issue of parliamentary suffrage; women excluded and included as citizens; the influence of classical ideas; nationhood and imperialism; the role of political and social theorists; interpretations by modern political parties; the role of education; environmental citizenship; multiculturalism; globalisation; and human rights. Organised chronologically, each chapter is divided into sections in order to present the reader with different themes in a manageable form. The book is unique in its historical coverage of citizenship in Britain — moving from the Middle Ages to the present day. It reveals the great complexity of the development of citizenship in Britain and demonstrates the importance of an historical perspective in understanding the issue of citizenship in Britain today.

This book seeks to analyse the impact of globalisation, European integration, mass migration, changing patterns of political participation and welfare state provision upon citizenship in Europe. Uniting theory with empirical examples, the central theme of the book is that how we view such changes is dependent upon how we view citizenship theoretically. The authors analyse the three main theoretical approaches to citizenship: [1] classical positions (liberal, communitarian, and republican), primarily concerned with questions of rights and responsibilities; [2] multiculturalist and feminist theories, concerned with the question of difference; and [3] postnational or cosmopolitan theories which emphasise how citizen rights and behaviours are increasingly located beyond the nation state. Using these theoretical perspectives, the second section of the book assesses four key social, economic and political developments which pose challenges for citizenship in Europe: migration, political participation, the welfare state and European integration. These, it is argued, represent the most significant challenges to and for citizenship in contemporary Europe.

Belief, Bias and Intelligence outlines an approach for reducing the risk of cognitive biases impacting intelligence analysis that draws from experimental research in the social sciences. It critiques the reliance of Western intelligence agencies on the use of a method for intelligence analysis developed by the CIA in the 1990’s, the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH). The book shows that the theoretical basis of the ACH method is significantly flawed, and that there is no empirical basis for the use of ACH in mitigating cognitive biases. It puts ACH to the test in an experimental setting against two key cognitive biases with unique empirical research facilitated by UK’s Professional Heads of Intelligence Analysis unit at the Cabinet Office, includes meta-analysis into which analytical factors increase and reduce the risk of cognitive bias and recommends an alternative approach to risk mitigation for intelligence communities. Finally, it proposes alternative models for explaining the underlying causes of cognitive biases, challenging current leading theories in the social sciences.