Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2005

        Democracy, social resources and political power in the European Union

        by Niilo Kauppi

        In this book Kauppi develops a structural constructivist theory of the European Union and critically analyses, through French and Finnish empirical cases, the political practices that maintain the Union's 'democratic deficit'. Kauppi conceptualises the European Union as both an arena for political contention and a nascent political order. In this evolving, multi-levelled European political field, individuals and groups construct material and symbolic structures of political power, grounded in a variety of social resources such as nationality, culture, and gender. The author shows how the dominance of both executive political resources and domestic political cultures has prevented the development of European democracy. Supranational executive networks have become more autonomous, reinforcing the dominance of the resources they control. At the same time, national political cultures condition the political status of elected institutions such as the European parliament. The book is particularly suited for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of European Politics, European Union Studies and International Relations. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2020

        The four dimensions of power

        by Mark Haugaard, Mark Haugaard

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Air power and colonial control

        by David Omissi

        Air policing was used in many colonial possessions, but its most effective incidence occurred in the crescent of territory from north-eastern Africa, through South-West Arabia, to North West Frontier of India. This book talks about air policing and its role in offering a cheaper means of 'pacification' in the inter-war years. It illuminates the potentialities and limitations of the new aerial technology, and makes important contributions to the history of colonial resistance and its suppression. Air policing was employed in the campaign against Mohammed bin Abdulla Hassan and his Dervish following in Somaliland in early 1920. The book discusses the relationships between air control and the survival of Royal Air Force in Iraq and between air power and indirect imperialism in the Hashemite kingdoms. It discusses Hugh Trenchard's plans to substitute air for naval or coastal forces, and assesses the extent to which barriers of climate and geography continued to limit the exercise of air power. Indigenous responses include being terrified at the mere sight of aircraft to the successful adaptation to air power, which was hardly foreseen by either the opponents or the supporters of air policing. The book examines the ethical debates which were a continuous undercurrent to the stream of argument about repressive air power methods from a political and operational perspective. It compares air policing as practised by other European powers by highlighting the Rif war in Morocco, the Druze revolt in Syria, and Italy's war of reconquest in Libya.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2018

        How to save politics in a post-truth era

        by Ilan Zvi Baron

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2023

        Made in France

        Societal structures and political work

        by Andy Smith

        How has French society been made, by whom and why? And how in turn has it influenced the French? This book sets out the institutionalized rules and norms that continue to structure France, together with the 'political work' that has recently changed or reproduced these power relations. Exploring a range of age groups and types of social activity, including work, business, entertainment, political mobilizations and retirement, Made in France examines where significant change has occurred over the last four decades. Smith argues that while transformation has occurred in France's financial and education sectors, only relatively marginal shifts have occurred elsewhere in French society. To explain this pattern of continuity and isolated change, the book strongly nuances claims that neo-liberalism, globalization or a rise in populism have been its causes. References to these trends have impacted upon French politics to varying extents, Smith argues; however, France continues to be dominated by issues which are specific to the country and linked to its deep societal structures and history. Smith provides a comprehensive account of French society and politics and in doing so proposes an insightful analytical framework applicable to the comparative analysis of other nations.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Imperialism and the natural world

        by John M. MacKenzie

        Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2017

        The divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga

        Hincmar of Rheims's De divortio

        by Rachel Stone, Charles West

        In the mid-ninth century, Francia was rocked by the first royal divorce scandal of the Middle Ages: the attempt by King Lothar II of Lotharingia to rid himself of his queen, Theutberga and remarry. Even 'women in their weaving sheds' were allegedly gossiping about the lurid accusations made. Kings and bishops from neighbouring kingdoms, and several popes, were gradually drawn into a crisis affecting the fate of an entire kingdom. This is the first professionally published translation of a key source for this extraordinary episode: Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims's De divortio Lotharii regis et Theutbergae reginae. This text offers eye-opening insight both on the political wrangling of the time and on early medieval attitudes towards magic, penance, gender, the ordeal, marriage, sodomy, the role of bishops, and kingship.The translation includes a substantial introduction and annotations, putting the case into its early medieval context and explaining Hincmar's sometimes-dubious methods of argument.

      • Trusted Partner
        Political ideologies
        May 2017

        Neoliberal power and public management reforms

        by Professor Peter Triantafillou. Series edited by Mark Haugaard

        This book examines the links between major contemporary public sector reforms and neoliberal thinking. The key contribution of the book is to enhance our understanding of contemporary neoliberalism as it plays out in the public administration and to provide a critical analysis of generally overlooked aspects of administrative power. The book examines the quest for accountability, credibility and evidence in the public sector. It asks whether this quest may be understood in terms of neoliberal thinking and, if so, how? The book makes the argument that while current administrative reforms are informed by several distinct political rationalities, they evolve above all around a particular form of neoliberalism: constructivist neoliberalism. The book analyses the dangers of the kinds of administrative power seeking to invoke the self-steering capacities of society and administration itself.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2023

        Politics, performance and popular culture

        Theatre and society in nineteenth-century Britain

        by Peter Yeandle, Katherine Newey, Jeffrey Richards

        This collection brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. It works with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political. The book is organised into three parts in dialogue regarding specific approaches to popular performance and politics. Part I offers a series of conceptual studies using popular culture as an analytical category for social and political history. Part II explores the ways that performance represents and constructs contemporary ideologies of race, nation and empire. Part III investigates the performance techniques of specific politicians - including Robert Peel, Keir Hardie and Henry Hyndman - and analyses the performative elements of collective movements.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation

        Passengers, pilots, publicity

        by Gordon Pirie, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie

        The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2024

        The political ecology of colonial capitalism

        Race, nature, and accumulation

        by Bikrum Gill

        This book situates the post financial crisis phenomenon of the "global land grab" within the longue duree of the capitalist world system. It does so by advancing a theoretical and historical framework, called the political ecology of colonial capitalism, that clarifies the key role played by the co-production of race and nature in provisioning the "ecological surplus" that has historically secured the emergence and reproduction of capitalist development. The key premise of this book is that the global land grab constitutes another such attempted moment of re-securing the cheap food premise through racialized frontier appropriation. The argument advanced here is that, within the neoliberal crisis conjuncture, the hegemonic resolution of capital's escalating social-ecological contradictions necessitates, through the practice of "global primitive accumulation," the racialized construction of frontiers of unused nature in emergent zones of appropriation.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2008

        Princely power in the Dutch Republic

        Patronage and William Frederick of Nassau (1613–64)

        by Geert Janssen, Joseph Bergin, Penny Roberts, Bill Naphy

        Based on one of the richest surviving diaries of the Dutch Golden Age, Princely Power in the Dutch Republic recaptures the social world of William Frederick of Nassau (1613-1664). As a Stadholder and relative of the Prince of Orange, William Frederick was among the key players in a fragmented republican state system. This study offers a vivid analysis of his political strategies and reveals how unwritten codes of patronage guided his daily contacts and shaped his mental world. As a patron at his court and as a client of the Prince of Orange, William Frederick developed distinctive patronage roles, appropriate to different social spheres. By assessing these different roles, Janssen provides a unique insight into the ways in which a seventeenth-century nobleman negotiated and articulated clientage, friendship and corruption in his life. This study offers an in-depth analysis of political practices in the Dutch Republic and reconsiders the way in which patronage shaped early modern politics, affected religious divisions and framed social identities. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2023

        Collective emotions and political violence

        by Maéva Clément

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        March 2024

        Markets and power in digital capitalism

        by Philipp Staab

        Today's global capitalism runs through digital networks. Its leaders are internet giants such as Google, Apple, Amazon and Tencent. Their technologies are ubiquitous: we carry high-performance computers around in our pockets, manage our lives in the cloud and display them on social media. They have also literally privatised the market, transforming capitalism in the process. Philipp Staab takes us on a virtual tour of modern digital capitalism. He shows how digital surveillance and evaluation practices have proliferated throughout the economy, exacerbating social inequality in the process. What is specific to digital capitalism, Staab argues, is the emergence of 'proprietary markets'. In the past the focus was on producing things and selling them at a profit. Today the meta-platforms extract their profits by owning the market itself.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter