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This book engages the reader in a wide-ranging assessment of the legacy of Barack Obama—the “first Black president”—relative to Black politics. It uses its vantage point of being written during Donald Trump’s presidency to understand what Black politics has and has not inherited from the Obama administration. It is comprehensive in the number of constituencies and policy topics it covers. Its co-editors frame its chapters by explaining how both “inverted linked fate” and an “inclusionary dilemma” shaped the Obama presidency and legacy for Black politics. Nearly twenty prominent or emerging political scientists provide this book’s interior chapters, using quantitative and qualitative methods to draw conclusions. The first group of scholars examines the Obama administration’s impact upon the attitudes and perceived group interests of various Black constituencies, including voters, partisans, civil rights leaders, lobbyists, women, church leaders and members, and LGBTQ persons. The second group examines Obama’s impact upon Black policy interests, including civil rights, criminal justice reform, antipoverty, women’s welfare, healthcare reform, housing, immigration, and foreign affairs. In the conclusion, the co-editors consider what may confront the “next Black president” and the “next Black America.”

The American War in Afghanistan is a full history of the war in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020. It covers political, cultural, strategic, and tactical aspects of the war and details the actions and decision-making of the United States, Afghan government, and Taliban. The work follows a narrative format to go through the 2001 US invasion, the state-building of 2002–2005, the Taliban offensive of 2006, the US surge of 2009–2011, the subsequent drawdown, and the peace talks of 2019–2020. The focus is on the overarching questions of the war: Why did the United States fail? What opportunities existed to reach a better outcome? Why did the United States not withdraw from the war?

Paramilitary or irregular units have been involved in practically every case of identity-based mass violence in the modern world, but detailed analysis of these dynamics is rare. Exploring the case of former Yugoslavia, Kate Ferguson exposes the relationships between paramilitaries, state commands, local communities, and organised crime present in modern mass atrocities, from Rwanda and Darfur to Syria and Myanmar. Visible paramilitary participation masks the continued dominance of the state in violent crises. Political elites benefit from using unconventional forces to fulfil ambitions that violate international law—and international policy responses are hindered when responsibility for violence is ambiguous. Ferguson’s inquiry into these overlooked dynamics of mass violence unveils substantial loopholes in current atrocity prevention architecture.

In Armies of Arabia—the first book to comprehensively analyze the Gulf monarchies’ militaries—Zoltan Barany explains the conspicuous ineffectiveness of these forces with a combination of political-structural and sociocultural factors. Based on over 150 personal interviews and meticulous multidisciplinary research, he offers a fascinating account of Arabia’s armies starting with Ibn Saud’s conquest of much of the peninsula and ending with the ongoing war in Yemen. He explores the ruling families’ role overseeing their militaries to ensure their loyalty and examines the backgrounds and career trajectories of soldiers and officers. Barany argues that Arabia’s armies remain ineffective because they are characterized by an absence of meritocracy, the domination of personal connections over institutional norms, disregard for personal responsibility, half-hearted leadership, casual work ethic, and training lacking intensity, frequency, and up-to-date settings. Massive expenditures on armaments are primarily payoffs to the United States for protecting them and have resulted in bloated arsenals and large-scale corruption. The setbacks of the Saudi-led coalition’s disastrous war in Yemen starkly illustrate the Gulf armies’ humiliating combat record. The book concludes with thoughts on waste (of human potential, resources, institutions) as a dominant theme of Gulf military affairs, considers likely changes in response to long-term weakening demand for oil, and suggests ways in which the effectiveness of Arabia’s armies could be raised. Chock-full of insights and stories from the field and written with a general audience in mind, Armies of Arabia is essential reading for anyone interested in military affairs and Middle Eastern politics, society, and international relations.

The book provides a novel explanation of rising Euroscepticism and right-wing populism in Western Europe. The changing political and cultural environment of recent decades is generating an ongoing realignment of voters structured by authoritarianism, which is a psychological disposition towards the maintenance of social cohesion and order at the expense of individual autonomy and diversity. High authoritarians find the values and demographic changes of the past several decades a threat to social cohesion, which has created an opportunity for populist radical right (PRR) parties to gain their support by campaigning against these perceived threats to national community posed by immigration, values change, and European integration. The result is a worldview evolution in which party conflict is shaped by the rival preferences of high and low authoritarians. Drawing on national and cross-national survey data as well as an original survey experiment, this book demonstrates how the relationship between authoritarianism and (1) attitudes towards the EU and (2) voting behaviour has evolved since the 1990s. In doing so, this book advances these literatures by providing an explanation for why certain voters are shifting towards PRR parties as electoral politics realigns.

Between Realism and Revolt explores urban governance in the “age of austerity”, focusing on the period between the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and the beginning of the global Coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019. It considers urban governance after the 2008 crisis, from the perspective of governability. How did cities navigate the crisis and the aftermath of austerity, with what political ordering and disordering dynamics at the forefront? To answer these questions it engages with two influential theoretical currents, Urban Regime Theory and Gramscian state theory, with a view to understanding how governance enabled austerity, deflected or intensified localised expressions of crisis, and generated more-or-less successful political alternatives. It develops a comparative analysis of case studies undertaken in the cities of Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Greater Dandenong (Melbourne), Leicester, Montreal and Nantes, and concludes by highlighting five characteristics that cut across the cities, unevenly and in different configurations: economic rationalism, weak hegemony, retreat to dominance, weak counter-hegemony and radically contagious politicisations.

Compulsory voting is widely used in the democratic world, and it is well established that it increases electoral participation. This book assesses the effects of compulsory voting beyond turnout. The author first summarizes the normative arguments for and against compulsory voting, provides information on its contemporary use, reviews recent events pertaining to its (proposed) adoption and abolition, and provides an extensive account of extant research on its consequences. The author then advances a theory that compulsory voting polarizes behavior and attitudes, and broadens gaps in political sophistication levels, among those with negative and positive orientations toward democracy. Recognizing the impact of mandatory voting on the electorate, political parties then alter the ways in which they seek votes, with mainstream parties moderating their platforms and smaller parties taking more extreme positions. The author uses survey data from countries with compulsory voting to show that support for the requirement to vote is driven by individuals’ orientations toward democracy. The theory is then comprehensively tested using: cross-national data, cross-cantonal data from Switzerland, and survey data from Argentina. Empirical results are largely indicative of the theorized process whereby compulsory voting has divergent effects on citizens and political parties. The book concludes with a discussion of future directions for academic research, implications for those who craft electoral policy, and alternative ways of boosting turnout.

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 need to secure civilians and their fundamental rights has led to the moral imperative to track, record and memorialise the killing and the suffering of those who find themselves in the midst of violent conflict. Body Count tracks and explores civilian deaths in Iraq following the 2003 invasion by the US-led coalition. It is a recounting of the conflict through the counting of its victims. The book provides a narrative of the War on Terror by charting its course and its impact, through ‘live’ reports and through reflective analysis by the principal researcher of the NGO Iraq Body Count. It highlights the importance and the challenges of casualty recording, it maps the insurgency in Iraq and the ensuing civilian deaths, the struggle between military power and ideology, the increasing radicalisation, the seeking of security through hegemony, and the cycle of violence. The book narrates state collapse through discussions on the neoliberal system’s effect on Iraq’s security, on military interventions and the Western control paradigm, on individual and community trauma. It raises questions on leadership and hegemony, the vulnerability of weak states, winning and losing, regime and energy security. It tells the daily story of Iraq: a story of fear, of executions and mass graves, of airstrikes and car bombs, of heroism and sacrifice, and of life carrying on.

This book provides a concise account of general elections during more than five tumultuous decades in British politics. Beginning in 1964, when partisan allegiances in the UK were relatively stable, it ends in 2019 when the volatility of voters was illustrated by the success of Conservative Party candidates in constituencies which had previously been ‘safe’ for Labour. The book describes the changing influences on voting behaviour—from the early 1960s, when allegiances were largely based on social class, to the 2020s when factors such as impressions of party leaders and new media outlets such as Facebook seem far more important. The electoral contests of these years produced dramatic results, ranging from Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 to the three closely fought battles of 2010, 2015, and 2017. These elections have taken place against a background of concern arising from the low turnout of voters, reaching its nadir in 2001 when less than 60 per cent of the electorate participated. Yet, in recent years, competition for the support of volatile voters has been complicated by issues like devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—not to mention the question of EU membership, which cut across long-established party lines and has helped to raise political passions to unprecedented levels. Apart from its analysis of electoral campaigns and outcomes, the book describes the most relevant developments between elections (including the EU referendum of 2016) which help to explain the dilemmas facing the system of liberal democracy in contemporary Britain.

The Building and Breaking of Peace considers the role of corporate firms in building peaceful societies. Examining the corporate motives for peacebuilding and then the implications of these activities for preventing violence and conflict resolution creates a holistic picture of the peace and conflict process. The book examines variation in corporate engagement as a product of corporate culture and shifts in government capacity, as well as threats to the ability to conduct business. Corporations engage in peacebuilding when there is a gap in the state’s capacity to enforce laws creating the demand for engagement but when there is stability that enables firms to supply peacebuilding. The book then considers the implications of corporate engagement for preventing and ending violence. Building on the rational choice theory of civil war and drawing from business research, The Building and Breaking of Peace examines the role of corporate firms in building peaceful societies. While firms are uniquely situated in their ability to raise the cost of violence, an active private sector acts as an additional veto player in the bargaining process, making it significantly harder to reach an agreement. The findings suggest that corporations help to prevent violence but not resolve it. These arguments are tested on original cross-national data of peacebuilding efforts by firms in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa from 2000 to 2018 and in-depth case analyses of corporate actions and outcomes in Colombia, Northern Ireland, and Tunisia.

This book challenges the claim that winning “hearts and minds” is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. The book argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites. The book offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions — the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the Salvadoran Civil War — to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing how compellence works in intrastate conflicts, the book makes clear that whether or not the international community decides these human, moral, and material costs are acceptable, responsible policymaking requires recognizing the actual components of counterinsurgent success — and the limited influence that external powers have over the tactics of counterinsurgent elites.

The president of the United States is commonly thought to wield extraordinary personal power through the issuance of executive orders. In fact, the vast majority of such orders are proposed by federal agencies and shaped by negotiations that span the executive branch. This book provides the first comprehensive look at how presidential directives are written — and by whom. The book examines more than five hundred executive orders from the 1930s to today — as well as more than two hundred others negotiated but never issued — shedding vital new light on the multilateral process of drafting supposedly unilateral directives. The book draws on a wealth of archival evidence from the Office of Management and Budget and presidential libraries as well as original interviews to show how the crafting of orders requires widespread consultation and compromise with a formidable bureaucracy. It explains the key role of management in the presidential skill set, detailing how bureaucratic resistance can stall and even prevent actions the chief executive desires, and how presidents must bargain with the bureaucracy even when they seek to act unilaterally. Challenging popular conceptions about the scope of presidential power, the book reveals how the executive branch holds the power to both enact and constrain the president's will.

This book is framed around two very simple and interrelated questions; what is global power and in what ways does China have it? By focussing on political economy and ideational dimensions of global power, it shows how Xi Jinping, whilst building on what came before, has developed a set of strategic strands designed to bring about (global) change. This does not mean that all Chinese international interactions are a direct result of a clearly coordinated and controlled state project; grand strategy and state interest and intent can be (and indeed, often is) assumed when in reality Chinese overseas actors are utilising their ‘bounded autonomy’ to attain other objectives. The changing nature of China’s global economic role – not least the growth of outward investment – might have been enough it itself to shine a new light on the nature of China’s rise. So too might the way that China’s leaders have articulated their global governance reform agenda and used an ‘occidentalism’ to establish China’s leadership credentials. Or the nature of attempts to influence (or even control) the way that China’s rise is discussed and debated across the world. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that while a risen China might have gained followership from some, concern about the consequences of China’s rise has increased quite significantly in places where it was previously viewed with less apprehension.

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 dives deep into the lives of Muslim American advocacy groups in the post-9/11 era, asking how they form and function within their broader community in a world marked by Islamophobia. Bias incidents against Muslim Americans reached unprecedented levels a few short years ago, and many groups responded through action — organizing on the national level to become increasingly visible, engaged, and assertive. This book draws on more than four years of participant observation and interviews to examine how Muslim American organizations have sought to access and influence the public square and, in so doing, forge a political identity. The result is an engaging and unique study, showing that policy advocacy, both foreign and domestic, is best understood as a sphere where Muslim American identity is performed and negotiated. The book offers ever-timely insight into the place of Muslims in American political life and, in the process, sheds light on one of the fastest-growing and most internally dynamic American minority groups.

Coalition government is the most frequent form of government in Western Europe, but there is relatively little systematic knowledge about how this form of government has developed in recent decades. This volume analyses governments that have formed in the Western European countries since the Second World War and covers the full life cycle of coalition governments from the formation of party alliances before elections to coalition formation after elections, governing and policy-making when parties work together in office, and the stages that eventually lead to governments terminating. Since the early 1990s, many coalition governments form in a context of increased fragmentation of party systems, increased polarization, and the rise of populist parties. The volume captures these changes and examines their implications for the different stages of the coalition life cycle. A particular emphasis of the volume is on the study of how coalitions govern together even when they have different agendas. Do individual ministers decide, or the prime minister, or are the policy outputs of a government a result of a process of coalition compromise? Focusing on the coalition governance stage, we analyse the variation in the use of various control mechanisms across countries, for example showing that many coalition governments draft extensive contracts to control their partners in cabinet. The volume covers 16 West European countries and introduces the case of Croatia. Systematic cross-national data is available in an online appendix.

In an era of rapid international economic integration, how do countries interact, innovate, and compete in industries, like energy, that are fundamental to national interests? Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New Global Economy examines the development of wind and solar industries, two sectors of historic importance that have long been the target of ambitious public policy. As wind and solar grew from cottage industries into $300 billion global sectors, China, Germany, and the United States each developed distinct constellations of firms with starkly different technical capabilities. The book shows that globalization itself has reinforced such distinct national patterns of industrial specialization. Economically, globalization has created opportunities for firms to specialize through collaboration with others. Politically, new possibilities for specialization have allowed firms to repurpose existing domestic institutions for application in new industries. Against the backdrop of policy efforts that have generally failed to grasp the cross-national nature of innovation, the book offers a novel explanation for both the causes of changes in the global organization of innovation and their impact on domestic politics. As interdependence in global supply chains has again come under fire in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Collaborative Advantage challenges the notion that globalization is primarily about competition, highlighting instead the central role of collaboration in the global economy, particularly in clean energy industries critical to solving the climate crisis.