Search Results

Social scientists and political theorists have recently come to realize the potential importance of the classical Greek world and its legacy for testing social theories. Meanwhile, some Hellenists have mastered the techniques of contemporary social science. They have come to recognize the value of formal and quantitative methods as a complement to traditional qualitative approaches to Greek history and culture. Some of the most exciting new work in social science is now being done within interdisciplinary domains for which recent work on Greece provides apt case studies. This book features essays examining the role played by democratic political and legal institutions in economic development; the potential for inter-state cooperation and international institutions within a decentralized ecology of states; the relationship between state government and the social networks arising from voluntary associations; the interplay between political culture, informal politics, formal institutions and political change; and the relationship between empirical and formal methods of analysis and normative political theory. In sum, this book introduces readers to the emerging field of “social science ancient history.”

The Chinese system is like no other known to man, now or in history. This book explains how the system works and where it may be moving. Drawing on Chinese and international sources, on extensive collaboration with Chinese scholars, and on the political science of state analysis, the author concludes that under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, the system of government has been transformed into a new regime radically harder and more ideological than the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. China is less strong economically and more dictatorial politically than the world has wanted to believe. By analysing the leadership of Xi Jinping, the meaning of ‘socialist market economy’, corruption, the party-state apparatus, the reach of the party, the mechanisms of repression, taxation and public services, and state-society relations, the book broadens the field of China studies, as well as the fields of political economy, comparative politics, development, and welfare state studies.

Planetary-scale computation presents a fundamental challenge to Modern geopolitical architectures. As calculative reason and as global infrastructure, it not only deforms and distorts Westphalian political geography it creates new territories in its own image, ones that don’t necessarily replace the old but which are superimposed on them, each grinding against the other. These thickened and noisy jurisdictions are our new normal. They are the scaffolds through which our cultures evolve through them, and they represent our most difficult and important design challenge. Computation is changing not only how governments govern, but what government even is in the first place: less governance of computation than computation as governance. Global cloud platforms take on roles that have traditionally been the domain of States, cities become hardware/software platforms organized by physical and virtual interfaces, and strange new political subjects (some not even human) gain unforeseen sovereignties as the users of those interfaces. To understand (and to design) these transformations, we need to see them as part of a whole, an accidental megastructure called The Stack. This book examines each layer of The Stack–Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—as a dynamic technology that is re-structuring some part of our world at its particular scale and as part of the whole. The Stack is a platform, and so combines logics of both States and Markets, and produces forms of sovereignty that are unique to this technical and institutional form. Fortunately, stack platforms are made to be re-made. How the Stack-we-have becomes the Stack-to-come depends on how well we understand it as a totality, By seeing the whole we stand a better chance of designing a system we will want to inhabit. To formulate the “design brief” for that project, as this book does, requires a perspective that blends philosophical, geopolitical and technological understandings and methods.

By investigating the narratives of everyday life, Identity, Belonging and Migration provides some understanding of the many socio-political, historical, discursive and socio-cognitive processes involved in expressions of everyday racism in European countries. Consisting of three parts, the book provides a contextual understanding of European society past and present, foregrounding race and discrimination’s place within it. Part one of the text analyses the theoretical perspectives on belonging within a European context, part two addresses the exclusionary discourses and practices of states and their institutions, and part three concludes the book with four thematic discussions on violence, resistance, Islamophobia in the Netherlands, and racism in the education system.

The right to own property is something we generally take for granted. For refugees living in camps, in some cases for as long as generations, the link between citizenship and property ownership becomes strained. How do refugees protect these assets and preserve communal ties? How do they maintain a sense of identity and belonging within chaotic settings? Protection Amid Chaos follows people as they develop binding claims on assets and resources in challenging political and economic spaces. Focusing on Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, it shows how the first to arrive developed flexible though legitimate property rights claims based on legal knowledge retained from their homeland, subsequently adapted to the restrictions of refugee life. As camps increased in complexity, refugees merged their informal institutions with the formal rules of political outsiders, devising a broader, stronger system for protecting their assets and culture from predation and state incorporation. For this book, Nadya Hajj conducted interviews with two hundred refugees. She consults memoirs, legal documents, and findings in the United Nations Relief Works Agency archives. Her work reveals the strategies Palestinian refugees have used to navigate their precarious conditions while under continuous assault and situates their struggle within the larger context of communities living in transitional spaces.

What does China’s rise mean for transnational civil society? What happens when global activist networks engage a powerful and norm-resistant new hegemon? This book combines detailed ethnographic research with cross-case comparisons to identify key factors underpinning variation in the results and processes of advocacy on a range of issues affecting both China and the world, including global warming, intellectual property rights, HIV/AIDS treatment, the use of capital punishment, suppression of the Falun Gong religious movement, and Tibetan independence. Built on an innovative blend of comparative and international theory, it advances a theory of “advocacy drift”—a process whereby the objectives and principled beliefs of activists are transformed through interaction with the Chinese state. The book is a timely reassessment of transnational civil society in the era of an ascendant China, and is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of civil society organizations.