Search Results

Ancient Greece comprised 1000 or so political entities at any time between about 600 and 300 BC. Wars between the Greek citizen-states were pretty much endemic, the most notorious and destructive being the so-called ‘Peloponnesian War’ between Sparta and Athens and their respective allies (431–404). This chapter explores the nature of Greek interstate and international warfare, and unpacks the Greeks' ideas and vocabulary of surrender, with special reference to the relationship between man-made laws and overarching religious sanctions. Four case-studies, drawn from the Atheno-Spartan Peloponnesian War and its immediate aftermath, illustrate the spectrum of behaviours from brutal reprisals including outright legal enslavement to the Western world's first general amnesty.

This chapter discusses the aggregate efforts for global public goods. Global public goods requiring aggregate efforts are particularly susceptible to free riding. This means that success depends on the efforts of all countries regardless of whether a country is incapable of helping or the strongest country is capable to doing. Global public goods likewise depend on the total efforts of all countries. Presently, global climate change mitigation is the most important global public good that requires aggregate efforts especially in the reduction of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. If any country were able to reduce it then whole countries would benefit, but not at the same levels and amounts.

This chapter provides a critical introduction to the problem of disengagement between governments and citizens. It looks at different arguments for reforming the scope and approach adopted by the state and explains why the way forward has to be through more effective state-citizen cooperation. It also gives a general outline of the three parts of the book. The first part examines the theoretical background and recent development of state-citizen cooperation to find out why more attention should be given to advance it; how its impact should be judged; and what makes it distinctive and complementary to other proposals on improving democratic governance. The second part reviews policies and strategies that have been tried out in different parts of the world to enable citizens and state institutions to work together in an informed and collaborative manner in defining and pursuing the public good. The final part considers how various underlying barriers to effective state-citizen cooperation can be overcome, with reference to specific case examples.

The focus of this chapter is the Church–state–citizen relations from the 1950s to 2004, looking at how the Church leadership emerged as the mediator between Coptic citizenry and the state. It argues that the diversification of centers of power has complicated this pact and made it both more ambiguous. This chapter also addresses the marginalization of Copts in civil and political society, starting with Nasser’s policies of centralization, and the Islamization of political space from the 1970s.

While employment regulation is clearly lagging behind the development of insecure employment practices, as Silke Bothfeld and Sigrid Betzelt's chapter indicates, social protection policy is shoring up their expansion. In reconsidering the decommodifying effects of social policy in the contemporary work-welfare nexus, the authors’ use of the concept of ‘autonomy’ provides an alternative means to establish the impact of changes in a state-citizen relations located in the rise of ‘activation’ policies, and the primacy now accorded to full labour market participation. In a cross-national European comparison, their focus is the nature and form of activation policies and how these affect individual autonomy, measured by quality, status differentiation and user participation in the process of employment-related social security reform. In their overview of labour market deregulation, changes to active labour market policies and unemployment benefit schemes, the analysis demonstrates a general decline in both the quality and security afforded by employment; a trend that is accelerated by both the policy push for maximum participation and the demise of the ‘core worker’ as a referent of standards.

The introduction starts with what many have seen as a worrying paradox: the illiberal turn that liberal democracies have taken with, or perhaps because of, popular support. While commentators have focused on ‘why’ liberal democracy has taken an illiberal turn, the book proposes an alternative starting point that focuses on the ‘how’ and the ‘what’: what democracy means to some of Britain’s most marginalized citizens in the first place and how these citizens engage with the state. It is by shifting the analytical focus to these questions that a more encompassing legacy of state coercion than commonly acknowledged in narratives of the punitive turn can be brought into focus, as well as the possibility of its critique and subversion. The introduction sets out council estates as a historical and ethnographic setting for such a project, outlines the methodology, and introduces the anthropological framework at the core of the book.

Continuing the discussion of Church–state–citizen relations into the late-2000s, this chapter looks at the power struggles and rising tensions between the Church leadership and the state and the SSI. With sectarian attacks increasing, it discusses state security attempts to contain Pope Shenouda III, his dwindling bargaining power, and his return to methods of dissent and protest that employed in the 1970s. It also discusses resistance among Coptic civil actors.

This chapter studies working-class nationalism and antisemitism in post-war Poland. It argues that in early post-war Poland, citizen–state relations expressed themselves in part through national identity. In this context, antisemitism took on new meaning in Poland because it became not only an expression of fears about national identity and cultural vulnerability, but also a means of defining the state and citizenship. Thus, national identity paradoxically sharpened as Poland approached homo-ethnicity. Before and during the war, Polish workers had expressed a strong national consciousness, and post-war reconstruction invoked national themes. The professed class nature of the new state, however, and the practical concerns of the workers eventually made allegiance to the state a central issue. That allegiance was potentially based not just upon prosperity or nationalism, but upon agreement with certain programmes and policies of the communist regime.

This first chapter introduces the main premises and ideas for the book. It begins by outlining three challenges that need to be addressed in any defence of toleration and traditional liberalism: The Multicultural Challenge, The Despotism Challenge, and The Neutrality Challenge. The chapter argues for an understanding of toleration that is justified through freedom, and applies this to diversity in its broadest sense—that is, not simply cultural or belief-dependent. It introduces the idea of toleration as permissive, and grounds its understanding in traditional liberalism. The importance of distinguishing between different agents of toleration is drawn out—in this case, the state or the citizen. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the role of principles in political theory.