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This monograph discusses the concept of solidarity. Using Germany as a case study, the book investigates how political actors – political parties in specific – use the term solidarity in their programmatic documents. It maps out the attitudes, features, and behaviors that the parties continuously denote as expressions of solidarity and reconstructs the generalized concept of solidarity held by each party. It categorizes earlier ideas of solidarity into micro and macro perspectives and uses both theoretical and empirical considerations to build a model of solidarity and identify the elements that make solidarity what it is.Departing from the typical procedure in intellectual history research, this volume takes inspiration from Wittgenstein, starting with the language and tracing it back to its historical setting. Thus, it avoids the trap of speaking of only one meaning of solidarity and allows for more attuned analysis of the differences in understanding the concept. Furthermore, it links the scientific study of the concept of solidarity with research on political competition, and – in broader sense – political theory and party politics research. Closing the gap in scientific coverage of the concept of solidarity, this book will be of interest to students and researchers studying political theory, political sociology, political philosophy, political history, and political parties.

This book examines the Europeanisation of party politics in Malta. It evaluates the influence of Europeanisation on the political system, which is based on two party-system, polarisation, and clientelism. Malta is the smallest European Union (EU) member state, which joined the EU in 2004. The road toward membership was fraught with contentious and emotionally charged debates. This book explores the relationship between Maltese political parties and the EU, the politicisation and framing of the European Union by political parties, and the impact of the European Union on Malta's political system. The book further discusses more contentious recent events which made headlines at the EU level, including the Panama Papers scandals, the Individual Investment Programme, and the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. The book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science and international relations interested in a better understanding ofelectoral studies, Europeanisation, European integration, as well as the Maltese political system, and party politics.

This book uses an innovative interdisciplinary approach to explain how communication is a necessary condition for diplomacy in a digital and relationship-driven world. Divided into three parts, it highlights the importance of communication strategies and processes in contemporary society and in current global socio-political events in general, particularly within the field of diplomacy. The first part discusses the main theoretical debates that shaped the central concepts of the project, while the second part of the book presents further practical approaches and examples of diplomatic practice. Lastly, the third part focuses on pedagogical and methodological approaches, which can be useful in diplomacy and communication classes and for the implementation of a European curriculum. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to students, researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners from various disciplines, including international relations, political science,business, and communication.

This handbook presents the roots of symbolic racism as partly in both anti-black antagonism and non-racial conservative attitudes and values, representing a new form of racism independent of older racial and political attitudes. By doing so, it homes in on certain historical incidents and episodes and presents a cogent analysis of anti-black, Jim Crowism, anti-people of color (Black, Latino, Native Americans), and prejudice that exists in the United States and around the world as a central tenet of racism. The book exposes the reader to the nature and practice of stereotyping, negative bias, social categorization, modern forms of racism, immigration law empowerment, racialized incarceration, and police brutality in the American heartland. It states that several centuries of white Americans'negative socializing culture marked by widespread negative attitudes toward African Americans, are not eradicated and are still rife. Further, the book provides a panoramic view of trends of racial discrimination and other negative and desperate challenges that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color face across the world. Finally, the volume examines xenophobia, racism, prejudice, and stereotyping in different contexts, including topics such as Covid-19, religion and racism, information manipulation, and populism. The book, therefore, is a must-read for students, researchers, and scholars of political science, psychology, history, sociology, communications/media studies, diplomatic studies, and law in general, as well as ethnic and racial studies, American politics, global affairs, populism, and discrimination in particular.

Both historically and conceptually, patriotism has been one of the foundational characteristics that defines the very essence of one's attachment, identification and loyalty to a political community and a basic virtue associated with citizenship as a political conception of the person. Despite its centrality in the pantheon of political ideals, patriotism remains a contested concept and an elusive virtue as well as a source of potential conflicts and violence. The Handbook of Patriotism (the first reference work of its kind) brings together a set of contributions by some of the leading authors on the main themes and concepts associated with this area of scholarly research. Each chapter provides a comprehensive coverage of a particular aspect of this complex, and controversial, social phenomenon. The handbook provides a clear and authoritative exposition of key contemporary conceptions of patriotism, discusses the justification and the motivational impulses associated with patriotism, and examines some of the different ideas most commonly associated with one's attachment, identification and loyalty to a political community. At the same time, it covers a number of basic concepts associated with the ‘standard'analysis of patriotism, e.g. civic friendship, solidarity, associative duties, civic virtue, loyalty, pride, responsibility, courage etc. It also presents some of the concepts that were previously lef outside its gravitational orbit, e.g. federalism, religion, taxation and the economy.

Today, cities are being intensively reshaped by unexpected dynamics. The rise and growth of the digital economy have fundamentally changed the relationship between the urban fabric and its resident community, overcoming the conventional hierarchy based on production priorities. Moreover, contemporary society discovers new labour conditions and ways of satisfying needs and desires by developing new synergies and links. This book examines cultural and urban commons from a multidisciplinary perspective. Economists, architects, urban planners, sociologists, designers, political scientists, and artists explore the impact and implications of cultural commons on urban change. The contributions discuss both cases of successful urban participation and cases of strong social conflict, while also addressing a host of institutional contradictions and dilemmas. The first part of the book examines urban commons in response to institutional constraints from a theoretical point of view. The second and third parts apply the theories to case studies and discuss various practices of sustainable planning and re-appropriation in the urban context. In closing, the fourth part develops a new urban agenda as artists imagine it. This book will appeal to scholars interested in the social, economic and institutional implications of cultural and urban commons, and provide useful insights and tools to help local governments and policymakers manage social, cultural and economic change.

Contemporary Mexico faces a complex crisis of violence and insecurity with high levels of impunity and the lack of an effective rule of law. These weaknesses in the rule of law are multidimensional and involve elements of institutional design, the specific content of the laws, particularities of political competition and a culture of legality in a country with severe social inequalities. This book discusses necessary institutional and legal reforms to develop the rule of law in a context of democratic, social and economic transformations. The chapters are organized to address: 1) The concept of the ‘rule of law'and its measurement; 2) The fragility of the ‘rule of law'in Mexico; 3) Structural reforms and implementation challenges; 4) Social exclusion and the culture of legality. The book addresses decision-makers, civil servants, consultants, scholars, lecturers, and students focusing on public policy, rule of law, sociology of law, legislative studies and practice,impunity, and areas of political philosophy. • The book presents an interdisciplinary and integrated approach for understanding the rule of law in Mexico, taking into account national particularities, the regional context and global comparisons.• Chapters discuss recent institutional reforms in Mexico from a critical point of view and explore possible next steps to achieve effective implementation.• This book addresses the links between a weak rule of law and social phenomena like insecurity, violence, corruption and democratic deficits.

This book investigates the professional needs and training requirements of an ever-changing public service workforce in Australia and the United Kingdom. It explores the nature of future roles, the types of skills and competencies that will be required and how organisations might recruit, train and develop public servants for these roles. Leading international research - practitioners make recommendations for how local organisations can equip future public servants with the skills and professional capacities for these shifting professional demands, and the skillsets they will require. Drawing on ideas that have been developed in the Australian and UK context, the book delves into the major themes involved in re-imagining the public service workforce and the various forms of capacities and capabilities that this entails. It then explores delivery of this future vision, and its implications in terms of development, recruitment and strategy.

Political Science Abstracts is an annual supplement to the Political Science, Government, and Public Policy Series of The Universal Reference System, which was first published in 1967. All back issues are still available.

Political Science Abstracts is an annual supplement to the Political Science, Government, and Public Policy Series of The Universal Reference System, which was first published in 1967. All previous volumes are still available.

Language policies are increasingly acknowledged as being a necessary component of many decisions taken in the areas of the labor market, education, minority languages, mobility, and social inclusion of migrants. They can affect the democratic control of political organizations, and they can either entrench or reduce inequalities. These are the central topics of this book. Economists, philosophers, political scientists, and sociolinguists discuss – from an interdisciplinary perspective – the distributive socio-economic effects of language policies, their impact on justice and inequality at the national or international level, as well as the connection between language choices and an inclusive access to public services. The range of social and economic issues raised by linguistic diversity in contemporary societies is large, and this requires new approaches to tackle them. This book provides new input to design better, more efficient, and fair language policies in order to manage linguistic diversity in different areas. Topics covered include: theoretical models of linguistic justice and linguistic disadvantage; the assessment of the socio-economic consequences of language policies; the evaluation of the costs, benefits, and degree of inclusion of language planning measures; the politics of migrants'linguistic integration; as well as multilingualism and economic activities. These topics are discussed in different contexts, including the areas inhabited by linguistic minorities, cities receiving migrants, and supranational organizations.

This book studies the impact of cleavages on electoral choices. Based on a case study of Switzerland, it analyses how cleavages divide voters into voting blocs and how this influences Swiss voting behaviour and the Swiss party system. The first part examines the development of salient cleavages such as religion, social class, rural-urban, and language between 1971 and 2011. Behavioural changes among voters and changes in the size of social groups are explored as explanatory factors for the decline of cleavage voting. The second part proposes a contextual perspective analysis of the current impact of cleavages using both individual and contextual factors. These factors are also combined to examine interaction effects between the individual and the context. Finally, the third part analyses whether the impact of cleavages has harmonised across different contexts (Swiss cantons) over time.

This book examines the methodological problems of accounting for the dead in armed conflicts as well as how the process itself is open to manipulation and controversy. Inspired by the work of the International Practitioner Network of casualty recording organizations, the book features thematic analysis, case studies and historical discussion on the use of the body count towards political, humanitarian and military ends.The book begins with a strategic analysis of the body count that introduces a general discussion on the measurement of war violence; its treatment by the media, humanitarian organizations, governments and the military; and its legal and political implications. It then examines the accounting for civilian war casualties in past and future conflicts, investigates the way the International Committee of the Red Cross has dealt with the issue of missing persons and the identification of dead bodies in armed conflicts and explores the role of statistics in aid policydebates, especially in regards to humanitarian workers.Next, the book details the field of casualty recording as practiced by civil society organizations, with insights from a study of 40 practitioners. It also features narrative case studies that detail the ways human losses were documented during recent conflicts in Northeastern India (2006-2009) and Croatia (1991-1995). In addition, one case study looks at the usefulness of casualty recording in engaging policymakers on the impacts of particular technologies of violence.This book offers an insightful investigation into violence, statistics and the politics of accounting for the dead. It will appeal to a broad audience of policy-makers, human rights activists, humanitarian practitioners as well as academics.

Histories of Transnational Crime provides a broad, historical framework for understanding the developments in research of transnational crime over the centuries. This volume provides examples of transnational crime, and places them in a broad historical context, which has so far been missing from this field of study. The contributions to this comprehensive volume explore the causes and historical precursors of six main types of transnational crime: -piracy -human smuggling -arms trafficking -drug trafficking -art and antique trafficking -corporate crime. The historical contributions demonstrate that transnational crime is not a novel phenomenon of recent globalization and that, beyond organized crime groups, powerful individuals, governments and business corporations have been heavily involved. Through a systematic historical and contextual analysis of these types of transnational crime, the contributions to this volume provide a fundamental understanding of why and how variousforms of transnational crime are still present in the contemporary world. In the past two decades, the study of transnational crime has developed from a subset of the study of organized crime to its own recognized field of study, covering distinct societal threats and requiring a particular approach.

This book has two mutually reinforcing aims/parts. The first aim is to contribute to a more productive debate between different theoretical standpoints. There is surprisingly little theoretical and conceptual debate in this burgeoning field, which is one major reason for the failure to fully grasp the diversity of today's interregionalism. Too often theorists speak past each other, without really engaging with alternative theoretical perspectives or competing research results. Indeed, this book constitutes the first systematic attempt to bring together leading theories and theorists of interregionalism. Leading scholars from around the world develop their own distinctive theoretical perspectives on interregionalism, with a particular emphasis on the dynamic relationship between regionalism and interregionalism. These highly acclaimed theorists have all been associated over the years with a variety of disciplines, institutions, schools and debates and so bring a rich set of insights andconnections to this pioneering project. The second part of the book ‘unpacks'and problematises the region, the driving actors and institutions that are engaged in interregional relations. There is a strong tendency in the field to treat regions as coherent units actors in an interregional relationship, and such simplified notions about ‘regions'and ‘regional organisations'necessarily result in superficial and misleading understandings of interregionalism. This part of the book connects the theoretical discussion in the first part with a manageable empirical object.

This brief fills a gap in the studies of organized crime in Mexico (Kan 2012, Ríos 2011, Dell 2011) by documenting and mapping the post-2008 assassination of Mexican border police chiefs. It traces out a “systematic” of law-enforcement assassination in Northern Tier Mexico, showing how the selective, often sequential, hits by cartels on chiefs in border towns and along key drug-trafficking corridors has proven an effective strategy by organized crime elements to serve several goals: (1) to retaliate for federal, state and local prosecution, (2) to try and neutralize police chiefs, (3) to achieve intermittent local governance and/or to seed corrupt police chiefs at the municipal level, and, (4) to reduce local governmental capacity to obtain greater freedom for movement of goods. It is argued that the tactical advantage of organized crime elements gives them relatively easy physical access to law enforcement targets and thus is thus one prime element facilitating the use of assassination as a strategy. U.S. and Mexican legal, political and judicial institutions have not been able to adequately restrict opportunity for law-enforcement assassinations. The inability to reduce access to weapons and officials, to increase security for police personnel, to reduce corruption and punish offenders sets the stage for the assassination of local law enforcement. Yet, it is the goals of organized crime elements (to clear drug-smuggling routes and to try and gain more pliant governance at the municipal level) that ultimately motivate such killings.

Political Science Abstracts is an annual supplement to the Political Science, Government, and Public Policy Series of The Universal Reference System, which was first published in 1967. All back issues are still available.

How do small states approach their security problems? What types of strategic instruments exist for small states, and when and why are certain strategies chosen rather than others? The security of `weak'states is problematic, demanding trade-offs in the decisions made. Using 19th century Swedish security policy as an example, it is argued here that small states, in their pursuit of security and autonomy, face a dilemma between abandonment and entrapment, leading to a choice between balancing between great powers or making an approach to one of them. This hard choice confronts both non-aligned and allied states. It is also argued that a focus on the images of decision makers is required as a complement to traditional realist theory in order to gain an in-depth understanding of small state security decisions. This book is special in its focus on small, non-aligned states. Most studies on balance-of-power behaviour limit their analysis to alignment decisions. The study also expands the domain of image constructs by introducing perceived regime characteristics into the analysis, besides images of power and intentions. Audience: Scholars and students interested in foreign policy analysis, particularly small-state behaviour. The book points to the importance of beliefs and ideas in security policy.

The pursuit for better governance has assumed center stage in developmental discourse as well as reform initiatives of all organizations working for the public welfare, and includes such issues as service delivery and responding to citizens'needs and demands. In the era of globalization, multilevel and new modes of governance are changing the traditional governance models of nation states, accelerated by technological innovation, rising citizen expectation, policy intervention from international and multilateral donor communities, and the hegemony of western ideology imposed on many developing nations. However, a universally accepted and agreed upon definition of'governance'still remains elusive. There is no consensus or agreement as to what would be the nature and form of governance and public administration. The question that is raised: Is there a universal governance mechanism that fits in all contexts or governance mechanisms should be based on home grown ideas?One can see various programs and policies of reforms and reorganizations in public administration in the developing countries, but these efforts have not been effective to address the challenging issues of economic development, employment generation, poverty reduction, ensuring equality of access to public services, maintaining fairness and equity, security and safety of citizens, social cohesion, democratic institution building, ensuring broader participation in the decision making process, and improving the quality of life. Therefore, there is a widespread concern for better governance or sound governance to bridge the gap between theory and practice, making this book of interest to academics as well as policy-makers in global public administration.

This unique book investigates the implications of the rising importance of supra-national regional organizations for global governance in general, and for the United Nations, in particular. It touches upon issues such as regional representation at the UN, high-level dialogues with regional organisations, as well as the coordination of UN member states'voting behaviour in the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council. The book further explores the regional dimension and coordination of UN operations in areas such as peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development. The contributions to the book are both in-depth chapters and shorter viewpoints, written by a combination of academics, policy-makers at regional organizations, and experts from international think tanks. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of global governance.

The study of power is the nucleus of political science and international relations. As a shift of power from traditional industrial countries to emerging powers has been perceived since the turn of the century, this book aims to present innovative theoretical and empirical approaches that can increase our understanding of this transition. Scholars from the fields of international relations, international political economy, economics and security studies not only explore current theoretical debates on ‘power'and ‘power shifts'among entities, but also provide fresh insights into relevant aspects of international power in the 21st century. With a particular focus on aspects of international security, trade and production, new methods of identifying power and its sources are presented, and their potential implications and challenges are discussed.

In recent years, the concept of environmental security has been adapted to include preparedness for acts of ecoterrorism. This latter term has now become synonymous with environmental terrorism where the perpetrator uses the environment as a weapon to harm an opponent. The intended outcome is usually large-scale deaths, severe damage to the environment, and instilling fear in the general population. This book explores various facets of ecoterrorism including the role of the state in pursuing and maintaining environmental security, a review of the concept of ecoterrorism, food security challenges and weaknesses, technological countermeasures to enable rapid detection or response, and existing pollution sources and hazards that may serve as targets for terrorist acts. In sum, this volume provides a useful overview for both the layperson and experienced researchers.