Authoritarian populist parties have advanced in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Even small parties can still ...shift the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP's role in catalyzing Brexit. Drawing on new evidence, the book advances a general theory why the silent revolution in values triggered a backlash fuelling support for Authoritarian-Populist parties and leaders in the US and Europe. The conclusion highlights the dangers of this development and what could be done to mitigate the risks to liberal democracy.
Waiting for the Revolution to End explores the Syrian
revolution through the experiences of citizens in exile. Based on
more than three years of embedded fieldwork with Syrians displaced
in the ...border city of Gaziantep (southern Turkey), the book places
the Syrian revolution and its tragic aftermath under ethnographic
scrutiny. It charts the evolution from peaceful uprising (2011) to
armed confrontation (2012), descent into fully fledged conflict
(2013) and finally to proxy war (2015), to propose an understanding
of revolution beyond success and failure.
While the Assad regime remains in place, the Syrian revolution
( al-thawra ) still holds a transformational power that can
be located on intimate and world-making scales. Charlotte
Al-Khalili traces the unintended consequences of revolution and its
unexpected consequences to reveal the reshaping of Syrian
life-worlds and exiles' evolving theorizations, experiences and
imaginations of al-thawra. She describes the in-between
spatio-temporal realm inhabited by Syrians displaced to Turkey as
they await the revolution's outcomes, and maps the revolution's
multidimensional and multi-scalar effects on their everyday life.
By following the chronology of events inside Syria and Syrians'
geography of displacement, the book makes the relation between
revolution and displacement its centerpiece, both as an
ethnographic object and an analytical device.
Praise for Waiting for the Revolution to
End
' Waiting for the Revolution to End is essential reading
for scholars and students wanting to understand the temporal and
affective orientations at play in the aftermath of the Syrian
revolution. Al-Khalili presents a lucid ethnography of
revolutionary hopes, defeat, and displacement hereby offering a
sustained theoretical engagement with the social, political and
religious forces that undergird Syrian existence.' Andreas
Bandak, University of Copenhagen
'Although so much has been said about the Syrian revolution,
surprisingly little has been written about what it did to the
selves, hopes, and lives of those who joined it but were defeated.
Waiting for the Revolution to End is a very important and
urgently needed contribution that tells the story of the revolution
as it is understood by ordinary Syrians who turned into
revolutionaries by participating in the uprising from its
beginnings in 2011 and 2012, when the possibility of a non-violent
overcoming of a violent regime still appeared within reach. Writing
through the experience of living among displaced Syrians in
Gaziantep, Al-Khalili tells us something that political analyses
from above so often miss: the transformational power of
participation in the revolution, and the cosmogonic change it
effected in the minds and lives of people while they were
tragically defeated. Speaking of defeat rather than failure of
Syrian revolutionaries, Waiting for the Revolution to End
weaves a rich, emphatic, convincing, tragic yet also hopeful story
of the possibility of dignity.' Samuli Schielke,
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
'Charlotte Al-Khalili's stunning and moving ethnography is a
landmark in the study of revolution, social change and mobility.
Through an extraordinary portrayal of the lives, hopes and fears of
Syria's exiled revolutionaries in their "capital", Al-Khalili
transforms understandings of how migration shapes revolutionary
subjectivity, how grassroots revolutionary activists theorize
revolutionary outcomes, and how revolutionaries reorganize families
and networks to keep ideals of social transformation alive.'
Alice Wilson, University of Sussex
From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class
Life expectancy in the United States has ...recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year—and they're still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today's America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America.
This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism’s excesses and make it work for everyone.
Although there is no overt ideological battle in the twenty-first century, citizens in every latitude register growing dissatisfaction with the results delivered by their governments. In the West ...they increasingly turn to populist forces to seek an easy respite to the frustration caused by the failures of democracy. Other models of governance, such as China’s "autocratic capitalism", rest on technocratic command and control methods that are disdained in the West but whose global appeal is growing mostly due to their perceived ability to deliver. No matter how and where they are practised, these alternatives seem to offer only partial and unsatisfactory answers to increasingly complex questions of governance. In a world ravaged by pandemics and climate crises, migration flows and cyberwars, rigid rule-making imparted from above or populist over-simplifications brewing from below can only represent the extremes of a more sophisticated picture of governing processes. In this book, Fabrizio Tassinari seeks to rediscover the methods, practices and limits of good governance. By taking inspiration from the Nordic region, where democratic governance has delivered some of its most impressive feats, he shows that populism and technocracy are not the causes of our political malaise; they represent skewed by-products of the most basic instincts in our body politic. They need not be suppressed but channelled and reconciled in our practices of governing.
Following in the footsteps of an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt, Sherry Shenoda forges an imagined path through her ancestor's ...mummification and journey to the afterlife.
Whereabouts Carson, Edward
2021, 2021-08-02, Volume:
61
eBook
In this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereabouts powerfully ...charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the polemics of self and other.
Why did the Eurozone crisis prove to be so difficult to resolve? Why was it resolved in a manner in which some countries bore a much larger share of the pain than other countries? Why did no country ...leave the Eurozone rather than implement unprecedented austerity? Who supported and who opposed the different policy options in the crisis domestically, and how did the distributive struggles among these groups shape crisis politics? Building on macro-level statistical data, original survey data from interest groups, and qualitative comparative case studies, this book argues and shows that the answers to these questions revolve around distributive struggles about how the costs of the Eurozone crisis should be divided among countries, and among different socioeconomic groups within countries. Together with divergent but strongly held ideas about the “right way” to conduct economic policy and asymmetries in the distribution of power among actors, severe distributive concerns of important actors lie at the root of the difficulties of resolving the Eurozone crisis as well as the difficulties to substantially reform European Monetary Union (EMU). The book provides new insights into the politics of the Eurozone crisis by emphasizing three perspectives that have received scant attention in existing research: A comparative perspective on the Eurozone crisis by systematically comparing it to previous financial crises, an analysis of the whole range of policy options, including the ones not chosen, and a unified framework that examines crisis politics not just in deficit-debtor, but also in surplus-creditor countries.
Looking beyond Putin to understand how today's Russia actually works
Media and public discussion tends to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin's seeming omnipotence or ...Russia's unique history and culture. Yet Russia is remarkably similar to other autocracies—and recognizing this illuminates the inherent limits to Putin's power. Weak Strongman challenges the conventional wisdom about Putin's Russia, highlighting the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin on issues ranging from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy.
Drawing on three decades of his own on-the-ground experience and research as well as insights from a new generation of social scientists that have received little attention outside academia, Timothy Frye reveals how much we overlook about today's Russia when we focus solely on Putin or Russian exceptionalism. Frye brings a new understanding to a host of crucial questions: How popular is Putin? Is Russian propaganda effective? Why are relations with the West so fraught? Can Russian cyber warriors really swing foreign elections? In answering these and other questions, Frye offers a highly accessible reassessment of Russian politics that highlights the challenges of governing Russia and the nature of modern autocracy.
Rich in personal anecdotes and cutting-edge social science, Weak Strongman offers the best evidence available about how Russia actually works.
This book tells the dramatic story of the Wuhan lockdown in the voices of the city's own people. Using a vast archive of more than 6,000 diaries, the sociologist Guobin Yang vividly depicts how the ...city coped during the crisis.
