This book examines the fascinating interplay of party and media behavior to explain one of the most important phenomena in Western Europe: the rise of far-right parties. To account for the divergent ...electoral fortunes of these parties, the book examines how political parties and the mass media have dealt with growing public concerns over national identity. Mainstream politicians chose to 'play the nationalist card', creating opportunities for the entry of far-right parties into the political system. In some cases, the media gave outsized exposure to such parties, allowing them to capitalize on these opportunities; in other cases, they ignored them, blocking their entry into the political system. Using elite interviews, content analysis, and primary documents to trace identity politics since the 1980s, this book presents an original interpretation of identity politics and media behavior in Austria, Germany, Greece, and France since the 1980s.
Fare Well, Illyria Binder, David
2013, 20131110, 2013-11-01, 2013-01-11
eBook
As a reporter for the prestigious New York Times the author interviewed many of the leading political figures of the Balkans (Illyria). He also sought out the area's intellectuals, many of them ...critical of their leaders, and everyday people who provide a sense of daily life. He devotes a chapter to each ethnic group from Vlachs to Serbs, talks about their differences and similarities, and does so without giving offense. He also provides a short historical account of the various places he visits, which deepens our understanding of the local cultures.
Tiananmen moon Cunningham, Philip J
2014., 2014, 2014-05-05
eBook
This compelling book provides a vivid firsthand account of the student demonstrations and massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Uniquely placed as a Western observer drawn into active participation ...through Chinese friends in the uprising, Philip J Cunningham offers a remarkable day-by-day account of Beijing students desperately trying to secure the most coveted political real estate in China in the face of ever-more daunting government countermoves. Tiananmen Moon takes the reader into the thick of the 1989 protests while also following the parallel response of an unprepared but resourceful Western media. In this revised and expanded edition, Cunningham recounts rare vignettes about life in Tiananmen Square under student leadership, including previously unpublished material. There is an account of the Goddess of Democracy being unveiled, a whimsical trip to the countryside that ends up on a collision course with PLA troops readying for attack, the tale of a near riot when a reporter is mistaken for Gorbachev, the saga of a tearful leader who quits and dictates her last will and testament to the author, and a dramatic account of futile resistance in the face of an unforgiving crackdown. The book chronicles the opportunistic and awkward tango between naive student activists and jaded foreign journalists, in which, after a month of mutual courting, the tables turn and the now-savvy students watch the journalists, seduced and confused, run circles just trying to keep up. During the hunger strike under the light of a full moon, China bares its conflicted soul to the world, the mournful cry for reform amplified by the footsteps of a million peaceful marchers. This remarkable testament to a searing month that changed China forever serves as a witness to the rise and fall of an uprising, capturing the plaintive and lyrical beauty of a dream that endures and continues to haunt the country today.
The Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and ...establishment elite. For decades it kept a low profile even while it shaped policy, advised presidents, and helped shore up U.S. hegemony following the Second World War. In 1977, Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter published the first in-depth study of the CFR,Imperial Brain Trust, an explosive work that traced the activities and influence of the CFR from its origins in the 1920s through the Cold War.
Now, Laurence H. Shoup returns with this long-awaited sequel, which brings the story up to date.Wall Street's Think Tankfollows the CFR from the 1970s through the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present. It explains how members responded to rapid changes in the world scene: globalization, the rise of China, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the launch of a "War on Terror," among other major developments. Shoup argues that the CFR now operates in an era of "Neoliberal Geopolitics," a worldwide paradigm that its members helped to establish and that reflects the interests of the U.S. ruling class, but is not without challengers.Wall Street's Think Tankis an essential guide to understanding the Council on Foreign Relations and the shadow it casts over recent history and current events.
Sovereign Lives Edkins, Jenny; Shapiro, Michael J; Pin-Fat, Veronique
2004, 20121002, 2012-10-02, 20040101
eBook
For International Relations scholars, discussions of globalization inevitably turn to questions of sovereignty. How much control does a country have over its borders, people and economy? Where does ...that authority come from? Sovereign Lives explores these changes through reading of humanitarian intervention, human rights discourses, securitization, refugees, the fragmentation of identities and the practices of development.
The 1989-91 upheavals in Eastern Europe sparked a turbulent process of social and economic transition. Two decades on, with the global economic crisis of 2008-10, a new phase has begun. This book ...explores the scale and trajectory of the crisis through case studies of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia. The contributors focus upon the relationships between geopolitics, the world economy and class restructuring. The book covers the changing relationship between business and states; foreign capital flows; financialisation and asset price bubbles; austerity and privatisation; and societal responses, in the form of reactionary populism and progressive social movements. Challenging neoliberal interpretations that envisage the transition as a process of unfolding liberty, the dialectic charted in these pages reveals uneven development, attenuated freedoms and social polarisation.
This book focuses on regulatory challenges of creating and sustaining freedom of speech and freedom of information two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, in global, comparative context. Some ...chapters overview, others address specific issues, or describe country case studies. Instead of trying to provide an exhaustive assessment which in one volume might not reach deeper analyzes of contextual details, this book will shed light on and help better understanding of general challenges for freedom of speech and information through varying comparative examples and highlighting important regulatory questions.
Why do some political parties flourish, while others flounder? In this book, Meguid examines variation in the electoral trajectories of the new set of single-issue parties: green, radical right, and ...ethnoterritorial parties. Instead of being dictated by electoral institutions or the socioeconomic climate, as the dominant theories contend, the fortunes of these niche parties, she argues, are shaped by the strategic responses of mainstream parties. She advances a theory of party competition in which mainstream parties facing unequal competitors have access to a wider and more effective set of strategies than posited by standard spatial models. Combining statistical analyses with in-depth case studies from Western Europe, the book explores how and why established parties undermine niche parties or turn them into weapons against their mainstream party opponents. This study of competition between unequals thus provides broader insights into the nature and outcome of competition between political equals.
With the collapse of communism, a new world seemed to open for the peoples of East Central Europe. The possibilities this world presented, and the costs it exacted, have been experienced differently ...by men and women. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman explore these differences through a probing analysis of the role of gender in reshaping politics and social relations since 1989.
The authors raise two crucial questions: How are gender relations and ideas about gender shaping political and economic change in the region? And what forms of gender inequality are emerging as a result? The book provides a rich understanding of gender relations and their significance in social and institutional transformations. Gal and Kligman offer a systematic comparison of East Central European gender relations with those of western welfare states, and with the presocialist, bourgeois past. Throughout this essay, the authors attend to historical comparisons as well as cross regional interactions and contrasts. Their work contributes importantly to the study of postsocialism, and to the broader feminist literature that critically examines how states and political-economic processes are gendered, and how states and markets regulate gender relations.
