Political Science and International Studies (R0)

This book adopts a regional approach to understanding 2020 presidential election outcomes, taking into account the tribalism that has come to define contemporary US politics and building a path to 270 Electoral College votes. The authors employ qualitative and quantitative methods to examine electoral outcomes in the Midwest, Southwest, Southeast, and Northeast, enriching contextual understandings of the national results and illuminating nuances in public opinion, voter behavior, and party politics. From this foundation, the book offers a comprehensive assessment of prominent issues in the 2020 campaign, which fundamentally shaped and reshaped the nature of the election. Scholars examine seven key issues, including multiple crises that unfolded during the campaign, to understand how these issues affected public opinion and the 2020 campaign.

This fully updated third-edition of Contemporary Peacemaking is a state of the art overview of peacemaking in relation to contemporary civil wars. It examines best (and worst) practice in relation to peace processes and peace accords. The contributing authors are a mix of leading academics and practitioners with expert knowledge of a wide arrays of cases and techniques. The book provides a mix of theory and concept-building along with insights into ongoing cases of peace processes and post-accord peacebuilding. The chapters make clear that peacemaking is a dynamic field, with new practices in peacemaking techniques, changes to the international peace support architecture, and greater awareness of key issues such as gender and development after peace accords. The book is mindful of the intersection between top-down and bottom-up approaches to peace and how formal and institutionalized peace accords need to be lived and enacted by communities on the ground.

This book proposes a unified approach to populism that sees it as a primarily rhetorical concept. Populism is on the rise worldwide with both populist leaders and movements gaining power, and the term “populism” resounds in political debate, journalism, and scholarship. Populism as a phenomenon seems to instantiate perennial issues besetting rhetoric (e.g., the charges of manipulation, exclusive reliance on opinion over knowledge, and abuse of emotional appeals), yet relatively little research on populism has emerged from the discipline of rhetoric. This volume investigates the theory and practice of populism under the heading of rhetoric but as an interdisciplinary effort involving scholars in rhetoric as well as neighbouring disciplines such as political science and sociology. Seven case studies covering Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, UK, USA, and Venezuela offer conceptual discussions as well as close analyses applying both historical and theoretical approaches. In the introduction, the editors outline the problem of populism and their project, presenting the book’s wide-spanning case-based explorations. In an afterword they seek to distil a “minimal” rhetorical definition of populism. The claim or pretense to speak for “the people” emerges as the feature that connects the highly diverse instances studied in the book—and populisms in general, the editors hypothesize. They argue that this prevalent rhetorical move, often glossed over as unremarkable and banal, is in principle more debatable and deserving of more vigilant scrutiny than usually assumed.

This book examines the progress of institutionalisation of evaluation in American countries from various perspectives. It presents prior developments and current states of evaluation in 11 American countries and three transnational organisations, focusing on three dimensions, namely the political, social and professional systems. These detailed country reports, which have been written by selected researchers and authors of the respective countries, lead to a concluding comparison and synthesis. This is the second of four volumes of the compendium The Institutionalisation of Evaluation. The first volume on Europe was published in 2020. It will be followed by two more volumes on Asia Pacific, and Africa. The overall aim is to provide an interdisciplinary audience with cross-country learning to enable them to better understand the institutionalisation of evaluation in different nations, world regions and sectors. 

This book challenges the current thinking and strategies in the field of global peace and security. It is clear that current global public and private institutions are inadequate for the challenges we face today. These challenges cut across borders and require a more coordinated and concerted effort to find workable solutions. This book therefore begins with the question of global leadership and works its way back to the interconnected dynamics of global modernity and conflict. It is divided into four parts, each addressing a fundamental challenge to global peace and security. By exploring how we break out of the current framework, in which we understand global activities and the distribution of resources, and this book provides new ways of understanding the material, cultural, political, and spiritual relations that form the basis of international society.

This book considers the state of Czech democracy, following the rise of authoritarian regimes in Poland and Hungary and the ascent of billionaire oligarch Andrej Babiš to the office of prime minister of the Czech Republic, leading to concerns about conflict of interest. The authors argue that civic values, such as tolerance, respect for the equality of people, and readiness to play by the rules of the political game, are key factors in determining whether the Czech Republic will maintain its democracy in the coming years. The book employs a broad perspective, bringing together insights from political science, sociology, cultural studies, and other disciplines to analyse changes in the democracy of the Czech Republic since 1989, taking into consideration various dimensions of civic values, including politics, gender inequality, film, and the media.

Hateful thoughts and words can lead to harmful actions like the March 2019 terrorist attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. In free, open and democratic societies, governments cannot justifiably regulate what citizens think, feel, believe or value, but do have a duty to protect citizens from harmful communication that incites discrimination, active hostility and violence.

Written by a public policy advisor for fellow practitioners in politics and public life, this book discusses significant practical and moral challenges regarding internet governance and freedom of speech, particularly when responding to content that is legal but harmful. Policy makers and professionals working for governmental institutions need to strike a fair balance between protecting from harm and preserving the right to freedom of expression. And because merely passing laws does not solve complex social problems, governments need to invest, not just regulate. Governments, big tech and the private sector, civil society, individual citizens and the fourth estate all have roles to play, and counter-speech is everyone’s responsibility.

This book tackles hard questions about internet governance, hate speech, cancel culture and the loss of civility, and illustrates principled pragmatism applied to perplexing policy problems. Furthermore, it presents counter-speech strategies as alternatives and complements to censorship and criminalisation.

This book contributes to the literature on the EU’s role in the international system by engaging with the debates on global actorness and mapping new conceptual and theoretical avenues to better understand how agency and power are exerted at the global and regional levels, in a context of increased contestation of the international liberal order. Organised around three main lines, the book first looks at how the EU positions itself internationally in different policy areas, providing a multi-dimensional reading of EU policies, instruments, and practices; secondly, it engages with the EU’s own perspective toward its regional contexts and with the perspectives of regional actors on the EU; and, thirdly, it explores non-European perspectives on EU actorness, as the way the EU is perceived by others in this system of contested leadership is central to how it is understood in terms of policies, instruments, and overall capability to lead and act as a global power.

By analyzing the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) contribution to peacebuilding, this book aims to show how international bureaucracies develop knowledge and thereby come to matter on the world stage. Portraying UNEP as an open system, it explores how a growing understanding within the Programme of how environmental degradation shapes insecurities and vice versa has motivated its work on peacebuilding. The theoretical part of this book addresses knowledge, open systems, and knowledge creation. It then presents a historical discussion of UNEP’s development in an open system context. Finally, it investigates how knowledge emergence on the linkage between the environment, conflicts, and insecurities influenced UNEP’s interests and its work on environmental peacebuilding.

This book aspires to face the challenge of analyzing with due academic rigor, always in the paradigm of security and advanced sciences, but without forgetting the ethical questions that our world raises every day. The work is divided into two main sections: the first section is focused on the cyber world, with not only technical but also legal derivations given the expansion of vulnerabilities and our technological dependence. The second section, with a more interdisciplinary nature, runs through undeniably topical issues such as territorial problems and the potential decline of the traditional States, the communicational impact of information management and false news, or the commitment to essential freedoms for the West.

This book connects advanced technologies and ethical issues and includes discussions on recent crises such as COVID-19. It also provides an interdisciplinary view on the ethical issues for security technologies.

This volume employs a comparative approach to cast light on representation and representative processes from a communications perspective. It focuses on online constituency communication, aiming to provide a perspective from which to empirically study the changes taking place in the relationship between citizens and their representatives. The (hyper)mediatisation of politics and society is here considered a relevant enabling factor, because it creates the conditions leading to change in the nature of democratic processes. The chapters discuss Podemos, the Lega, Law and Justice, and the Five-star Movement as good examples of this phenomenon.

Populist and nationalist forces have emerged as bottom-up and top-down entities aiming to embody the will of the people, or to push for democratic processes to be more inclusive. Until now, however, the intersection between populist and nationalist discourses and the related question of representation have been largely ignored. By analysingthe transformations that have taken place in MPs’ communication practices in non-election periods, the contributors illuminate how social media is affecting MPs’ communication and examine the strains in the relationship between executives and legislatures that populist and nationalist parties exploit.

From 2015, Europe was hit by a new wave of terrorist attacks, coordinated or supported by an international Islamist organization (ISIS) but sometimes also perpetrated by citizens of the targeted country: the attacks on Paris, Brussels, London, Manchester, Nice and Barcelona probably attracted most attention but the most dramatic were perpetrated in Paris, in January and November 2015. These events shook the foundations of French society not only because of their magnitude but also because of the symbolic nature of the targets. Whilst in January, the targets were carefully selected as emblematic of France (the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the police forces, the Jewish community) and of European liberal values (journalists and cartoonists), in November the victims ordinary people enjoying music, sports and restaurants. The book offers a unique interdisciplinary investigation into the complex responses of French society: from the individual level (survivors of the Bataclan attack, emotional citizens paying homage to the victims, French Muslims) to the meso level of civic association and web communities, and the macro level of the State and public opinion.

This book offers a systematic and far-reaching account of party system institutionalization in Western Europe. Drawing upon a wide array of data and through a comparison of 20 countries from the end of WWII to 2019 across three arenas of party competition (electoral, parliamentary, and governmental ones), the empirical analysis shows that, over the past decade, the level of institutionalization in the Western European party systems has dramatically declined compared with previous decades. Electoral, parliamentary, and – in some cases – governmental instability and unpredictability have reached record-high levels. Although the impact of the 2008 Great Recession has certainly worked as a catalyst, this process of de-institutionalization has been mainly driven by long-term factors, such as cleavage decline and length of democratic experience. Moreover, its consequences are relevant not only for the relationship between parties and voters, but also for the very quality of democracy, asparty system deinstitutionalization causes a decline in the citizens’ satisfaction of the way democracy works and even an erosion of the ‘objective’ democratic standards. In a nutshell, Western Europe, once seen as the land of stability and the cradle of democracy, may have become the land of party system deinstitutionalization and incipient democratic backsliding. 

The fifth volume of the Interdisciplinary European Studies series aims to explore the EU’s pursuit of societal resilience and its role in the transition to a green economy. It brings together scholars from economics, law, and political science to provide insights related to climate change and the protection of the environment, the role of innovation in the green economy, resilience of national public health systems after the COVID-19 pandemic, regulatory resilience in the face of financial instability, and immigration. All chapters are based on up-to-date research, succinct assessment of the current state of affairs, and ongoing debates. They conclude with policy recommendations for decision-makers on European and national levels.
Legal Preconditions for an Environmentally Sustainable European Union” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

China and Russia have grown progressively closer over the last two decades, yielding a China-Russia “axis” uniquely capable of challenging the United States and of revising key aspects of the international order. Although the scholarly literature has offered detailed descriptions and various ad hoc explanations of this trend, the Sino-Russian bilateral relationship has been the subject of very little scrutiny using rigorous theory, which has precluded the formation of logically coherent and empirically supported explanations for increasing China-Russia cooperation. Moreover, the cooperative post-Cold War trend in the bilateral relationship is puzzling for each of the major paradigms of international relations theory: realism, constructivism and liberalism. This volume brings together leading IR scholars from various theoretical perspectives, as well as theoretically-informed experts in Chinese and Russian foreign policy. The chapters develop and apply nuanced theoretical arguments to derive testable hypotheses for the cooperative trend in China-Russia relations. In contrast to existing scholarship, the book offers generalizable insights that both improve our understanding of a crucially important contemporary case, while also advancing IR theory in substantial ways.

This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary and international revaluation of Friedrich Engels as much more than “junior partner” to Karl Marx or “second fiddle” in the Marxist orchestra. The nineteen critical essays in this collection are the work of scholars from Germany, USA, UK, Italy, China, India, Mexico and the Philippines. Together they present and evaluate archival material and scholarly commentary that covers epistemology, political economy, political theory, gender studies, cultural studies, political geography, philosophy of social science and sociological studies of class-conflict. Students, activists and specialists will find fresh consideration of familiar works, such as The Condition of the Working Class in England, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and The Dialectics of Nature. They will also be able to explore Engels’s less familiar pamphleteering, literary criticism and political commentary through detailed contextualization andcareful analysis. Friedrich Engels for the 21^st Century: Perspectives and Problems is unique in putting different intellectual and political receptions of Engels’s work into productive conversation, particularly from non-Anglophone scholars, translated here into English. Readers will appreciate why Engels has been so widely celebrated some two hundred years after his birth.  

This volume discusses Korea’s role as a middle power in the midst of the 21^st century global power shift. Focusing on Korea’s middle power diplomacy from the perspective of coalition building, the book discusses structural factors that shape middle power strategy and diplomacy. Written by leading Korean researchers, the chapters use diverse methodologies to offer a range of perspectives on Korea’s place in the developing global order. Topics discussed include South Korea’s approach to technology policy in the midst of US-China cyber competition, the East Asian ‘Thucydides Trap’, MITKA and middle power diplomacy, Korea’s role in the South China Sea dispute, and South Korean cyber security. Providing a unique treatment of middle power opportunities and motivations in the East Asia region, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, Asian politics, diplomacy, security studies, and global governance.

This book explores how international sanctions on Iran reshaped the contours of East Asia’s interactions with the Middle Eastern state. Almost all East Asian political entities, from the industrialized and developed nations of Japan and South Korea, to the communist and developing countries of China and North Korea, have become major international partners of Iran over the past several decades. In addition, East Asian states were, by and large, thought to be among leading foreign beneficiaries of Iran sanctions, and the overall impacts of sanctions in transforming both the scope and size of their rather multifaceted connections to the Middle Eastern country have been consequential.

Despite its significance, academic studies about this topic have remained sparse and scattered. This book aims to partially fill that research lacuna by surveying all relevant information and data available in the archives of several languages, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, and Persian. While the book strives to cover the entire sanctions period, most of the analysis focuses on the past one and a half decades, when Iran came under the severest sets of international sanctions. It was during this particular time period that international quandary over the Iranian nuclear program led to a slew of far-reaching penalties and stringent restrictions levied against Iranians by the United Nations and the United States. These recent waves of international sanctions and limitations transformed many quintessential characteristics of East Asia’s interactions with Iran. Such sanctions-induced critical developments and changes, moreover, are bound to play an instrumental role in the direction and volume of exchanges between East Asian states and Iran in the coming years and decades.

This open access book bridges the divide between political science and public health, whilst simultaneously embracing the complexities and differences of both. Although public health is inherently political, the tools and insights of political science are often ignored in public health scholarship. Bringing together academics and researchers working at the intersection of both, the book demonstrates how integrating these fields can help reconcile the roles of politics and scientific evidence in policymaking. It also highlights the key conceptual, methodological and substantive implications for bridging this divide, and charts a path forward for a movement towards political science with public health. It will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in public health, political science, public policy, and the role of scientific evidence in policymaking.

A key message is that effective policy advising is less about cycles, stages and steps, and more about relationships, integrity and communication. Policy making is incremental social problem solving. Policy advising is mostly learned on the job, like an apprenticeship. It starts with careful listening, knowing one’s place in the constitutional scheme of things, winning the confidence of decision makers, skillfully communicating what they need to hear and not only what they want to hear, and learning to lead from behind, scheme virtuously and play nicely with others.

The author introduces a public value approach to policy advising that uses collective thinking to address complex policy problems, evidence-informed policy analysis that also factors in emotions and values, and the practice of “gifting and gaining” (rather than “trade-offs”) in the long-term public interest. Theory is illustrated by personal anecdote and each chapter offers practical processes, tools, techniques and questions for reflection, to help readers master the art and craft of policy advising.

This open access book provides insights into challenges, threats and opportunities of urban development in Africa. It discusses how and why African cities need localised urban planning concepts and theories to deal with challenges and threats of rapid urbanisation and climate change. The book delivers an in-depth view of the nature and gaps of the framework on which current planning practice and education in Africa are based. With that, it discusses the potentials of African cities to mobilise local knowledge, resources and capacity building for sustained and resilient urban growth.

This work is addressed to educationists and practitioners in the field of urban development management, climate change adaptation and urban resilience.  Specifically, such audiences include researchers, spatial planners, graduate students and member of civil societies working on urban development management.

This book presents a comparative analysis of Russia and Iran under sanctions. Whilst the growing literature on sanctions has focused primarily on their effectiveness, much less attention has been paid to the ways in which sanctions have transformed target societies and states. Despite, or indeed because of, the relentless enactment of sanctions, Russia and Iran have become increasingly Hobbesian in their governance – more self-reliant, less democratic, and more aggressive towards the West. The author explores these developments through a novel Welfare State Regime framework (WSR) that combines welfare state functionality with institutional, economic, and cultural structural dimensions.

The European Union (EU) support for good governance reforms has been the cornerstone of its conditionality and funding policies and contributed its role as a transformative power. This book re-evaluates the EU’s governance promotion capacity both within the EU and beyond its borders in light of the simultaneous decline in democracy in Europe in particular, and across the whole world in general. The book is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the EU’s good governance transfer to member and accession countries. Part II examines how and to what extent the EU’s governance promotion strategies travel beyond its borders and focuses on neighbours, partners, and aid recipient countries especially in Africa. Part III turns to other regional and global actors and discusses the implications of illiberal contesters such as China and Russia on the future of EU’s good governance promotion efforts. The findings of the book bring fresh insights for the scope and depth of the EU’s governancetransfer capacity.

Europe’s future is contested between those who want to integrate further, those who prefer things to stay as they are, and those who would retreat into nationalism. These divisions impair the government of the European Union and weaken its ability to shoulder more responsibility for its unstable neighbourhood. 

This open access book analyses the EU’s evolving constitution, arguing that the lack of effective federal government lies at the heart of its problems. It recommends reforms for each EU institution, including those involving treaty change. It makes the case for a unified executive, a more legitimate legislature, and the introduction of a federal treasury and supreme court. It proposes a fresh category of affiliate membership underpinned by a new European security council that would overcome the historic division between the EU and NATO. 

This book aims to explore and contextualize G20 rising powers’ increasing role in international development from a comprehensive and multidimensional perspective. This book will scrutinize the G20 rising powers’ evolving role as international development actors around three research questions: 1) How do we contextualize and locate G20 rising powers as emerging actors in international development? 2) What are the main contributions, trends and limits of G20 rising powers in South-South Cooperation? 3) Does G20 rising powers’ active involvement in international development support their foreign policy objectives and challenge the international development order? Based on these three, interrelated research questions, this cluster of chapters is structured as follows: The first part, elaborated under the first research question, focuses on the historical development and current dynamics of (G20) rising powers’ evolving actorness in international development to assess their main motivations, ambitions and instruments. The second part examines the main contributions, trends and limits of G20 rising powers in South-South Cooperation. The third part delves into an assessment of the linkage between G20 rising powers’ active involvement in international development and their foreign policies. 

The Communist Party appeared a hundred years ago on the French political and social scene. According to opinions and moments, it has been the party of Moscow, of those shot, of the working class, of the union of the left, the party of the foreigner or that of the nation. It has been underground, in government, in town halls, in factories or in the streets. Some considered it too revolutionary, others not enough. More than others, it aroused passions, positive or negative. It attracted many and repelled just as many. After the fall of the USSR, it decided to remain a communist party, while many others gave it up. But it no longer has the place it once had, in reality as in the imagination. This book does not intend to judge, but to provide keys to understanding. It is based on a considerable number of archives that are now available and is an ordered and distanced look at an object that is not lacking in complexity and no doubt even in mystery. 

This book has been translated from French to English thanks to a financial help from the Gabriel Péri Foundation and the LIR3S UMR Cnrs 7366 of Dijon.

For millennia, humans waged war on land and sea. The 20th century opened the skies and the stars, introducing air and space as warfare domains. Now, the 21st century has revealed perhaps the most insidious domain of all: cyberspace, the fifth domain. A realm free of physical boundaries, cyberspace lies at the intersection of technology and psychology, where one cannot see one’s enemy, and the most potent weapon is information.

The third book in the Great Power Competition series, Cyberspace: The Fifth Domain, explores the emergence of cyberspace as a vector for espionage, sabotage, crime, and war. It examines how cyberspace rapidly evolved from a novelty to a weapon capable of influencing global economics and overthrowing regimes, wielded by nation-states and religious ideologies to stunning effect.

Cyberspace: The Fifth Domain offers a candid look at the United States’ role in cyberspace, offering realistic prescriptions for responding to international cyber threats on the tactical, strategic, and doctrinal levels, answering the questions of how can we respond to these threats versus how should we respond? What are the obstacles to and consequences of strategic and tactical response options? What technological solutions are on the horizon? Should the U.S. adopt a more multi-domain offensive posture that eschews the dominant “cyber vs. cyber” paradigm? To answer these questions, experts examine the technological threats to critical infrastructure; cyber operations strategy, tactics, and doctrine; information influence operations; the weaponization of social media; and much more.

This book unpacks policy and politics for health, equity, and wellbeing. With a critical realist lens, the book provides a methodology for sophisticated health focussed policy analysis which situates public health within complex political processes and systems. The application of that lens is demonstrated with insights from a decade of research into urban and regional planning.

This book examines knowledge and policy transfer from the perspectives of Brazil and China. It assesses how these two nations have emerged as providers of ideas and models that contribute to the global offer of public policies. With a variety of case studies in areas such as health, food security and infrastructure, the volume offers new insights into the distinct levels through which knowledge and policy transfers take place, including the local, regional, national and supranational. It develops a multidimensional framework of analysis that considers the agents, objects, and mechanisms for knowledge and policy transfer, as well as the structures and timings within which they operate. Unlike previous studies on policy transfer – which largely focus on North-North and North-South learning processes – this book offers an innovative approach to this area of study. By reflecting on the experiences of these two rising powers, it provides fresh insights on the future of knowledge and policy transfer as global power dynamics shift. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to students and scholars of policy transfer, development studies, international relations and public policy.

There is an emerging consensus that what is projected as democratic governance and justice in Africa requires a re-calibration, in particular, in relation to the constitutive demos, human rights, the realisation of commitments at various governance levels and the convergence between these ideations. The post-colonial narrative on democracy has unveiled some crevices in rule of law, political equality, political participation, political culture and freedom of the press. Aside from the fact that these notions are threatened by some existing institutional structures, these notions are increasingly being negotiated across political spaces. Evident in the prevalent narrative is an imperative for Africa to assert its place on the global scene of democratic governance and justice. However, if this will be accomplished, it is important to understand some of the issues that need to be worked through in this transition.

This book analyses and furthers the academic debates on post-liberal peacebuilding, through a number of conceptual, theoretical and empirical research outputs. Part I includes a review of how the recent discourse on peacebuilding has evolved, and three conceptual/theoretical perspectives relevant to post-liberal peacebuilding. In particular, the editors propose the concept of bespoke peacebuilding to articulate key features of new peacebuilding models. Part II introduces five case studies that present how alternative peacebuilding models are being shaped (or can be shaped) in practice. Essential reading for scholars and students in Peace and Conflict Studies, International Relations, and International Security Studies.

Chapter 8 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book brings together researchers from different analytical perspectives for the study of contemporary geoeconomics to create a broader and more useful catalogue of conceptual tools, empirical entry points, and case studies around the subject. The distinctive contribution this book offers is its firm rooting in International Political Economy and the hitherto under-researched geoeconomics dynamics of Europe. Many existing accounts of geoeconomics have been developed in International Relations and often reproduce some of the state-centric and static assumptions of the discipline. Recent scholarship furthermore tends to focus on the US-China rivalry, thus discounting the role of other global powers in shaping geoeconomics. As a first collective contribution to the topic in the field of International Political Economy, the book stands to become a major reference point in the field for the coming years. Interest in geoeconomics as well as in related concepts like weaponized interdependence or emerging new rivalries has been on the rise in recent years and will be one of the key research areas in the coming decade of transition and change in Europe and beyond.

Chapters 1, 2 and 7 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book reveals the reasons for and ways in which the Islamic Republic of Iran challenged the world powers, through the pursuit of material and ideational goals, to advance a strong nuclear program in the past decade. The book explores Iran’s interactions with the United States of America, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the French Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Republic of India, in the period before (2011-2012), during (2013-2016) and after (2017-2021) the finalization of the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. Iran’s narratives and actions to build middle power status are examined at length against the backdrop of its attempts to reshape global politics, the Middle East region, and the future of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

This book is based on unprecedented interviews with active and former jihadists, even IS fighters. It focuses on the changing nature of jihad as a social phenomenon and how jihad changes jihadists. It argues that there are fascinating generational differences between jihadists’ ideas and behaviors. Moreover, it argues that jihad changes jihadists through socialization in jihadists groups. Indeed, radicalization continues in new forms after entering the conflict zone. Recognizing that jihadism is a complex social phenomenon and a discourse on religiously legitimized violence with deep roots in the history of Islam and Muslim societies, the book asks two simple questions. Why have some Muslims residing in the West taken up arms to enter the global battlefields of jihad? Have the motivations and experiences of different jihadists all been the same? To create a more coherent analysis than the article format allows, and to offer new insights, the author summarizes and further develops several years of research into jihadism. As gaining access to and conducting interviews—especially with active jihadists—often differs from standard interviews, much of the data were collected in a gray zone between more formal interviewing and ethnographic research. The empirical material, which is based on interviews with active and former jihadists, is unique. Moreover, the methodological reflections are unprecedented, and the project offers new analytical insights into jihadism with a focus on how jihadism and jihadists change.

The space occupied by international law in shaping political action is subject to continuing debate and controversy. This book aims to answer the question of how and why international law impacts the behaviour of actors on the international stage in the absence of central authority and faced with asymmetric power. At a time when the role of normative restraints in international relations, and international law in particular, has come under renewed questioning, it advances an analytical framework for understanding the effect of norms on behaviour that is not contingent on material restraints or a given political constellation, while being informed by the practical realities and practice of international organisation. In doing so, this book draws on an interdisciplinary range of sources, including international law, political theory, cognitive psychology and behavioural economics to explore a communicative action-based approach of how norms and ideas persuade actors to engage in a course of action consonant with international law to achieve a particular outcome. In probing the role of norms on questions such as the use of force and accountability, and issues of equity and justice, it examines the challenges international law faces and what the way forward may look like.

This book analyzes key popular culture artifacts linked with United States’ far-right extremism to illustrate how extremists use various narrative strategies to legitimate their interests and goals and to justify violent actions. Recognizing these narrative strategies and how they are used partly explains the back and forth moves between mainstream politics and the far-right of ideas and issues that used to remain within far-right circles. The main objective of this book is to utilize theoretical approaches that centralize processes of racialization to analyze and explain how far-right extremists utilize recognizable narratives to mainstream and communicate their ideas. The book will illustrate processes by which racialized subjects are produced and violence justified. In order to do so, the book concentrates on popular culture as sources of how the far-right constitutes their identities and goals. It first develops a methodological plan to study popular culture artifacts that is drawn from scholarship on race and discourse analysis in International Relations (IR). It then analyzes far-right use of key popular culture artifacts, such as magazines, memes, and manifestos, to note how extremist identities and interests are produced, publicly communicated, and mainstreamed. This will contribute to Security Studies and IR’s understanding of far-right extremism, especially how they utilize similar narrative strategies as used in mainstream contexts to justify their calls for violence.

This book argues that Donald Trump’s election and Presidency represent the triumph of marketing, branding and segmentation in American politics. An early emphasis on political marketing helped Trump secure the presidency, but his use of marketing sharply limited his presidency. President Trump’s political marketing strategy privileged emotion—particularly anger—over policy, constraining his ability to represent all Americans or engage in bipartisan negotiation in Congress. Rather than pushing forward realistic legislation and rallying for bipartisan support, Trump’s campaign and presidency focused on providing emotional gratification to his target audience, leading those outside this audience to ultimately feel unrepresented and unsettled, further fracturing the already divided electorate. Donald Trump and the Branding of the American Presidency considers the impact of this new age of political marketing through an extensive analysis of the Trump phenomenon and its implications for future elections.   

This book analyses why the Ukrainian state established asylum laws and policies in the thirty years since 1991, even though the number of asylum seekers was very low. International and non-governmental organisations transferred international asylum norms to Ukraine. Various state and non-state actors participated in this process, translating, spreading, and resisting those norms. In many cases, legislative adoption was driven by domestic politicians’ pursuit of recognition by international organisations, such as the European Union and the Council of Europe, and by their desire to meet conditionality requirements. NGOs sought to influence administrative practices, alternating between confrontational and conciliatory, formal and informal approaches, and often relying on personal contacts. Actors used and shifted between scales in order to transfer norms or resist transfer. In the process, they produced, renegotiated, and confirmed those scales. For instance, NGOs resorting to the European Court of Human Rights to prevent refoulement placed the European scale above the national scale. This book offers a new multi-actor and multi-scalar analysis of policy transfer.

While the CFSP depends on the contribution of EU member states, their role in shaping the CFSP towards China has not been researched yet, and this book fills the gap.

This book explores the political economy of governance in Palestine. It makes a unique contribution to studies of governance and political economy using the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a case study, introducing and developing the concept of ‘dual rentierism’. The author uses primary research to chart the evolution of the fiscal sociology of the PA and explore how it has shaped the PA’s economic policies and the state–society relationship in the Palestinian Territories. The book adopts a critical political economy approach, making the case that external sources of PA income represent political rents that need to be disaggregated and studied concurrently. It further focuses on the drivers and constraints that have shaped the PA’s policy development and state-building associated with its dependence on external revenues. Ultimately, the book elaborates on how the need for fiscal survivability has thwarted the Palestinian quest for statehood. 

This book analyses the rapidly unfolding events that have impacted on the European energy dynamics, in the light of the way in Ukraine and the energy crisis that have reconfigured, since 2022, the European and the global geopolitical scene, dislocating not only crucial natural resources but also the pace of the energy transition and the continent’s existential security, its basic trust and sense of continuity. It introduces an innovative interpretation of the conflict and cooperation dynamics in Europe, by challenging the reader to look beyond the material aspects of energy security, related to supply and demand, consumption, production and prices dynamics, which I nonetheless explain in detail. Thus, it invites the audience to explore the deeper layer of motivations that underpin the actors’ decision to engage in conflict and cooperation, by exploring their cognitive and psychological considerations, in addition to the material ones. For this purpose, it presents a new conceptual tool, the conflict-cooperation perpetuum, in order to explain why the same players, in this case the EU, Russia and Turkey, may choose to simultaneously perceive each other as security threats and trade partners, engaging in both conflict and cooperation simultaneously with the same ‘Other’. In addition, it proposes to apply the framework of ontological security, in order to understand the responses of the EU, Russia and Turkey to the major existential crises that have affected them in past years, culminating with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis of 2022.

This book explores the resilience of constitutional government in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, connecting and comparing perspectives from ten countries in sub-Saharan Africa to global trends.

In emergency situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a state has the right and duty under both international law and domestic constitutional law to take appropriate steps to protect the health and security of its population. Emergency regimes may allow for the suspension or limitation of normal constitutional government and even human rights. Those measures are not a license for authoritarian rule, but they must conform to legal standards of necessity, reasonableness, and proportionality that limit state action in ways appropriate to the maintenance of the rule of law in the context of a public health emergency. 

Bringing together established and emerging African scholars from ten countries, this book looks at the impact government emergency responses to the pandemic have on the functions of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, as well as the protection of human rights. It also considers whether and to what extent government emergency responses were consistent with international human rights law, in particular with the standards of legality, necessity, proportionality, and non-discrimination in the Siracusa Principles.

This book focuses on Post-Soviet ethnic conflicts and Russia's involvement in them. In light of its significant importance for general ethnic conflict, specifically the post-Soviet Caucasus, along with the most recent war just fought over the area from September-November 2020, this book appropriately argues that it is time to reconsider Karabakh.

This project deals with the historical, social and political aspects of the Karabakh issue regarding its origins, development and the current status of the conflict subsequent to the war in the autumn of 2020.  Thus, the main themes will stress these points, as well as the importance of the Karabakh issue for the future, by considering its precedents and implications for other secessionist wars. This book also explores how such wars begin and end, the international legal precedents of self-determination versus territorial integrity, its implications for post-Soviet developments and conflicts, and the latest successful weaponsdevelopments lessons from the recent war involving drones, among others such as Azerbaijan’s rich oil reserves.

Recent elections in Japan have been dramatic, and the 2021 general election was no exception. Worldwide turmoil caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as well as domestic uncertainty following the resignation of long-serving Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, left many voters and political observers wondering whether his successors were up to the task of leading the country through the crisis. In the end, the LDP and coalition partner Kōmeitō eked out an electoral victory—but one that masks important changes in the party system and nuanced changes in voter behavior and preferences. This fourth volume in the Japan Decides series features a comprehensive collection of analyses from leading experts, covering the legacy of Abe’s tenure in office, the state of the LDP and other parties, the impact of COVID-19 and the postponed 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, and many other important topics in contemporary party politics and domestic and foreignpolicy.

This is an open access book.

This book studies neoliberalism's features in the UK and USA in the 1980s in relation to the philosophical, historical, political, legal, and economic concepts. It analyses the model's legacy in the "Anglosphere," its acceptance, rejection, proliferation in France and Europe - the EU often emulating and disseminating neoliberal processes and techniques via hard and soft law -, its scope, its spread throughout EU countries characterised by "illiberalism," highlighting the model's need to adapt. It fills a historiographical gap regarding a concept which remains acutely topical.

The shift from response to recovery is now noticeable as the world moves past the paralyzing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This book explores responses to the pandemic by international, regional, and local institutions, multilateral action, and crisis prevention efforts at different levels of governance, with a specific focus on the situation of women and children. The contributions in this volume address novel topics and expand the analysis to the different challenges faced by women and children, linking these to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, to create a holistic view of the true impact of the pandemic. The focus on international and regional cooperation provides further insights on how management of the COVID-19-induced crisis can be altered and improved. Immediate effects of the pandemic were focused on healthcare, but long-term and knock-on effects spread to different societal sectors and must be analyzed to ensure they will be addressed and, ultimately, resolved. 

This open-access book presents cutting-edge research on securitization and democratic development in the OSCE Region. Gathering contributions by practitioners and researchers from various disciplines, it presents case studies and highlights recent activities of proactive engagement in democratic institution-building and responding to security threats from the Balkans to Central Asia. The volume is divided into three parts, the first of which focuses on security-related matters, armed conflicts, minorities, and women’s safety, as well as the roles that civil society, foreign governments, social media, and external donors play in this area. These contributions illustrate how the OSCE’s informal approach to peace, security, and securitization as norm entrepreneur is closely linked to the level of democracy among its member states. The second part presents a special section on the political implications of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), assessing the impact of this infrastructural program on the levels of democracy and/or autocracy in Eurasia. The third part consists of short chapters outlining future research and debates. The book will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, security studies, and the human rights-politics nexus. 

This is the 2022 instalment in a series of books released by the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. The OSCE works to promote Minority Protection, Security, Democratic Development and Human Rights, guided by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), and to enhance securitization and development policies in Eurasia, Europe, Central Asia and North America. Since being founded in 1993, the OSCE and its agencies and departments have attracted a wealth of academic research in various fields and disciplines, ranging from economic development and election monitoring to enhancing global principles of human rights and securitization.

This book is about risk conceptions, experiences and reflections. It applies the concept of the risk triangle, with its societal, organisational and personal angles, to two areas of inquiry: financial markets and the military, seeking to demonstrate the challenges, dilemmas and, in many ways, also the impossibilities of risk analysis and risk management. Drawing on empirical and micro- and macro-level analysis, this innovative work will appeal to students of political science, economics and business as well as to risk professionals and risk-takers. 

Each year, the Supreme Court of the United States announces new rulings with deep consequences for our lives. This fifth volume in Palgrave’s SCOTUS series describes, explains, and contextualizes the landmark cases of the US Supreme Court in the term ending 2022. With a close look at cases involving key issues and debates in American politics and society, SCOTUS 2022 tackles the Court’s rulings on abortion, guns, religion, environmental regulation, pandemic controls, immigration and more. Written by notable scholars in political science and law, the chapters in SCOTUS 2022 present the details of each ruling, its meaning for constitutional debate, and its impact on public policy or partisan politics. Finally, SCOTUS 2022 offers an analysis of the current ideological and interpretive divisions on the Court, including an analysis of the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs draft ruling.

This book presents an analysis of forest politics that employs a broader scope to include non-institutionalized actors. It offers a comparative perspective on various environmental social movements fighting to protect forests around the globe, including indigenous communities in the Amazon and eco-anarchists in Europe. By examining the political goals, motives, and tactics of these sometimes-radical environmentalists, it helps readers understand the commonalities and differences among these “grass-roots forest politicians.” In addition, the book highlights the importance of forest-related struggles for a just transition to a carbon-neutral future. Accordingly, it will appeal to scholars of political science, public policy, and political sociology, as well as anyone interested in social movements and forest conservation.

This handbook offers a unique approach to the question: How do scholars write the future of global politics? Written in futur antérieur style, around the 200-year anniversary of the birth of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline, the contributions engage in world-building and imagine different futures of IR. Set in a multiverse, 23 chapters draw on a range of possible themes and imaginaries, for instance post-pandemic conditions, the Anthropocene, and not least academic practices and the role of researchers. A concluding chapter anchors these explorations in contemporary discussions.

The book mirrors the format and style of existing handbooks, combining outlines and discussions of theories, structures, processes, and core issues in IR with an academic science fiction account of how these might play out over the course of the next century. In doing so, the book challenges IR and provides alternative imaginaries, rather than predicting future conditions for all humanity. The book invites readers to reflect on how thinking about the future has become an increasingly radical, but more than ever necessary act. 

This book focuses on Arab youth marginalization along intersectional lines of gender, ethnicity and social class in four cities: Jerusalem, Amman, Cairo, and Tunis. The author explores how the political and economic climates in each city influence the life prospects of youth and uncovers their narratives around their aspirations, disappointments and life choices. Providing an interdisciplinary approach, the project will interest a wide range of audiences including graduate students, scholars, and policy makers in the fields of the Middle Eastern studies, political science, urban studies, and education. 

This open access book explores the relevance of the concept of technology assessment (TA) on an international and global level. Technologies play a key role in addressing global challenges such as climate change, population aging, digitization, and health. At the same time, their use increases the need for coordinated action and governance at the global level in the field of science, technology and innovation (STI). 

Featuring case studies on STI fields such as energy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and health technology, as well as TA activities at the national and international levels, this book reflects on the challenges and opportunities of global technology governance. It also provides an in-depth discussion of current governmental STI cultures and systems, societal expectations, and the policy priorities needed to achieve coordinated and effective STI intervention in policymaking and public debate at the global level. Lastly, the book promotes the establishment of a forum for a truly global dialogue of TA practitioners, fostering the articulation of their needs, knowledge and perspectives.

This book deals with a central aspect of Marx’s critique of society that is usually not examined further since it is taken as a matter of course: its scientific claim of being true. But what concept of truth underlies his way of reasoning which attempts to comprehend the social and political circumstances in terms of the possibility of their practical upheaval? In three studies focusing specifically on the development of Marx’s scientific critique of capitalist society, his journalistic commentaries on European politics, and his reflections on the organisation of revolutionary subjectivity, the authors carve out the immanent relation between the scientifically substantiated claim to truth and the revolutionary perspective in Marxʼs writings. They argue that Marx does not grasp the world ‘as it is’ but conceives it as an inverted state which cannot remain what it is but generates the means by which it can eventually be overcome. This is not something to be taken lightly: Such a concept has theoretical, political and even violent consequences—consequences that nevertheless derive neither from a subjective error nor a contamination of an otherwise ‘pure’ science. By analyzing Marx’s concept of truth the authors also attempt to shed light on a pivotal problematique of any modern critique of society that raises a reasoned claim of being true.

This book examines community partnership schools in the USA. Authored by academics and practitioners, it provides an overview of how community schools work in practice, provides a historical context of the model, and demonstrates the importance of the university-community connection in their effective running. Above all, the book showcases how community partnership schools are educational equity solutions that provide support services to underserved students, families, and communities. It will appeal to students and scholars of public administration, public policy, public health, and education, as well as practitioners.

This book uses several fantasy movies or movie series and television series to explain political and international relations (IR) concepts and theories. It begins with an overview of the importance of fantasy in literature, film and television, and its increasing impact on the field of International Relations. It then presents the political, IR, and social issues in each franchise, and in five chapters uses these tales’ key story arcs or plot points to illustrate major political and IR themes. The volume pays particular attention to such fantasy franchises as Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, the Harry Potter films, recent fairytale and children’s stories, and female-led fantasy projects.

This book provides a pre-history of Russia's war on Ukraine and Europe’s relations to it, illuminating the deep roots of the EU’s neighbourhood crisis as well as the migration crises the Union created in the last decade. To do so, the book employs a new and innovative framework that allows for a comprehensive, yet nuanced analysis of borders and a more cogent interpretation of their socio-political consequences.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship the book analytically examines the key common elements of borderscapes and links them in related arrays to allow for nuanced evaluation of both their particular and cumulative effects, as well as interpretation of their overall consequences, particularly for issues of identities and orders. The book offers a significant conceptual and theoretical advance, providing a transferable conceptualization of borderscapes to guide research, analysis, and interpretation. Drawing on the author’s experience in policy, practice and academia, it also makes a methodological contribution by pushing the boundaries of reflexivity in interpretive International Relations (IR) research. 

Analyzing three main sites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the book challenges conventional critical wisdom on EU bordering in the Schengen zone, at its external frontiers, and in its Eastern neighborhood. In so doing, it sheds new light on the politics of post-communist transitions as well as the contemporary politics of CEE. It also shows how EU bordering and its relations to identities and orders created great benefits for many Europeans, but also hindered the lives of many others and became self-defeating. This book is a must-read for scholars, students, and policy-makers, interested in a better understanding of Critical Border Studies (CBS) in particular, and International Relations in general. It will also appeal to anyone interested in CEE or wishing to get a deeper understanding of Russia’s warand the fight for Europe’s future.

Global security threats have created a complex risk landscape that is challenging and transforming society. These global security issues intersect and influence the political, economic, social, technological, ecological and legal dimensions of the complex risk landscape and are now transborder thereby becoming national security issues.

Accessing the innovation space to support safety, security and defence capabilities is critical in order to mitigate new and evolving threats.

Through real-world examples of innovation, this book provides a detailed examination of the innovation space as it pertains to the application of S&T to safety and security threats and challenges.

This book is of most interest to public and private sector innovators as well as academician and graduate students working in the safety and security domain. 

This edited volume analyzes the experiences learned in practice especially among small holder farmers to eradicate poverty. In other words, it discusses practical solutions which small scale farmers can use to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality. This addresses the issue of inclusive and sustainability of projects leading to the notion of not leaving anyone behind. The book provides insights that can be translated into policy with potential to inform practice. It also has the potential to address the issue of rural urban migration by providing knowledge that is usable by small scale farmers, policy makers and entrepreneurs alike. The volume is written by authors from different countries, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, indicating the commonality of the problems of poverty and inequality. It contains insights from all these countries assembled together into an amalgam of practices ready to use and implement informed by evidence from the field as most of the chapters are based onempirical data.

Lessons Learned from Afghanistan: America’s Longest War examines the lessons of how America’s “longest war” came to an ignominious end with staggering consequences for the United States and the Afghan nation. Afghanistan today faces an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, looming threat of a civil war and a resurgence of violent extremism organizations similar to pre-9/11.  As the U.S. enters a new era in the strategic geopolitical Great Power Competition, an analysis of the original mission intent, shifting policy and strategic objectives, and ineffective implementation of security, political and economic programs reveal critical lessons and questions such as:  What led to the “strategic failure” of the U.S. in Afghanistan?  What decisions resulted in the present-day humanitarian, civil, and political crises in Afghanistan? Were these consequences in fact avoidable? Was there an alternative approach that could have maintained the hard-fought gains of the last two decades, and better demonstrated America's standing as a defender of global human rights?

Lessons Learned from Afghanistan: America’s Longest War further explores lessons of the past negotiations between the United States, Taliban, and former U.S. backed Afghan government to suggest alternative pathways that honor the original intent of the mission and meet present-day obligations to an Afghan nation in crisis.

This monograph addresses the complexity of China-Africa and Japan-Africa relations from a comparative perspective. The volume is divided into five sections. Section I focuses on the divergent perspectives that are reflected in the discourse on China-Africa relations. Section II discusses Japan’s economic modernization and its potential lessons for Africa. Section III compares the foreign policies of Japan and China in Africa and analyzes their supposed rivalries on the continent. Section IV explores the relationship between Southeast Asia and China and its relevance to Africa-China relations. Section V provides an in-depth case study of Ethiopia-China relations over the last century.

The book fills a major gap in the existing literature on the triad of Africa, China, and Japan. Under the guidance of the disciplines of African studies, international relations, political sociology, and international political economy, this volume elucidates and examines the complexities of theforeign policies of the two Asian powers toward Africa as well as their economic, political, and cultural underpinnings.

This edited volume brings together a selected group of talented emerging leaders drawn from academia, policy and professional backgrounds from across the Euro-Atlantic space. The book reflects the various trends and implications of emerging technologies and their different – positive and negative – effects on the security, societies and economies in the Euro-Atlantic region. It tremendously benefits from the broad range of views and divergent professional as well as cultural backgrounds of the contributors.

The monograph examines the sources of Polish social divisions. It explains their emergence and discusses the mechanisms behind their evolution from 1945-2022. The findings corroborate the idea that divisions were formed irrespective of the current state of social hierarchy, or the accepted interpretation of justice, and that they existed both in totalitarian and democratic systems alike. The book distinguishes the category of divisions from the practices of repartition, and demonstrates that the repartitions discussed in a political discourse do not generate divisions, but constitute the politicization of the latter. Repartitions are understood as discursive, dichotomic juxtapositions that result from the existence of divisions and can be used as political tools. It has been demonstrated that they can also function as analytical categories used with a view to determining the state of social inequalities. The notions of divisions and repartitions discussed in this volume confirm theexistence of the continuity of changes and describe the evolution of Polish society has a consequence.

This book offers a comprehensive and multidisciplinary global overview of populism and human rights in the light of globalization. It examines why the dominant (neo)liberal paradigm of the last decades resulted in major economic and social inequalities which resulted in the surge of national populism, led by the election success of right-wing parties, movements, and leaders across the world.  It discusses, among other topics, the success of Brexit in Britain and the election success of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen and explains why there is a need for a dialogue on human rights and globalization in this era of populism.

Further contributions analyze various important topics of the field, including cross-culturalism, globalization, human rights, challenges and threats, diversity, curbing global corruption, sustainable development, populism, the decline of free speech, the new nationalism, internationalization, global regime of human rights, leadership theory, global management competencies, gender, quality management, individualism-collectivism, and examples of new initiatives in global organizations. This makes the book a valuable and useful resource for students, researchers, and scholars of international relations, political science, sociology, political psychology, law, diplomatic studies, Communication and media studies, economics, education and management, as well as practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of globalization, populism, and human rights.

This volume is the continuation of our research on economic and developmental policy-making in the global semi-periphery in the post-crisis cycle (see our two recently published volumes titled ‘Market-Liberalism and Economic Patriotism in Capitalist Systems’ edited by Gerőcs and Szanyi, 2019, Palgrave Macmillan and ‘The Post-Crisis Developmental State – Perspectives from the Global Periphery’ edited by Gerőcs and Ricz, 2021). Our new volume aims to be a contribution to the analysis of emerging market economies’ alternative development trajectories, as we explore the new perspectives on semi-peripheral dependent development since the Global Financial Crisis and especially amidst the new global pandemic, the COVID-19.

The scope of comparative capitalism research has also been altered accordingly to include the analysis of emerging economies outside the core of the world system, and to make intertemporal comparisons possible (such as to define and characterise historical wavesof state capitalism). Still, we are convinced that to better understand the current wave of state capitalism and to explore its national varieties there is a need to critically reconsider existing theoretical approaches and methodologies, and to search for new ones, if necessary.

This book aims to be a contribution to the analysis of emerging market economies' alternative development trajectories and explores new perspectives on semi-peripheral dependent development, especially amidst COVID-19.

This book examines law and governance implications in relation to maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS). Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, it focuses on a wide array of timely, topical and thorny issues, including naval warfare and security, seaworthiness and techno-regulatory assessments, global environmental change, autonomous passenger transportation, as well as liability and insurance. It also considers selected national and regional developments. The book provides an insight into the role of innovation-diplomacy as the driving force that could expedite the transition from automation to autonomy. After navigating through the complex law and governance landscape, it concludes by assessing critical findings for further consideration. The book will appeal to scholars and students of maritime technology, law and governance.

Chapter 11 and Chapter 18 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The book develops a novel framework for the analysis of global crises. It differentiates crises on three dimensions: permanent, recurring and ephemeral crises. This conceptualization allows us to analyze global crises not only in their immediate environment, but makes it possible to understand them in the broader context of social instability. The approach revolves around the terminology of discursive dislocation which provides fundamental insights into diverse forms of social instability. A multidimensional conceptualization of dislocation is advanced which informs the differentiation of global crises. Furthermore, a methodological toolkit is developed and tailored to the theoretical framework, which makes it possible to utilize the book both theoretically and methodologically for the analysis of manifold forms of global crises. The book also provides a comprehensive analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States under Donald Trump. Making use of the aforementioned methodology, it presents a hands-on illustration of how the multidimensional framework can be utilized for practical analyses. The analysis reveals how the construction of the Covid-19 pandemic is embedded in the historically ingrained self-portrayal of the United States, and how crisis responses are invoked to serve particular socio-political purposes in retaining an established vision of the United States.

Chapter 1 is the most important chapter in Capital, as well as the most difficult and the most controversial. An influential interpretation of Chapter 1 in recent decades has been the so-called “value-form interpretation” of Marx’s theory in general and Chapter 1 in particular. The most important proponent of the value-form interpretation today, both in Germany and in the English-speaking world, is Michael Heinrich, and Heinrich’s work has emphasized the first chapter. Heinrich’s latest book in English is a detailed commentary of the first seven chapters of Volume 1 of Capital. The publication of an English translation of Heinrich’s book is an important event in Marxian scholarship and it is important to critically engage with this important book in order to advance our understanding of this critical foundational chapter. This book emphasizes the quantitative issue of whether the magnitude of value and socially necessary labour-timeare determined in production or also depend on exchange and demand, which has been the main issue in the controversy over the value-form interpretation.

This book focusses on the interaction between different kinds of violence and radicalization. Current research criticizes linear models of radicalization and assumes that individuals are involved in radical actions even without extremist preferences. In recent years, the research on radicalization and the use of violence has increasingly been focused on this phenomenon of individual radicalization. However, radicalization is a manifold phenomenon on various levels and exists in miscellaneous variations.

The book provides an impetus for analysing social situations that contain the potential for the emergence of conflict. This is done through new outlooks on the role of emotions, the influence of narratives and representations, the connection between (non)violence and emancipation and, lastly, new approaches and perspectives on deradicalization.

This book analyses major themes in twenty-first-century east African politics. Predominantly authored by researchers and academics from the region, it examines recent political developments, public policy and governance across east and southern African countries. The book advocates for a regionally-focused comparative approach across Africa, arguing that it provides a greater level of analysis than a complete continental study. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it covers numerous topics relating to politics, public policy, state and nation-building in Africa. Filling an important void in current literature, the book will appeal to academics, practitioners, politicians and students of politics, public policy and governance.

Chapter 16 and 20 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Spoilers and tactical blockages to peace have connected across local, national, regional and international scales, highlighting ideological divisions. Drawing on counter-revolutionary theory, the concept of counter-peace is used as a tool to critically interrogate a systemic array of blockages to peace. Distinct counter-peace patterns are now entangled in peace and reform processes, including  the stalemate pattern, the limited counter-peace, and the unmitigated counter-peace patterns. Across cases, once tactical blockages begin to form these patterns, they become systemic and ultimately enable conflict escalation. Consequently, the intimate entanglement of the existing international peace architecture with counter-peace processes points to ideological divisions in international order, as well as the growing gulf between diminished practices of peace and reform with critical scholarship on peace, justice, and sustainability.

Voter turnout in local elections is paradoxical. It is where government is closest to those governed and where many first become politically active; yet, it is also where political participation in the form of voting is the lowest. If high participation is an indicator of a healthy democracy, then what can be done to increase participation at the local level? Early voting has long been perceived to increase voter turnout, and there is evidence to suggest that early voting does have an impact on turnout. A majority of early voting scholarship, however, focuses on turnout at the national or state level. What is not clear is how early voting influences turnout at the local level. In the wake of partisan controversy surrounding early voting policies and the reduction of early voting periods in many states, it is important to understand the impact of such policies on all types of elections. Localities are the bedrock of American democracy. Understanding what factors could increase turnout at the local level—where it is devastatingly low—provides valuable insight on local participation, election administration, and early voting laws for scholars and decision-makers alike.

The Republic of Turkey celebrates the centenary of its proclamation in 2023. Founded on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, one of the world’s greatest empires both in terms of its geographical extent and its longevity, Republican Turkey has gone through a century of profound and constant changes and transformations from politics to society, economy to religion, or culture to history. These changes have been produced by inner and foreign policies carried out and implemented by the country’s leaders – from Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current Turkish President in 2023 - but also under the influence of the regional and international context. This collective work aims to take stock of the great achievements of the Turkish republican project. It attempts to draw a general presentation of the evolution of contemporary Turkey in six main areas which constitute six major issues for the country: the general political evolution of Turkey focusing on the issue of citizenship; the transformations in the Turkish economy through a political economy analysis; the evolution of the relationship between religion, state and society; Turkey’s nation-building and the Kurdish question, which still seeks a solution; the changes in Turkish foreign policy focusing on the relationship between Turkey and the West; the relationship between Turkey and Europe, caught between the model of civilization for the republican regime and the prospects of accession to the European Union. Several “focus points” also concentrate on specific subjects such as the Alevi issue, the Cyprus issue or the Turkish soft power with an accent on Africa.

The Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and transregional perspective on the Kashmir dispute. Spanning South and Central Asia, Kashmir has been at the center of geopolitical conflicts and rivalries among India, Pakistan and China for decades, with members of heterogeneous local communities negotiating the complexities of regional state formations, national power assertions and geopolitical competitions. Taken together, the chapters in this handbook examine diverse people’s struggles to establish processes of democratic accountability in relation to the colonial-era state consolidations, postcolonial military occupations, interstate wars, intrastate armed conflicts and cold war and post-cold war politics that have shaped and transformed social and political identities in the region. Contributors chart out varied and bold new directions by attending to local constellations of situated knowledges and practices through which people living in different parts of the disputed region make sense of the conditions and contingencies of their political lives. The handbook further initiates a dialogue on the ways in which state power and border regimes have shaped scholarship and undermined the pursuit of shared intellectual and political projects across physical and epistemological boundaries.

Chapters 1 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

This Open Access textbook is a result of the work of ENTAN – the European Non-Territorial Autonomy Network. It provides students with a comprehensive analysis of the different aspects and issues around the concept of non-territorial autonomy (NTA). The themes of each chapter have been selected to ensure a multi- and interdisciplinary overview of an emerging research field and show both in theory and in practice the possibilities of NTA in addressing cultural, ethnic, religious and language differences in contemporary societies.

This is an open access book.

This book engages with the diverse traditions within non-Western Marxisms, as they emerge across the Global South, positioning itself against calls for a “pure” Marxism. The author views Marxism as a conceptual “field,” similar to electromagnetic or gravitational fields, where bodies and objects impact other bodies and objects without necessarily coming in contact with them. So too, in the “field” of Marxism, people behave in specific ways and deploy languages and concepts with their own specific inflections and accents. While rejecting the view of Marxism as an inherently European and fully-formed doctrine that is corrupted by contact with alien contexts, Nigam simultaneously acknowledges the residual force of certain elements of the theory and the gravitational pull that the authoritative figures continue to have on the evolution of the field in non-Western contexts. He argues that since a large part of Marxism’s earthly journey was undertaken in the Global South, it is that experience that needs to be rendered legible, by setting aside the conceptual lens of Western Marxism that repeatedly misreads such experience. Ultimately, the book invites a fruitful and challenging re-examination of a variety of phenomena arising from the contemporaneous co-existence of pre-capitalist and capitalist social relations that have been an inextricable part of the majority of the world—what the author terms “untimely encounters.”

Today’s middle-income countries tend to be locked in a middle-income trap, unable to transition to higher income levels due to rising costs and declining competitiveness. While there is a broad consensus that upgrading these economies towards innovation-led growth is imperative, countless institutional and political economy obstacles remain. This book brings together analytical perspectives from comparative political economy, innovation studies, and development economics for the study of technological upgrading. Its distinctive contribution is the development of an innovative theoretical framework, named upgrading regimes, combining and extending the comparative capitalism and innovation system perspectives. It explores the usefulness of this approach by providing an indepth assessment of the political economy of upgrading in Brazil under the Workers’ Party governments. As the politics of technological upgrading will be one of the crucial research areas in the years to come, this book promises to become a key reference point in this debate.

This book assesses the processes and outcomes of international urban networks in Europe from 2007 to the present day. Focusing on Greece in particular, it examines 162 municipalities involved in more than 240 European city networks to shed light on the various factors that affect cities’ capacities to act as international actors. The book demonstrates that the participation of Greek municipalities in European city networks has entailed changes to local political structures, policies and procedures, as well as the strengthening of a ‘European’ identity and the creation of long-term partnerships. At the same time, these changes have often clashed with bureaucratic traditions and unfavorable economic conditions, which have mitigated the reformatory potential of European city networking. Providing important insights into city diplomacy and Europeanization, the book will appeal to scholars and students of public administration, European integration and political science, as well as professionals and practitioners. 

This book examines how popular narratives of Canadian identity became implicated in Canada’s foreign policy in the Global War on Terror. McDonald argues that Canada’s decisions to join the 2001 Afghanistan War yet abstain from the 2003 Iraq War became politically possible because parliamentarians linked these policies to similar narratives of an enduring Canadian identity - even while re-imagining their meanings. These decisions are explored through politicians’ mobilization of three discourses: Canada as America’s neighbour, Canada as protector of foreign civilians, and Canada as a champion of multilateralism. This book challenges conceptions of national identity as entirely stable or fluid and contests predominant arguments that downplay the role of identity discourses in Canadian foreign policy. The relevance of these narratives is assessed by exploring the rhetoric of Canadian foreign policy in light of contemporary international challenges, including the Donald Trump presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s War on Ukraine.

This book investigates the phenomenon of overbalancing through an analysis of Japan’s foreign policy during the interbellum. In the mid-1930s, Japan withdrew from a naval arms control framework that had restrained military buildup on both sides of the Pacific Ocean since the early 1920s. By doing so, Japan not only triggered a naval arms race with the United States that exhausted its economy, it also destroyed the last institutionalized structure regulating the relationship between the two Pacific powers. Japan and the United States became caught in a spiral of tensions that culminated with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Puzzling is the fact that the international environment in the Asia-Pacific was relatively stable in the mid-1930s, while Washington was pursuing a policy of accommodation toward Tokyo. By rejecting arms control and engaging in unfettered naval expansion, Japan overbalanced against the United States and began its rush to the Pacific War.

This book argues that domestic politics and political pressures determine the extent of the U.S. role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from the emergence of containment strategy against the Soviet Union to the Russian war in Ukraine. NATO has evolved in the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy from a conventional military alliance to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War to an important instrument in the competition against China and Russia. This book examines American domestic political implications of U.S. security commitments to NATO. It adopts a historical approach and places the U.S. foreign policy toward NATO on the domestic level of analysis by highlighting domestic political determinants in the foreign policymaking process. It also highlights the connections between the Biden Administration’s definition of a struggle between democracy and autocracy and the state of American democracy following the January 6^th insurrection by far-right Trump extremists. U.S. These include the evolution of American attitudes towards NATO, societal and economic factors, and entrenched bureaucratic interests shaping U.S. foreign policy. The book incorporates the contributions of major theoretical works on the domestic political factors that shape foreign policy preferences and behavior to understand the extent to which domestic politics influences the historical evolution of the U.S. role in NATO and American foreign policy toward Europe. 

This book uses comparative case study methodology and extensive field work to examine and compare outcomes of four East African nations (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda) that implemented formal Information and Communications Technology policies in the 1990s. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book assesses the emergence of a new policy and technological arena from the turn of the millennium to the present. In addition to tracing the implementation and reception of these policies, Bowman considers to what extent the politics of infrastructure in four connected but distinct African nations have resulted in global participation and equitable distribution and access of infrastructure to all citizens, as well as the impact a recent history of war or peace have on the technological outcomes in these communities. The book provides us with invaluable new data on how policy and politics function in emerging democracies, and illuminates long-overlooked opportunities and conditions necessary for the distribution of new and potentially beneficial technologies in other developing countries. 

This book develops Marcuse’s critique of advanced industrial society and deploys it as a lens to critically analyze contemporary neoliberalism and its structural failures. In the chapters, Marcuse scholars explore three related topics: First, Marcuse’s theory as it applies to the relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarianism, including both the historical relationship between the two and the modern re-emergence of authoritarianism and nationalism in neoliberal states today. Second, a re-examination of the relationship between neoliberal subjectivity and technological rationality that seeks to understand the stabilizing forces of neoliberal society and the way these forces register at the level of thought. Third and finally, Marcuse’s conception of socialism in conversation with contemporary neoliberal rationality, and ways in which alternatives to the status quo remain possible. Together, this volume contributes to recent discussions of neoliberalism and contribute to thedevelopment of Marcuse scholarship.

This book brings together Marxian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the hegemonic form of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class and world of the third. The authors counterpose the world of the third to the mainstream notion of the third world, seen as a lacking other in desperate need of aid and development. Thus, for them, the hegemonic form of global capital is engendered through the foregrounding of the poor, victim third world and the foreclosure of the non-capitalist world of the third. Building on what they characterize as an ab-original reading of Marxian historical materialism and the Lacanian real, the authors seek to conceptualize a counter-hegemonic revolutionary subject as a basis for postcapitalist alternatives to the hegemonic form of global capital.

This open access book offers a systematic survey of the attitudes and values of European political scientists. It builds a structural interpretation based on empirical data, as well as offering reflections on the future structure of the discipline. In the middle of a delicate phase of changes marked by the effects of pandemic and the war in Ukraine, we need to pay attention to the factors that are affecting not only the ‘objects’ of Political Science as a discipline but also its interactions with the world around it.

This book is the first detailed analysis of how the EU responded to Brexit. It is an important reference point for future studies of the Brexit negotiations. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with key institutional players in Brussels and in several member states to document how the EU handled the first-ever exit of one of its members. The Brexit shock came at a time when the EU had barely recovered from the Euro crisis and was struggling to manage an unprecedented inflow of refugees. The immediate fear was that Brexit might be the final straw that broke the camel ’s back.

Eurosceptics were jubilant, and Europhiles were distraught. In reality, the EU reacted to Brexit with resolve and a determination to protect the polity. The book argues that getting the process right was crucial. The EU mobilised its collective capacity to negotiate effectively and with one voice.

This edited volume examines the cases of four African military leaders who had enormous impact on the continent and beyond. These military officers, and later heads of state -- Jerry Rawlings of Ghana; Moammar Gaddafi of Libya; Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso; and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt – were provocative and polarizing figures, beloved domestically but mostly viewed with suspicion and hostility by foreign governments. This volume studies these leaders as a group, engaging in a critical but systematic examination of their personalities, leadership styles, official performance, legacies, and their continuing impact on the future and political destiny of the continent. Providing a survey of controversial but important African political figures, this volume will be of use to scholars and students in the social sciences, especially those interested in African history, African studies, military science, Black studies, political science, leadership studies, and the politics of developing nations.

Italian politics has changed course yet again. Thanks to the outcome of the 2022 general election, a coalition dominated, for the first time, by a party of the far right has taken office under Giorgia Meloni, the first woman to serve as prime minister in Italy’s republican history. Italy has always been a kind of ‘political laboratory’ for Western democracies – one in which new political phenomena have developed with considerable potency. Consequently, the electoral analyses presented in this book make it possible for the reader to understand the challenges and related consequences that established democracies are currently facing, beyond Italy.

This book analyzes China's transformative political power in today's world while simultaneously addressing global issues and the reformation of world institutions. China has become known as the world's first factory and trading power, but more knowledge on China's rise is necessary to understand the world of today and the future. The main question is where China's rise is headed and how this affects the increasingly connected world that faces problems that no state can effectively address on its own.

This book analyzes both sides of the coin, that is, the problems of a world scale and the change of the world political order. China is among the major actors for global issues such as mitigating climate warming, controlling weapons of mass destruction, combating economic inequality and underdevelopment, and improving health for all. In the current setting of the new world order, all countries and especially world powers develop a general blueprint for the future, as cultural andmaterial conditions of the present world are very different from the past. Under such conditions, China faces a review of its bilateral and regional strategies, as well as its position and actions in world institutions that have the mission of forming policy responses to issues of a global scale.

This book, therefore, provides insight into China's view of world problems and the future world order. It is a must-read for everybody interested in a better understanding of China's role in today's world and the global power shift.

The American gun control debate is best understood as a battle in a war over the influence of individualism on American culture, politics, and policy. This book demonstrates that the gun debate is fundamentally about values. Specifically, it is about what we value most: private rights, or the public good. This helps explain why the technical, empirical, or legalistic arguments we hear aren’t persuasive. A review of scholarly literature on both the politics of gun control and American political culture finds an American bias toward an individualism that embraces personal rights. We argue that this bias stacks the deck against gun control. Interviews we conducted with activists show that support for, or opposition to, gun control is linked to concern for the public, or private, good. Finally, we trace the federal gun control debate in Washington from the 1960s to 2010s to show the ebbs and flows of individualism’s influence.

This book discusses the emerging threats to European stability in different borderland regions, from the Greater Middle East to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Black Sea. It highlights the specific geopolitical risks that could, left unchecked, have global repercussions. The book shows how recent events have exasperated underlying problems that have been slowly destabilizing each of these regions for years. It also looks at the geopolitical constraints and objectives of the countries within these regions to build a basis for understanding their current and future security challenges. 

While doing so, the book discusses the European borderlands in a non-traditional way, proposing a specific framework to study them, going beyond historical analysis and employing a heuristic process and in-depth socio-economic analysis to understand regional power relations and trends. It develops the key concepts of "core borderland" and "geopolitical node" to understand the future challenges that Europe in particular and Eurasia, in general, will face, discussing specific features shaping current affairs and identifying the main drivers - countries and specific regional elements - for the future stability of the borderlands.

This book will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, as well as policy-makers, practitioners, and international organizations interested in a better understanding of current and future challenges at Europe's borderlands and the security risks the European continent faces.

This book presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of sustainable economic growth in Russia. The ill-planned transition in the 1990s from planned economy to market economy resulted in a sharp decline in national production; however, Russian economic growth was evident in the 2000s and 2010s. Osipian here analyses whether Russia has potential to achieve sustainable economic growth, filling a gap between the continuous presence of volatile economic growth in Russia and the lack of scholarly literature in the field. This book considers Russia’s economic transition within the set of early, modern, classical, exogenous, and endogenous theories of economic growth. At the same time, this book considers the phenomenon of sustainable economic growth in the context of the post-Soviet transition. Such a contextualization allows for finding and highlighting certain features and processes within economic transition that were earlier neglected by the scholars, including primarily the possibility of not only recovering after economic and financial crises, but also initiating sustainable economic growth. It identifies the place and role of human capital in economic growth within the market-type post-transitional Russian economy and concludes that human capital accumulation is key for sustainable economic growth.

The Western and Political Thought: A Fistful of Politics offers a variety of engaging and entertaining answers to the question: What do Westerns have to do with politics? This collection features contributions from scholars in a variety of fields—political science, English, communication studies, and others—that explore the connections between Westerns (prose fiction, films, television series, and more) and politics.

This book addresses the links between war, state and sovereignty using an interdisciplinary approach. The authors and editors investigate the transformation of the state through the practices of security governance - an effective way to question the evolution of authority and legitimacy of state violence, and the organisation of human societies. This work contributes to the understanding of the transformation of state through the prism of security challenges and provides the means to identify the evolution of their regalian contours, the legal and technical forms of regulating violence, and the legitimisation of public power. This volume shows that the contribution of the social sciences is decisive for understanding the changes of the role and insertion of armed forces in their political, social and professional environment.

Unconfessed by definition, hypocrisy is one of the most used and abused polemical categories, even today, to denounce the "masked cynicism" of certain social actors, especially when they hold public office. But has hypocrisy always been just that? Should we really always be wary of it and challenge its every manifestation? What forms of hypocrisy can we distinguish? What kind of relationship exists between hypocrisy and the lack of self-critical attitude of those who are used to challenge the conduct of others? And above all: what relationship exists between this common vice, democratic politics and the institutional reproduction of different forms of oppression and domination? These are just some of the questions that inspire this philosophical journey back into the history of one of the most chameleonic concepts of Western culture. In Mazzone’s conception, democratic hypocrisy includes argumentative strategies used by institutional actors to refuse any kind of responsibility whentheir decisions, actions or roles are called into question by the protests of citizens in a democratic context. He reveals the relationship that exists between such “apologetic narratives” and the institutional reproduction of different forms of oppression and domination. Ultimately, the book urges civic vigilance against underhand wannabe authoritarians, who – as a group – are evolving to find new ways to trick people into opposing democracy.

Volume two of Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe: The 2023 Election and Beyond argues that research into Zimbabwe’s politics is multifaceted and topical, particularly because for more than two decades now, this Southern African state has been dogged by multiple problems including hyperinflation, drought, escalating poverty levels, extremely high unemployment rates and political instabilities. The volume’s overall goal is to ignite intellectual discussions and practical action towards turning the political wheels that have been in place for decades. The first segment examines the interface between gender and electoral politics in Zimbabwe. The second part discusses the role of the media in Zimbabwe’s electoral politics. The third section reflects on the role of traditional leaders and religious discourses in Zimbabwe’s electoral politics. The book will be a key resource to colleges, universities and organisations in Zimbabwe, the Southern Africa region andeven beyond. 

This book sheds light on modern populism and discusses the link between populism and identity politics against the backdrop of populist leaders asserting the identity of their own group, while maintaining the separation from others.

Written by former BBC correspondent and commentator Deepak Tripathi, the book explains how populism has a long history with early discernable origins in the Tsarist Russian Empire and North America in the nineteenth century, spreading to Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere in the following century. The book analyzes various forms of populism, its causes and consequences. It further looks at how industrialization, economic growth, and movement of people led to conditions which contributed to inequalities, fueling populist sentiments and social conflict around the globe. Tripathi concludes that populism has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of politics, and is here to stay, given factors such as growing competition for resources, population increase, climate change, and migration.

The book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science and neighboring disciplines, as well as policy-makers interested in a better understanding of modern populism and its roots.

Written in a graceful, informative style, this book explores the rise of populism on the global scene and exposes its dangers.
Mark Juergensmeyer, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State

Deepak Tripathi provides the first lucid and comprehensive analysis of a political phenomenon that engulfs many states and societies today.
Ilan Pappe, Professor of History, and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter

This wide-ranging and clear-sighted book gives a historically-informed account of how populism went mainstream. It is a fascinating read. 
Richard Toye, Professor of Modern History, University of Exeter

The book explores how weak presidents directly or indirectly elected can still play a crucial role in the political arena. Weak presidents have been distinguished from strong ones by relying on the evaluation of the powers they display according to the constitution. Six Western European countries are analysed: Germany and Italy which present a consistent constitutional design (as weak presidents are elected indirectly), and Austria, Ireland, Finland and Portugal that present inconsistent constitutional design (as weak presidents are elected directly). In contrast to much of the existing comparative works on presidential powers and activism, the book emphasises the role and the use of informal powers beyond that of formal ones. In particular, a definition and a typology of informal powers are provided as well as an empirical investigation on informal presidential activism. The positive outcome of presidential informal interventions are studied by relying on an interactionist approachwhich combines presidency-centred as well as president centred-explanations. The book argues that when dealing with informal presidential activism the opportunity structure matters but presidential public support matters even more.