Democracy Unbound

Democracy Unbound PDF

Author: David B. Reynolds

Publisher: South End Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780896085633

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David Reynolds explains how grassroots activists are translating mass discontent into new people-driven parties in America. This is the first and only book to look beyond the superficial media coverage of Ross Perot to the real movement for fundamental change.

Security Unbound

Security Unbound PDF

Author: Jef Huysmans

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1317813081

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Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life.

Democracy Lives in Darkness

Democracy Lives in Darkness PDF

Author: Emily Van Duyn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0197557015

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"Republicans and Democrats increasingly distrust, avoid, and wish harm upon those from the other party. To make matters worse, they also increasingly reside among like-minded others and are part of social groups that share their political beliefs. All of this can make expressing a dissenting political opinion hard. Yet digital and social media have given people new spaces for political discourse and community, and more control over who knows their political beliefs and who does not. With Democracy Lives in Darkness, Van Duyn looks at what these changes in the political and media landscape mean for democracy. She uncovers and follows a secret political organization in rural Texas over the entire Trump presidency. The group, which organized out of fear of their conservative community in 2016, has a confidentiality agreement, an email listserv and secret Facebook group, and meets in secret every month. By building relationships with members, she explores how and why they hide their beliefs and what this does for their own political behavior and for their community. Drawing on research from communication, political science, and sociology along with survey data on secret political expression, she finds that polarization has led even average partisans to hide their political beliefs from others. And although intensifying polarization will likely make political secrecy more common, she argues that this secrecy is not just evidence that democracy is hurting, but that it is still alive; that people persist in the face of opposition and that this matters if democracy is to survive"--

Socialism Unbound

Socialism Unbound PDF

Author: Stephen Eric Bronner

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011-11-22

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0231527357

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Published more than twenty years ago, Stephen Eric Bronner's bold defense of socialism remains a seminal text for our time. Treating socialism as an ethic, reinterpreting its core categories, and critically confronting its early foundations, Bronner's work offers a reinvigorated "class ideal" and a new perspective for progressive politics in the twentieth century. Socialism Unbound is an extraordinary work of political history that revisits the pivotal figures of the labor movement: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. Examining their contributions as well as their flaws, Bronner shows how critical innovation gave way to dogma. New practical problems have arisen, and this volume engages with the relationship between class and social movements, institutional accountability and democratic participation, economic justice and market imperatives, and internationalism and identity. With a foreword by Dick Howard and a new introduction by the author, Bronner's classic study remains indispensable for scholars and activists alike.

Security Unbound

Security Unbound PDF

Author: Jef Huysmans

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1317813073

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Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life.

India Unbound

India Unbound PDF

Author: Gurcharan Das

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2002-04-09

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0385720742

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India today is a vibrant free-market democracy, a nation well on its way to overcoming decades of widespread poverty. The nation’s rise is one of the great international stories of the late twentieth century, and in India Unbound the acclaimed columnist Gurcharan Das offers a sweeping economic history of India from independence to the new millennium. Das shows how India’s policies after 1947 condemned the nation to a hobbled economy until 1991, when the government instituted sweeping reforms that paved the way for extraordinary growth. Das traces these developments and tells the stories of the major players from Nehru through today. As the former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India, Das offers a unique insider’s perspective and he deftly interweaves memoir with history, creating a book that is at once vigorously analytical and vividly written. Impassioned, erudite, and eminently readable, India Unbound is a must for anyone interested in the global economy and its future.

The Creative Citizen Unbound

The Creative Citizen Unbound PDF

Author: Ian Hargreaves

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2016-04-06

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1447324951

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This timely book explores the nature and value of creative citizenship in our age of digital communication and social media. A stellar roster of contributors addresses the crucial question of what the place of creative citizenship is in the struggle to remake democratic institutions and procedures in ways that can take full advantage of the tools and connections made available through online, social communications.

Public Space Unbound

Public Space Unbound PDF

Author: Sabine Knierbein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1315449188

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Through an exploration of emancipation in recent processes of capitalist urbanization, this book argues the political is enacted through the everyday practices of publics producing space. This suggests democracy is a spatial practice rather than an abstract professional field organized by institutions, politicians and movements. Public Space Unbound brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars to examine spaces, conditions and circumstances in which emancipatory practices impact the everyday life of citizens. We ask: How do emancipatory practices relate with public space under ‘post-political conditions’? In a time when democracy, solidarity and utopias are in crisis, we argue that productive emancipatory claims already exist in the lived space of everyday life rather than in the expectation of urban revolution and future progress.

The Executive Unbound

The Executive Unbound PDF

Author: Eric A. Posner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-03-16

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780199831753

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Ever since Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. used "imperial presidency" as a book title, the term has become central to the debate about the balance of power in the U.S. government. Since the presidency of George W. Bush, when advocates of executive power such as Dick Cheney gained ascendancy, the argument has blazed hotter than ever. Many argue the Constitution itself is in grave danger. What is to be done? The answer, according to legal scholars Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule, is nothing. In The Executive Unbound, they provide a bracing challenge to conventional wisdom, arguing that a strong presidency is inevitable in the modern world. Most scholars, they note, object to today's level of executive power because it varies so dramatically from the vision of the framers. But there is nothing in our system of checks and balances that intrinsically generates order or promotes positive arrangements. In fact, the greater complexity of the modern world produces a concentration of power, particularly in the White House. The authors chart the rise of executive authority straight through to the Obama presidency. Political, cultural and social restraints, they argue, have been more effective in preventing dictatorship than any law. The executive-centered state tends to generate political checks that substitute for the legal checks of the Madisonian constitution.