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If personal and national identity is often constructed in terms of place, how do our identities and values change as places themselves are transformed? What happens to the spaces in which we live as societal values and identities change? These questions can be asked of almost any discipline, whether one is taking a photograph or mapping a literary topography, tracing linguistic change in a geographic region or language’s importance to our conception of a political territory, building a house or place of worship on a physical plot of land, or constructing them from words on a page or computer software. Few places are ever uniquely our own. We share them, knowing that the geographic points s...
Portuguese democracy is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. Portugal joined the European Union (EU) in 1986, but the enduring legacies of the country’s transition process from authoritarianism to democracy became apparent during the European sovereign debt crisis, when Portugal experienced its third bailout since the institutionalization of democratic government. Although the first decade after EU accession was one of slight growth and investment, Portugal’s economy has, in effect, been performing poorly since the beginning of the 21st century. Among the major changes in Portuga - as in much of Southern Europe - as a result of the ‘great recession’, was the emergence of important n...
The question of Turkish membership in the European Union is highly controversial and subject to many misperceptions and misunderstandings on both sides. This book examines the politics of EU accession which have evolved during the expansion of the EU, from more procedural conditions to provisions of substantive democracy. With a particular focus on the challenges Turkey faces to join the EU, the authors examine the experiences of the newly-democratised and acceded Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to provide insight and to identify the best possible solutions. Combining the Turkish and Central European perspectives in one volume, and using a social constructivist approach, the aut...
Zusammenfassung: This two-volume work brings together studies focusing on the Greek realities of class as they appear in and through the Greek media realm. Critically engaging with traditions of class analysis, it brings to light various class perspectives and their explanatory power for the Greek context. In doing so, it embraces intersectional approaches that study class structures in their co-constructions/co-articulations with other forms of social organization and identification, such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, geography and labor. Instead of providing clear-cut definitions, the chapters reveal the complexities and relationalities of class cultures and classed selves in their...
This book examines political party system change from a party-centric perspective and assesses how, and to what extent, established political parties in western Europe can maintain their dominant positions. Parties are increasingly competing in a changeable environment and this book assesses the ways in which political parties have tried to adapt to these changes, by undertaking a study of the strategies employed by established parties since 1950. It features analysis of seventeen western European countries, with eight case-studies explored in greater depth, including; France, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The book assesses two groups of ‘strategi...
Although Turkey has a long-held aspiration for European Union membership and has been a candidate for more than a decade, relations between the EU and Turkey have not received the attention it deserves from non-Turkish researchers thus far, and consequently the international literature on EU-Turkey relations is rather limited. In light of recent global economic and political challenges for the EU and Turkey, a need has emerged for an interdisciplinary approach to study EU-Turkey relations within the wider international political and economic context. Turkey’s Accession to the European Union: Political and Economic Challenges, edited by Belgin Akçay and Bahri Yilmaz, provides a timely over...
The EU likes to be seen as a normative actor, engaged in diffusing the norms and values enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty. This book focuses on gender equality as one of these values. It shows that the EU, in implementing the mandate to promote gender equality abroad, is acting under distinctly separate sets of logic in the various policy fields and vis-�-vis different stakeholders. The same normative commitment to gender equality, when filtered through the particular logic of the various policy fields, leads to different types of external action with rather different outcomes. (Series: Gender Discussion / [Gender-Diskussion, Vol. 24) pSubject: European Studies, Gender Studies, Sociology, Public Policy, Politics]
Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas uses a range of analytical approaches to interrogate how the traditional socio-political rhetoric of national cinema can be rethought through ecosystemic concerns, by exploring a range of Nordic films as national and transnational, regional and local texts--all with significant global implications. By synergizing transnational theories with ecological approaches, the study considers the planetary implications of nation-based cultural production.
This book analyses the impact of external actors, primarily the European Union (EU) and Russia, on democratisation and authoritarian tendencies in Ukraine and Turkey. The war in Ukraine will continue to affect patterns of cooperation and confrontation in the Black Sea region for years to come, critically undermining Russia as a viable alternative partner for deeper political and economic integration, but also revealing that the EU has only partially succeeded in stabilising its neighbourhood. In this volume, international contributors consider future EU and Russian strategy in the region and the impact on domestic and foreign policy in two countries seen by the EU as “disputed Europeans”. The book will appeal to those working on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the EU and Russia, scholars of international relations, democratisation studies, East European politics and area studies, and Eurasian studies. It is also aimed at foreign policy analysts, journalists, policymakers and diplomats.
Many contemporary environmental risks and global environmental changes occurring today are unprecedented in the history of human life on earth. However, the images and narratives through which humans relate to these phenomena are built on existing cultural tropes and narrative models. Cultural, social, and historical contexts strongly influence how we construct images and narratives of nature and the environment. It is therefore highly important to study such narratives in works of literature, film, and other forms of cultural expression in relation to the specific circumstances from which they arise. Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment is the first English language anthology tha...