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Can people use new participatory spaces to reclaim their rights as citizens and challenge structures of political power? This book carefully examines the constraints and possibilities for participatory governance under capitalism. To understand what is at stake in the politics of participation, we need to look beyond the values commonly associated with it. Citizens face a dilemma: should they participate, even if this helps to sustain an unjust system, or not participate, thereby turning down rare opportunities to make a difference? By examining the rationale behind democratic innovation and the reasons people have for getting involved, this book provides a theory of how citizens can use new...
It is easy to be in favor of a government that reflects the will of people you like. It is more difficult to be in favor of a government that reflects the will of people you hate. But this is precisely what democracy requires of us. And one of the most serious threats facing democracy today, in the United States and around the world, is the discomfort that many citizens feel toward this core democratic principle: that even those citizens we think of as evil, deluded, or simply wrong should still be allowed a say in what their own government does. Perhaps the best hope of resolving this tension can be found in the idea of deliberative democracy, which sees a particular form of non-coercive di...
Remodelling to Prepare for Independence: The Philippine Commonwealth, Decolonisation, Cities and Public Works, c. 1935–46 illuminates the implications of the USA’s final phase of colonial rule in the Philippine Islands. It explores the Filipino side of decolonisation and the management of the built environment in the years immediately prior to self-rule. This book shakes off the collaboration vs. resistance paradigm that empire histories generally follow and consequently yields an original vantage point to comprehend transition within an Asian society in the years immediately prior to, during, and after World War Two. This will not only deepen insight of the American Empire, but also gra...
Within the last four years, the death of George Floyd brought a new level of urgency to understanding police violence; the world experienced two of the three hottest years on record; drug overdose deaths in the U.S. surpassed 100,000 per year for the first time; the foreign-born percentage of the population became the highest ever; and COVID-19 transformed education, work, and public health. Seeing Social Problems: The Hidden Stories Behind Contemporary Issues, Second Edition shows students how to think about social problems in a new way, by exploring the connection between their own experiences and larger social forces. The personal relevance of this book’s content is at the forefront of ...
Whatever happened to the poster child of European social democracy? For a young generation of socialists, the Swedish experience has been an obvious reference and inspiration. But what remains of the Swedish model today is, in fact, a failed project in decline. This book is the first comprehensive study of the rise and fall of one of the most influential political movements of our time. Ostberg depicts the rise of one of the 20th century's best organized labor movements and Sweden's development from one of Europe's poorest countries to one of the richest and with the most extensive welfare. During the last 90 years, Sweden had a social democratic prime minister for 72 years, including a 44 y...
This book unravels the paradox of gentrification in Helsinki, Finland. Here, housing and welfare policies work well under certain conditions to prevent the worst outcomes of residential gentrification. Yet other forms of gentrification have proliferated in recent years, and local urban planning has gained a momentum in efforts to remake the urban landscape for business and tourism. Through a range of methods, each chapter approaches a different aspect of gentrification: the effectiveness of welfare policies against residential gentrification, the importance of retail gentrification and symbolic changes, the role of media and state-led tourism campaigns in promoting gentrification, the rise o...
Democracy today faces deep and complex challenges, especially when it comes to political communication and the quality of public discourse. Dishonest and manipulative communication amplified by unscrupulous politicians and media pervades these diabolical times, enabling right-wing populism, extremism, truth denial, and authoritarianism to flourish. To tackle these issues, we need to encourage meaningful deliberative communication – creating spaces for reflective and constructive dialogue, repairing unhealthy public spheres while preserving healthier ones, and building discursive bridges across deep divides. Citizens who see through elite manipulations should be at the core of this response, especially if bad elite behavior is to be effectively constrained. Democratic activists and leaders, diverse interpersonal networks, resilient public spheres, deliberative innovations and clever communication strategies all have vital roles to play in both defending and renewing democracy. Healthy discursive infrastructures can make democracies work again.
Felix Anderl’s book is a stimulating analysis of the decline of the social movement against the World Bank and the rise of a new form of transnational rule. The book observes international organizations and social movements in their interaction, demonstrating how social movements are divided and ruled in the absence of a ruler.
As the material anchors of globalization, North America’s global port cities channel flows of commodities, capital, and tourists. This book explores how economic globalization processes have shaped these cities' political institutions, social structures, and urban identities since the mid-1970s. Although the impacts of financialization on global cities have been widely discussed, it is curious that how the global integration of commodity chains actually happens spatially — creating a quantitatively new, global organization of production, distribution, and consumption processes — remains understudied. The book uses New York City, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Montreal as case studies of how once-redundant spaces have been reorganized, and crucially, reinterpreted, so as to accommodate new flows of goods and people — and how, in these processes, social, environmental, and security costs of global production networks have been shifted to the public.
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal ...