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We are all modern today. But modernity today is not what it used to be. Over the past few decades, modernity has been radically changed by globalization, individualization, new inequalities, and fundamentalism. A novel way of analysing contemporary societies is needed. This book proposes such an analysis. Every society seeks answers to certain basic questions: how to order life in common; how to satisfy human needs; how to establish knowledge. Sociology long assumed that the answers had been found once and for all: a liberal-democratic state, a market economy, and free scientific institutions. This trinity used to be called ‘modern society’. By contrast, this book is based on the idea th...
We live in a modern age, but what does ‘modern’ mean and how can a reflection on ‘modernity’ help us to understand the world today? These are the questions that Peter Wagner sets out to answer in this concise and accessible book. Wagner begins by returning to the question of modernity's Western origins and its claims to open up a new and better era in the history of humanity. Modernity's claims and expectations have become more prevalent and widely shared, but in the course of their realization and diffusion they have also been radically transformed. In an acute and engaging analysis, Wagner examines the following key issues among others: - Modernity was based on the hope for freedom...
This book provides an analysis of the articulation and organisation of radical international solidarity by organisations that were either connected to or had been established by the Communist International (Comintern), such as the International Red Aid, the International Workers’ Relief, the League Against Imperialism, the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. The guiding light of these organisations was a radical interpretation of international solidarity, usually in combination with concepts and visions of gender, race and class as well as anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and anti-fascism. All of these...
This volume addresses the question of migration in Europe. It is concerned with the extent to which racism and anti-immigration discourse has been to some extent normalised and ‘democratised’ in European and national political discourses. Mainstream political parties are espousing increasingly coercive policies and frequently attempting to legitimate such approaches via nationalist-populist slogans and coded forms of racism. Identity, Belonging and Migration shows that that liberalism is not enough to oppose the disparate and diffuse xenophobia and racism faced by many migrants today and calls for new conceptions of anti-racism within and beyond the state. The book is divided into three parts and organised around a theoretical framework for understanding migration, belonging, and exclusion, which is subsequently developed through discussions of state and structural discrimination as well as a series of thematic case studies. In drawing on a range of rich and original data, this timely volume makes an important contribution to discussions on migration in Europe.
This book explores the possibilities of alternative worldings beyond those authorized by the disciplinary norms and customs of International Relations. In response to the boundary-drawing practices of IR that privilege the historical experience and scholarly folkways of the "West," the contributors examine the limits of even critical practice within the discipline; investigate alternative archives from India, the Caribbean, the steppes of Eurasia, the Andes, China, Japan and Southeast Asia that offer different understandings of proper rule, the relationality of identities and polities, notions of freedom and imaginations of layers of sovereignty; and demonstrate distinct modes of writing and inquiry. In doing so, the book also speaks about different possibilities for IR and for inquiry without it.
More than perhaps anybody else in the world, the Swedish social scientist Björn Wittrock has contributed - both on the intellectual and institutional level - to making a truly global science possible. This book is devoted to an appreciation of his contributions.
This book analyses the concept and conditions of transnational solidarity, the challenges and the opportunities, from an interdisciplinary global perspective.
Pioneering study offering a ‘new comparatism’ — a new world-systems’ approach to the ‘world’ in ‘world literature’.
This important Manifesto argues that we still need a concept ofsociety in order to make sense of the forces which structure ourlives. Written by leading social theorist William Outhwaite Asks if the notion of society is relevant in the twenty-firstcentury Goes to the heart of contemporary social and politicaldebate Examines critiques of the concept of society from neoliberals,postmodernists, and globalization theorists
The triangular relationship between the social, the political and the cultural has opened up social and political theory to new challenges. The social can no longer be reduced to the category of society, and the political extends beyond the traditional concerns of the nature of the state and political authority. This Handbook will address a range of issues that have recently emerged from the disciplines of social and political theory, focusing on key themes as opposed to schools of thought or major theorists. It is divided into three sections which address: the most influential theoretical traditions that have emerged from the legacy of the twentieth century the most important new and emergi...