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Explains the current weakness of democratic polities by addressing paradoxes in constitutional democracy and its theoretical foundations.
This book is about systemic change in what we consider as capitalism. Far beyond qualifications such as Industry 4.0, the view presented here is that the very structures of capitalism are currently being displaced, and that the present digital revolution is as deep in its impact as the industrial revolution was when it emerged from the agricultural age. Another mode of production is being built, and we are facing a transformation of labor relations, surplus-value extraction, means of production, the role of money and credit, the concept of national borders, and social relations. Rather than lining up what is changing in the industrial capitalism we know, this book studies the new system that is being born, as a broader look at this is necessary due to the present convergence of environmental catastrophe, explosive inequality, global financial chaos, and erosion of democracy.
The geopolitics of American law enforcement and how it changed corporate criminal accountability in other countries Over the past decade, many of the world’s biggest companies have found themselves embroiled in legal disputes over corruption, fraud, environmental damage, tax evasion, or sanction violations. Corporations including Volkswagen, BP, and Credit Suisse have paid record-breaking fines. Many critics of globalization and corporate impunity cheer this turn toward accountability. Others, however, question American dominance in legal battles that seem to impose domestic legal norms beyond national boundaries. In this book, Cornelia Woll examines the politics of American corporate crim...
This book’s essays aim subversively and resolutely to replace the hegemonic discursive frame governing comparative law. Beyond harnessing negative critique to resist the orthodoxy’s self-assured cognitive assumptions, at once unexamined and indefensible, the argument mobilizes negativity as an empowering idea, a resource towards the displacement of the brand of comparative law that has been fostering a closing of the comparing mind. To answer the demands of the moment and herald foreign law research as a creditable intellectual development, one requires to engage in a culturalist theorization and practice of comparative law at radical variance from the prevailing positivist model. The ne...
Using Africa as a context for research, new conceptual framing is proposed to make sense of the challenges of designing effective organizations to pursue socio-economic development.
Leading scholars and policy analysts from around the Americas come together to untangle the factors that have fuelled the implementation of mano dura politics, their rising popularity, and impacts across nine widely heterogeneous countries in Latin America. Beginning with a discussion on the concept of mano dura, the editors move to survey various theoretical approaches to punitivism, and later review of the empirical research evaluating different drivers behind the adoption of tough on crime policies. Since hard-line initiatives often have consequences beyond the general goal of reducing violence, they then analyze the impacts of these policing strategies on crime rates and different democr...
This book’s essays seek to cleanse comparative law of some of the epistemic detritus it has been collecting and that has been cluttering its theory and practice to the point where this flotsam has effectively stultified ‘good’ comparison. While a critique would pursue adjustments to the prevailing model, this text’s negative critique seeks a much more radical refurbishment as it utters an emphatic ‘no’ to the governing epistemology: it pursues, in effect, a deposition and a disposition of the leading epistemic configuration and the various assumptions regarding the acquisition of knowledge about foreign law that inform it. Negative comparative law thus operates at a primordial le...
Brazil, Land of the Past scrutinizes the ideological roots of the so-called New Right in Brazil. The book traces the continuity and resilience of a system of thought based on the idea of a God-given hierarchical order to be defended against any social contract and modernizing relativization. It explains in detail how today a diverse movement — which includes actors ranging from the authoritarian Bolsonaro wing to economic liberals to the military to both Catholic and evangelical religious conservatives – assumes unanimously the ideas of this tradition as underlying premises of their political action. Though not always explicitly, this drives the self-declared “liberal-conservative” but rather anti-modernist reaction which claims to liberate an imaginary authentic “Brazil” from an aberrant “State” – and in so doing intends to preserve inherited privilege in an extremely unequal society.
Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy – to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.