You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Around the turn of 21st Century, Spain welcomed more than six million foreigners, many of them from various parts of the African continent. How African immigrants represent themselves and are represented in contemporary Spanish texts is the subject of this interdisciplinary collection. Analyzing blogs, films, translations, and literary works by contemporary authors including Donato Ndongo (Ecquatorial Guinea), Abderrahman El Fathi (Morocco), Chus Gutiérrez (Spain), Juan Bonilla (Spain), and Bahia Mahmud Awah (Western Sahara), the contributors interrogate how Spanish cultural texts represent, idealize, or sympathize with the plight of immigrants, as well as the ways in which immigrants themselves represent Spain and Spanish culture. At the same time, these works shed light on issues related to Spain’s racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spain’s economic crisis in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, the essays are a convincing reminder that cultural texts provide a mirror into the perceptions of a society during times of change.
This book discusses the origins and trajectories of political parties, welfare policies, and income inequality, and how the former two affects the latter.
Drawing from recent streams of scholarship, Democratizing Europe provides a renewed portrait of EU government that point at the enduring leading role of independent powers (the European Court, Commission and Central Bank). Vauchez suggests that we recognize this centrality and adjust our democratization strategies accordingly.
The book seeks to link theoretical debates on the relevance of trust in economic outcomes with the current arguments about the origins and lessons of the subprime crisis. By what mechanisms does trust influence economic outcomes? Under what conditions do these mechanisms prevail? How do debates about trust help our understanding of the subprime crisis in the European Union? By integrating insights from Post-Keynesian, Austrian and new institutional economics, the central proposition of the analysis is that the presence or absence of institutional trust creates virtuous and vicious cycles in law-abiding, which critically influence the possibility for economic agents to have realistic long-term plans.
If we believe that the small, open economies of Nordic Europe are paragons of good governance, why are they so prone to economic crisis? In Good Governance Gone Bad, Darius Ornston provides evidence that adapting flexibly to rapid, technological change and shifting patterns of economic competition may be a great virtue, but it does not prevent countries from making strikingly poor policy choices and suffering devastating results. Home to three of the "big five" financial crises in the twentieth century, Nordic Europe in the new millennium has witnessed a housing bubble in Denmark, the collapse of the Finnish ICT industry, and the Icelandic financial crisis. Ornston argues that the reason for...
This book engages with politics and political discourse that relate to and qualify immigration in Europe. It brings together empirical analysis of immigration both topically and contextually, and interprets such empirical evidence with the use of policy and discursive analyses as methodological tools. Thematically, this volume focuses on how discourse and politics operate in issue areas as varied as immigrant integration and multilevel governance, Roma immigration and their respective securitization, the uses of language in determination of asylum applications, gendered immigrants in informal economy, perceptions of integration by the migrants, economic interests and economic nationalism stimulating immigration choices, ideology and entry policies, and asylum processes and the institutional evolution of immigration systems. These issues are analyzed with empirical evidence investigating the discursive formulation of immigration systems in political contexts such as the Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, Turkey, Switzerland, Scandinavian states, and Finland.
Although inequality in Latin America ranks among the worst in the world, it has notably declined over the last decade, offset by improvements in health care and education, enhanced programs for social assistance, and increases in the minimum wage. In Democracy and the Left, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens argue that the resurgence of democracy in Latin America is key to this change. In addition to directly affecting public policy, democratic institutions enable left-leaning political parties to emerge, significantly influencing the allocation of social spending on poverty and inequality. But while democracy is an important determinant of redistributive change, it is by no means the only f...
A fascinating exploration of the evolution of the Portuguese economy over the course of eight centuries, from 1143 to 2010.
Was the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) designed as a definitive trade agreement, or as a stepping stone? This book reviews NAFTA's performances on trade, investment, intellectual property rights, dispute-settlement, as well as environmental and labor side-agreements within a theoretical construct.
With a focus predominantly on the two governments of José Maria Aznar between 1996 and 2004, and the José Luis Zapatero government after 2004, this book provides an introduction for students of Spain's history and its contemporary politics.