Since the mid-1980s, Fritz W. Scharpf has been investigating the evolution of the multilevel European polity and its impact on the effectiveness and legitimacy of democratic government in Europe. Community and Autonomy collects in one volume Scharpf’s nearly two decades of research on government in Europe and offers new contributions that focus on the asymmetric impact of European law on the institutions and policy legacies of EU member states and on the implications of these asymmetries for the democratic legitimacy of government at national and European levels.

As civil wars and insurgencies rage around the globe, Klaus Schlichte’s In the Shadow of Violence addresses a crucial question: why do some groups succeed in violently seizing and holding power while others fail? What makes for a successful non-state armed force? Arguing that success rests on the ability of these groups to transform the power of violence into legitimate domination, both inside their ranks and in the larger society, Schlichte explores the techniques and strategies they employ—and the long shadow of violence they must overcome along the way.

In today’s world, interstate wars are fairly rare—but when they happen, they tend to be more complicated than in the past, combining regional causes with the involvement of external actors as well. This book looks at that problem in the wake of the post-Soviet withdrawal of Russia from involvement in Eastern Europe and the destabilization of regimes in Africa, the Middle East, and the Near East. What do these changes mean for the possibility of establishing peace and security in Europe’s future? What role will the growth of nationalism and populism play in those efforts? And what forms should the relationship between Europe and Russia take? Core Europe and Greater Eurasia addresses these questions and many more, assessing our current moment and looking ahead.

The global order that has held sway in world political affairs for decades—dominated by the United States, Russia, China, and the European Union—is now in an uneasy period of instability and turmoil, driven as much by failures of governance as by the rise of smaller powers. Multipolarity explores both the causes of this decline in power—from Brexit and Trump to the rise of autocratic strongmen in Europe and Asia—along with a number of possibilities for a more decentralized world, among them a Russian pivot to the east and the rise of African influence worldwide. The authors examine the diffusion of power among newly emerging leaders on the world stage, offering a multitude of potential roadmaps for creating security and stability in a changing world.

In this timely investigation of secessionist entities in post-Soviet territories, Smolnik explores how political authority is organized, produced, and reproduced in conditions of violent conflict. Drawing on case studies of unrecognized or only partially recognized states in the South Caucasus, she shows that so-called low-level violent conflicts may significantly influence the form and functioning of political rule and thereby have a considerable impact on the empowerment and disempowerment of local actors. Offering fresh insight into the connections between violence and political power, Secessionist Rule not only contributes to the political sociology of violent conflict, but also adds to our knowledge of the largely understudied internal dynamics of de facto states.

Do unemployment, religiosity, or morality play a role in people’s perception of happiness and well-being?  Using large-scale survey data from more than seventy countries, Olga Stavrova shows in Fitting In and Getting Happy that to a large extent happiness depends on a match between individuals’ attributes and the sociocultural characteristics of the environment in which they live. The first systematic, theory-driven investigation of cross-cultural variability in the causes and correlates of happiness, this book also provides a comprehensive overview of prior theoretical and empirical literature on happiness and life satisfaction, and suggests a number of avenues for further research in the fields of subjective well-being studies and cross-cultural comparative studies.

In recent years political history has been rediscovered by historians. In this volume the contributors approach the new political history in a constructivist way, conceiving the political as a communicative space whose boundaries are constantly reconfigured through acts of verbal, visual, and sometimes violent communication. Writing Political History Today is organized into four sections, focusing on politics and the political as contested concepts; boundary disputes between the political and other spheres; the question whether violence is a means, an object, or the end of political communication; and on a future agenda for writing political history.  

The global finance system has been the subject of hot debate for several years. Major players such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have come under fire for their financial practices, while the role of epistemic authorities, including rating agencies, remains unclear. This book systematically analyzes the role knowledge plays in global finance reform by considering its influence in the empirical areas of finance (banking, accounting, and bond rating, for example). As the contributors demonstrate, current institutional management strategies reflect a shift toward “cognitive,” or learning-based modes of managing financial and political risks—and this cognitive thinking has its own consequences for the global marketplace.