Treating rhetoric and symbols as central rather than peripheral to politics, Lisa Wedeen’s groundbreaking book offers a compelling counterargument to those who insist that politics is primarily about material interests and the groups advocating for them. During the thirty-year rule of President Hafiz al-Asad’s regime, his image was everywhere. In newspapers, on television, and during orchestrated spectacles. Asad was praised as the “father,” the “gallant knight,” even the country’s “premier pharmacist.” Yet most Syrians, including those who create the official rhetoric, did not believe its claims. Why would a regime spend scarce resources on a personality cult whose content is patently spurious?

Wedeen shows how such flagrantly fictitious claims were able to produce a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens acted as if they revered the leader. By inundating daily life with tired symbolism, the regime exercised a subtle, yet effective form of power. The cult worked to enforce obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians from one another, and set guidelines for public speech and behavior. Wedeen‘s ethnographic research demonstrates how Syrians recognized the disciplinary aspects of the cult and sought to undermine them. In a new preface, Wedeen discusses the uprising against the Syrian regime that began in 2011 and questions the usefulness of the concept of legitimacy in trying to analyze and understand authoritarian regimes.

In Syria, the image of President Hafiz al-Asad is everywhere. In newspapers, on television, and during orchestrated spectacles Asad is praised as the "father," the "gallant knight," even the country's "premier pharmacist." Yet most Syrians, including those who create the official rhetoric, do not believe its claims. Why would a regime spend scarce resources on a cult whose content is patently spurious?

Wedeen concludes that Asad's cult acts as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revered their leader. By inundating daily life with tired symbolism, the regime exercises a subtle, yet effective form of power. The cult works to enforce obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians from one another, and set guidelines for public speech and behavior. Wedeen's ethnographic research demonstrates how Syrians recognize the disciplinary aspects of the cult and seek to undermine them. Provocative and original, Ambiguities of Domination is a significant contribution to comparative politics, political theory, and cultural studies.

This book is both an analysis of the Bastille as cultural paradigm and a case study on the history of French political culture. It examines in particular the storming and subsequent fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789 and how it came to represent the cornerstone of the French Revolution, becoming a symbol of the repression of the Old Regime. Lüsebrink and Reichardt use this semiotic reading of the Bastille to reveal how historical symbols are generated; what these symbols’ functions are in the collective memory of societies; and how they are used by social, political, and ideological groups.
To facilitate the symbolic nature of the investigation, this analysis of the evolving signification of the Bastille moves from the French Revolution to the nineteenth century to contemporary history. The narrative also shifts from France to other cultural arenas, like the modern European colonial sphere, where the overthrow of the Bastille acquired radical new signification in the decolonization period of the 1940s and 1950s. The Bastille demonstrates the potency of the interdisciplinary historical research that has characterized the end of this century, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and taking its methodological tools from history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies.

Thanks to the ready availability of political news today, informed citizens can protect and promote their own interests and the public interest more effectively. Or can they? Murray Edelman argues against this conventional interpretation of politics, one that takes for granted that we live in a world of facts and that people react rationally to the facts they know. In doing so, he explores in detail the ways in which the conspicuous aspects of the political scene are interpretations that systematically buttress established inequalities and interpretations already dominant political ideologies.

National symbols, modern totems with ancient roots, remain entities for which men and women continue to march, debate, fight, and die. Modern political leaders still drape their campaigns in such symbols; modern revolutionaries still defile them. Identity Designs  explores the source of this long-standing power––the way national symbols are selected, the manner in which their meaning is conveyed, their potential effects, and the sustenance of their power.

In particular, the book charts the role of design in the selection of symbolic images, thus demonstrating that symbols are chosen not just for what they convey, but how they convey their message. Karen Cerulo shows that the symbolic designs of a nation's identity are not simply the products of indigenous characteristics, as conventional wisdom might suggest. Rather, the banners and songs by which nations represent themselves are generated by broad social forces that transcend the peculiarities of any one nation. Cerulo's analysis acquaints readers with a set of social structural factors that delimit rules of symbolic expression. Further, the book suggests the benefits of adhering to these rules and explores the costs of violating them.

A penetrating account, drawing on a wide range of sources in multiple languages, of the development of Islamic political language

What does jihad really mean? What is the Muslim conception of law? What is Islam's stance toward unbelievers? Probing literary and historical sources, Bernard Lewis traces the development of Islamic political language from the time of the Prophet to the present. His analysis of documents written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish illuminates differences between Muslim political thinking and Western political theory, and clarifies the perception, discussion, and practices of politics in the Islamic world.

Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use argues that rhetoric, ideology, and myth have played key roles in influencing the development of the 100-year conflict between first the Zionist settlers and the current Israeli people and the Palestinian residents in what is now Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is usually treated as an issue of land and water. While these elements are the core of the conflict, they are heavily influenced by the symbols used by both peoples to describe, understand, and persuade each other. The authors argue that symbolic practices deeply influenced the Oslo Accords, and that the breakthrough in the peace process that led to Oslo could not have occurred without a breakthrough in communication styles.
Rowland and Frank develop four crucial ideas on social development: the roles of rhetoric, ideology, and myth; the influence of symbolic factors; specific symbolic factors that played a key role in peace negotiations; and the identification and value of criteria for evaluating symbolic practices in any society.