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Palestinians in Israel considers a key issue ignored by the official 'peace process' and most mainstream commentators: that of the growing Palestinian minority within Israel itself.

What the Israeli right-wing calls 'the demographic problem' Ben White identifies as 'the democratic problem' which goes to the heart of the conflict. Israel defines itself not as a state of its citizens, but as a Jewish state, despite the substantial and increasing Palestinian population. White demonstrates how the consistent emphasis on privileging one ethno-religious group over another cannot be seen as compatible with democratic values and that, unless addressed, will undermine any attempts to find a lasting peace.

Individual case studies are used to complement this deeply informed study into the great, unspoken contradiction of Israeli democracy. It is a pioneering contribution which will spark debate amongst all those concerned with a resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The people of Colombia have, for the last fifty years, been subject to a specific form of violence: paramilitarism. An embodiment of the underbelly of global capitalist accumulation, this form of pervasive violence expresses the exacerbation of social inequalities and class formation under capitalism. In Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism, Jasmin Hristov theorises this extreme expression in light of forced displacement, labour repression, subjugation of social movements, decentralisation of violence, drug trafficking and the emergence of a variety of para-institutional armed actors across Latin America.

The activities of paramilitary groups in the post­demobilisation era, their involvement in human rights violations, and their multi­level support networks inside major state institutions are documented, with a particular emphasis on violent dispossession and illegal land appropriation that has benefited agroindustries and mining enterprises. Hristov engages in a Marxist political economy approach, combined with a global sociological perspective, allowing for an expansive and deep-reaching understanding of paramilitarism as a phenomenon with many faces, ultimately illustrating how it is increasingly becoming the coercive counterpart of global capital.

An essential guide to how the interactions between social norms, party politics, and expressions of prejudice are driving contemporary politics.

Antiminority rhetoric in American politics has grown more overt. What were once fringe comments on Stormfront have now become typical campaign appeals from many mainstream politicians. If there was ever a doubt, this is a poignant reminder that the boundaries of what is “acceptable” and “unacceptable” to say and do are fluid and socially enforced.

In Parties and Prejudice, Maneesh Arora offers a broad framework for understanding this new political terrain. Arora argues that the interaction between social norms and party politics determines what the political consequence of prejudicial speech will be. He illuminates this nuanced relationship by showing that norms vary based on the targeted minority group and the intended audience.

Drawing on experiments, survey data, news coverage, and real-world examples, Parties and Prejudice examines the distinctive ways that egalitarian/inegalitarian norms have developed—within each party—for Black, Muslim, and LGBTQ+ Americans. It is essential reading for understanding Donald Trump’s rise to power, the modern conservative agenda (including opposition to critical race theory and transgender rights), and threats to the development of a multiracial democracy.

An unflinching examination of the effects and boundaries of partisan animosity.

For generations, experts argued that American politics needed cohesive parties to function effectively. Now many fear that strong partisan views, particularly hostility to the opposing party, are damaging democracy. Is partisanship as dangerous as we fear it is?

To provide an answer, this book offers a nuanced evaluation of when and how partisan animosity matters in today’s highly charged, dynamic political environment, drawing on panel data from some of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, 2019 through 2021. The authors show that partisanship powerfully shapes political behaviors, but its effects are conditional, not constant. Instead, it is most powerful when politicians send clear signals and when an issue is unlikely to bring direct personal consequences. In the absence of these conditions, other factors often dominate decision-making.

The authors argue that while partisan hostility has degraded US politics—for example, politicizing previously non-political issues and undermining compromise—it is not in itself an existential threat. As their research shows, the future of American democracy depends on how politicians, more than ordinary voters, behave.

A provocative exploration of how America’s democratic crisis is rooted in a dangerous mismatch between our Constitution and today’s nationalized, partisan politics.

The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble.

In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today’s challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape—state parties, interest groups, and media—varied locally and reinforced the nation’s stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today’s polarization is self-perpetuating—and intensifying.

Partisan Nation offers a powerful caution. As a result of this polarization, America’s political system is distinctly and acutely vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America’s unusual Constitutional design. Combining the precision and acuity characteristic of their earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy.

In order to understand National Socialism one must recognize its religious nature. Many Germans were attracted to the party by its pledge to re-establish a true community of the people, a goal that was celebrated as “holy”.
     Not only did Hitler promise to solve political, social, and economic problems, he also responded to a widely felt need for salvation. The prospect of salvation elevated politics into the realm of religion and lent meaning to the lives of those who embraced it.
      In this work Klaus Vondung explores the various forms in which the elevation of politics into the sphere of religion was expressed in the Third Reich: in the faith of committed National Socialists, in the party’s cult events which celebrated the “community  of the people” as a “community of faith” and the Fuhrer as “savior”, and in the persecution of the Jews that was ‘justified’ in religious terms by demonizing Jews as the “evil enemies of humanity” responsible for the world’s ills. This apocalyptic worldview was the extreme manifestation of the religious nature of National Socialism and, in the final analysis, the only plausible explanation for the intention of exterminating the Jews that led to the holocaust.

This book centers on the Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, published in Washington in the early summer of 1914 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The volume was born from the conviction that the full assessment of the significance of the Carnegie Report—one of the first international non-governmental fact-finding missions with the intention to promote peace—requires a deeper exploration of the context of its birth.

The authors examine how the countries involved in the wars handled the inquires of the Carnegie Commission and the role of the report in the remembrance of the wars in the respective states. Although the report considered both the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan nation-states insufficiently civilized to wage wars within the limits of the codes of conduct of international law, this orientalist conclusion can in part be explained by the liberal internationalist strategy of the Carnegie Endowment, and of the commission members’ professional, political, and ethnic background. Overshadowed by the outbreak of World War I, the Carnegie Report’s direct impact on international arbitration or international criminal law was limited, yet—in the authors’ opinion—it ultimately contributed to the further juridification of international relations

What draws ordinary Americans into extremist political movements, and why do they stay? Playing Patriot takes readers inside the contemporary Patriot Movement through immersive ethnographic fieldwork conducted with members of the Patriot Movement in Central Florida (including those active in the Proud Boys and Three-Percenters) following January 6. Over months of participant observation, conversations, and firsthand experiences, anthropologist Alexander Lowie explores how humor, play, alternative media, conspiracy narratives, and performances of masculinity shape political belonging. Rather than portraying these organizations as collections of abstract beliefs alone, the book reveals them as communities built through everyday relationships, shared rituals, and stories about national decline and renewal. Written as a first-person narrative ethnography, Playing Patriot offers an accessible, deeply human account of political extremism while providing fresh insight into the emotional and cultural forces shaping contemporary American populism.

This volume of essays and interviews by Polish, British, and American academics and journalists provides an overview of current Polish politics for both informed and non-specialist readers. The essays consider why and how PiS, Law and Justice, the party of Jarosław Kaczynski, returned to power, and the why and how of its policies while in power. They help to make sense of how “history” plays a key role in Polish public life and politics.

The descriptions of PiS in Western media tend to rework old stereotypes about Eastern Europe that had lain dormant for some time. The book addresses the underlying question whether PiS was simply successful in understanding its electorate, and just helped Poland to revert to its normal state. This new Normal seems quite similar to the old one: insular, conservative, xenophobic, and statist.

The book looks at the current struggle between one ‘Poland’ and another; between a Western-looking Poland and an inward-looking Poland, the former more interested in opening to the world, competing in open markets, and working within the EU, and the latter more concerned with holding onto tradition.

The question of illiberalism has gone from an ‘Eastern’ problem (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, etc.) to a global one (Brexit and the U.S. elections). This makes the very specific analysis of Poland’s illiberalism applicable on a broader scale.

An insightful examination of Latin America’s contemporary democratic landscape and how it is marked by patterns of polarization and volatility.

Although Latin American democracies have shown considerable resilience, today they face new forms of political polarization and instability. These challenges are closely connected to the legacies of the region’s “left turn,” which sought to transform entrenched inequalities and social hierarchies in the early twenty-first century. Unprecedented in its scope and duration, the left turn reflected an underlying realignment of political contestation in a highly unequal region. Yet despite notable achievements in addressing social needs, leftist parties struggled to deepen democracy by empowering popular majorities, and they faced powerful elite backlashes.

Through a comparative analysis of seven South American countries, Santiago Anria and Kenneth M. Roberts trace the different origins and trajectories in power of the populist and social democratic currents that emerged within the left turn. Anria and Roberts argue that today’s democratic orders face intensifying polarization and institutional fragility, even where social democratic parties made explicit efforts to build broad coalitions and temper political conflict. They show how activist networks and social movements on the left and the right triggered latent political conflicts and are now reshaping democratic competition and the terms of social inclusion in South American politics.

This book fills a gap in the existing literature on how parties and party systems are developing in the new democracies of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. It provides the first detailed, empirically based examination from a structural and organizational perspective of the new parties and political groupings that have emerged in Poland since the collapse of communism in 1989.

The author develops his argument on the basis of an analysis of five key structural and organizational variables: the internal distribution of power and modes of representation within the parties; the role of the party bureaucracy; the relationship between parties and their electorates; the development of parties as membership organizations; and the relationship between parties and the state.

As the first in-depth, empirically grounded single-country study of party structure and organization in post-communist Eastern Europe, the book provides an opportunity to draw broader conclusions about the process of Central and East European party development and will contribute significantly towards the development of a post-communist political party model. Szczerbiak sheds light on an important aspect of the more general process of post-communist democratization in the region and provides a major contribution to one of the least-explored areas of transition.

The police forces of the transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe have to undergo profound reform to be able to respond to the needs of society; to serve the public and not just the government, and to prove that they can effectively combat crime. This volume is the result of a survey by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee concerning the mode and extent of changes police forces of the post-communist countries have undergone since 1989 – 1990. Information is provided about the relevant tasks, organization, personnel, accountability, and international relations of the national police forces and about the coercive measures they are entitled to use.

Written by internationally acknowledged experts of policing and representatives of human-rights organizations, Police in Transition deals with the questions of transition, European trends in the governance of the police, the relationship between police and criminality, the role of the police in the constitutional framework, the limits of policing, police brutality, civilian oversight of the police and the possibilities of a democratic reform of police forces in Central and Eastern Europe. 

Based on two international conferences at Princeton University and the Central European University, this is a handy guide to the problem of corruption in transition countries, with an important comparative content. Political Corruption in Transition is distinguished from similar publications by at least two features: by the quality of the carefully selected and edited essays ans by its original treatment. Instead of the usual preaching and excommunications, this Skeptic`s Handbook represents down-to-earth realism.

Combines general issues with case studies and original research. The geographic coverage is wide, though it is ideas rather than a geography that drive the volume`s organization.

A scholarly analysis of the origins, evolution, and enduring impact of populism in Latin American political life.

This updated edition of Populism in Latin America discusses new developments in populism as a political phenomenon and the emergence of new populist political figures in Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela in particular.

For more than one hundred years—from the beginning of the twentieth to the early twenty-first century—Latin American populists proved amazingly successful at gaining high office, holding on to power, maintaining their followings, and renewing their careers.  They raised more campaign money, got more voters to the polls,and held followers’ allegiances far better than traditional politicians.  Certainly some populist leaders were corrupt, others manipulated their followers, and still others disgraced themselves. Nevertheless, populist leaders were  extraordinarily effective in reaching masses of voters, and some left positive legacies for future generations.

Populism in Latin America examines the notion of populism in the political and social culture of Latin American societies as expressed through the populist leaders of several Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. This second edition also includes a new preface by Kenneth M. Roberts, professor of comparative and Latin American politics and the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University.

Contributors
Jorge Basurto / Michael L. Conniff / Paul W. Drake / Steve Ellner / Joel Horowitz /
Kenneth M. Roberts / W. Frank Robinson /Ximena Sosa / Steve Stein / Kurt Weyland

In an era of intense polarization, misinformation, and challenges to democratic norms, American citizens have become disenchanted with democracy and instead embraced populism and grievance. In Populism, Education, and Teaching the Manners of Democracy Robert V. Bullough Jr. offers readers a range of concepts useful for re-imagining the practice of democratic citizenship, both in the classroom as well as for themselves as citizens. Structured around five democratic manners that Bullough argues teachers, students, and citizens should cultivate, hospitality, attuned listening, voice, reflectivity, and evidential discernment, he argues that democracy is a peculiar and demanding way of life that shares with education the goal of human flourishing. By embracing these five manners, we can counter the current grievance culture and instead promote personal and social growth, reorienting education toward democratic living.

Post-anarchism has been of considerable importance in the discussions of radical intellectuals across the globe in the last decade. In its most popular form, it demonstrates a desire to blend the most promising aspects of traditional anarchist theory with developments in post-structuralist and post-modernist thought. Post-Anarchism: A Reader includes the most comprehensive collection of essays about this emergent body of thought, making it an essential and accessible resource for academics, intellectuals, activists and anarchists interested in radical philosophy.

Many of the chapters have been formative to the development of a distinctly 'post-anarchist' approach to politics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Others respond to the so-called 'post-anarchist turn' with caution and scepticism. The book also includes original contributions from several of today's 'post-anarchists', inviting further debate and new ways of conceiving post-anarchism across a number of disciplines.

Plebiscites, or referendums, are epitomes of direct democracy and the right of self-determination. While direct democracy has always been a key subject in the theory and practice of western liberal democracies, the issue of self-determination has been propelled to the fore by the hegemonistic moves of Russia. By providing a historical analysis of the post-World War One plebiscites, this book deals with enduring, painfully contemporary, and in in any case fundamental, concepts.

The contributors to this edited volume approach the referendums comparatively. After grounding the analysis theoretically, the authors look at detailed aspects of individual cases, with the two plebiscites held in the Danish-German border region of Schleswig in the winter of 1920 as points of departure. They then extend the exploration through the inter-war period and address the effects of border delimitations on everyday life or gender roles in the context of ethnic mobilization. Finally, the book places the post-World War One plebiscites in a long-term perspective. The concluding essays assess, among others, the applicability of plebiscitary solutions to contemporary conflicts, taking into consideration issues of borders, religion, language, identity, and minority rights.