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Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Control draws on a wealth of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how conflict shapes the establishment and maintenance of political institutions, from small-scale societies to expansive empires. The book examines the material and ideological factors that drive warfare, the organization of combatants, the ways leaders use violence to consolidate power, and how groups resist political domination in times of conflict. By posing critical questions about the efficacy of strategies and the varied outcomes of conflict-driven power struggles, this volume offers profound insights into the dynamics of political control throughout history.

Bringing together case studies from diverse regions and time periods, Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Controlilluminates the multifaceted nature of political violence. The volume includes discussions of human sacrifice, slave-taking, ideological signaling, and military strategy and tactics. The case studies reveal how different forms of political violence influence societal structures. From the fortifications of the Māori in New Zealand to the city walls of early historic India, each contribution provides a detailed analysis of how warfare has been used to both to challenge and to establish political hierarchies. Featuring examples from small foraging communities to large empires across various regions and time periods, the book offers a wide-ranging exploration of how different groups have used and resisted political violence.

This essential work contributes to our understanding of the intersections between conflict and political power, making it a vital resource for scholars of anthropology, archaeology, political science, and history.

Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision making on the climate and ecological crisis. They are increasingly being used at local, national and even global levels. But with what impact? Can they take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics? Can they make a real difference? This book explains why climate assemblies have captured the imagination of governments and activists alike, exploring the ways they can have a meaningful impact on climate politics.

This book charts the development of climate assemblies across Europe and beyond. It explores what ordinary people want, highlighting the ways in which assembly recommendations take us beyond current government policies and offer new visions and directions for change. It shows that not all assemblies are the same and that the context and design of climate assemblies have differed quite profoundly – as have their impacts on policy and public discourse. The book also lays out the key elements needed for climate assemblies to have sustained impact, providing essential insights for anyone wanting to run or advocate for them, and concludes with reflections on what we can expect from assemblies as they evolve.

The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant impacts on citizens’ choices and behaviours. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly and this book shows how climate assemblies can achieve this, allowing us to address the issues we all face together.

Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision making on the climate and ecological crisis. They are increasingly being used at local, national and even global levels. But with what impact? Can they take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics? Can they make a real difference? This book explains why climate assemblies have captured the imagination of governments and activists alike, exploring the ways they can have a meaningful impact on climate politics.

This book charts the development of climate assemblies across Europe and beyond. It explores what ordinary people want, highlighting the ways in which assembly recommendations take us beyond current government policies and offer new visions and directions for change. It shows that not all assemblies are the same and that the context and design of climate assemblies have differed quite profoundly – as have their impacts on policy and public discourse. The book also lays out the key elements needed for climate assemblies to have sustained impact, providing essential insights for anyone wanting to run or advocate for them, and concludes with reflections on what we can expect from assemblies as they evolve.

The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant impacts on citizens’ choices and behaviours. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly and this book shows how climate assemblies can achieve this, allowing us to address the issues we all face together.

In 1963, nearly two decades after the end of the most destructive war in human history, George L. Mosse assembled a group of interdisciplinary scholars from diverse backgrounds to answer a seemingly simple question: What is fascism? The landmark seminar that followed, held at Stanford University, came to define the intellectual conversation about European fascism throughout the postwar era. Mosse strove to better understand the legacy of fascism by debating its origins—often contentiously—with the sharpest minds of his generation.

In this volume, which collects Mosse’s lectures as well as his peers’ responses, Mosse and his colleagues wrestle with fascism’s origins and impact. The straightforward question that launched the seminar quickly expands to deeper debates: What are the intellectual foundations of right-wing populist political movements? How had these particular movements risen to power so quickly and then left so much devastation in their wakes? Were charismatic leaders like Hitler and Mussolini driving forces or did the various incarnations of fascism throughout Europe and beyond constitute a broader “revolution”? What was the relationship of religious and cultural institutions to fascism’s rise and cataclysmic fall?

As the word “fascism” takes on new meaning in the twenty-first century, it is more urgent than ever to revisit the work of scholars who witnessed its birth—and its defeat. In the foreword, Stanley G. Payne situates the lively debate in its historical context, and in the critical introduction, James J. Sheehan shares his own memories of the seminar and reflects on how the experience drove Mosse’s later work.

Where Currents Meet, Tanya Zaharchenko’s path-breaking study of literature and cultural memory, moves decisively beyond the simplistic view of a post-Soviet Ukraine divided between east and west. It positions the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in the country’s east as elements of a complex continuum. Combining insights from memory studies and border studies, Zaharchenko analyzes a generation of younger riters in the city of Kharkiv—a “doubletake generation” that came of age at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse and now revisits this experience through fiction. In the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andreĭ Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev, and others the author reveals how borderlands and frontiers, both geographical and conceptual, acquire zonal qualities of their own as these writers navigate the historical legacy they have inherited.

The continued spread of democracy into the twenty-first century has seen two-thirds of the almost two hundred independent countries of the world adopting this model. In these newer democracies, one of the biggest challenges has been to establish the proper balance between the civilian and military sectors. A fundamental question of power must be addressed—who guards the guardians and how?

In this volume of essays, contributors associated with the Center for Civil-Military Relations in Monterey, California, offer firsthand observations about civil-military relations in a broad range of regions including Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Despite diversity among the consolidating democracies of the world, their civil-military problems and solutions are similar—soldiers and statesmen must achieve a deeper understanding of one another, and be motivated to interact in a mutually beneficial way. The unifying theme of this collection is the creation and development of the institutions whereby democratically elected civilians achieve and exercise power over those who hold a monopoly on the use of force within a society, while ensuring that the state has sufficient and qualified armed forces to defend itself against internal and external aggressors. Although these essays address a wide variety of institutions and situations, they each stress a necessity for balance between democratic civilian control and military effectiveness.

Europe's turn of fortune is humbling, humiliating and, perhaps, irreversible. What went wrong, and when? Europe's most audacious moment occurred sometime between 1989 and 1991, a brief period that encapsulated both the demise of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the bold steps forward on the path towards an 'ever-closer union' in Western Europe. Twenty years later, the dramatic failures of economic and political integration have forced Europeans to re-consider the underpinnings of their project. The economic crisis of 2010-11 also manifested itself as a crisis of European democracy. Old questions acquired new meaning: Is it possible to maintain conditions for self-government while undermining the nation-state? What are the limits of solidarity? Can Europe be truly united through its common history, or its common currency? Is further unity in Europe even desirable?

In Whose Liberty Is It Anyway? Stefan Auer exposes the limits of the current European project by interrogating some of its many incongruities, particularly when it comes to its commitment to freedom. The author argues that the calls for more European solidarity are not convincing when Europe's poor are asked to pay for the mistakes of those who are more fortunate. Europe's unity, Auer asserts, can only be maintained by accepting its limitations and by beginning to fulfill some of its many promises.

A sophisticated literary analysis positioning Emily Dickinson’s poetry within the framework of democratic thought and individual sovereignty.

In this study, Paul Crumbley asserts that, contrary to popular opinion, Emily Dickinson consistently communicated political views through her poetry. Dickinson’s life of self-isolation—today her most notable personal characteristic—by no means extended into the political sphere, he argues. While she rarely addressed political issues directly and was curiously disengaged from the liberal causes and female reform movements of her time, Dickinson’s poems are deeply rooted both in matters of personal sovereignty and reader choice. The significant choices Dickinson extends to the reader underscore the democratic dimensions of reading her work, and of reading itself as a political act.

Crumbley employs close readings of Dickinson’s poems and letters, highlighting the many changing—and often contradictory—voices in her work, both throughout her oeuvre and in individual poems themselves. In Dickinson’s letters Crumbley finds just as many unique and conflicting voices; thus, both her personal correspondence and the poems make political demands by placing the burden of interpretation on the reader.

Rather than reflecting explicit political values, Dickinson’s work chronicles an ongoing decision-making process that magnifies the role of individual choice, not the advocacy of specific outcomes. In the end, Dickinson’s readers must either accept an isolated lyric subjectivity or invest that subjectivity with the substance necessary for engagement with the larger world.

Contributors bring to light the presence and persistence of Jewish anarchism throughout histories of radical labor, women’s studies, political theory, multilingual literature, and ethnic studies.

These essays reveal an ongoing engagement with non-Jewish radical cultures, including the translation practices of the Jewish anarchist press. Jewish anarchists drew from a matrix of secular, cultural, and religious influences, inventing new anarchist forms that ranged from mystical individualism to militantly atheist revolutionary cells.

With Freedom in Our Ears brings together more than a dozen scholars and translators to write the first collaborative history of international, multilingual, and transdisciplinary Jewish anarchism.

This is a history of a stateless people, the Carpatho-Rusyns, and their historic homeland, Carpathian Rus’, located in the heart of central Europe. A little over 100,000 Carpatho-Rusyns are registered in official censuses but their population is estimated at around 1,000,000, the greater part in Ukraine and Slovakia. The majority of the diaspora—nearly 600,000—lives in the US.

At the present, when it is fashionable to speak of nationalities as “imagined communities” created by intellectuals or elites who may live in the historic homeland, Carpatho-Rusyns provide an ideal example of a people made—or some would say still being made—before our very eyes. The book traces the evolution of Carpathian Rus’ from earliest prehistoric times to the present, and the complex manner in which a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn people, since the mid-nineteenth century, came into being, disappeared, and then re-appeared in the wake of the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of communist rule in central and eastern Europe.

To help guide the reader further there are 34 detailed maps plus an annotated discussion of relevant books, chapters, and journal articles.

Costaguta charts the socialist movement’s journey through the conflict and down a path that ultimately abandoned scientific racism in favor of an internationalist class-focused and racial-conscious American socialism. As he shows, the shift relied on a strong immigrant influence personified by the cosmopolitan Marxist thinker and future IWW cofounder Daniel De Leon. The class-focused movement that emerged became American socialism’s most common approach to race in the twentieth century and beyond.

What do we mean by Europe? Thirty-three renowned authors from 33 European countries attempt an answer-in serious, ironic, skeptical, or optimistic tones. Their essays, written for the symposium held at the Literaturhaus Hamburg in 2003, reflect the astonishing diversity of European cultures. Not only are the style and experience of the individual authors remarkable for their distinctiveness, but their perspectives and views also appear to have little in common-at first glance.

The editors have created a unique literary project, a milestone in the vitally necessary cultural discourse about Europe.

Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe's irreversible division.

It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Through this cultural practice, I offer a new reading of Cold War Europe's history. Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the 'Other Europe' to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature.