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14 books match the query '1979-1997'

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A Voice in Their Own Destiny

Reagan, Thatcher, and Public Diplomacy in the Nuclear 1980s

Anthony M. Eames

University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

On June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan delivered a historic address to the British Parliament, promising that the United States would give people around the world “a voice in their own destiny” in the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. While British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher celebrated Reagan’s visit and thanked him for putting “freedom on the offensive,” over 100,000 Britons marched from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square to protest his arrival and call for nuclear disarmament. Reagan’s homecoming was equally eventful, with 1,000,000 protesters marking his return with a rally for nuclear disarmament in Central Park—the largest protest in American history up to that point.

Employing a wide range of previously unexamined primary sources, Anthony M. Eames demonstrates how the Reagan and Thatcher administrations used innovations in public diplomacy to build back support for their foreign policy agendas at a moment of widespread popular dissent. A Voice in Their Own Destiny traces how competition between the governments of Reagan and Thatcher, the Anglo-American antinuclear movement, and the Soviet peace offensive sparked a revolution in public diplomacy.

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Confidence Regained

Economics, Mrs. Thatcher, and the British Voter

Helmut Norpoth

University of Michigan Press, 1992

Elected to office at the end of a decade of economic decline, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher set out to cure Britain's ills with daring new free-market policies. Putting financial stability first on the agenda of macroeconomic priorities, the Thatcher government pursued this goal with rare tenacity. In Confidence Regained, Helmut Norpoth examines the electoral risks and rewards of this economic strategy.Professor Norpoth paints a vivid picture of the fierce battle over the economic policies and record of the Thatcher government. Using electoral surveys, Norpoth reveals how British voters sorted out the competing claims of economists and politicians in their various partisan choices. Turning from election outcomes to government popularity between elections, Professor Norpoth charts the rise and decline of Margaret Thatcher's approval ratings and Conservative party support, showing how responsive these ratings were to economic performance. The statistical evidence presented shows that economic views significantly affected voter choices in the Thatcher elections. But the author reveals that the Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher owed their ability to regain the confidence of the British electorate not only to the nation’s economic success, but also, in large measure, to the British victory in the Falkland Islands.Confidence Regained is an invaluable source to scholars of electoral politics, especially of British elections, but it will also interest historians of Thatcherism and scholars studying the role of macroeconomics in elections.

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Here to Stay, Here to Fight

A Race Today Anthology

Paul Field

Pluto Press, 2019

From 1973 to 1988, Race Today, the journal of the revolutionary Race Today Collective was at the epicentre of the struggle for racial justice in Britain. Placing race, sex and social class at the core of its analysis, it featured in its articles and pamphlets contributions from some of the leading writers and activists of the time: C. L. R. James, Darcus Howe, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Walter Rodney, Bobby Sands, Farrukh Dhondy and Mala Sen and many more. Here to Stay, Here to Fight, draws together many of these key articles and extracts into an impressive collection - the first book-length anthology of its kind - rescuing many contributions from the obscurity of inaccessible archives. Framing the original contributions, there is a general introduction, which provides an overview of Race Today's 15-year history, section introductions providing context for each extract, written by writers and activists associated with the Collective, and a concluding section exploring the legacy of Race Today in contemporary social movements and debates around race, gender and class.

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Here to Stay, Here to Fight

A Race Today Anthology

Paul Field

Pluto Press, 2019

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Iran, Islam and Democracy

The Politics of Managing Change

Ali M. Ansari

Gingko, 2019

The surprise election of Hasan Rouhani in 2013 has refocused attention on the dynamics between Islam and democracy in Iran after the hiatus of the Ahmadinejad presidency. With comparisons being drawn between Rouhani and his predecessor, the late Reformist President Mohammad Khatami, there has never been a better time for a close look at the rise and fall of the Reform movement in Iran, situating it within the context of the “politics of managing change.” This revised and updated edition incorporates recent work on the presidential election crisis of 2009, along with the election of Rouhani in 2013, and an additional essay on the idea of reformism in Iran in historical context. The study remains then most comprehensive account of the politics of reform and, in situating the Rouhani presidency within that context, it shines a clear light on the pressures and pitfalls Iran faces in politics and international relations.

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Major

Robert Taylor

Haus Publishing, 2006

British Prime Minister who worked with Clinton to bring peace to Northern Ireland

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Post/Revolutionary Conditions

Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle

Alborz Ghandehari

Northwestern University Press, 2025

An exploration of how the Iranian people have renewed their longtime struggle for freedom

The Woman, Life, Freedom uprising is only the latest manifestation of a century-long struggle for liberation in Iran. This ongoing movement for justice has encompassed two revolutions against domestic dictatorship and foreign imperialism, as well as a series of uprisings since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which was followed by a new era of repression. Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle offers an intersectional analysis of how progressive and radical movement builders have reenvisioned liberation in the post-’79 era, despite new forms of oppression under the Islamic Republic and from US and other foreign imperial powers. Bringing together a diverse array of sources, including oral histories with Iranian labor, student, and gender justice organizers, as well as resistance literature and art, Alborz Ghandehari challenges narratives that treat working-class, feminist, queer, and oppressed ethnic minorities’ movements as separate from one another. Post/Revolutionary Conditions demonstrates how such potent reimaginings of collective liberation and a radically democratic future have been shaped by multiple generations of protest and kindred struggles globally.

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Reinventing Khomeini

The Struggle for Reform in Iran

Daniel Brumberg

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Reinventing Khomeini offers a new interpretation of the political battles that paved the way for reform in Iran. Brumberg argues that these conflicts did not result from a sudden ideological shift; nor did the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997 really defy the core principles of the Islamic Revolution. To the contrary, the struggle for a more democratic Iran can be traced to the revolution itself, and to the contradictory agendas of the revolution's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

A complex figure, Khomeini was a fervent champion of Islam, but while he sought a Shi'ite vision of clerical rule under one Supreme Leader, he also strove to mesh that vision with an implicitly Western view of mass participatory politics. The intense magnetism and charisma of the ayatollah obscured this paradox. But reformers in Iran today, while rejecting his autocratic vision, are reviving the constitutional notions of government that he considered, and even casting themselves as the bearers of his legacy. In Reinventing Khomeini, Brumberg proves that the ayatollah is as much the author of modern Iran as he is the symbol of its fundamentalist past.

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Seeking a Premier Economy

The Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000

Edited by David Card, Richard Blundell, and Richard B. Freeman

University of Chicago Press, 2004

In the 1980s and 1990s successive United Kingdom governments enacted a series of reforms to establish a more market-oriented economy, closer to the American model and further away from its Western European competitors. Today, the United Kingdom is one of the least regulated economies in the world, marked by transformed welfare and industrial relations systems and broad privatization. Virtually every industry and government program has been affected by the reforms, from hospitals and schools to labor unions and jobless benefit programs.

Seeking a Premier Economy focuses on the labor and product market reforms that directly impacted productivity, employment, and inequality. The questions asked are provocative: How did the United Kingdom manage to stave off falling earnings for lower paid workers? What role did the reforms play in rising income inequality and trends in poverty? At the same time, what reforms also contributed to reduced unemployment and the accelerated growth of real wages? The comparative microeconomic approach of this book yields the most credible evaluation possible, focusing on closely associated outcomes of particular reforms for individuals, firms, and sectors.

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Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution

Parsa, Misagh

Rutgers University Press, 1989

Misagh Parsa develops a structural theory of the causes and outcomes of revolution, applying the theory in particular to Iran. He focuses on the ends and means of various groups of Iranians before, during, and after the revolution. For Parsa, revolution is not a direct result of ideologies, which may be less important than structural factors such as the nature of the state and the economy, as well as each group's interests, capacity for mobilization, autonomy, and solidarity structures.

Existing theories of revolution explain earlier revolutions better than the Iranian revolution. In Iran most of the protest was in urban areas, the peasants never played a major role, and power was transferred to the clergy, not to an intelligentsia. In the 1970s, oil revenues increased, the economy developed rapidly but unevenly, and the state's expanded intervention undermined market forces and politicized capital accumulation. Systematic repression of workers, aid to the upper class, and attacks on secular and religious opposition showed that the state was serving the interests of particular groups. When the state tried to check high inflation by imposing price controls on bazaaris (merchants, shopkeepers, artisans), their protests forced the state to introduce reforms, providing an opportunity for industrial workers, white-collar workers, intellectuals, and the clergy to mobilize against the state. Thus, structural features rendered the state vulnerable to challenge and attack.

Parsa's thorough explanation of the collective actions of each major group in Iran in the three decades prior to the revolution shows how a coalition of classes and groups, using mosques as safe gathering places and led by a segment of the clergy, brought down the monarch of 1979. In the years since the revolution, the conflicts that existed before the revolution seem to be reemerging, in slightly altered form. The clergy now has control, and the state has become centrally and powerfully involved in the economy of the country.

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Thatcher

Clare Beckett

Haus Publishing, 2006

Britain's first woman prime minister, friend of Ronald Reagan and the longest serving head of government in the 20th century (1979-90), but also the only one to be removed from office in peacetime by pressure from within her own party

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The Free Economy and the Strong State

Andrew Gamble

Duke University Press, 1988

A new politics emerged in the 1970s in response to the world recession, the exhaustion of Fordism (the theory, traced to Henry Ford, that well-paid industrial workers fuel continuous capitalist growth), and the breakdown of American hegemony. Thatcherism, one expression of this new politics, acquired its distinctive characteristics through the exceptional and deep-seated crisis of state authority that developed in Britain in the mid-1970s.

By 1987, the Conservatives under Thatcher's leadership had won their third successive election victory over a divided opposition and enjoyed a degree of political and ideological dominance that led many commentators to speak of the end of the socialist era and the emergence of a new consensus in Britain. A new word—Thatcherism—had entered the political lexicon. It has come to signify a broad-ranging and distinctive program aimed at promoting economic recovery through the privatization of public enterprise and restoring the authority of the state. The Free Economy and the Strong State explores the roots of Thatcherism and its relationship to the Conservative tradition, to the economic liberal ideology of the New Right, and to the "new politics" which emerged from the recession and crisis of the world order in the mid 1970s.

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