De Gruyter Contemporary Social Sciences

Fascism or Whatever You Want to Call It constructs a crucial framework for diagnosing and exposing fascist ideologies and movements in whatever historical and geographical circumstances or disguises they may appear. At no point in history have so many people been subjected to the rule or threat of fascist movements. Nor have power and privilege ever been so concentrated in the hands of a few. We are living in the age of the decline of bourgeois liberalism and the rise of something much less democratic, something sectarian, extremist, militaristic, and exclusionary, which should be called fascism. Because fascism deploys endless camouflaging strategies, a critical theory for diagnosing and analyzing it is desperately needed. That is what this book offers. Arguing against conventional approaches that use the European model of the 1930s as a yardstick, Bahozde conceptualizes fascism as a form, rather than a system, of power and ideology.

This book is a timely and systematic analysis of Russian hybrid warfare with a particular focus on Russian cyberespionage and cyberwarfare. It especially analyzes Russian policy from the election of President Vladmir Putin in 2000 to date.

It takes a long term, long lens, view of Russian policies and actions internationally and domestically, fundamentally questioning the relationship and boundaries between active measures, espionage, cyberespionage, and hybrid warfare.

The West is under challenge from the rise of China as a global power. Cyberespionage has enhanced China’s economy, military, and political influence, and it is now a peer rival to the American-led West across land, sea, air, and space. China can conduct cyberespionage on a scale that no other nation can currently match. Its Belt and Road Initiative is a modern-day Silk Route for both overland and maritime trade.
Under President Xi Jingpin, China is now much closer to parity in conventional forces should it begin hard-power contestation and enter the realm of ‘Thucydides’ Trap’; a belief that a rising power will challenge a hegemon. Chinese cyberespionage is a real long-term challenge to the United States and the West in general. This book discusses what the implications are and what might still be to come.

During his first term in office, Donald Trump failed to implement his revolutionary foreign policy agenda. To provide a plausible explanation for the multifaceted nature of Trump’s foreign policy achievements and shortcomings, this book brings together leadership trait analysis and bureaucratic politics to develop a model that frames their interactions and mutual influence.

This book analyses the strategies and narratives of Non-State Armed Actors (NSAAs), principally relying on primary material and interviews conducted by the author. The book develops a simple model based on goals and means, which allows us to increase our understanding and comprehension of organisations and individuals that decide to take up arms in the name of a political cause. One of the key arguments is that statehood plays a critical role for NSAAs, irrespective of their military capabilities, ideological aspirations and geographic origins. They are ‘non-state’ not by choice but because they are unable to be a ‘state’ actor. In other words, their stateless status is a matter of lack of power, not lack of will.

With the aim of shedding light on the intimate relationship between NSAAs and statehood, the book examines 25 cases from around the globe. These armed actors use violence in order to attain divergent political aims, which are segmented into two macro categories, namely territorial change (secessionists) and regime change (Marxists-Leninist, Salafi-Jihadists and far-right).

News today is a genre "in flux". New kinds of news producers and novel means of distributing, sharing and using news align with alternative ways of understanding what news is. Based on an extensive ethnography of news practices and perceptions among a broad range of young adults in Sweden, this book discusses how the rapid digitisation of news has shaped young people’s understanding of it, as well as how news is made relevant, trusted and used in the temporalities and spatialities of everyday life. This cutting-edge volume analyses the blurring boundaries between news and social media, facts and stories, highlighting how new media categories such as influencers and memes can take on the status of news for young audiences and shape their understanding of themselves and the world.

Since 2014 the conflict in Ukraine has escalated from an internal crisis into an ongoing full scale conventional war. The extensive public documentation and commentary on these unfolding events present an opportunity for empirical research yet untainted by hindsight perspectives. Drawing on an extensive regional network of local stakeholders and experts, this book combines theoretical insights with practical reflections on the efficacy of a selected range of tools employed by the West to assist Ukraine, such as the provision of military assistance, troop training, intelligence sharing, information campaigns, early crisis signaling by aircraft carrier deployments, and coalition building efforts.

Bridging the gap in open-source studies between academic research and practitioner assessments, the authors discuss how these specific measures correspond with theoretical assessments of the effects they are due to produce, as well as with the expectations about their performance held by the deploying policy makers and their audience. As the war continues to unfold, and the reality on the ground, as well as emerging new data, mean a constantly shifting landscape, this volume will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the conflict in Ukraine.

Asynchronicity is a study of the information stress and its genesis in the accelerative dynamics of computation and automation. In simple terms, this volume illustrates how anti-democratic communication has become characteristic of our present social and political reality. This book is significant in two respects. By fully realising a general theory of social time, it advances temporal analysis as a mode of social enquiry. Grounding the production of time within the event-dynamics of media systems, it establishes a framework for analysing the temporal logics of digital media, and shows that they may be fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of democratic communication.

The pursuit of truth is of crucial importance in environmentalism. How can we establish shared realities that encompass biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollutions that disrupt essential ecosystems? Taking signs and repetitions as a point of departure, Eva Lilja and Mona Lilja suggest a range of basic communicative practices that could be the foundation of a semiotics of sustainability. Their book aims for an in-depth exploration of eco-strategies and expands on how we could – perhaps even should – communicate sustainability issues. Homing in on problems related to communication, Making Truth probes into the role of signs, the importance of reality effects, repetitions, scripts, emotions, and strategies of (de)politicization.

The women on television series are spectacularly feminine. They are the most beautiful doctors, lawyers, detectives, scientists, queens, fashion-writers, moms, Victorian ladies, and witches ever seen. Focusing on series that celebrate empowered women from mainstay crime dramas such as Bones (2005-2017) and The Rookie: Feds (2022-2023) to teen dramas, with series such as Sex Education (2019-2023) and Charmed (2018-2022), to romance series such as Bridgerton (2020-), this book analyzes the onscreen portrayals of femme, femininity, and feminism. Specifically, this book maps the televisual trends that objectify femininity and those that visualize femininity as subject, working to demonstrate how televisual style constructs femininity through its onscreen portrayals.

Featuring a collection of works by scholars from across a variety of disciplines, this book outlines the principles of a critical historical criminology. For historical criminologists, this book provides a framework of how to engage with historical material in a way that is critical in its interrogation, instructive in terms of how the past impacts upon our current (and future) practice, and attentive to the dangers of presentism. For critical criminologists, this book highlights the potential benefits of looking to the past to inform our understanding of the critical issues we face in the current social, cultural, and political context in a purposeful, historically sensitive way.

This remarkable volume aims to model how to practice a critical version of historical criminology that has implications for practice in the contemporary period. It does so by incorporating contributions that emphasize robust, high-quality historical research that nonetheless speaks to issues and problems of premium concern to present-minded critical criminologists, bridging a gap between the past and present through an operationalization of the past that allows readers to better understand the criminological concerns of the present. In this sense, it can be used pedagogically, as a collection of works which model critical historical criminology, and is thus of instructional use alongside its research contribution.

Mass Protests in Iran: From Resistance to Overthrow explores the various waves of protests in Iran over the past 44 years, surveying their causes, consequences, and outcomes. The author argues that the regime and its support base of fundamentalist groups constitute a minority in Iran and lack legitimacy, and thus the regime uses repression and violence to secure its rule. The result is a pre-revolutionary situation and a shifting political landscape of overthrows, constant mass protests and mass repression. Kazemzadeh’s analysis highlights the factors that would assist the fundamentalist regime in succeeding in suppressing these protests, and the factors that would assist the Iranian people in defeating the fundamentalist regime.
Written in an accessible style, this timely book offers a much-needed contribution to the literature on Iranian politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars, as well as policy makers, interested in Middle Eastern studies, social movements, protest movements, political science and sociology.

Turning Points: Challenges for Western Democracies in the 21st Century centers around the strikingly under-researched concept of turning points and its application in political science, including various theories, fields, and sub-disciplines. The chapters provide theoretical discussion and conceptual clarity by distinguishing a set of turning points at different analytical levels. Based on a wide range of case studies, the authors illustrate where, when and how different types of turning points occur (or not) against the backdrop of current challenges in and for Western democracies. The conceptual and empirical variety of the volume allows scholars and practitioners in policymaking to develop and apply their own frameworks when dealing with turning point dynamics.

This book is an early warning to public officials, policymakers, and procurement practitioners on the impact of AI on the public sector. Many governments have established national AI strategies and set ambitious goals to incorporate AI into the public infrastructure, while lacking AI-specific procurement guidelines. AI is not traditional software, and traditional processes are not sufficient to meet the challenges AI brings. Today’s decisions to embed AI and algorithmic systems into public system infrastructure can – and will – have serious repercussions in the future.
The promise of AI systems is to make the public sector more efficient, effective, fair, and sustainable.
However, AI systems also bring new and emerging risks which can impact rights and freedoms. Therefore, guardrails are necessary to consider the socio-technical dimensions and impact on individuals, communities, and society at large.
It is crucial that public sector decision-makers understand the emerging risks of AI systems, the impact on the agency and the wider public infrastructure, and have the means to independently validate vendor claims. This book is a result of interviews with more than 20 public procurement professionals across countries, offering an in-depth analysis of the risks, incidents, governance practices, and emerging good practices around the world, and provides valuable procurement policy and process recommendations to address and mitigate these risks.

Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency represented a radical departure from political norms that are often classified by media and researchers as ‘populist’. Instead, this book theorizes Trump’s campaign and presidency with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s "carnival" – a medieval festival of transgression, ridicule, and renewal. In this book, Lisa Gaufman and Bharath Ganesh provide a closer insight into the Trump Carnival, developing interdisciplinary perspectives on populism, misogyny, misinformation, and far-right vernacular culture. Building on the idea of the carnivalesque, this book focuses on the laughing culture of the Trump campaigns and presidency that vilified minorities, disparaged women, and ultimately emboldened the far right. Bringing Bakhtin into dialogue with key developments in contemporary politics, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Trump phenomenon, American politics, and populism.

Society Without People is the first major scholarly analysis of the profound social and cultural effects of emerging technologies such as generative AI and the Metaverse. Using an approachable style and compelling scenarios, Pieper and Nelson examine the potential ways these technologies will shape identity, institutions, relationships, communities, power, and personhood itself in the near future. Introducing the theory of Gamism, the authors suggest that the logic of games could serve as the new ideology governing this strange, exciting world. One question underlies each chapter: how can humans flourish in the midst of such rapid and deep changes? It is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of society and technology.

Religion plays a central role in a variety of social movements, including many that are not explicitly faith-based. This book provides the first systematic analysis of the ways religion contributes to diverse movements for social change. It draws on a variety of case studies, from the US and globally, to build an argument about religion’s distinctive capacity to provide logistical support, to inspire and legitimize activist practices, to connect different spatial scales, and to link big ideas to everyday experiences.

The book’s analysis rests on three foundational arguments. First and most fundamentally, it is impossible to understand movements for social change without analyzing the multiple ways that religion shapes their ideas, communities, and practices.

Second, religion is always in mutually transformative interaction with social and political forces and can never be entirely separated from them. In social movements and in the public sphere more generally, people interpret politics with values and concepts drawn from religion and understand their activism as spiritually meaningful. This challenges the assumption that religion is a largely a private matter.

Third, scholars must treat religion as a relatively independent variable, which actively shapes social processes just as it is shaped by them. We cannot make sense of religion’s role in social movements without acknowledging that religious institutions and traditions have, to some extent, a life of their own.

Why is the past so dominant in the present? This book conceptualizes collective memory as currency, a medium of exchange, a system in common use, and one that is traded between and within nations. Bringing together contemporary case studies and multidisciplinary scholarship, this volume shows how past events are used and perceived as a commodity and a substantially fungible marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs, their supply or demand being a part of one universal market.

This book provides readers with a broader understanding of the power of the past in the present. Specific past events are incarnated into collective memories that can transform into iconic, almost mythical stories that can be employed to help make sense of the present. Through evoking, constructing and reconstructing, selectively highlighting certain aspects or perspectives of prominent past events, these collective memories become a significant resource that actors and publics turn to in times of need. As currency, these memories provide a service. As currency, they can also relatively easily travel between collectives, since it is commonly understood that the past has value in the present, and that this value is similarly utilized in various countries around the world.

This book provides a broad picture of Sri Lanka’s on-going political and economic crisis as the culmination of several centuries of colonial and neo-colonial developments. The book presents the Sri Lankan crisis as an exemplification of a broader global existential crisis facing more and more debt trapped countries, especially in the post-colonial Global South. The book's in-depth case study raises important questions pertaining to sovereignty and political and economic democracy in Sri Lanka and the world at large.

The book also explores the emergence of the crisis in the context of the accelerating geopolitical conflict between China and the USA in the Indian Ocean. It ponders if the debt crisis, economic collapse and political destabilization in Sri Lanka were intentionally precipitated to the advantage of the Quadrilateral Alliance (USA, India, Australia and Japan).

Moving beyond geopolitical rivalry, the book juxtaposes Sri Lanka’s political-economic crisis with the broader ecological crisis of climate change and sea-level rise.

The book concludes with a consideration of the ethical dilemmas behind the debt and survival crisis in Sri Lanka and across the world. It points out a range of social movements and initiatives in Sri Lanka and the Global South which subscribe to collective and ecological alternatives and a Middle Path of sustainability and social justice.

There are many ‘how-to’ books on writing for academics; none of these, however, relate specifically to the discipline of geography. In this book, the author identifies the principle modes of academic writing that graduate students and early-career faculty will encounter – specifically focusing on those forms expected of geographers, that is, those modes that are reviewed by academic peers.

This book is readily accessible to senior undergraduate and graduate students and early-career faculty who may feel intimidated by the process of writing. This volume is not strictly a ‘how-to’ or ‘step-by-step’ manual for writing an article or book; rather, through the use of real, concrete examples from published and unpublished works, the author de-mystifies the process of different types of scholarly pieces geographers have to write with the specific needs and challenges of the discipline in mind.

Although chapters are thematic-based, e.g., stand-alone chapters on book reviews, articles, and books, the manuscript is structured around the concept of story-telling, for it is the author’s contention that all writing, whether a ‘scientific’ study or more humanist essay, is a form of story-telling.

Digital technology has revolutionized connectivity, but it has also overcome spatial obstacles that used to shield people from subjugating gazes and unlimited exercise of power. The home as an auratic space is dead, and this alienation has hindered our democratic capacities and created complex crises. The Death of Home aims to intellectually engage readers via enhancing spatial literacy to critically confront today’s crises.

From QR codes to stay-at-home orders and mask mandates, the pandemic posed intriguing questions about the nature of political power in a time that is increasingly being classified as marked by democratic erosion, backsliding, or populism, Through a multi-methodological analysis of datasets covering different characteristics of pandemic responses in 54 liberal democratic states, Authoritarian Liberal Surveillance and the COVID-19 Pandemic draws attention to a different set of processes and dynamics. By adopting the theoretical frameworks of authoritarian liberalism and surveillance capitalism, a new explanation of political, economic, and social outcomes that arose over the course of the pandemic is provided in a critical cross-national inquiry. Findings turn attention to a previously neglected set of factors that were behind the emergence of widespread illiberal practices. Many liberal democracies experienced a metamorphosis that arose out of the unfettered implementation of authoritarian liberal economic policy making which merged with previously embedded structures of surveillance capitalism.

Environmental Injustice and Catastrophe meticulously explores key global security issues that pose severe threats to the future of humanity and the planet. This distinctive, timely, and conceptually rigorous book combines a rich body of research. It is a valuable source for sociologists, political scientists, historians, critical theorists, and all those who care about our future and environment.

Influencer Politics focuses on current discussions about the role and impact of social media influencers in the political sphere, and how the personal, political and promotional often converges in digital media. A key question is how core ideas of influencer culture – authenticity, intimacy, commercialism, and self-branding – shape the ways in which politics are expressed and understood in this context, as well as opens up space for new ways of connecting and interacting with the public. It also highlights the way that influencer culture itself is infused with politics, where issues of, for example, empowerment and exploitation are articulated and discussed in different ways. The book is the result of a common interest among researchers engaged in work on political aspects of influencer marketing and influencer culture from critical, cultural, and strategic perspectives, and offers a range of case studies devoted to both the promises and limitations of influencer politics.

The Affective Agency of Public Space explores the pivotal role that public spaces play in fostering social inclusion and community cohesion within various settings, including Europe and the United States. This scholarly work underscores the critical importance of developing inclusive public zones that enhance urban life and promote integration and interaction among diverse community groups. It also confronts and debunks common myths about ‘different people,’ actively addressing misconceptions while promoting the recognition of diverse identities and voices. Through a comparative lens, the book presents insightful case studies that illustrate its core themes. Serving as a timely and important academic resource, this text is indispensable for urban planners, educators, architects, designers, and sociologists committed to progressive urban planning methodologies.

The rise of far-right communities on digital platforms is a global crisis. Digital Islamophobia tracks far-right groups where they are a virtual and vicious threat, exploring how these networks grow, develop, and circulate Islamophobic hate-speech on Twitter. Reconstructing this media ecosystem, Digital Islamophobia traces the reactionary political ideologies animating these groups through feminist data analytic techniques in a transnational study of German and American far-right, digitally networked users.

This work illustrates far-right communities using data visualization techniques, identifies a taxonomy of user-types, analyzes themes and stories that motivate far-right users, and tracks the spread of linked forms of anti-Muslim sentiment, reactionary ideologies, and (mis)information. In doing so, Digital Islamophobia details how far-right discourse is not merely national, or even transatlantic, but increasingly transnationalized among American, German, as well as Indian and Nigerian digital networks. By tracking and tracing the contours of these far-right digital communities on Twitter and analyzing the content of their conversations, Digital Islamophobia provides policy-makers, researchers, and scholars with a potential road-map to stop them.

The Iran National Front and the Struggle for Democracy: 1949–Present explores the activities of the Iran National Front (INF). The INF is a coalition of parties, groups, and individuals and Iran’s oldest and main pro-democracy political party.

This book presents a political history of the INF from 1949 to the present day. It discusses the current platform of the INF, its leadership, policies, strategies, as well as criticisms and weaknesses. The volume draws on a rich range of primary sources, INF documents, and interviews, including translated transcripts with the top leader of the INF. As it is one of the major political parties opposing the current regime in Iran, the book also examines the current situation in the country. It provides an analysis of the nature of the political systems under the Shah and the Islamic Republic.

Sociology has developed theories of social change in the fields of evolution, conflict and modernization, viewing modern society as essentially unstable and conflict driven. However, it has not seriously studied catastrophe. A Theory of Catastrophe develops a sociology of catastrophes, comparing natural, social and political causes and consequences, and the social theories that might offer explanations.

A catastrophe is a general and systematic breakdown of social and political institutions resulting, among other things, in what we could call a catastrophe consciousness.

The Greek ‘cata-strophe’ formed the conclusion to a dramatic sequence of strophes. The cata-strophe was the final act of a drama, namely its denouement. Catastrophic denouements are without hope: genocides, military occupations, plagues, famines and earthquakes. A Theory of Catastrophe analyzes Pompeii, the Black Death, colonial genocide in North America, WWI and the Spanish Flu, and Nazi Germany and finally this century: terrorism, new wars, climate change and pandemics.

As a study of sociological theory, Bryan Turner discusses Spengler’s Decline of the West, Marxism as a theory of catastrophic capitalism, messianic movements, Weber on modernity, and risk society. He concludes by comparing optimism and pessimism, and the idea of inter-generational justice.

Enough of Experts: Expert Authority in Crisis analyses the challenges and threats to expert authority in neoliberal political economies and societies. It focuses upon the deep-seated political, economic, social and cultural transformations which have fundamentally destabilized and eroded the institutional foundations of expert authority over more than four decades. The book critically assesses the orthodox or ‘received’ model of expert authority as it has come under escalating pressures from a nexus of ideological, organizational, technological and cultural changes that have radically weakened the former’s core ‘institutional logic’ and practical efficacy. It also looks forward to a range of ‘expert futures’ in which expert groups and organizations decline in power and status as their prevalence proliferates to a stage where they become ubiquitous in neoliberal regimes. Finally, the book presents an alternative reflexive model of expert authority and governance that is grounded in the ‘dynamics of contestation and trust’ and stands in direct contrast to the orthodox, rational model.

Digitalization in Practice: Intersections, Implications and Interventions shows that as welfare is increasingly digitalized, an investigation of the social implications of this digitalization becomes increasingly pertinent. The book offers chapters on how the state operates, from the day-to-day practices of governance to keeping registers of businesses, from overarching and sometimes contradictory policies to considering how to best include citizens in digitalized processes. Moreover, the book takes a citizen perspective on key issues of access, identification and social harm to consider the social implications of digitalization in the everyday. The diversity of topics in Digitalization in Practice reflects how digitalization as an ongoing process and practice fundamentally impacts and often reshapes the relationship between states and citizens.

Neoliberalism Reloaded: Authoritarian Governmentality and the Rise of the Radical Right analyzes the violent enforcement of neoliberal governmentality and its relationship to the emergence of a new political and cultural Right that combines political authoritarianism, ethnocentric nationalism, racism, misogyny, and antifeminism with neoliberal economic principles. Many critical thinkers have defined this post-2008 crisis phase as a fascist moment of neoliberalism since far-Right movements and parties are not only enhancing their political representation but also setting the agenda of today’s politics. However, such a crucial political moment needs more precise analytical tools.

In this framework, Neoliberalism Reloaded: Authoritarian Governmentality and the Rise of the Radical Right seeks to understand the emergence of the New Right and punitive neoliberalism not only as a reaction to a crisis of accumulation but also as an outcome of neoliberal reason and the historical neoliberal alliance with conservative and reactionary political forces. Therefore, far from thinking this moment as exceptional, this book seeks the roots of today’s punitive neoliberalism in its theoretical framework and in the violence inherent to neoliberal capitalism towards those racialized, colonized, genderized and precarized populations that cannot adjust to the norm of competitiveness. Thus, Neoliberalism Reloaded seeks to contribute to understanding the challenges of our present as a necessary step to imagine alternative futures.　　

The end of the Cold War marks the geopolitical peak of America’s global primacy. The centerpiece of U.S. Foreign Policy in the pre-pandemic world order was the assumption that promoting human rights and democracy will secure peace. However, the Coronavirus Pandemic challenged the U.S.-dominated globalized order. The international system in the post-pandemic age embodies a paradox of the American primacy and the Chinese struggle for global domination. Pandemics Among Nations: U.S. Foreign Policy and the New Grand Chessboard addresses the geopolitical puzzle of the post-pandemic world order and seeks to explain how COVID 19 has remastered Brzezinski’s theory of the Grand Chessboard. In this book, Ivanov offers a two-level approach, emphasizing the consequences of the Pandemic and their impact on U.S. Foreign Policy. He also argues that if the United States wants to maintain its leadership in the post-pandemic world order, Washington should develop a new concept of smart power to deter the Chinese Art of War.

The foremost goal of Pandemics Among Nations is to analyze how America could overcome the geopolitical effects of the Pandemic. The author examines three possible scenarios for the future role of the United States on the post-pandemic Chessboard. The analysis rests on the testing of a series of research hypotheses across a structured comparison of all elements of the remastered Grand Chessboard, not just on isolated case studies such as China’s rise, Russian New Imperialism or European ambitions for a mutual defense.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality crisis which affected Eastern Europe and the republics of the former USSR at the time of the transition to a market economy was arguably the major peacetime health crisis of recent decades. Chernobyl and the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe and the Old USSR discusses the importance of that crisis, surprisingly underplayed in the scientific literature, and presents evidence suggesting a potential role of the Chernobyl disaster among the causes contributing to it.

Everyday life as we knew it is increasingly challenged in a world of climate, social, health and political crisis. Emerging technologies, data analytics and automation open up new possibilities which have implications for energy generation, storage and energy demand. To support these changes we urgently need to rethink how energy will be sourced, shared and used. Yet existing approaches to this problem, driven by engineering, data analytics and capital, are dangerously conservative and entrenched.

Energy Futures critically evaluates this context, and the energy infrastructures, stakeholders, and politics that participate in it, to propose plausible, responsible and ethical modes of encountering possible energy futures. Imagining anthropocene challenges, emerging technologies and everyday life otherwise through empirically grounded studies, opens up possible energy futures.

Energy Futures proposes and demonstrates a new critical and interventional futures-oriented energy anthropology. Combining the theories and methods of futures anthropology with the critical expertise and perspectives of energy anthropology creates a powerful mode of engagement, which this book argues is needed to disrupt the dominant narratives about our energy futures. Its contributors collectively reveal and evidence through innovative ethnographic practice how new knowledge about imagined and possible energy futures can be mobilised in engagements with emerging technologies, anthropocene challenges and everyday realities.

In doing so it brings together authors, analytical expertise and ethnographic evidence from the global south, north and places in between, generated through innovative methodologies including remote video and comic strip methods and documentary video practice as well as long term fieldwork.

The conflict in Ukraine has deep domestic roots. A third of the population, primarily in the East and South, regards its own Russian cultural identity as entirely compatible with a Ukrainian civic identity. The state’s reluctance to recognize this ethnos as a legitimate part of the modern Ukrainian nation, has created a tragic cycle that entangles Ukrainian politics.

The Tragedy of Ukraine argues that in order to untangle the conflict within the Ukraine, it must be addressed on an emotional, as well as institutional level. It draws on Richard Ned Lebow’s ‘tragic vision of politics’ and on classical Greek tragedy to assist in understanding the persistence of this conflict. Classical Greek tragedy once served as a mechanism in Athenian society to heal deep social trauma and create more just institutions. The Tragedy of Ukraine reflects on the ways in which ancient Greek tragedy can help us rethink civic conflict and polarization, as well as model ways of healing deep social divisions.

Personalisation is the most relevant political phenomenon of our time. After the decline of structural and ideological foundations of Western democracies, a radical shift from collective to individual actors and institutions has occurred in several political systems. On the one hand, political leaders have gained centrality on the democratic scene as a consequence of both a more direct, sometimes plebiscitary, relationship with citizens, and a more direct control of the executive administration. On the other hand, a process of fragmentation occurs at the mass level, where electoral volatility has strongly increased and the spread of social media enables each citizen to express their convictions in the self-referential autonomy of the digital networks.

Monocratic Government: The Impact of Personalisation on Democratic Regimes analyses the consequences of personalisation of political leaders on democratic government by asking whether it is possible to keep together demos and kratos in a post-particratic context. It explores topics such as governmental decrees, Trump-governance, and includes an analysis of the coronavirus outbreak. Offering comparative insights and exploring how political leaders govern in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and Hungary, this volume brings into focus the study of political personalisation in relation to some of the key trends – and crises – in modern politics.

This work argues that a component part of US neoliberalism involves adaptive accumulation, a process in which capital seeks to enlarge public programs, as a means to reroute public revenues into private revenue streams. Along the way, corporations project quasi-public aspirations as a central part of their commercial mission, as the state carves out new – or expands old – areas of accumulative growth for corporate America.

The Challenge to Academic Freedom in Hungary: A Case Study in Culture War, Authoritarianism and Resistance presents a case study as to how an authoritarian regime like the one in Hungary seeks to tame academic freedom. Andrew Ryder probes the reasons for ideological conflict within the academy through concepts like ‘culture war’ and authoritarian populism. He explores how the Orbán administration has introduced a series of reforms leading to limitations being placed on the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Gender Studies no longer being recognized by the State, the relocation of the Central European University because of government pressure and new reforms that ostensibly appear to give universities autonomy but critics assert are in fact changes that will lead to cronyism and pro-government interference in academic freedom.

From smart gates and drone patrols to e-visas and mobile GPS apps, digital technologies are becoming a ubiquitous feature of state borders and travel. The embedding of digital technologies into bordering and travel processes is reshaping the ways people move around the world, as well as the means sovereign states use to control and facilitate that movement. Digital Mobilities studies these changes and examines how ‘digitisation’ is remaking the very fabric of state sovereignty, territory, and borders.

Some of the core bordering and travel transitions prompted by digitisation that are examined in Digital Mobilities include the spatial and temporal reorganisation of borders; the algorithmic assessment of travellers as ‘data doubles’; the reformulation of border agency, or who or what performs the border; the digital augmentation of international travel; and the new tensions and conflicts arising between smart borders and digital mobilities. Understanding these transitions is essential for policy makers, advocates, and members of the public to comprehend both the exceptional opportunities and monumental risks posed by the embedding of digital technologies into borders and travel.

Multidimensional Inequalities is a deep dive into the historical contexts and contemporary realities that negatively influence society and its structures. It is often overlooked that inequality is not just about income and wealth but rather a broad spectrum of intersecting factors. This book focuses on each aspect individually, analysing its effect on welfare systems, and informs about the instruments available to reduce inequality.

From Anwar al-Sadat’s dramatic gambit in 1977 to the surprising declaration of the Abraham Accords in 2020, making peace with Israel was always a tough sell for Arab regimes. Through an analysis of hundreds of fatwas, sermons, essays, books, interviews, poems, postage stamps and other media, Peace in the Name of Allah examines how Egyptian, Jordanian, and Emirati political and religious authorities introduced Islamic justifications for peace with Israel, and how those opposed countered them. The discussion demonstrates the flexible and ambiguous nature of revelation-based political discourses; Islam is neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ peace with Israel – people are, as different Muslim political actors take competing or even contradictory positions.

Men Do It Too: Opting Out and In offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of men leaving mainstream careers models, adding to current debates on opting out. The book investigates how globalization, individualization, and this age of high modernity, in addition to issues of masculinity and what it means to be a man in contemporary society and organizational contexts, affect decisions to opt out. Throughout the book, social theory and relevant debates are interwoven with the narratives of 15 men who have left successful careers and mainstream career models to live and work on their own terms: six from the United States, five from Finland, and four from the UK. The narratives help illustrate the issues presented, as well as providing an insight into the men’s identity work throughout their opting out processes. In addition, Biese explores what organizations can learn from the knowledge gathered in her research on men (and women) opting out. This is important in order to create sustainable work environments that not only attract but also retain employees.

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party devoted itself to reviving and unifying the Syrian nation and establishing this nation’s complete independence over its historical homeland, Greater Syria. It continues its struggle today, influencing and shaping Lebanese and Syrian society and politics. Yet, the party remains largely unknown and misunderstood, a condition that stems from the lack of any comprehensive study of it. This book fills this gap.

Syrian nationalism and nationalist movements, generally speaking, have been largely neglected and ignored by historians, scholars, and observers of the Middle East. So, too, has the SSNP. The lack of detailed and nuanced analyses has left significant gaps in the party’s rich history unaddressed and enabled the perpetuation of inaccuracies and misperceptions regarding its past. Given this and the party’s ongoing relevance in Lebanon and Syria, a thorough examination of the early history of the SSNP, the political organization and movement that embodied Syrian nationalism’s most explicit, most cogent expression is even more necessary.

Based on an extensive and thorough examination of Arabic, French, and English primary sources, the monograph is the first comprehensive, systematic history of the SSNP to date, detailing its struggle to fulfill its nationalist vision and establish a secular, independent state in Greater Syria through a thorough analysis of its formation, evolution, and political activities in Lebanon and Syria.