Author: Chris Ogden
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1529205131
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The rise of authoritarian movements presents an increasing illiberal trend in international affairs. A rapidly modernizing China is at the vanguard of this phenomenon. Does this signal the demise of Western democracy and the dawn of an authoritarian era in world politics? In this book, Chris Ogden argues that the world is on the verge of a capitulation to China’s preferred authoritarian order. As other world powers adopt such values, they are facilitating the normalization of this authoritarianism into a dominant global phenomenon. This shift, he says, will transform global institutions, human rights and political systems, and herald an authoritarian century.
Author: Azeem Ibrahim
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 180526012X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
Liberal democracy has produced the most freedom and security for the most people of any form of government in human history. For a while, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we believed that this would be enough. Yet, today, we face an anti-liberal backlash--and we bear much of the responsibility. Western leaders learnt the wrong lesson from the Soviets' downfall, seeing it as an ideological victory and adopting a 'total liberalism' with the same rigidity that had just brought down communism. Now, the economic and foreign policy failures of neoliberalism have fatally undermined the public's faith in the associated political system, liberal democracy. Cue disaffected masses, opportunistic populists, canny Russian sabotage, and the Chinese model as a powerful alternative--where do we go from here? From Tsarist conspiracy theories and Italian corruption to revolution in America, France and China, this book shows the roots of our century's descent into crisis. Exposing the critical mistakes of contemporary liberals, Azeem Ibrahim urges a rethink to renew liberal democracy, domestically and internationally. His incisive narrative of the West's recent past is sober and sobering; his vision for the future hopeful yet urgent--for only a liberal order can save vulnerable lives and confront global emergencies.
Author: Wendy Brown
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659727X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 131
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Book Description
Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to “traditional values,” in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era? Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis? In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our current predicament. Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it. Brown explains how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for manifestly un-emancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure. These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth–and twentieth–century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day.
Author: Jerzy W. Borejsza
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571816412
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 630
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Book Description
Based on a conference organized by the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the German Historical Institute, Warsaw, held in Sept. 2000.
Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books
ISBN: 1101903465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
A brilliant, haunting, and profoundly original portrait of the defining tragedy of our time. In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think, and thus all the more terrifying. The Holocaust began in a dark but accessible place, in Hitler's mind, with the thought that the elimination of Jews would restore balance to the planet and allow Germans to win the resources they desperately needed. Such a worldview could be realized only if Germany destroyed other states, so Hitler's aim was a colonial war in Europe itself. In the zones of statelessness, almost all Jews died. A few people, the righteous few, aided them, without support from institutions. Much of the new research in this book is devoted to understanding these extraordinary individuals. The almost insurmountable difficulties they faced only confirm the dangers of state destruction and ecological panic. These men and women should be emulated, but in similar circumstances few of us would do so. By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future. The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was --and ourselves as we are. Groundbreaking, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Black Earth reveals a Holocaust that is not only history but warning.
Author: Jerzy J. Wiatr
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
ISBN: 3847412493
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
The authos deal with comparative aspects of contemporary authoritarianism. Authoritarian tendencies have appeared in several “old democracies” but their main successes take place in several states which departed from dictatorial regimes recently. The book contains case-studies of contemporary Hungarian, Kenyan, Polish, Russian and Turkish regimes.
Author: Susan Rubin Suleiman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691015361
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Political ideologies often informed early twentieth-century French novels, creating a hybrid genre that is both "realist" and didactic: the roman thse. In this ground-breaking and critically acclaimed work, Susan Suleiman looks beyond the politics of novels by such authors as Malraux, Mauriac, Sartre, and Aragon, and examines their shared formal and generic features. Although the genre itself is considered antimodern, the critical and interpretive problems it raises are central to an understanding of both realist and modernist writing. "The great virtue of [Suleiman's] book is its ability to synthesize a range of theoretical ideas--whether formalist, structuralist or "reader-response' in the service of a clear and compelling critical argument".--Christopher Norris, The London Review of Books "This book is certainly one of the best examples of semiotic theory put to use for interpretation of literature and its relation to culture".--Thas Morgan, Genre
Author: Erik Ching
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268076995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
In December 1931, El Salvador’s civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation’s first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador’s national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years.
Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Signal
ISBN: 0771005865
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
A finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize One of Back Obama's Favourite Books of the Year A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Despotic leaders do not rule alone; they rely on political allies, bureaucrats, and media figures to pave their way and support their rule. The authoritarian and nationalist parties that have arisen within modern democracies offer new paths to wealth or power for their adherents. Applebaum describes many of the new advocates of illiberalism in countries around the world, showing how they use conspiracy theory, political polarization, social media, and even nostalgia to change their societies. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.
Author: Erica Frantz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190880228
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Despite the spread of democratization following the Cold War's end, all signs indicate that we are living through an era of resurgent authoritarianism. Around 40 percent of the world's people live under some form of authoritarian rule, and authoritarian regimes govern about a third of the world's countries. In Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Erica Frantz guides us through today's authoritarian wave, explaining how it came to be and what its features are. She also looks at authoritarians themselves, focusing in particular on the techniques they use to take power, the strategies they use to survive, and how they fall. Understanding how politics works in authoritarian regimes and recognizing the factors that either give rise to them or trigger their downfall is ever-more important given current global trends, and this book paves the ways for such an understanding. An essential primer on the topic, Authoritarianism provides a clear and penetrating overview of one of the most important-and worrying-developments in contemporary world politics.
