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1377689 results in Books

Page 1385 of 68885

Germany, pacifism and peace enforcement
  • Edited by Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book is about the transformation of Germany's security and defence policy in the time between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 war against Iraq. It traces and explains the reaction of Europe's biggest and potentially most powerful country to the ethnic wars of the 1990s, the emergence of large-scale terrorism, and the new US emphasis on pre-emptive strikes. Based on an analysis of Germany's strategic culture, it portrays Germany as a security actor and indicates the conditions and limits of the new German willingness to participate in international military crisis management that developed over the 1990s. The book debates the implications of Germany's transformation for Germany's partners and neighbours, and explains why Germany said ‘yes’ to the war in Afghanistan, but ‘no’ to the Iraq War. Based on a comprehensive study of the debates of the German Bundestag and actual German policy responses to the international crises between 1991 and 2003, it provides insights into the causes and results of Germany's transformation.

Elizabeth Maconchy in Context
  • Edited by Justin Vickers, Lucy Walker
  • Published online:
    23 April 2026
    Print publication:
    07 May 2026
  • Elizabeth Maconchy was one of the most prominent and successful composers of the twentieth century, a champion of contemporary music who composed chamber operas, choral music, orchestral works, a range of compositions and operas for children, and a highly-regarded series of string quartets. This collection explores her life and work, her Irishness and her formative years at the Royal College of Music. It examines her intersections with musical and cultural movements, and the persistent and insidious presence of sexism against which she presented a forceful, often humorous stance. There are chapters devoted to her important friendships with composers and teachers, interactions with broadcasters and festival organisers along with a focused section dedicated to the breadth and depth of Maconchy's compositions. The Irish-English composer is revealed a force to be reckoned with who frequently demonstrated a powerful instinct to thrive and survive, often against the odds.

Entangled Life in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
  • A Multi-scalar Poetics
  • Liliane Campos
  • Published online:
    23 April 2026
    Print publication:
    07 May 2026
  • Liliane Campos argues that contemporary fiction is shaping a new, multi-scalar view of life. In the early twenty-first century, humans face complex relations of dependency with the invisibly small and the ungraspably huge, from the viral to the planetary. Entangled Life examines how Anglophone fiction imagines this ecological interdependence. It outlines an emergent poetics across a range of genres, including realist fiction, science-fiction, weird fiction and dystopian fiction. Arguing that literary form performs epistemic and ethical work, Campos analyses the rhetorical strategies through which these stories connect human and nonhuman scales. She shows that fiction uses three recurrent devices – critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis and scalar irony – to shape our awareness of other scales and forms of life, and our response-ability towards them. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Mike Leigh
  • Tony Whitehead
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • Mike Leigh may well be Britain's greatest living film director; his worldview has permeated our national consciousness. This book gives detailed readings of the nine feature films he has made for the cinema, as well as an overview of his work for television. Written with the co-operation of Leigh himself, it challenges the critical privileging of realism in histories of British cinema, placing the emphasis instead on the importance of comedy and humour: of jokes and their functions; of laughter as a survival mechanism; and of characterisations and situations that disrupt our preconceptions of ‘realism’. Striving for the all-important quality of truth in everything he does, Leigh has consistently shown how ordinary lives are too complex to fit snugly into the conventions of narrative art. From the bittersweet observation of Life is Sweet or Secrets and Lies, to the blistering satire of Naked and the manifest compassion of Vera Drake, he has demonstrated a matchless ability to perceive life's funny side as well as its tragedies.

Coverage Denied
  • How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States
  • Miranda Yaver
  • Published online:
    23 April 2026
    Print publication:
    23 April 2026
  • In the aftermath of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, everyday Americans took to social media to share stories of the challenges they'd faced trying to navigate the American health insurance system. Why did this event strike such a nerve with the American public? For a topic as central to the lives of Americans as health care, there is no book that examines the impact of coverage denial, whereby health insurers decide whether to cover health services that appear to be within the scope of a plan's benefits – not until now. In Coverage Denied, health policy professor Miranda Yaver offers a sobering account of the ways in which coverage denials damage patient health and exacerbate inequalities along income, education, and racial lines. Combining rich interview material with original survey data, Yaver draws critical attention to the tens of millions of medical claims denied by health insurers every year, shining a necessary light on our inequitable health care system.

Global warming policy in Japan and Britain
  • Interactions between institutions and issue characteristics
  • Shizuka Oshitani
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book attempts a systematic comparison of Japanese and British climate policy and politics. Focusing on institutional contrasts between Japan and Britain in terms of corporatist or pluralist characteristics of government-industry relations and decision-making and implementation styles, it examines how and to what extent institutions explain climate policy in the two countries. In doing this, the book explores how climate policy is shaped by the interplay of nationally specific institutional factors and universal constraints on actors, which emanate from characteristics of the global warming problem itself. It also considers how corporatist institutional characteristics may make a difference in attaining sustainable development. Overall, the book provides a set of comparisons of climate policy and new frameworks of analysis, which could be built on in future research on cross-national climate policy analysis.

The social construction of Swedish neutrality
  • Challenges to Swedish identity and sovereignty
  • Christine Agius
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • Neutrality as a concept and practice has long been conceptualised in IR theory as problematic. Broadly seen as the tool of small and weak states with dubious moral credentials, a limited understanding of neutrality has persisted from the Peloponnesian War to the ‘war on terror’. Furthermore, as globalisation and non-traditional security problems animate international politics, neutrality is seen as a policy of the past. This book argues that neutrality has been a neglected and misunderstood subject, limited to realist understandings of war and viable statecraft, and in doing so aims to uncover the normative strands of neutrality that mesh with identity, security and alternatives to the anarchic international order. Using Sweden as a case study, it explores the domestic roots of neutrality via a constructivist analysis, examining how neutrality is embedded in ideas of self, and part of a wider Social Democratic vision of active internationalism. Identity, however, is malleable and subject to change, and this analysis also considers the impact of globalisation and European integration, the end of bipolarity, and new security threats such as global terrorism on neutrality as an idea and a practice.

Gay men and the Left in post-war Britain
  • How the personal got political
  • Lucy Robinson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book demonstrates how the personal became political in post-war Britain, and argues that attention to gay activism can help us to rethink fundamentally the nature of post-war politics. While the Left were fighting among themselves and the reformists were struggling with the limits of law reform, gay men started organising for themselves, first individually within existing organisations and later rejecting formal political structures altogether. Gay activists intersected with Trotskyism, Stalinism, the New Left, feminism and youth movements. As the slogan of the Gay Liberation Front proclaimed, ‘Come out, come together and change the world’. Culture, performance and identity took over from economics and class struggle, as gay men worked to change the world through the politics of sexuality. Throughout the post-war years, the new cult of the teenager in the 1950s, CND and the counter-culture of the 1960s, gay liberation, feminism, the Punk movement and the miners' strike of 1984 all helped to build a politics of identity. When AIDS and Thatcherism impacted on gay men's lives in the 1980s, gay politics came into its own. There is an assumption among many of today's politicians that young people are apathetic and disengaged. This book argues that these politicians are looking in the wrong place. People now feel that they can impact the world through the way in which they live, shop, have sex and organise their private lives. The book shows that gay men and their politics have been central to this change in the post-war world.

Mutualism and health care
  • British hospital contributory schemes in the twentieth century
  • Martin Gorsky, John Mohan, Tim Willis
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book presents a comprehensive account of a major innovation in hospital funding before the NHS. The voluntary hospitals, which provided the bulk of Britain’s acute hospital services, diversified their financial base by establishing hospital contributory schemes. Through these, working people subscribed small, regular amounts to their local hospitals, in return for which they were eligible for free hospital care. The book evaluates the extent to which the schemes were successful in achieving comprehensive coverage of the population, funding hospital services, and broadening opportunities for participation in the governance of health care and for the expression of consumer views. It then explores why the option of funding the post-war NHS through mass contribution was rejected, and traces the transformation of the surviving schemes into health cash plans. This is a substantial investigation into the attractions and limitations of mutualism in health care. It is relevant to debates about organisational innovations in the delivery of welfare services.

Leading the localities
  • Executive mayors in English local governance
  • Colin Copus
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book is the result of national research conducted amongst England's directly elected mayors and the councillors that serve alongside them. It assesses the impact on local politics of this new office and fills a gap in our understanding of how the Local Government Act 2000 has influenced local governance. The book also draws from a range of research that has focused on elected mayors—in England and overseas—to set out how the powers, roles and responsibilities of mayors and mayoral councils would need to change if English local politics is to reconnect fundamentally with citizens. It not only explores how English elected mayors are currently operating, but how the office could develop and, as such, contributes to the debate about the governance of the English localities.

Explaining local government
  • Local government in Britain since 1800
  • J. A. Chandler
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book presents a history of local government in Britain from 1800 until the present day. It explains how local government in Britain has evolved from a structure that appeared to be relatively free from central government interference to, as John Prescott observes, ‘one of the most centralised systems of government in the Western world’. The book is an introduction to the development of local government in Britain but also balances values and political practice in relation to the evolving structures to provide a theory of the evolution of the system. It analyses local government prior to 1832 and its subsequent development into the uniform two-tier structures of the twentieth century. The book argues that the emergence of a ‘New Liberal’ national welfare state and, by the 1920s, the growth of the Labour Party, created pressures within central government to control local governments. This has led, post-1945, to the creation of larger, less-local units, and to further restraints on local autonomy, as electoral competition among National Parties to offer better public services and local economic growth ensures that national leaders cannot leave local authorities to administer to local needs as they see fit. The conclusion compares the development of British centralism with the pattern of central–local development, as well as the relative conservatism in re-structuring the systems in the United States and France.

Global citizen and European Republic
  • Irish foreign policy in transition
  • Ben Tonra
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book offers a new way of looking at Irish foreign policy, linking its development with changes in Irish national identity. Many debates within contemporary international relations focus on the relative benefits of taking a traditional interest-based approach to the study of foreign policy as opposed to the more recently developed identity-based approach. This book takes the latter and, instead of looking at Irish foreign policy through the lens of individual, geo-strategic or political interests, is linked to deeper identity changes. As one Minister of Foreign Affairs put it; ‘Irish foreign policy is about much more than self-interest. The elaboration of our foreign policy is also a matter of self-definition—simply put, it is for many of us a statement of the kind of people that we are’. Using this approach, four grand narratives are identified which, it is argued, have served to shape the course of Irish foreign policy and which have, in turn, been impacted by the course of Ireland's international experience. The roots and significance of each of these narratives; Ireland as a European Republic, as a Global Citizen, as an Anglo-American State and as an Irish Nation are then outlined and their significance assessed. The shape of Irish foreign-policy-making structures is then drawn out and the usefulness of this book's approach to Irish foreign policy is then considered in three brief case studies: Ireland's European experience, its neutrality and Irish policy towards the 2003 Iraq War.

Might, right, prosperity and consent
  • Representative democracy and the international economy 1919–2001
  • Helen Thompson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book offers an analysis of the problem of the authority of the state in democracies. Unlike many discussions of democracy that treat authority as a problem primarily of domestic politics or normative values, it puts the international economy at the centre of the analysis. The book shows how changes in the international economy from the inter-war years to the end of the twentieth century impacted upon the success and failures of democracy. It makes the argument by considering a range of different cases, and traces the success and failure of democracies over the past century. The book includes detailed studies of democracies in both developed and developing countries, and offers a comparative analysis of their fate.

Palace Gardens in Lower Mesopotamia
  • 8th to 11th Centuries
  • Safa Mahmoudian
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • Gardens were both a setting and showcase for nearly every aspect of social and daily life at the royal court during the early Islamic period in Western Asia. Safa Mahmoudian uses ‎a wide range of ‎primary source materials including ‎‎contemporary ‎‎Arabic manuscripts, together with archaeological ‎reports, aerial ‎photographs, and archaeologists’ letters ‎and diaries.‎ ‎Through close readings of this evidence, Mahmoudian creates a picture of these gardens in their historical, architectural and environmental contexts and examines various factors that influenced their design and placement. In doing so, Mahmoudian adds to our understanding of these gardens and palaces and, ultimately, early Islamic-period court culture as a whole.

Equality and the British Left
  • A study in progressive political thought, 1900–64
  • Ben Jackson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • The demand for equality was at the heart of the politics of the Left in the twentieth century, but what did theorists and politicians on the British Left mean when they said they were committed to ‘equality’? How did they argue for a more egalitarian society? Which policies did they think could best advance their egalitarian ideals? This book provides comprehensive answers to these questions. It charts debates about equality from the progressive liberalism and socialism of the early twentieth century to the arrival of the New Left and revisionist social democracy in the 1950s. Along the way, the book examines and reassesses the egalitarian political thought of many significant figures in the history of the British Left, including L. T. Hobhouse, R. H. Tawney and Anthony Crosland. It demonstrates that the British Left has historically been distinguished from its ideological competitors on the centre and the right by a commitment to a demanding form of economic egalitarianism. The book shows that this egalitarianism has come to be neglected or caricatured by politicians and scholars alike, and is more surprising and sophisticated than is often imagined.
The Chilean <i>Cantora</i>

The Chilean Cantora
  • Women Music Poets in Latin American Post-Colonial Culture
  • María Bernardita Batlle
  • Published online:
    23 April 2026
    Print publication:
    14 May 2026
  • This Element discusses the figure of the cantora – or woman music poet – and the development of her artistic activity in a context of post-colonial paradigms in Chilean and Latin American societies. Through a historical overview of this multifaceted concept, alongside gender construction in colonial Latin America, this Element offers insights on how the figure of the cantora developed in the confluence between discrimination against festive popular culture and the restrictions imposed on women in a context of an inherited patriarchal order. Moreover, it examines the embodiment of the cantora archetype within the contemporary urban folkloric scene in Chile as a performative exercise of identity construction that is framed in a process of cultural resistance. Revealing how contemporary cantoras are continuing the legacy of their predecessors has become especially relevant at the time of writing in 2020–22, amidst a wave of political protests against long-standing social disparities in Chile.

Unstable universalities
  • Poststructuralism and radical politics
  • Saul Newman
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • How do we think about radical politics today, in the wake of the collapse of Marxist-Leninism and the triumph of neo-liberal capitalism? How should radical political theory respond to new challenges posed by globalisation, postmodernity, the ‘war on terror’ and the rise of religious fundamentalism? How are we to take account of the new social movements and political struggles appearing on the global horizon? In addressing these questions, this book explores the theme of universality and its place in radical political theory. It argues that both Marxist politics of class struggle and the postmodern politics of difference have reached their historical and political limits, and that what is needed is a new approach to universality, a new way of thinking about collective politics. By exploring various themes and ideas within poststructuralist and post-Marxist theory, the book develops a new approach to universality — one that has implications for politics today, particularly on questions of power, subjectivity, ethics and democracy. In so doing, it engages in debates with thinkers such as Laclau, Žižek, Badiou and Rancière over the future of radical politics. The book also applies theoretical insights to contemporary events such as the emergence of the anti-globalisation movement, the ‘war on terrorism’, the rise of anti-immigrant racism and the nihilistic violence that lurks at the margins of the political.

Socio-ideological fantasy and the Northern Ireland conflict
  • The Other side
  • Adrian Millar
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • Conducting an analysis of some of the most candid interview materials ever gathered from former Irish Republican Army (IRA) members and loyalists in Northern Ireland, this book demonstrates through a psychoanalysis of slips of the tongue, jokes, rationalisations and contradictions that it is the unconscious dynamics of the conflict — that is, the pleasure to be found in suffering, failure, domination, submission and ignorance, and in rivalry over jouissance — that lead to the reproduction of polarisation between the Catholic and Protestant communities. As a result, it contends that traditional approaches to conflict resolution which overlook the unconscious are doomed and argues that a Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding of socio-ideological fantasy has great potential for informing the way we understand and study all inter-religious and ethnic conflicts and, as such, deserves to be further developed in conflict-management processes. Whether readers find themselves agreeing with the arguments in the book or not, they are sure to find it a change from both traditional approaches to conflict resolution and the existing mainly conservative analyses of the Northern Ireland conflict.

Cultural warfare and trust
  • Fighting the Mafia in Palermo
  • Carina Gunnarson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book concentrates on a central issue in research on democratic processes: the development of generalised trust. The existence of generalised trust and confidence in a society is decisive for economic development and an effective democracy. Is it possible to fight persistent values of distrust and non-cooperation? Is it possible to support the development of generalised trust through public action and education? The book addresses these questions by examining political efforts to combat Palermo's Mafia-controlled heritage and to turn a tradition of non-cooperation and distrust into cooperation and trust. In particular, it focuses on the school program launched by Leoluca Orlando, Mayor of Palermo, during the mid-1990s, which was designed to break the Mafia's territorial and mental control, to restore citizens' rights and to promote a civic consciousness based on the rule of law. Combining theories on social capital and civic education, the book presents and analyses quantitative and qualitative research carried out in seven public schools in Palermo, some situated in extremely difficult areas dominated by drugs, violence and organised crime.

Political responsibility and the European Union
  • Myrto Tsakatika
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
  • This book addresses the question of political legitimacy in the European Union from the much-neglected angle of political responsibility. It develops an original communitarian approach to legitimacy based on Alasdair MacIntyre's ethics of virtues and practices, that can be contrasted with prevalent liberal-egalitarian and neo-republican approaches. The book argues that a ‘responsibility deficit’, quite distinct from the often discussed ‘democratic deficit’, can be diagnosed in the EU. This is documented in chapters that provide in-depth analysis of accountability, transparency and the difficulties associated with identifying responsibility in European governance. Closing this gap requires going beyond institutional engineering. It calls for gradual convergence towards certain core social and political practices and for the flourishing of the virtues of political responsibility in Europe's nascent political community. Throughout the book, normative political theory is brought to bear on concrete dilemmas of institutional choice faced by the EU during the recent constitutional debates.

Page 1385 of 68885