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innovations in everyday medical practice to humanitarian work in the field. It seems to me a cultural, a psychosocial block. If you talk about surgery , for example, in a humanitarian setting, immediately among many NGO workers their antibodies will rise. They will say, ‘That’s terrible, you can’t allow that Western, too high-tech surgery; it is inappropriate.’ But then if you say, ‘So, what about obstructed labour and interventions to save the mother and the child?’, then
the government won’t see the difference if it is us or ICRC providing the surgery and yet we don’t have the permanent ability to address the needs of non-war-wounded patients, such as obstetrics. Indeed, surgical care available to wounded combatants had been considered a trump card to obtain guarantees of respect and protection from the opposition’s leadership, whose soldiers, according to MSF-H’s head of mission
Representational democracy is at the heart of the UK’s political constitution, and the electoral system is central to achieving it. But is the first-past-the-post system used to elect the UK parliament truly representative? To answer that question requires an understanding of several factors: debates over the nature of representation; the evolution of the current electoral system; how first-past-the-post distorts electoral politics; and how else elections might be conducted. Running through all these debates are issues over the representation not only of people but also of places. The book examines all of these issues and focuses on the effect of geography on the operation of the electoral system.
This book examines moral theories that endeavour to tell us how we ought to treat animals, as well as how individuals and the law actually do treat them. The author gives consideration of the considerable bulk of philosophical literature on the moral status of animals that has appeared in recent years. What has made this philosophical debate so important, of course, has been its impact on the realm of practical politics. The book documents the re-emergence of the animal protection movement and the author makes an attempt at a classification of its key characteristics, and explores a number of explanations for its development. With the rise of a movement to expound the radical philosophy, the debate about the treatment of animals has also fundamentally changed. The book examines the nature of this debate by relating competing moral theories to the variety of uses to which humans put animals. It is the willingness of some elements in the animal protection movement to take direct action that has provoked the greatest publicity for the cause of animal protection in recent years. The author gives attention to the nature of modern pressure group politics and, in particular, it is asked, with the help of various theoretical approaches, to what extent the political system provides for fair competition between the animal protection movement and those with a vested interest in continuing to exploit animals.
Having lost the 1979 general election after the Winter of Discontent, the Labour Party descended into internal turmoil, as the left-dominated National Executive Committee (NEC) and conference sought revenge on the centre-right Parliamentary Labour Party for its alleged failures in government. This book is about the 'stayers', those who, despite being deeply unhappy about the state of the party, not only stayed after 1981 but organised the fightback. In 1981, the Social Democratic Party split from Labour, leaving the Labour Party facing possible electoral extinction. The trade unions – founders of the Labour Party – came to its rescue. They were led by a small group of dedicated general secretaries and staff who set out to regain the NEC for the moderates, and to return the Labour Party to what they termed 'sanity' and electability, by expelling Militant, safeguarding the position of Deputy Leader Denis Healey when challenged by Tony Benn, and delivering for Neil Kinnock, an NEC committed to supporting him in changing the party. The book first summarises the background to 1981, reaching back into 1974–79, and outlining the environment faced by the right. It describes the non-policy battleground fought over within the party: Militant, One-Member-One-Vote and the 1981 and 1983 leadership contests. It then moves on to the organisational response; firstly the Manifesto Group and Labour First, and the internal party groupings which led the post-1981 fightback of the traditional right (the St Ermins Group of trade union leaders, the Labour Solidarity Campaign and Forward Labour).
While there are many dangers in informational politics, dangers that risk to exhaust the morality-and-politics agenda and control the excess of information, the system is leaking and hierarchies of good/bad or optimism/pessimism fail to capture the complexities of global politics in an information age. The book explores the networked information society from a number of perspectives and locations, from the strategies used by the state apparatus through to the strategies of resistance that are opening up to those who feel that the 'global society' is not the route to a secure cosmopolitan space of freedom and security. It rejects the heroic narrative in which citizens simply discover the 'truth' or achieve 'moral proximity' and open up the possibility of a more enlightened planetary order, the type of narrative that Gray would argue is the Prozac of the thinking classes. The book begins with Developing a new speech for global security: exploring the rhetoric of evil in the Bush administration response to 9.11.01 by Timothy Luke. People's lived experience in the Information Age, their engagement with the im/materiality of cultural forms in the contexts of their everyday life, is of paramount concern when systems of representation are at stake. At the level of ideology the end of the Cold War began the erosion of the alignments of left-right, east-west, capitalist-communist which had structured the global politics of the twentieth century.
English radicalism has been a deep-rooted but minority tradition in the political culture since at least the seventeenth century. The central aim of this book is to examine, in historical and political context, a range of key events and individuals that exemplify English radicalism in the twentieth century. This analysis is preceded by defining precisely what has constituted this tradition; and by the main outline of the development of the tradition from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Three of the main currents of English radicalism in the twentieth century have been the labour movement, the women’s movement and the peace movement. These are discussed in some detail, as a framework for the detailed consideration of ten key representative figures of the tradition in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Joan Maynard, Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Nicolas Walter. The question of ‘agency’ – of how to bring about radical change in a predominantly conservative society and culture – has been a fundamental issue for English radicals. It is argued that, in the twentieth century, many of the important achievements in progressive politics have taken place in and through extra-parliamentary movements, as well as through formal political parties and organisations – the Labour Party and other socialist organisations – and on occasion, through libertarian and anarchist politics. The final chapter considers the continuing relevance of this political tradition in the early twenty-first century, and reviews its challenges and prospects.
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which is a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Assembled at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. Taking up a critical perspective which is attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage and entrepreneurship education. The overarching analysis converges on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. It is against the backdrop of this problematic that the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Focusing on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history and geography.
This book opens with a review of some of the significant themes concerning women's citizenship from the perspective of politics. It considers the environment in which women live and the identities they possess and how these characteristics contribute to the nature of their citizenship. The book analyses how its commitment to gender mainstreaming has affected the United Nations' activities, particularly with respect to environmental law. It addresses the nature of women's access to citizenship in the West through considering both women's unfair exposure to environmental problems (in that it is disproportionately negative compared to men's) and the strategies they adopt to redress this. The book considers active citizenship in the urban landscape. It examines women's citizenship in post-communist Russia, focusing on the Soldiers' Mothers' committee. Their existence constitutes an active part of Russia's nascent civil society. The collapse of soviet socialism has had some highly negative consequences for women, including under-representation in political institutions and growing unemployment. Since his election as president in 2000, Putin has sought to create a 'managed democracy' with the aim of co-opting or coercing civil society organisations. Despite this, and the fact that feminist and human rights discourses are quite weak in Russia today, the Soldiers' Mothers' committees continue to grow and have won respect and support.
This book aspires to contribute to the literature on the theory and practice of European political integration by providing a systematic theorisation of Union citizenship and European migration policy, and a set of proposals for institutional reform. The subject matter of this study is a thorough examination of the process of community-building in the European Union, that is, the politics of 'belonging' and 'exclusion', as they find their juridico-political expression in citizenship laws and immigration policies, from the standpoint of normative political theory. This entails an inquiry into: (a) the question of socio-political membership in the emerging European polity and the issue of European identity, (b) the theory and politics of EU citizenship and (c) the issue of immigration. The lens of normative political theory will enable the critical examination of constitutive categories and conceptual frameworks by highlighting the historicity of their construction and possibilities for their reconceptualisation. It will also facilitate the analysis and critical evaluation of European institutions and discussion as to how these may be reformed. The book wishes to partake in the newly emergent but fast-growing search for a new explanatory framework in the Union. Intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism - the two paradigms which have dominated integration theory literature since the mid-1960s - have yielded important insights about the process of European integration, but have been unable to capture the complexity of the political evolution of European governance.