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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.
This volume proposes that the photobook is best understood as a collective endeavour, a confluence of individuals, interests and events. By looking beyond canons and artistic definitions, by factoring in the public and by paying closer attention to the texts and the contexts, the aim of this book is to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the ‘photobook’. While the market is geared today for photographer-driven books, and is buoyed by the theoretical framework proposed by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, this book casts a wider net, and pays particular attention to anonymous photographers, institutional publications, digital opportunities, unrealised projects, illegal practices, collectives, poets, and the reader. The chapters uncover forgotten social objects, and show how personal histories are bound to broader historical movements. Certain chapters deliberately engage with canonical authors (Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Roland Penrose, the Visual Studies Workshop, for example) to reveal the origination contexts and the ‘biographies’ of the photographs. Together, the chapters examine the North American, British or French photobook from 1900 to the present. The chapters address the ecosystem of the photobook art market; commitment and explicit political engagement; memory and the writing of history; materiality and how material form affects circulation. The contributors are specialists in the history of photography, book studies and visual studies, researchers in sociology, US history, anthropology, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, feminism, architecture and comparative literature, and there are contributions from practising photographers and curators.
Feudalism, venality, and revolution is about the political and social order revealed by the monarchy’s most ambitious effort to reform its institutions, the introduction of participatory assemblies at all levels of the government. It should draw the attention of anyone interested in the sort of social and political conditions that predisposed people to make the French Revolution. In particular, according to Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential work on the Old Regime and the French Revolution, royal centralization had so weakened the feudal power of the nobles that their remaining privileges became glaringly intolerable to commoners. Feudalism, venality, and revolution challenges this theory by showing that when Louis XVI convened assemblies of landowners in the late 1770s and 1780s to discuss policies needed to resolve the budgetary crisis, he faced widespread opposition from lords and office holders. These elites regarded the assemblies as a challenge to their hereditary power over commoners. The monarchy incorporated an administration of seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices. Lordships and offices upheld inequality on behalf of the nobility and bred the discontent evident in the French Revolution. These findings will alter the way scholars think about the Old Regime society and state and should therefore find a large market among graduate students and professors of European history.
In 1960–62, a large number of white autochthonous parents in Southall became very concerned that the sudden influx of largely non-Anglophone Indian immigrant children in local schools would hold back their children’s education. It was primarily to placate such fears that ‘dispersal’ (or ‘bussing’) was introduced in areas such as Southall and Bradford, as well as to promote the integration of mostly Asian children. It consisted in sending busloads of immigrant children to predominantly white suburban schools, in an effort to ‘spread the burden’. This form of social engineering went on until the early 1980s. This book, by mobilising local and national archival material as well as interviews with formerly bussed pupils in the 1960s and 1970s, reveals the extent to which dispersal was a flawed policy, mostly because thousands of Asian pupils were faced with racist bullying on the playgrounds of Ealing, Bradford, etc. It also investigates the debate around dispersal and the integration of immigrant children, e.g. by analysing the way some Local Education Authorities (Birmingham, London) refused to introduce bussing. It studies the various forms that dispersal took in the dozen or so LEAs where it operated. Finally, it studies local mobilisations against dispersal by ethnic associations and individuals. It provides an analysis of debates around ‘ghetto schools’, ‘integration’, ‘separation’, ‘segregation’ where quite often the US serves as a cognitive map to make sense of the English situation.
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.
This book explores the evolving African security paradigm in light of the multitude of diverse threats facing the continent and the international community today and in the decades ahead. It challenges current thinking and traditional security constructs as woefully inadequate to meet the real security concerns and needs of African governments in a globalized world. The continent has becoming increasingly integrated into an international security architecture, whereby Africans are just as vulnerable to threats emanating from outside the continent as they are from home-grown ones. Thus, Africa and what happens there, matters more than ever. Through an in-depth examination and analysis of the continent’s most pressing traditional and non-traditional security challenges—from failing states and identity and resource conflict to terrorism, health, and the environment—it provides a solid intellectual foundation, as well as practical examples of the complexities of the modern African security environment. Not only does it assess current progress at the local, regional, and international level in meeting these challenges, it also explores new strategies and tools for more effectively engaging Africans and the global community through the human security approach.
ministers, of leaders, of failure) that requires social action by agents. The prime minister’s fall might be due to the action of some virus (in cattle, or in the prime minister herself – she resigns because of illness), but the social explanation is couched in terms that are reducible to (sets of) individuals as agents. The idea of ‘structural suggestion’ here is that, given the biological individuals’ interests, the environment they face – both the social or institutional rules and the interests of other people – will structure their behaviour. For social scientists
pluralism and individual rights. We need always to ask: What is the price – in terms of concrete individual interests – of pluralism?3 Mouffe is right to explore the question of whether the conventional conception of human rights places excessive limits on pluralism. But if we are going to revise these limits, we had better have good reasons to do so, given the costs that extra pluralism could involve. On this key issue, Mouffe’s essay disappoints. It distances itself from moral relativism by means of an ambiguous notion of ‘dignity’, while at the same time distancing
strict settlement: preserving the family estate prevailed over protecting individual interests, while still providing for dependents. Breaking entail was possible, but legally cumbersome. By the nineteenth century, perhaps almost half the land in England was settled in this way: John Walker had decided to follow the custom of the aristocracy and greater gentry and to do likewise. 22 His will was forty-eight large pages of dense legalese and followed customary strict settlement
terms, the European Parliament stresses the importance of human rights and anti-corruption (i.e. more values-based perspectives) while the Commission focuses on trade and standards. The chapters on energy, trade and migration in particular have shown the contrast between EU-isation in terms of a common EU normative approach to the neighbours and areas where member states assert their individual interests such as trade with Russia and pipelines. In the area of identity there can also be tensions between a common EU approach and the perceptions of Europe and national