Search results
This book provides an introduction to how the Länder (the sixteen states of Germany) function, not only within the country itself, but also within the wider context of Europe's political affairs. It looks at the Länder in the constitutional order of the country, as well as their political and administrative systems, and also discusses their organisation and administration, together with their financial administration. Finally, the book looks at the role of political parties and elections in the Länder, and considers the importance of their parliaments.
progress, the more we increase our chances for collective annihilation. Indeed, despite the potential human benefits of technological advancement, the triumph of the technical over the poetic in political affairs undermines the role of human creativity. How many critical theorists still have to affirm the importance of arts and humanities to the promotion of peace? Theory and science are not objective: we produce the technologies we desire, which are over-coded with all manner of assumptions and prejudices. So, as the technological mind continues to produce war machines
, 2012 : 25). At the same time, it arguably averts a wider conversation about what threats aid workers actually face, who receives training or other support, and how to reduce risks across the aid sector. This is especially problematic when aid workers are engaging in ever more political work, intertwining humanitarian and peacebuilding work with development and political affairs in the famed ‘nexus’. One long-time aid worker described two scenarios where aid workers had
the tensions that the idea and practice of protest politics can generate, particularly for women. But, as we will see, precisely because both Virmati and Aasmaani are shown to be in close proximity, emotional as well as physical, to women who are actively engaged in political affairs, especially Swarna in Difficult Daughters and Samina in Broken Verses , the two texts resist being read as
entertained that Collins was mad. The Court Journal, convinced that Collins had been driven insane through ‘habits of intemperance and vice’, was pleased to disassociate him from political affairs. But Cobbett disagreed. ‘Never was an act more deliberate in the whole world’, he wrote. ‘Here was premeditation, predetermination, everything proving that the malice was prepense; and all this proves to demonstration the absence of insanity.’ The crime could therefore only be construed as high treason, wrote Cobbett, however uncomfortable ministers found it, but Collins’s ill
Shelleys’ business and what was the world’s business is thus destabilized by a novel which fictionalizes historical accounts, appropriates the past as the present, projects a critique of Italian political affairs onto an English scenario (in the process subverting the fashionable form of Gothic romance), and enrols the author’s friends and neighbours in its cast list. In the end, readers cannot be sure if
The introduction presents the main ideas, arguments and justification for the study. After stressing the importance of the topic under study, this chapter first presents two key ideas for underpinning the book’s argument: the clashing visions of state sovereignty within South Asia and the princely states as emblematic of the British use of indirect rule. Within India’s princely states, the British government instituted a suzerain system of governance in which princes held nominal independence and the political autonomy to handle their internal political affairs, yet maintained an allegiance to an overarching imperial power. This created a political system that shaped the interests of the princes and other political elites who benefited from it. The elites’ privileges and status, therefore, were bound up with the perpetuation of the political system granting them asymmetric access to power, especially in the face of non-elites challenging a political status quo from which they derived few benefits. The princes thus remained resistant to broader political reforms that could undermine their authority, a position that was frequently supported and encouraged by the British government’s policies and rhetoric. As a result, several princes contested the sovereignty of both the Indian and Pakistani governments within their states and attempted to assert their independence to preserve their state’s political autonomy and their personal status. The introduction concludes with a description of the contributions of the study and how the book is structured, including an explanation of the four case studies used within the book.
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.
Colonial powers and Ethiopian frontiers 1880–1884 is the fourth volume of Acta Aethiopica, a series that presents original Ethiopian documents of nineteenth-century Ethiopian history with English translations and scholarly notes. The documents have been collected from dozens of archives in Africa and Europe to recover and present the Ethiopian voice in the history of Ethiopia in the nineteenth century. The present book, the first Acta Aethiopica volume to appear from Lund University Press, deals with how Ethiopian rulers related to colonial powers in their attempts to open Ethiopia for trade and technological development while preserving the integrity and independence of their country. In addition to the correspondence and treatises with the rulers and representatives of Italy, Egypt and Great Britain, the volume also presents letters dealing with ecclesiastical issues, including the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem.
Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book is about improving our understanding of political parties as democratic organisations in the context of multi-level governance. It analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The purpose of this book is to investigate who within the three parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists, such as the candidates for European parliamentary elections and EU spokespersons.
The book utilises a principal-agent framework to investigate the delegation of power inside the three parties across multiple levels and faces. It draws on over 65 original interviews with EU experts from the three national parties and the Party of European Socialists (PES) and an e-mail questionnaire. This book reveals that European policy has largely remained in the hands of the party leadership. Its findings suggest that the party grassroots are interested in EU affairs, but that interest rarely translates into influence, as information asymmetry between the grassroots and the party leadership makes it very difficult for local activists to scrutinise elected politicians and to come up with their own policy proposals. As regards the selection of EU specialists, such as candidates for the European parliamentary elections, this book highlights that the parties’ processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.