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This open access book examines how civil society organizations in Poland, Russia, and Sweden (re)act to transformations of opportunities and limitations in access to various forms of resources. The volume’s contributions discuss the constraints associated with different types of resources as well as organizations’ capacities to generate resources—or compensate for their lack—as they negotiate and contest barriers. The resourcefulness of civil society is revealed to be rooted in a variety of capabilities: converting resources, eliciting organizational change, and metamorphosing in response to organizational and environmental development. ​
This book examines how civil society engages with transitional justice in Russia, demonstrating a broad range of roles civil society can undertake while operating in a restrictive political context. Based on sociolegal research, the study focuses on three types of civil society groups dealing with the legacies of the Soviet repression in Russia – a prominent organisation that works on recovering historical truth, the International Memorial; a parish of the Orthodox Church of Russia operating at a former mass execution and mass burial site, the Church at Butovo; and contentious groups that could hinder attempts at reckoning and promote state narratives built on the Stalinist and WWII victory myths. This book explores an often-overlooked case of Russia’s transitional justice ‘from below.’ It provides insights into how even in authoritarian contexts, civil society can adopt imaginative, piecemeal, and at times unconventional ways of seeking justice outside and in the absence of official and institutionalised transitional justice measures. This book will appeal to scholars of transitional justice, memory studies, human rights, and democratic and civil society theory, as well as policymakers and practitioners in these fields, and others with interests in Russian and post-Soviet studies.
Coalitions of consumer groups, NGOs, and trade unions have traditionally been considered politically weak compared to well-organized and resourceful financial sector groups which dominate or "capture" financial regulatory decisions. However, following the 2008 financial crisis, civil society groups have been seen to exert much more influence, with politicians successfully implementing financial reform in spite of industry opposition. Drawing on literature from social movement research and regulatory politics, this book shows how diffuse interests were represented in financial regulatory overhauls in both the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). Four cases of reform in the post-crisis regulatory context are analyzed: the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the US; the introduction of new consumer protection regulations through EU directives; the failure of attempts to introduce a financial transaction tax in the US; and the agreement of 11 EU member states to introduce such a tax. It shows how building coalitions with important elite allies outside and inside government helped traditionally weak interest groups transcend a lack of material resources to influence and shape regulatory policy. By engaging with a less well-known side of the debate, it explains how business power was curbed and diverse interests translated into financial regulatory policy.
In May 1998 the fall of Suharto marked the beginning of a difficult and multi-layered transition process. It was accompanied by intensified conflict in the political arena, a dramatic increase of ethnic and religious violence and the danger of national disintegration. Ten years after the collapse of the New Order, Indonesia has made significant progress, however the quality of democracy is still low. Theoretically innovative and empirically sound, this book is an in-depth analysis of the Indonesian reform process since 1998. Marco Bünte and Andreas Ufen bring together a selection of noted Indonesia experts to provide new insights into the restructuring of core state institutions, the empowerment of Parliament, the slow and difficult evolution of the rule of law, and the transfer of power to locally elected regional governments (decentralization). Based on the results of extensive fieldwork, Democratization in Post-Suharto Indonesia will be an important read for scholars engaged in research on Indonesia and the politics of Southeast Asia.
Eruptions, Initiatives and Evolution in Citizen Activism is the result of a collaborative research project spanning Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. The book analyses internal and external challenges to civil society in more than twenty countries. It investigates through studies of ountries that include South Africa, India and the Netherlands of civil society evolution; examinations of citizen activism, such as Occupy London, the Chilean student movement, the Cambodian farmers campaign against land grabs; regional overviews such as the Southern Cone of Latin America, Southern Africa, and Russia. The studies identify changing roles, capacities, contributions and limitations of civil society in response to changing political, economic and social contexts. The book goes on to present selected studies, identifies patterns and lessons that emerge across countries and regions. It articulates implications of those lessons for practitioners and policy makers concerned with civil society contributions to national and regional development. This book was published as a special double issue of Development in Practice.
Situated within the context of "post-soviet times", this book explores young people’s citizenship activities and values in three distinct environments: post-soviet union countries, post-soviet union satellites, and countries that were independent of the soviet-union. Its purpose is to investigate the influence of these contexts on the ways young people see their citizenship in what are now emerging democracies. The future of nations depends to a large extent on whether citizens will continue to support existing values and will engage in activities to support those values. Using a framework designed by Kennedy (2006) and further developed by Zalewska, Krzywosz-Rynkiewicz (2011) the study examined the citizenship values of 3794 students aged 11-14-18 from 11 European countries. The main themes of this book include exploring similarities and differences in citizenship activities within countries and across countries; advancing explanations for these similarities and differences; highlighting the importance of contexts that influence citizenship activities and values; and assessing the extent to which democratic values are reflected in young people’s citizenship activities.
Mass media play a significant role in shaping public perceptions on a variety of important issues, both through the information that is dispensed through them and through the interpretations they place upon this information. They also play a large role in shaping modern culture, by selecting and portraying a particular set of beliefs, values, and traditions (an entire way of life), as reality. That is, by portraying a certain interpretation of reality, they shape reality to be more in line with that interpretation. Mass communication is “the process by which a person, group of people or large organization creates a message and transmits it through some type of medium to a large, anonymous, heterogeneous audience.” Mass communication is regularly associated with media influence or media effects, and media studies. Mass communication is a branch of social science that falls under the larger umbrella of communication studies or communication. With the rise of mass society and the rapid growth of the mass media starting in the nineteenth century, the public, media critics, and scholars have raised questions about the effects various media might have on society and individuals. These effects were viewed initially as being strong, direct, and relatively uniform on the population as a whole. More recently, research has expanded to move beyond looking just at the effects that media and media content have on individuals and society to examinations of how living in a world with all-pervasive media changes the nature of our interactions and culture. It is hoped that the book will serve the purpose of students and scholars of the subject and can be useful to them in allied fields.
The book examines the conditions for successful high-technology policy from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It enhances the predominant national systems of innovation approach to innovation policy with concepts based on new developments in the governance of complex systems and processes. The conceptual framework of complex networks and systems is used to examine national policy approaches in countries that have created environments conducive to high-technology industries as well as individual high-technology sectors, such as biotechnology, alternative energy, and aerospace. Theoretical and empirical contributions are synthesised into lessons for high-tech policy and further research.
Based on extensive original research, this book examines the extent to which media in Russia upholds the Russian government’s stance on sexuality. It considers the Russian government’s policies designed to uphold ‘traditional sexuality’, reveals the strategies of resistance used by Russian media outlets to create positive portrayals of non-heteronormative people and circumvent the restrictive 2013 legislation banning positive representations of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’, and highlights particular examples of subversive media practices. Overall, the book challenges the prevailing view that media in authoritarian regimes are completely compliant with their government’s position.