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This book argues that we are currently witnessing not merely a decline in the quality of social science research, but the proliferation of meaningless research, of no value to society, and modest value to its authors - apart from securing employment and promotion. The explosion of published outputs, at least in social science, creates a noisy, cluttered environment which makes meaningful research difficult, as different voices compete to capture the limelight even briefly. Older, more significant contributions are easily neglected, as the premium is to write and publish, not read and learn. The result is a widespread cynicism among academics on the value of academic research, sometimes including their own. Publishing comes to be seen as a game of hits and misses, devoid of intrinsic meaning and value, and of no wider social uses whatsoever. Academics do research in order to get published, not to say something socially meaningful. This is what we view as the rise of nonsense in academic research, which represents a serious social problem. It undermines the very point of social science. This problem is far from 'academic'. It affects many areas of social and political life entailing extensive waste of resources and inflated student fees as well as costs to tax-payers. Part two of the book offers a range of proposals aimed at restoring meaning at the heart of social research and drawing social science back address the major problems and issues that face our societies.
When Joe tells a local news reporter exactly what he would do if he were leader of the country, the video goes viral and Joe's speech becomes famous all over the world! Before long, people are calling for the current leader to resign and give someone else a go . . . and that's how an ordinary boy like Joe ended up with the most extraordinary job. Now the fun can really start . . . Hats for cats! Pet pigs for all! Banana shaped buses! Swimming pools on trains! A hilarious story of one boy's meteoric rise to power!
A set of state of the art empirical analyses at the country, regional, and global level that work from a new theoretical framework that analyzes the politics of growth and stagnation. As highlighted by the recent debate on 'secular stagnation,' economic growth has slowed down considerably, and this has given rise to a host of new problems, from financial instability to the collapse of mainstream parties. What happens when growththe main mechanism of capitalist legitimationis harder to come by and less broadly shared? And how should we think about capitalist diversity in the context of global stagnation? In Diminishing Returns, Lucio Baccaro, Mark Blyth, and Jonas Pontusson address these questions by bringing together a number of comparative and international political economists with expertise across many different countries and regions. Going beyond the methodological nationalism common in most comparative research, each author departs from a common theoretical framework, the Growth Model Perspective, and contributes to develop it further. The outcome is a new theoretical framework to help social scientists, policymakers, and opinion makers, understand the politics of growth and stagnation, which offers state of the art empirical analyses at the country, regional, and global level.
This book seeks to answer to a central international politics: why do great powers rise and fall? It provides an innovative argument about how domestic political institutions are the key to a state's ability to amass power and influence in the international system. This text also offers a sweeping historical analysis of democratic and autocratic competitors from ancient Greece through the Cold War. This book employs a unique framework to understand and analyze the state of today's competition between the democratic United States and its autocratic competitors, Russia and China.
In the 21st century, the Indo-Pacific region has become the new centre of the world. The concept of the 'Indo-Pacific', though still under construction, is a potentially 'pivotal' site, where various institutions and intellectuals of statecraft are seeking common ground on which to anchor new regional coalitions, alliances. and allies to better serve their respective national agendas. This book explores the 'Indo-Pacific' as an ambiguous and hotly contested regional security construction. It critically examines the major drivers behind the revival of classical geopolitical concepts and their deployment through different national lenses. The book also analyses the presence of India and the U.S in the Indo-Pacific, and the manner in which China has reacted to their positions in the Indo-Pacific to date. It suggests that national constructions of the Indo-Pacific region are more informed by domestic political realities, anti-Chinese bigotries, distinctive properties of 21st century U.S hegemony, and narrow nation-statist sentiments rather than genuine pan-regional aspirations. The Rise and Return of the Indo-Pacific argues that the spouting of contested depictions of the Indo-Pacific region depend on the fixed geo-strategic lenses of nation-states, but what is also important is the re-emergence of older ideas - a class conceptual revival - based on early to mid-20th century geopolitical ideas in many of these countries. The book deliberately raises the issue of the sea and constructions of 'nature', as these symbols are indispensable parts of many of these Indo-Pacific regional narratives. Despite the existence of diverse nation-statist, pan- and sub-regional discourses, the narratives of the most powerful states still dominate 21st century Indo-Pacific statecraft. The term 'Indo-Pacific' has the potential of unsettling various existing bilateral and multilateral geopolitical equations within the Indian Ocean region. Despite substantial heterogeneity in Indo-Pacific regional imaginations, the most dominant 'stories' and 'maps' are crafted and disseminated by the most dominant nation -in this case, the U.S- as it grapples with new ways of retaining its hegemony into the 21st century.
An incisive look at American Indian and Euro-American relations from the 16th century to the present, this book focuses on how such relations have shaped the Native American political identity and tactics in the ongoing struggle for power. Cornell shows how, in the early days of colonization, Indians were able to maintain their nationhood by playing off the competing European powers; and how the American Revolution and westward expansion eventually caused Native Americans to lose their land, social cohesion, and economic independence. The final part of the book recounts the slow, steady reemergence of American Indian political power and identity, evidenced by militant political activism in the 1960s and early 1970s. By paying particular attention to the evolution of Indian groups as collective actors and to changes over time in Indian political opportunities and their capacities to act on those opportunities, Cornell traces the Indian path from power to powerlessness and back to power again.
George Orwell is watching you and you're watching him. Britain pays its respects in the form of the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Lecture, and, more recently, Orwell Day. A statue of Orwell now stands outside Broadcasting House in London and he continues to tower over broadsheet journalism. His ghost is repeatedly summoned in the houses of Parliament and in schools across Britain. In Europe and the US, citizens confront the perennial question: "What would Orwell say?" Orwell is part of the political vocabulary of our times, yet partly due to this popularity, what he stands for remains opaque. His writing confirms deep and widely shared intuitions about political justice, but much of its enduring fascination derives from the fact that these intuitions don't quite add up. David Dwan accounts for these inconsistencies by exploring the broader moral conflict at the centre of Orwell's work and the troubled idealism it yields. Examining the whole sweep of Orwell's writings, this book shows how literature can be a rich source of political wisdom.
Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. “A tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.