Politik og regering

Critical Geography examines the power structures, inequality, and the dominant ideologies that shape physical space. By critically analyzing these forces, the publication stimulates conversations about social justice, environmental sustainability, and transformative change. The artistic practices featured in the book shed light on systemic oppression, violence, and pressing environmental issues, and encompass a wide range of image-based practices that make inequality visible in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, including mapping, social media, and technology. FOTOFEST is a Houston-based contemporary arts organization co-founded by photojournalists Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss. The use of photography or related media to examine social, cultural, and political histories as well as contemporary life is central to FotoFest's mission. In addition to year-round programming, FotoFest organizes a city-wide biennial project that includes large-scale central exhibitions, curated lectures, performances, a symposium, and a film program.

Call Me Lola is a moving photo essay by the acclaimed Israeli-American lens-based artist and documentarian Loli Kantor. For over twenty years, she combed through the family archives of her Polish-born father, a doctor and political activist. At the center of her work is her mother, Lola, who died in childbirth: a woman who manifests herself principally through images and stories rather than direct memories. The family documents and photographs that retrace the artist's personal history are shown alongside new camera-based works, resulting in a deeply subjective reflection on the most significant upheavals of the twentieth century: war and displacement, love and loss, trauma and grief. LOLI KANTOR (*1952) is an Israeli-American photographer whose work centers on personal and cultural memory. She lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas.

Accompanying her parents to Berlin in the 1930s, Martha Dodd knew almost nothing about Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. Yet almost overnight, she stepped into the spotlight, and found herself at the over-heated centre of Hitler's 'New Germany', befriending and dating several high-ranking Nazis, including the then-head of the Gestapo.An affair with a dashing Russian diplomat saw her recruited as a spy, and so began a long and tumultuous career in both Berlin and America, including infiltrating First Lady Eleanor Rooevelt's inner circle and playing a key role in Henry Wallace's disastrous 1948 presidential campaign.Betrayed by a Hollywood-hustler-turned-double-agent, Martha spent years under deep FBI surveillance - escaping twice - and went to ground in Cold War Prague, sad, lonely, rich and bored, living out her final decades in a Communist Sunset Boulevard.Largely forgotten, Martha Dodd began emerging as an iconic historical figure in the early 2000s. While her scandalous behaviour and pro-Soviet leanings were never much in dispute, the actual matter of her guilt remained unresolved. Using recently released KGB archived information and FBI files, in Traitor's Odyssey, author and journalist Brendan McNally corrects this, telling the full epic of Martha Dodd's life for the first time, casting her in a new and bright light.

Women make over 80 percent of healthcare decisions in the U.S. yet have been excluded from designing the health system for too long. It was only 1993 when women and people of color were officially included in clinical trials. Heart attacks are the number one killer of women worldwide, but women are 50 percent more likely to be given a wrong diagnosis. Only four percent of all healthcare research and development is focused on women's health issues. From periods and childbirth to menopause, female pain has been normalized, as society shrugs and says "Welcome to being a woman" instead of coming up with better solutions.In The Vagina Business, award-winning journalist Marina Gerner PhD takes an eye-opening-and often times shocking-look at the inequities when it comes to scientific research and the funding of female-focused health companies. She exposes the obstacles entrepreneurs around the world face in the boardroom and beyond. Most of all, she shows us that it doesn't have to be this way. From a life-saving bra to non-hormonal contraception and new takes on fertility and menopause, she shines a light on innovation that matters. Women should not be denied solutions to health issues just because people are embarrassed to talk about vaginas. We deserve much better.

In this provocative new book, Lucy Ash reveals how, under Putin, religion is being stripped of its spiritual content and used as a weapon to control the population in a way never seen before. Orthodox clerics and their acolytes are trying to drag Russia backwards into a new Middle Ages.Combining historical research with vivid present-day reportage, The Baton and the Cross explores the impact the Church is having on millions of Russians' lives - from the tower blocks of Moscow and the big cities to far-flung villages in Siberia. Delving into the underbelly of politics, state security and big money, Ash shows how these forces have formed an unholy alliance with Orthodoxy.

For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they've not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they've secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, journalist Casey Michel contends some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself.These Americans are known as foreign lobbyists, and many of them spent years ushering dictatorships directly into the halls of Washington, all while laundering the reputations of the most heinous, repressive regimes in the process. These lobbyists include figures like Ivy Lee, the inventor of the public relations industry - a man who whitewashed Mussolini, opened doors to the Soviets, and advised the Nazis on how to sway American audiences. They include people like Paul Manafort, who invented lobbying as we know it - and who then took his talents to autocrats from Ukraine to the Philippines, and then back to the White House. And they now include an increasing number of Americans elsewhere: in law firms and consultancies, among PR specialists and former lawmakers, and even within think tanks and universities.Many of these lobbyists have transformed into proxies for dictators and strongmen wherever they can be found. And for years, they've escaped scrutiny.In Foreign Agents, Casey Michel shines a light on these foreign lobbyists, and all the damage and devastation they have caused in Washington and elsewhere. From Moscow to Beijing, from far-right nationalists to far-left communists, from anti-American autocrats to pro-Western authoritarians, these foreign lobbyists have helped any illiberal, anti-democratic government they can find. And after decades of success in installing dictator after dictator, and in tilting American policy in the process, some of these lobbyists have now begun trying to end America's democratic experiment, once and for all.

Providing a cross-cutting contribution for the achievement of the 2030 Goals, this edited collection offers essential guidance for transforming the SDGs from agenda to reality.

Seeks to introduce an "affective turn" to the study of China's political modernization process.

This catalogue is an immersive adventure through the what, how and why of a contemporary art exhibition for children and adults alike. It is a journey through the 2023 exhibition Thoughts Play Hide and Seek by Ephra in Berlin. Curated by Rebecca Raue, the catalogue features works by Paula Anke, Ilit Azoulay, Olafur Eliasson, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Jeppe Hein, Claudia Hill, Christian Jankowski, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Ali Kaaf, Wie-yi T. Lauw, Dafna Maimon, Wolfgang Karl May, Ayumi Paul, Ana Prvacki, Karin Sander, Yorgos Sapountzis, Tomás Saraceno, Nadine Schemmann, Vlado Velkov, Ulrich Vogl and Nicole Wendel.

Die hier behandelten Essays, Analysen und Briefe beschäftigen sich mit aktuellen Themen, entstanden in Diskussionen und als Reaktionen auf vorherige Inhalte. Die Herausforderung liegt darin, die gegenwärtigen Ereignisse zu verstehen, da klassische Begriffe wie Links/Rechts an Bedeutung verloren haben.Besonders bemerkenswert ist die Hartnäckigkeit des aktuellen Linksliberalismus, der an der durchlässigen Grenzpolitik festhält, obwohl sich weltweit Millionen Menschen darauf vorbereiten, nach Europa zu kommen. Die Überforderung, die daraus resultiert, zeigt sich in verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen.Es ist erstaunlich, wie die Islamkritik im aktuellen Diskurs kriminalisiert wird, während eine differenzierte Betrachtung notwendig ist. Die Kritik an einer unkontrollierten Massenmigration und die Sorge um kulturelle Identität sollten nicht als unmoralisch abgetan werden.Die Wissenschaftsfeindlichkeit und die Diffamierung von Wissenschaftlern, die kontroverse Themen ansprechen, sind besorgniserregend. Eine offene Diskussion über verschiedene Standpunkte ist notwendig, um gesellschaftliche Spannungen zu bewältigen.Der gesellschaftliche Riss, der sich zeigt, ist tief greifend. Der Duldungsbogen ist überspannt, und eine schweigende Mehrheit fühlt sich nicht ernst genommen. Die Polarisation verstärkt sich, und die Gefahr eines neuen Autoritarismus ist real.

"This book addresses the international legal issues surrounding the adoption of secondary sanctions. These controversial measures aim to regulate economic or financial transactions between third states and a target state. The volume takes on board recent evolutions in case-law and practice, such as the drafting of the EU Anti-Coercion Instrument"--

"The political and cultural lessons drawn from the collapse of the Weimar Republic are invoked in order to understand contemporary threats to democracy. The contributors challenge the validity of these lessons, the extent to which they reflect political agendas, and how they are brought to bear on contemporary political problems"--

"The contested creation of free movement, for people and goods, in the Schengen area of Europe. Europe is a place of free movement among nations, or is it? The Schengen area, established in 1985 and today encompassing twenty-seven European countries, allows people, goods, and capital to cross borders without restraint. Schengen transformed European life, advancing both a democratic project of transnational citizenship and a neoliberal project of international free trade. But the right of free movement always excluded non-Europeans, especially migrants of color from former colonies of the Schengen states. In Europe without Borders, Isaac Stanley-Becker explores the contested creation of free movement in Schengen, from treatymaking at European summits and disputes in international courts to the street protests of undocumented immigrants who claimed free movement as a human right. Schengen laid the groundwork for the making of a single market and the founding of the European Union. Yet its emergence is one of the great untold stories of modern European history, one hidden in archives long embargoed. Stanley-Becker is among the first to have access to records of the treatymaking-such as letters between France's Franðcois Mitterrand and West Germany's Helmut Kohl-and Europe Without Borders offers a pathbreaking account of Schengen's creation. Stanley-Becker argues that Schengen gave a humanist cast to a market paradigm; but even in pairing the border crossing of human beings with the principles of free-market exchange, this vision of free movement was hedged by alarm about foreign migrants. Meanwhile, these migrants-the sans papiers-saw in the promise of a borderless Europe only a neocolonial enterprise"--

An original defense of the unique value of voting in a democracyVoting is only one of the many ways that citizens can participate in public decision making, so why does it occupy such a central place in the democratic imagination? In Election Day, political theorist Emilee Booth Chapman provides an original answer to that question, showing precisely what is so special about how we vote in today's democracies. By presenting a holistic account of popular voting practices and where they fit into complex democratic systems, she defends popular attitudes toward voting against radical critics and offers much-needed guidance for voting reform.Elections embody a distinctive constellation of democratic values and perform essential functions in democratic communities. Election day dramatizes the nature of democracy as a collective and individual undertaking, makes equal citizenship and individual dignity concrete and transparent, and socializes citizens into their roles as equal political agents. Chapman shows that fully realizing these ends depends not only on the widespread opportunity to vote but also on consistently high levels of actual turnout, and that citizens' experiences of voting matters as much as the formal properties of a voting system. And these insights are also essential for crafting and evaluating electoral reform proposals.By rethinking what citizens experience when they go to the polls, Election Day recovers the full value of democratic voting today.

Why some of Asia's authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer-and why others haven'tOver the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization-a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world's poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia's record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become more democratic as they have grown richer, while others-most notably China-haven't? In From Development to Democracy, Dan Slater and Joseph Wong offer a sweeping and original answer to this crucial question.Slater and Wong demonstrate that Asia defies the conventional expectation that authoritarian regimes concede democratization only as a last resort, during times of weakness. Instead, Asian dictators have pursued democratic reforms as a proactive strategy to revitalize their power from a position of strength. Of central importance is whether authoritarians are confident of victory and stability. In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan these factors fostered democracy through strength, while democratic experiments in Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar were less successful and more reversible. At the same time, resistance to democratic reforms has proven intractable in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Reconsidering China's 1989 crackdown, Slater and Wong argue that it was the action of a regime too weak to concede, not too strong to fail, and they explain why China can allow democracy without inviting instability.The result is a comprehensive regional history that offers important new insights about when and how democratic transitions happen-and what the future of Asia might be.

Why some cities are more effective than others at reducing inequalities in the built environment: urban governance in São Paulo and Johannesburg For the first time in history, most people live in cities. One in seven are living in slums, the most excluded parts of cities, in which the basics of urban life--including adequate housing, accessible sanitation, and reliable transportation--are largely unavailable. Why are some cities more successful than others in reducing inequalities in the built environment? In Urban Power, Benjamin Bradlow explores this question, examining the effectiveness of urban governance in two "megacities" in young democracies: São Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Both cities came out of periods of authoritarian rule with similarly high inequalities and similar policy priorities to lower them. And yet São Paulo has been far more successful than Johannesburg in improving access to basic urban goods. Bradlow examines the relationships between local government bureaucracies and urban social movements that have shaped these outcomes. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork in both cities, including interviews with informants from government agencies, political leadership, social movements, private developers, bus companies, and water and sanitation companies, Bradlow details the political and professional conflicts between and within movements, governments, private corporations, and political parties. He proposes a bold theoretical approach for a new global urban sociology that focuses on variations in the coordination of local governing power, arguing that the concepts of "embeddedness" and "cohesion" explain processes of change that bridge external social mobilization and the internal coordinating capacity of local government to implement policy changes.

"An in-depth look at the ways in which an emboldened effort to ungovern threatens to undermine the effective working of the administrative state. In this book, political theorists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, aim to identify and name a growing effort to undermine the workings of effective government. They call this "ungoverning." It is an unfamiliar name for an unfamiliar phenomenon, but one which has become increasingly strident in recent years. It is a root and branch attack on the functions and legitimacy of the administrative state, that unloved element of modern government that is necessary for everything people expect a modern state to do. The administrative state consists of the vast array of government agencies that shape, implement, adjudicate, and enforce public policies of every kind. It encompasses all those who carry on the day-to day business of government: the ordinary and routine, the wars and emergencies, and even the most basic function of a democracy: the oversight of free and fair elections. Ungoverning is the effort to reverse, by various methods, the already highly developed capacity of state to provide for its citizenry. It is different from state failure because it is a path deliberately chosen by politicians and agency heads who have a specific aim in mind. Ungoverning in the U.S., went from thinly veiled policy to open warfare, during the Trump presidency. Although efforts to ungovern were underway before his term in office, Trump clarified ungoverning as no one else could by forming the first presidential administration that was anti-administration. Rosenblum and Muirehead point to the incapacitation of a range of agencies from the Departments of State and Justice to Housing and Urban Development. Ungoverning did not come out of nowhere. The President brought decades of cultivated hostility toward government to a crescendo. Prior to that, even though over its history hostility toward the administrative state was expressed by both the Left and Right, there had been nothing like errant destruction of government capacity. But this is not just a story of the Trump administration. The damage ungoverning has done and can do remains a grave threat. Despite the Biden's admistration's efforts, reversing the corrosive effects of ungoverning cannot happen at a stroke. The capacity of a public agency takes many years to build. Replacing demoralized civil servants can take decades. The retail consequences of disdain for governing endure: As hard to reverse, and perhaps most serious for democracies, is public belief that neither the ability nor the will to govern exists. Ungoverning is, the authors argues, part of the constellation of actions that make up illiberal, anti-democratic politics with the end result being democratic erosion"--

An in-depth, authoritative, and timely look at the unprecedented economic war against Russia after Putin's invasion of Ukraine - written by a veteran journalist with unparalleled access to Western and Russian sources

The European Union is in a state of revolution. In response to new global realities from the climate crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine to the emerging cold war with China, the EU is transforming into a federal superpower in a new world order.  In this timely intervention, Marc De Vos gets to the heart of the challenges facing the European Union as it undergoes this silent revolution. Charting its changing mission and identity from a European community into a geostrategic coalition of Eurasian countries; from a union of values into a union of power; and from a market project into a state project, he exposes what's at stake for both the EU itself and its partners across the world.  But retaining this new superpower status, he cautions, is not a given. The European Union's de facto metamorphosis must mature into a democratic political structure or it risks a crisis of legitimacy that could ultimately threaten the stability of the European Union itself.

"The political and cultural lessons drawn from the collapse of the Weimar Republic are invoked in order to understand contemporary threats to democracy. The contributors challenge the validity of these lessons, the extent to which they reflect political agendas, and how they are brought to bear on contemporary political problems"--

Senator Akume, a multifaceted figure, is introduced through diverse perspectives in this book. The narrative traces his journey from civil service up to Permanent Secretary and his impactful roles in local government and directorate positions before navigating the complexities of Benue politics.As a class A Governor from 1999-2007 under the Peoples Democratic Party, Akume later served three terms as a Senator and held ministerial duties in President Buhari's cabinet. Acknowledged for his philanthropy, leadership qualities, and humility, he earned the esteem of prominent figures like President Tinubu, culminating in his appointment as the 21st Secretary to the Government of the Federation in 2023.The book, "George Akume: Eye Witness Accounts," invites readers to explore encounters with this remarkable individual, providing insights into enduring leadership and valuable lessons for the next generation.

My purpose here is exclusively to help you focus your mentality on this specific kingdom blueprint of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) of Christ, that is buried within the Word of God, and bring to light the kingdom principles that are already embedded within you, the king heirs.The objective now is to activate the development of unified kingdom leadership.Today the spoken word and Jesus' works of power were behind man's spiritual creation and is the perfect introduction of mankind into His GodHead. This power is the wisdom of God and is the greater works needed to be exercised by king heirs. It will bring awareness about their hidden treasure and our unlimited potential to demonstrate it in the world. King heirs are endowed with this spoken power to be exerted through the free enterprise system as substrate operations within the marketplace. Being properly positioned in the marketplace is key to raising the leadership foundations for multiple generations (both vertically and horizontally) of young professional adults all within our lifetime.