Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

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Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1942130112
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (421 download)

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Book Synopsis Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty written by Wendy Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning examination of why nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness. Why do walls marking national boundaries proliferate amid widespread proclamations of global connectedness and despite anticipation of a world without borders? Why are barricades built of concrete, steel, and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed, or networked? In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown considers the recent spate of wall building in contrast to the erosion of nation-state sovereignty. Drawing on classical and contemporary political theories of state sovereignty in order to understand how state power and national identity persist amid its decline, Brown considers both the need of the state for legitimacy and the popular desires that incite the contemporary building of walls. The new walls—dividing Texas from Mexico, Israel from Palestine, South Africa from Zimbabwe—consecrate the broken boundaries they would seem to contest and signify the ungovernability of a range of forces unleashed by globalization. Yet these same walls often amount to little more than theatrical props, frequently breached, and blur the distinction between law and lawlessness that they are intended to represent. But if today's walls fail to resolve the conflicts between globalization and national identity, they nonetheless project a stark image of sovereign power. Walls, Brown argues, address human desires for containment and protection in a world increasingly without these provisions. Walls respond to the wish for horizons even as horizons are vanquished.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

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Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1935408097
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (354 download)

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Book Synopsis Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty written by Wendy Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the spate of wall-building by countries around the world and considers the reasons why walls are being built in an increasingly globalized world in which threats to security come from sources that cannot be contained by brick and barbed wire.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

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Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1935408569
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (354 download)

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Book Synopsis Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty written by Wendy Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-05-16 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness? Why do walls marking national boundaries proliferate amid widespread proclamations of global connectedness and despite anticipation of a world without borders? Why are barricades built of concrete, steel, and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed, or networked? In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown considers the recent spate of wall building in contrast to the erosion of nation-state sovereignty. Drawing on classical and contemporary political theories of state sovereignty in order to understand how state power and national identity persist amid its decline, Brown considers both the need of the state for legitimacy and the popular desires that incite the contemporary building of walls. The new walls—dividing Texas from Mexico, Israel from Palestine, South Africa from Zimbabwe—consecrate the broken boundaries they would seem to contest and signify the ungovernability of a range of forces unleashed by globalization. Yet these same walls often amount to little more than theatrical props, frequently breached, and blur the distinction between law and lawlessness that they are intended to represent. But if today's walls fail to resolve the conflicts between globalization and national identity, they nonetheless project a stark image of sovereign power. Walls, Brown argues, address human desires for containment and protection in a world increasingly without these provisions. Walls respond to the wish for horizons even as horizons are vanquished.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

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Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1935408089
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (354 download)

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Book Synopsis Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty written by Wendy Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-09-03 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness? Why do walls marking national boundaries proliferate amid widespread proclamations of global connectedness and despite anticipation of a world without borders? Why are barricades built of concrete, steel, and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed, or networked? In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown considers the recent spate of wall building in contrast to the erosion of nation-state sovereignty. Drawing on classical and contemporary political theories of state sovereignty in order to understand how state power and national identity persist amid its decline, Brown considers both the need of the state for legitimacy and the popular desires that incite the contemporary building of walls. The new walls—dividing Texas from Mexico, Israel from Palestine, South Africa from Zimbabwe—consecrate the broken boundaries they would seem to contest and signify the ungovernability of a range of forces unleashed by globalization. Yet these same walls often amount to little more than theatrical props, frequently breached, and blur the distinction between law and lawlessness that they are intended to represent. But if today's walls fail to resolve the conflicts between globalization and national identity, they nonetheless project a stark image of sovereign power. Walls, Brown argues, address human desires for containment and protection in a world increasingly without these provisions. Walls respond to the wish for horizons even as horizons are vanquished.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1935408550
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (354 download)

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Book Synopsis Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty written by Wendy Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, just two decades after international celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, are so many nation-states building elaborate walls at or near their borders? Why walls now, given growing global connectedness and given the general imperviousness of late modern powers — from capital to religion to terror — to physical blockading? How do walls shore up an imago of sovereign statehood and to what extent do they fortify reactionary national imaginaries? What do the new walls perform symbolically, materially, psychically? In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown reflects on the proliferation of nation-state walls in a time of eroded nation-state sovereignty and intensifying transnational powers unleashed by globalization. A leading theorist of neoliberalism, Brown argues that although the new walls may demarcate existent or aspirational nation-state boundaries, they do not arise as fortresses against invading national armies or even as articulations of sovereign statehood. Rather, in a post-Westphalian context of increasing nonstate transnational actors and powers, the new walls consecrate the very boundary corruption they would contest as well as signify the contemporary limitations of national and global governance by law or political dictate. Even as walls theatrically display nation-state sovereignty, they index with equal force the decline of sovereign state power. In a rare combination of powerful theory and precise historical, political, and economic analysis, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty provides a new — indeed the first — account of nation-state walling as a distinctive contemporary phenomenon. For Brown, the frenzy of wall building today reveals crucial predicaments of political power and desire emerging from the waning of sovereignty, including new political legitimacy deficits, new citizen anxieties, and new fusions of state and non-state violence.

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231550537
Total Pages : 181 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis In the Ruins of Neoliberalism by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism written by Wendy Brown and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.

The Power of Tolerance

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231170181
Total Pages : 113 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis The Power of Tolerance by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book The Power of Tolerance written by Wendy Brown and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

The Image before the Weapon

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Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801461262
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (612 download)

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Book Synopsis The Image before the Weapon by : Helen M. Kinsella

Download or read book The Image before the Weapon written by Helen M. Kinsella and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since at least the Middle Ages, the laws of war have distinguished between combatants and civilians under an injunction now formally known as the principle of distinction. The principle of distinction is invoked in contemporary conflicts as if there were an unmistakable and sure distinction to be made between combatant and civilian. As is so brutally evident in armed conflicts, it is precisely the distinction between civilian and combatant, upon which the protection of civilians is founded, cannot be taken as self-evident or stable. Helen M. Kinsella documents that the history of international humanitarian law itself admits the difficulty of such a distinction. In The Image before the Weapon, Kinsella explores the evolution of the concept of the civilian and how it has been applied in warfare. A series of discourses—including gender, innocence, and civilization—have shaped the legal, military, and historical understandings of the civilian and she documents how these discourses converge at particular junctures to demarcate the difference between civilian and combatant. Engaging with works on the law of war from the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition, including St. Thomas Aquinas and Christine de Pisan, to contemporary figures such as James Turner Johnson and Michael Walzer, Kinsella identifies the foundational ambiguities and inconsistencies in the principle of distinction, as well as the significant role played by Christian concepts of mercy and charity. She then turns to the definition and treatment of civilians in specific armed conflicts: the American Civil War and the U.S.-Indian wars of the nineteenth century, and the civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Finally, she analyzes the two modern treaties most influential for the principle of distinction: the 1949 IV Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War and the 1977 Protocols Additional to the 1949 Conventions, which for the first time formally defined the civilian within international law. She shows how the experiences of the two world wars, but particularly World War II, and the Algerian war of independence affected these subsequent codifications of the laws of war. As recognition grows that compliance with the principle of distinction to limit violence against civilians depends on a firmer grasp of its legal, political, and historical evolution, The Image before the Weapon is a timely intervention in debates about how best to protect civilian populations.

The Space between Us

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108359612
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (83 download)

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Book Synopsis The Space between Us by : Ryan D. Enos

Download or read book The Space between Us written by Ryan D. Enos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Space between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these groups live and interact daily. Through the lens of numerous examples across the globe and drawing on a compelling combination of research techniques including field and laboratory experiments, big data analysis, and small-scale interactions, this timely book provides a new understanding of how geography shapes politics and how members of groups think about each other. Enos' analysis is punctuated with personal accounts from the field. His rigorous research unfolds in accessible writing that will appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike, illuminating the profound effects of social geography on how we relate to, think about, and politically interact across groups in the fabric of our daily lives.

A World without Why

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400848482
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis A World without Why by : Raymond Geuss

Download or read book A World without Why written by Raymond Geuss and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-16 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the human and natural world is not as intelligible to us as we think it is Wishful thinking is a deeply ingrained human trait that has had a long-term distorting effect on ethical thinking. Many influential ethical views depend on the optimistic assumption that, despite appearances to the contrary, the human and natural world in which we live could, eventually, be made to make sense to us. In A World without Why, Raymond Geuss challenges this assumption. The essays in this collection—several of which are published here for the first time—explore the genesis and historical development of this optimistic configuration in ethical thought and the ways in which it has shown itself to be unfounded and misguided. Discussions of Greco-Roman antiquity and of the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adorno play a central role in many of these essays. Geuss also ranges over such topics as the concepts of intelligibility, authority, democracy, and criticism; the role of lying in politics; architecture; the place of theology in ethics; tragedy and comedy; and the struggle between realism and our search for meaning. Characterized by Geuss's wide-ranging interests in literature, philosophy, and history, and by his political commitment and trenchant style, A World without Why raises fundamental questions about the viability not just of specific ethical concepts and theses, but of our most basic assumptions about what ethics could and must be.

Home Rule

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 147800245X
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Home Rule by : Nandita Sharma

Download or read book Home Rule written by Nandita Sharma and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.

Violent Borders

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Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1784784729
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (847 download)

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Book Synopsis Violent Borders by : Reece Jones

Download or read book Violent Borders written by Reece Jones and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new exploration of the refugee crisis, focusing on how borders are formed and policed Forty thousand people have died trying to cross between countries in the past decade, and yet international borders only continue to harden. The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union; the United States elected a president who campaigned on building a wall; while elsewhere, the popularity of right-wing antimigrant nationalist political parties is surging. Reece Jones argues that the West has helped bring about the deaths of countless migrants, as states attempt to contain populations and limit access to resources and opportunities. “We may live in an era of globalization,” he writes, “but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movement of people.” In Violent Borders, Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and the dire consequences for countless millions. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slum dwellings in the ailing decolonized world, the wealthy travel without constraint, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. With the growth of borders and resource enclosures, the deaths of migrants in search of a better life are intimately connected to climate change, environmental degradation, and the growth of global wealth inequality. Newly updated with a discussion of Brexit and the Trump administration.

Undoing the Demos

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Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1935408534
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (354 download)

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Book Synopsis Undoing the Demos by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book Undoing the Demos written by Wendy Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-02-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book for the age of resistance, for the occupiers of the squares, for the generation of Occupy Wall Street. The premier radical political philosopher of our time offers a devastating critique of the way neoliberalism has hollowed out democracy.

International Relations: A Very Short Introduction

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Author :
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191577537
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)

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Book Synopsis International Relations: A Very Short Introduction by : Paul Wilkinson

Download or read book International Relations: A Very Short Introduction written by Paul Wilkinson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-07-26 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of undoubtable relevance today, in a post-9-11 world of growing political tension and unease, this Very Short Introduction covers the topics essential to an understanding of modern international relations. Paul Wilkinson explains the theories and the practice that underlie the subject, and investigates issues ranging from foreign policy, arms control, and terrorism, to the environment and world poverty. He examines the role of organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, as well as the influence of ethnic and religious movements and terrorist groups which also play a role in shaping the way states and governments interact. This up-to-date book is required reading for those seeking a new perspective to help untangle and decipher international events. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Human Right to Dominate

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199365032
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

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Book Synopsis The Human Right to Dominate by : Nicola Perugini

Download or read book The Human Right to Dominate written by Nicola Perugini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged: conservatives, who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture, began to embrace human rights in order to advance their political goals. In this book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights--generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices--are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of human rights and mirror each other's political strategies. Indeed, Perugini and Gordon demonstrate the multifaceted role that this discourse is currently playing in the international arena: on the one hand, human rights have become the lingua franca of global moral speak, while on the other, they have become reconstrued as a tool for enhancing domination.

States of Injury

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691201390
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis States of Injury by : Wendy Brown

Download or read book States of Injury written by Wendy Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether in characterizing Catharine MacKinnon's theory of gender as itself pornographic or in identifying liberalism as unable to make good on its promises, Wendy Brown pursues a central question: how does a sense of woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity? Brown argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography powerfully legitimize the state: such apparently well-intentioned attempts harm victims further by portraying them as so helpless as to be in continuing need of governmental protection. "Whether one is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands," writes Brown, "the heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector's rules." True democracy, she insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not protection. Refusing any facile identification with one political position or another, Brown applies her argument to a panoply of topics, from the basis of litigiousness in political life to the appearance on the academic Left of themes of revenge and a thwarted will to power. These and other provocations in contemporary political thought and political life provide an occasion for rethinking the value of several of the last two centuries' most compelling theoretical critiques of modern political life, including the positions of Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, and Foucault.

Progress for the Poor

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Author :
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191620483
Total Pages : 171 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis Progress for the Poor by : Lane Kenworthy

Download or read book Progress for the Poor written by Lane Kenworthy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the principal goals of antipoverty efforts should be to improve the absolute living standards of the least well-off. This book aims to enhance our understanding of how to do that, drawing on the experiences of twenty affluent countries since the 1970s. The book addresses a set of questions at the heart of political economy and public policy: How much does economic growth help the poor? When and why does growth fail to trickle down? How can social policy help? Can a country have a sizeable low-wage sector yet few poor households? Are universal programs better than targeted ones? What role can public services play in antipoverty efforts? What is the best tax mix? Is more social spending better for the poor? If we commit to improvement in the absolute living standards of the least well-off, must we sacrifice other desirable outcomes?