Law and politics are deeply intertwined. Law is an essential tool of government action, an instrument with which government tries to influence society. Law is also the means by which government itself is structured, regulated, and controlled. It is no surprise, then, that law is an important prize in the political struggle and that law shapes how politics is conducted.

As serious thinking about and around law and politics continues to flourish and develop, this new title in Routledge's Critical Concepts in Political Science series meets the need for an authoritative...

Since at least the time of Plato, political scientists and philosophers have been concerned about what citizens and rulers should know if they are to be governed--and govern--well. Moreover, the increasing complexity of modern societies has revivified thinking about and around the critical concept of political knowledge. Vital questions arise, such as:

• does effective democracy demand an informed electorate?
• is such an aspiration realistic, given the size and reach of modern governments?
• how can electorates compensate for their...

The growing importance of Islam in the world coincides with the growing interest by scholars in understanding Islam as a religion and its political and social influences. The geographic scope of Islam goes far beyond the Middle East, ranging from the Far East to sub-Saharan Africa.There is a vast diversity of Islamic movements and every country has its own distinctive pattern. But of the main categories of Islamic groups, only the Islamist political groups, the best-known in the West such as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, Hamas and Hizballah, have been thoroughly analyzed and...

Citizenship, denoting full and active membership of the national and political community, has been recognized as a critical concept since ancient times. However, three key and related changes have occurred to each of the basic components of this concept that have altered dramatically to whom and to what it now refers, and the contexts in which it seems proper to use it. First, the scope of membership or who can be a citizen has broadened considerably. Second, the rights and duties of citizenship have likewise been transformed. Finally, the contours of the political community, or the loci...

Radicalization has become one of the great buzzwords of our time. A Google search for the concept produces more than 1,500,000 hits less than terrorism but equal to political violence and extremism . This may seem surprising, given that the term entered the academic vocabulary just ten years ago. Previous generations of scholars had, of course, been interested in why and how people become extremists, but there was no separate field of inquiry which brought together the many political scientists, historians, area studies and terrorism experts, social-movement theorists, and psychologists...

The study of ethnic conflict saw its heyday in the aftermath of the Cold War with a proliferation of theories about its causes and management. But its origins as a subject of academic inquiry not only predate the end of the Cold War but also its inception, with some of the earliest works of significance emerging as far back as the end of the First World War. Since then, the field has become both multidisciplinary (in the sense of different disciplinary perspectives engaging individually with ethnic conflict as an object of study) and interdisciplinary (with novel insights emerging from the...

Published in association with UCL's Institute of Global Governance, this new title in Routledge's Critical Concepts in Political Science series is a four-volume collection of the very best scholarship. It is an essential successor to an earlier Routledge collection, Global Governance (4 vols.) (978-0-415-27661-0) (2003), edited by Timothy J. Sinclair.

Research in and around global governance has experienced dramatic growth in recent years. Global Governance (2003) was the first comprehensive collection of the field's canonical and cutting-edge research, and...

Scholars and students of African politics address some of the thorniest issues of our time. Indeed, over the last thirty years or so, the subdiscipline has expanded in scope and ambition, and leads the way in major fields of research, such as the study of ethnicity and identity politics.

Now, this timely new collection from Routledge, edited by Nic Cheeseman ( Director of the African Studies Centre at Oxford University), brings together the classic and essential texts of African politics, creating a top-quality and easily accessible resource for students, researchers, and policymakers...