Europe is in trouble as right-wing motivated attacks have become a regular occurrence. Their targets span from religious minorities, such as Muslims and Jews, and ethnic minorities, such as Roma, to participants of LGBTQ1 parades, civil society protagonists and sometimes even representatives of the political order. At the same time, a xenophobic discourse, especially against migrants and refugees, has gained momentum among European publics, further blurring the lines between far-right agitation and mainstream politics. Likewise, far-right actors have become increasingly influential at various...

Even a cursory look at American society today reveals that protests against racial discrimination are by no means a thing of the past. What can we learn from past movements in order to understand the workings of racism and resistance? In this book, Franziska Meister revisits the Black Panther Party and offers a new perspective on the party as a whole and its struggle for racial social justice. She shows how the Panthers were engaged in exposing structural racism in the U.S. and depicts them as uniquely resourceful, imaginative, and subversive in the ways they challenged white supremacy while...

In the past three decades, radical right parties had the opportunity to directly influence political developments from the highest public office in many post-communist Central and Eastern European countries. Oliver Kossack provides the first comprehensive study on government formation with radical right parties in this region. Even after the turn of the millennium, some distinct features of the post-communist context persist, such as coalitions between radical right and centre-left parties. In addition to original empirical insights, the time-sensitive approach of this study also advances the...

Increasing irrigation efficiency has been high on the political agenda in Spain for many years. However, the overarching aim to reduce agricultural water consumption has not been met so far. To explore this phenomenon, Nora Schütze investigates processes of coordination between the water and agricultural sector in three Spanish river basins in the context of the EU Water Framework Directive implementation. From the perspective of polycentric governance, she identifies multiple mechanisms which illustrate how and why actors interact in certain ways, and thus shows why environmental aims of...

Brexit is a tale of two unions, not one: the British and the European unions. Their origins are different, but both struggle to maintain unity in diversity and both have to face the challenge of populism and claims of democratic deficit.Mark Corner suggests that the »four nations« that make up the UK can only survive as part of a single nation-state, if the country looks more sympathetically at the very European structures from which it has chosen to detach itself. This study addresses both academic and lay audiences interested in the current situation of the UK, particularly the strains...

How can we understand long-term change in world politics better? Based on readings of thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Foucault and Luhmann, the authors of this book propose a framework for understanding such change in terms of social evolution. They show that processes of social learning and unlearning are key to understanding the long-term historical evolution of complex societies, and propose to approach these with the core concepts of autonomization, hierarchical complexity, and co-evolution. Three case studies illustrate this social evolutionary perspective to the study of world...

Antidemokratische Machtdurchsetzung und Beschwörungen einer »Vollständigkeit« kennzeichnen den Faschismus von seinen historischen Erscheinungsformen bis zu seinen heutigen Ausprägungen. Rechte Mobilisierungen und Regimes dieser Art werden primär als autoritär angesehen. Drehli Robnik schlägt im Gegensatz dazu vor, sie als nihilistische Machtentfesselung in Dauerbewegung zu beschreiben. Diese Kennzeichnung des Faschismus, besonders des Nationalsozialismus, legen Siegfried Kracauers Schriften aus den 1930er und 1940er Jahren nahe. Dessen Analysen einer disruptiven und flexiblen Politik,...

Der anarchistische Politikbegriff erscheint widersprüchlich: Der Ablehnung von Politik steht eine Bezugnahme auf sie gegenüber. Diese Paradoxie entspringt einer bestimmten Denkweise, die dabei hilft, Netzwerke zwischen verschiedenen Strömungen, Gruppen und Diskursen zu weben. So eröffnet sich die Möglichkeit, auf widersprüchliche gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse zu antworten, um sie zu überschreiten. Dies zeigt sich im Modus des Strebens nach Autonomie, in Kontroversen zwischen Individualismus und Kollektivismus und in theoretischen Konzepten wie der sozialen Revolution. In diesem...

Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg entschied sich Europa für den Liberalismus und wählte dafür eine spezifische Wirtschafts- und Sozialordnung: die Soziale Marktwirtschaft. Mathieu Dubois zeichnet den Einfluss der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und des Ordoliberalismus auf dieses Modell nach. Seine These: Im Gegensatz zum Bild eines »politischen Zwergs« erwies sich die westdeutsche Europapolitik als entscheidender Vermittler europäischer Kompromisse. Damit leistete die Bundesrepublik einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Liberalisierung des Kontinents und zur Gründung einer Wirtschafts- und...