Throughout most of Russian history, two views of who the Russians are have dominated the minds of Russian intellectuals. Westerners assumed that Russia was part of the West, whilst Slavophiles saw Russia as part of a Slavic civilization. At present, it is Eurasianism that has emerged as the paradigm that has made attempts to place Russia in a broad civilizational context and it has recently become the only viable doctrine that is able to provide the very ideological justification for Russia's existence as a multiethnic state. Eurasians assert that Russia is a civilization in its own right, a...

Rational exercise of our responsibility requires us to relate the globalization process to the ends and purposes that properly befit human life and human community. Economic 'ends' are merely the 'means' to ends of a higher order, which can only be specified in terms of moral duty and ethical purpose. The contributors to this book explore political-ethical issues of globalization, including terrorism, institutional change and distribution in the world economy, the role of the United Nations and international financial institutions, the regimes of international trade and technology transfer,...

Transnational society is a new field of study, just as brain circulation is a new development strategy for the global South. This book contributes to the growing scholarship on transnational society and brain circulation, thus highlighting the dynamic social practices already underway

Participation of concerned actors and the public is a central element in the legal regulation of science and technology. In constitutional democracy, these participatory forms are governed by the rule of law. The volume critically examines participatory governance in this realm and makes suggestions with respect to further institutional and political-cultural developments. It assembles contributions of a broad interdisciplinary range within a comparative research programme, opening the black box of participatory governance in legal procedure. The contributions are the result of almost a...

A comparative study is made of how conflict-terminating negotiations led to maiden democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, pointing various thresholds out through specific chapters, invoking negotiations theories/stages to deepen interpretations, and prospecting the Bush Doctrine's future mileage in democratizing the Middle East.

We have come a long way from Evans-Pritchard's famous dictum that "there is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method - and that is impossible." Yet a good 40 years later, qualitative social inquiry still has an uneasy relationship with comparison. This volume sets out "thick comparison" as a means to revive "comparing" as a productive process in ethnographic work: a process that helps to revitalise the articulation work inherent in analytical ethnographies; to vary observer perspectives and point towards "blind spots;" to name and create "new things" and modes of...

Leading scholars address the interplay between rule of law and democracy, the most relevant ideals for our present civilisation in the legal and political spheres, at the same time making sense of the different ways in which legal requirements, social commitments, and democratic standards are expected to interweave. Through a reappraisal of the theoretical import of the concepts the contributors provide for a fresh set of inquiries, internal and external, ranging from the State, consolidated and transitional democracies, to interstate, European and global scenarios. Re-orienting the diversity...

Cases are not objects at hand for legal decision-making; cases are not echoes from a past crime. Cases are, first of all, made within compound discourse apparatus, here the English Crown Court and the procedure/s attached to it. This book reveals the legal production of cases including their relevant features. The socio-legal ethnography visits the natural sites of adversarial case-making: law firms, barristers' chambers, and Crown Courts. It examines the role and dynamics of client-lawyer meetings, pre-trial hearings, plea bargaining sessions, and jury trials. It focuses on the lawyers'...

Among all sociologists in the world born after 1900, Amitai Etzioni ranks ninth in total citations. One reason for this is his thousands of publications span theory, organizations, international politics, democratic politics, socio-economics and communitarianism, and they have been adopted in undergraduate coursework within each of these areas. Written for social theorists as well as general readers (including undergraduates) David Sciulli's book is the first to explain not only how but also why Amitai Etzioni's publications evolved from his dissertation to Active Society and Socio-Economics...

Joseph Schumpeter's "competitive theory of democracy" - often labeled democratic elitism - has struck many as an apt and insightful description of how representative democracy works, even though convinced democrats detect an elitist thrust they find disturbing. But neither Schumpeter nor subsequent defenders of democratic elitism have paid enough attention to actual behaviors of leaders and elites. Attention has been riveted on how adequately democratic elitism captures the relationship between governors and governed in its insistence that competitive elections prevent the relationship from...