Browse

When newly liberated African American slaves attempted to enter the marketplace and exercise their rights as citizens of the United States in 1865, few, if any, Americans expected that, a century and a half later, the class divide between black and white Americans would be as wide as it is today. The United States has faced several potential key turning points in the status of African Americans over the course of its history, yet at each of these points the prevailing understanding of African Americans and their place in the economic and political fabric of the country was at best contested and resolved on the side of second-class citizenship. This text seeks to answer the question of what the United States would look like today if, at the end of the Civil War, freed slaves had been granted full political, social, and economic rights. It does so by tracing the historical evolution of African American experiences, from the dawn of Reconstruction onward, through the perspectives of sociology, political science, law, economics, education, and psychology. As a whole, the book is a systematic study of the gap between the promise and performance of African Americans since 1865. Over the course of thirty-four articles, written by scholars of African American studies and across every major social discipline, the book presents a portrait of the particular hurdles faced by African Americans.

The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy affords readers an uncommon overview and integration of the eclectic body of knowledge of American bureaucracy. One of the major dilemmas facing the administrative state in the United States today is discerning how best to harness for public purposes the dynamism of markets, the passion and commitment of non-profit and volunteer organizations, and the public-interest-oriented expertise of the career civil service. Researchers across a variety of disciplines, fields, and subfields have independently investigated aspects of the formidable challenges, choices, and opportunities this dilemma poses for governance, democratic constitutionalism, and theory building. This literature is vast, affords multiple and conflicting perspectives, is methodologically diverse, and is fragmented. Each of the articles in this text identifies major issues and trends, critically takes stock of the state of knowledge, and ponders where future research is most promising. The book is one of Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior offers comprehensive coverage of the various theoretical approaches to the study of American elections and political behavior. The articles provide broad overviews of intellectual developments and challenges, as well as incisive commentary on the accomplishments of, and challenges facing, scholars of American politics. Substantively, the Handbook includes articles focusing on various approaches and issues in research design, political participation, vote choice, presidential and non-presidential elections, and issues, interests and elites as influences on individuals' political behavior. Each of the articles offers a working research bibliography, as well as retrospective evaluations of research and discussions of fruitful paths for future research. This book is one of The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics – and thus they question stylized facts about America’s political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time – and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance?

The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups is a major new volume that aims to help with the assessment of the current state of scholarship on parties and interest groups and the directions in which it needs to move. Never before has the academic literature on political parties received such an extended treatment. Thirty articles critically assess both the major contributions to the literature and the ways in which it has developed. With contributions from most of the leading scholars in the field, the Handbook provides a definitive point of reference for all those working in and around the area. Equally important, the articles also identify areas of new and interesting research. The articles offer a distinctive point of view, an argument about the successes and failures of past scholarship, and a set of recommendations about how future work ought to develop. This Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

Public opinion and the media form the foundation of the United States' representative democracy, and are the subject of enormous scrutiny by scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens. This handbook takes on the big questions about public opinion and the media both empirical and normative focusing on current debates and social scientific research. Bringing together the thinking of a team of academic experts, its chapters provide an assessment of contemporary research on public opinion, the media, and their interconnections. Emphasizing changes in the mass media and communications technology the vast number of cable channels, websites and blogs, and the new social media, which are changing how news about political life is collected and conveyed they describe the evolving information interdependence of the media and public opinion. In addition, the handbook reviews the wide range of influences on public opinion, including the processes by which information communicated through the media can affect the public. It describes what has been learnt from the latest research in psychology and genetics, and studies of the impact of gender, race and ethnicity, economic status, education and sophistication, religion, and generational change, on a wide range of political attitudes and perceptions. The handbook includes extensive discussion of how public opinion and mass media coverage are studied through survey research and increasingly through experiments using the latest technological advances.

Animal studies is an interdisciplinary field that captures one of the most important topics in contemporary society: how can humans rethink and reconfigure their relationships with other animals? This “animal question” is the focus of The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. In the last few decades, animal studies has flourished, with the widespread recognition of (1) the commodification of animals in a wide variety of human contexts, such as the use of animals as food, labor, and objects of spectacle and science; (2) the degradation of the natural world and a staggering loss of animal habitat and species extinction; and (3) the increasing need to coexist with other animals in urban, rural, and natural contexts. These themes are mapped into five major categories, reflected in the titles of the five parts that structure this volume: “Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics, and Public Policy”; “Animal Intentionality, Agency, and Reflexive Thinking”; “Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle, and Sport”; “Animals in Cultural Representations”; and “Animals in Ecosystems.” Each category is explicated with specially commissioned chapters written by international scholars from diverse backgrounds, including philosophy, law, history, English, art, sociology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, cultural studies, and animal advocacy. The thirty chapters of the handbook investigate issues and concepts central to understanding our current relationship with other animals and the potential for coexistence in an ecological community of living beings.

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is a comprehensive collection that considers Australia’s distinctive politics—both ancient and modern—at all levels and across many themes. It examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the nation’s Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement. The book presents an account of Australian politics that recognizes and celebrates its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach in six parts. The first theme addresses Australia’s unique inheritances, examining the development of its political culture in relation to the arrival of British colonists and their conflicts with First Nations peoples, as well as the resulting geopolitics. The second theme, improvization, focuses on Australia’s political institutions and how they have evolved. Place-making is then considered to assess how geography, distance, Indigenous presence, and migration shape Australian politics. Recurrent dilemmas centre on a range of complex, political problems and their influence on contemporary political practice. Politics, policy, and public administration cover how Australia has been a world leader in some respects, and a laggard in others when dealing with important policy challenges. The final theme, studying Australian politics, introduces some key areas in the study of Australian politics and identifies the strengths and shortcomings of the discipline. This Handbook is an opportunity for others to consider the nation’s unique politics from the perspective of leading and emerging scholars, and to gain a strong sense of its imperfections, its enduring challenges, and its strengths.

The Oxford Handbook of British Politics has been conceived, not just to illustrate both the breadth and depth of scholarship that is to be found within the field, but also to demonstrate the vibrancy and critical self-reflection that has cultivated a much sharper and engaging, and notably less insular, approach to the terrain it seeks to explore and understand. In showcasing the diversity now found in the analysis of British politics, the Handbook is built upon three foundations. The first principle that underpins the volume is a broad understanding of the political. It covers a much broader range of topics, themes, and issues than would commonly be found within a book on British politics. This emphasis on an inclusive approach also characterises the second principle that has shaped this collection namely, diversity in relation to commissioned authors. The final principle focuses on the distinctiveness of the study of British politics. Each article seeks to reflect on what is distinctive both in terms of the empirical nature of the issue of concern, and the theories and methods that have been deployed to unravel the nature and causes of the debate. This Handbook draws upon the intellectual strengths of the study of British politics, reflects the innate diversity and inclusiveness of the discipline, isolates certain distinctive issues and then reflects on their broader international relevance, and finally looks to the future by pointing towards emerging or overlooked areas of research.

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Politics provides a comprehensive overview of the transformation that has occurred in Canadian politics since the country achieved autonomy, examining the institutions and processes of Canadian government and politics at the local, provincial, and federal levels. The book represents the work of distinguished contributors, including some of the world's most prominent scholars of political science. Canada officially achieved legislative autonomy in 1931 and has since developed into one of the world's most prosperous democracies. Though its political system is widely commended for its stability and fairness, it is nonetheless extremely complex. Particularly within the past five decades, Canada has undergone a vast social and political revolution, as exhibited by events such as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the ratification of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Medical Care Act of 1966, and the official adoption of bilingualism and multiculturalism. As the world moves toward globalization, technology has likewise facilitated communication between previously isolated provinces and territories within Canada. Such developments hold significant implications for the role of Canadian politics, both domestically and internationally. This text analyzes all aspects of the Canadian political system: the courts, elections, political parties, Parliament, the constitution, fiscal and political federalism, the diffusion of policies between regions, and various aspects of public policy. It examines recent trends such as the movement toward minority Parliaments, and extrapolates potential developments.

This chapter provides a detailed introduction to the thought of Carl Schmitt that incorporates insights from law, the social sciences, and the humanities. It is also an intervention in its own right, seeking to decenter the study of this most hyped thinker of the twentieth century by advancing two interconnected arguments. First, we argue that the motif of order is a powerful yet insufficiently utilized heuristic device for making sense of Schmitt’s thought. By placing the motif of order at its heart, we contradict the popular belief that no unifying thread runs through the jurist’s oeuvre. Second, we argue that a trinity of thought is discernable in Schmitt’s writings comprising his political, legal, and cultural thought. We establish intellectual connections across these three bodies of thought and trace the mutually constitutive relationships that exist among them. Schmitt’s thought, we find, amounted to a network of ideas about the sources of social order, the cement of society.

The Oxford Handbook of Church and State in the United States presents an extensive, multidimensional overview of the church and state in the United States. Study of church and state in the United States is incredibly complex. Scholars working in this area have backgrounds in law, religious studies, history, theology, and politics, among other fields. Historically, they have focused on particular angles or dimensions of the church𠇓state relationship, because the field is so vast. The results have mostly been monographs that focus only on narrow cross-sections of the field, and the few works that do aim to give larger perspectives are reference works of factual compendia, which offer little or no analysis. In this book, twenty-one articles offer a scholarly look at the intricacies and past and current debates that frame the American system of church and state within five main areas: history, law, theology/philosophy, politics, and sociology. These articles provide factual accounts, but also address issues, problems, debates, controversies, and, where appropriate, suggest resolutions. They also offer analysis of the range of interpretations of the subject offered by various American scholars.

In the past two decades, “civil society” has become a central organizing concept in the social sciences. Occupying the middle ground between the state and private life, the civil sphere encompasses everything from associations to protests to church groups to nongovernmental organizations. Interest in the topic exploded with the decline of statism in the 1980s and 1990s, and many of our current debates about politics and social policy are informed by the renewed focus on civil society. Broadly speaking, The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society views the topic through three prisms: as a part of society (voluntary associations), as a kind of society (marked out by certain social norms), and as a space for citizen action and engagement (the public square or sphere). It does not focus solely on the West (a failing of much of the literature to date), but looks at civil society in both the developed and developing worlds. Throughout, it merges theory, practice, and empirical research.

This handbook presents assessments of classic works in public policy and administration by an international collection of contemporary scholars. These classic works include books written by such illustrious intellectuals as Mancur Olson, Elinor Ostrom, and Herbert Simon. The list of contributors offering assessments of these classic works is impressive as well, featuring scholars such as Peter John, David Lowery, and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Each chapter of the handbook presents a classic work, lays out its treatment in the years and decades since its publication, and comes to an assessment of its place in the field of public policy and administration. The collection of classic works demonstrates the breadth of the field of public policy and administration, touching on topics ranging from mobilization and political participation to decision-making across types of organizations and levels of government. Although public policy and administration may not in some respects constitute a well-defined area of inquiry, this collection demonstrates that there is a core of classic works that have had a seminal impact in the field, broadly construed, over time and across national and continental boundaries. The collection also elucidates enduring interactions between public policy and administration and other social scientific disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and especially political science.

The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society presents an analysis of this issue that draws on the best thinking on questions of how climate change affects human systems, and how societies can, do, and should respond. Key topics covered include the history of the issues, the social and political reception of climate science, the denial of that science by individuals and organized interests, the nature of the social disruptions caused by climate change, the economics of those disruptions and possible responses to them, questions of human security and social justice, obligations to future generations, policy instruments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and governance at local, regional, national, international, and global levels.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory provides an entry point into this burgeoning field by both synthesizing and challenging the terms that motivate it. The handbook demonstrates how mainstream political theory can and must be enriched through attention to genuinely global, rather than parochially Euro-American, contributions to political thinking. Entries emphasize exploration of substantive questions about political life—ranging from domination to political economy to the politics of knowledge—in a range of global contexts, with attention to whether and how those questions may be shared, contested, or reformulated across differences of time, space, and experience. They connect comparative political theory to cognate disciplines including postcolonial theory, area studies, and comparative politics. Creative organizational tools such as tags and keywords aid in navigation of the handbook to help readers trace disruptions, thematic connections, contrasts, and geographic affinities across entries.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of articles written by forty-seven scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes articles surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative method, the use of history, the practice and status of case-study research, and the contributions of field research) and assessing the possibility of constructing a science of comparative politics. Parts II to IV examine the foundations of political order: the origins of states and the extent to which they relate to war and to economic development; the sources of compliance or political obligation among citizens; democratic transitions, the role of civic culture; authoritarianism; revolutions; civil wars and contentious politics. Parts V and VI explore the mobilization, representation, and the coordination of political demands. Part V considers why parties emerge, and the forms they take and the ways in which voters choose parties. The text then includes articles on collective action, social movements, and political participation. Part VI opens with essays on the mechanisms through which political demands are aggregated and coordinated. This sets the agenda to the systematic exploration of the workings and effects of particular institutions: electoral systems, federalism, legislative-executive relationships, the judiciary and bureaucracy. Finally, Part VII is organized around the burgeoning literature on macro-political economy of the last two decades. This Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism—the first of its kind—offers a systematic and wide-ranging survey of the scholarship on regionalism, regionalization, and regional governance. Unpacking the major debates, leading authors of the field synthesize the state of the art, provide a guide to the comparative study of regionalism, and identify future avenues of research. Twenty-seven chapters review the theoretical and empirical scholarship with regard to the emergence of regionalism, the institutional design of regional organizations and issue-specific governance, as well as the effects of regionalism and its relationship with processes of regionalization. The authors explore theories of cooperation, integration, and diffusion explaining the rise and the different forms of regionalism. The Handbook also discusses the state of the art on the world regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Various chapters survey the literature on regional governance in major issue areas such as security and peace, trade and finance, environment, migration, social and gender policies, as well as democracy and human rights. Finally, the Handbook engages in cross-regional comparisons with regard to institutional design, dispute settlement, identities and communities, legitimacy and democracy, as well as inter- and transregionalism.

The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in this Handbook has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behaviour. It shows that context matters in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. The Handbook, written by scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account. It is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science.

As societies, governments, corporations, and individuals become more dependent on the digital environment, so they also become increasingly vulnerable to misuse of that environment. A considerable industry has developed to provide the means with which to make cyberspace more secure, stable, and predictable. Cybersecurity is concerned with the identification, avoidance, management, and mitigation of risk in, or from, cyberspace—the risk of harm and damage that might occur as the result of everything from individual carelessness to organized criminality, to industrial and national security espionage, and, at the extreme end of the scale, to disabling attacks against a country’s critical national infrastructure. But this represents a rather narrow understanding of security and there is much more to cyberspace than vulnerability, risk, and threat. As well as security from financial loss, physical damage, etc., cybersecurity must also be for the maximization of benefit. The Oxford Handbook of Cybersecurity takes a comprehensive and rounded approach to the still evolving topic of cybersecurity: the security of cyberspace is as much technological as it is commercial and strategic; as much international as regional, national, and personal; and as much a matter of hazard and vulnerability as an opportunity for social, economic, and cultural growth.

This is the most comprehensive and thorough English language book on Danish politics ever. It is written by fifty authors, each of whom is an expert in and has contributed to the field that they write about. And why is Denmark an interesting topic for a handbook? In some respects, Danish political institutions and political life are similar to that of other small, North European countries such as the other Scandinavian countries and The Netherlands. However, in other respects, Danish politics is interesting in its own right. For instance, Denmark has a world record in minority governments. According to standard scholarly knowledge, this should result in unstable governments and a bad economy. This is not the case, however, since Denmark has a rather stable political system and a strong and robust economy among the strongest in Europe. The Danes have continued reservations towards the EU despite close to 50 years of EC/EU membership, and the Danes rejected the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Still, the EU issue is handled in ways that do not call for large political battles. Also Denmark used to be known as a tolerant and liberal society; its Jews were almost all saved during the German occupation of the Second World War; it was the first country to legalize pornography and formally register same-sex couples. Yet recent Danish politics has also been associated with xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments. The handbook provides the reader with a detailed knowledge and understanding of almost all aspects of Danish politics.

Deliberative democracy has been the main game in contemporary political theory for two decades and has grown enormously in size and importance in political science and many other disciplines, and in political practice. The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy takes stock of deliberative democracy as a research field, as well as exploring and creating links with multiple disciplines and policy practice around the globe. It provides a concise history of deliberative ideals in political thought while also discussing their philosophical origins. It locates deliberation in a political system with different spaces, publics, and venues, including parliament and courts but also governance networks, protests, mini-publics, old and new media, and everyday talk. It documents the intersections of deliberative ideals with contemporary political theory, involving epistemology, representation, constitutionalism, justice, and multiculturalism. It explores the intersections of deliberative democracy with major research fields in the social sciences and law, including social and rational choice theory, communications, psychology, sociology, international relations, framing approaches, policy analysis, planning, democratization, and methodology. It engages with practical applications, mapping deliberation as a reform movement and as a device for conflict resolution. It documents the practice and study of deliberative democracy around the world, in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and global governance. And it provides reflections on the field by pioneering thinkers.

The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism examines unequal commercial, trade, and investment gains at the international level and explores how countries and nations can have exploitative relations. The book contains thirty-four chapters written by academics and experts in the field of international political economy. The chapters in the Handbook look at the history of economic imperialism from the early modern age to the present. They demonstrate the persistence of economic imperialism in today’s postcolonial world and the enduring control wielded by great powers even after the end of formal empire. The book reveals how emerging powers are expanding economic control in new geographic and geopolitical contexts. The Handbook highlights the significance of economic imperialism in the structures, relations, processes, and ideas that help sustain poverty and conflict worldwide.

Electoral persuasion rests at the center of the democratic process. Politicians, parties, interest groups, members of the media, and citizens themselves are constantly communicating with one another about electorally relevant topics. These communications will ultimately influence—although not always in predictable ways—voters’ choices and, therefore, election outcomes and the direction of government. Scholarship on this important topic has exploded in recent decades. Yet, there have been relatively few efforts to synthesize the accumulated knowledge. In this volume, we bring together accomplished scholars who study one or more aspect of electoral persuasion—who communicates with whom about democratic politics, what they communicate about and why, how and where they communicate, and with what effect. The result is a vibrant collection of US-based and international perspectives on the relevant actors, their motivations and methods of persuasion, and their varied influences on electoral choice.

No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. All across the globe, elections are a focal point for citizens, the media, and politicians long before-and sometimes long after—they occur. Electoral systems, the rules about how voters’ preferences are translated into election results, profoundly shape not only the results of individual elections but also many other important political outcomes including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. Electoral systems have been a hot topic in established democracies from the United Kingdom and Italy to New Zealand and Japan. Even in the United States, events like the 2016 presidential election and court decisions such as Citizens United have sparked advocates to promote change in the Electoral College, redistricting, and campaign finance rules. Elections and electoral systems have also intensified as a field of academic study, with groundbreaking work over the past decade sharpening our understanding of how electoral systems fundamentally shape the connections among citizens, government, and policy. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.

In many ways, everything we once knew about energy resources and technologies has been impacted by: the longstanding scientific consensus on climate change and related support for renewable energy; the affordability of extraction of unconventional fuels; increasing demand for energy resources by middle- and low-income nations; new regional and global stakeholders; fossil fuel discoveries and emerging renewable technologies; awareness of (trans)local politics; and rising interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the need for energy justice. Research on these and related topics now appears frequently in social science academic journals in broad-based journals, such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and Review of International Political Economy, as well as those focused specifically on energy (e.g., Energy Research & Social Science and Energy Policy), the environment (Global Environmental Politics), natural resources (Resources Policy), and extractive industries (Extractive Industries and Society). The Oxford Handbook of Energy Politics synthesizes and aggregates this substantively diverse literature to provide insights into, and a foundation for teaching and research on, critical energy issues primarily in the areas of international relations and comparative politics. Its primary goals are to further develop the energy politics scholarship and community, and generate sophisticated new work that will benefit a variety of scholars working on energy issues.

Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, this Handbook illustrates, defines, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Authors address canonical theorists and contemporary political and environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial section focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry within political science and political theory, both theoretically and within the academy. Next, authors engage with the conceptualization of nature and the environment, as well as the nature of political subjects, communities, and boundaries in those environments. Another section addresses the values that motivate environmental theorists, including justice, responsibility, rights, limits, flourishing, and the potential conflicts that can emerge within, between, and against these ideals. The final section examines the primary structures that constrain or enable the achievement of environmental ends, as well as theorizations of environmental movements, citizenship, and the potential for ongoing environmental action and change.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides an overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts feminist theorists have developed to challenge established knowledge. Leading feminist theorists, from around the globe, provide in-depth explorations of a diverse array of subject areas, capturing a plurality of approaches. The Handbook raises new questions, brings new evidence, and poses significant challenges across the spectrum of academic disciplines, demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory. The chapters offer innovative analyses of the central topics in social and political science (e.g. civilization, development, divisions of labor, economies, institutions, markets, migration, militarization, prisons, policy, politics, representation, the state/nation, the transnational, violence); cultural studies and the humanities (e.g. affect, agency, experience, identity, intersectionality, jurisprudence, narrative, performativity, popular culture, posthumanism, religion, representation, standpoint, temporality, visual culture); and discourses in medicine and science (e.g. cyborgs, health, intersexuality, nature, pregnancy, reproduction, science studies, sex/gender, sexuality, transsexuality) and contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization (e.g. biopolitics, coloniality, diaspora, the microphysics of power, norms/normalization, postcoloniality, race/racialization, subjectivity/subjectivation). The Handbook identifies the limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women’s and men’s lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

This book explores the complex interrelationships between food and agriculture, politics, and society. More specifically, it considers the political aspects of three basic economic questions: what is to be produced? how is it to be produced? how it is to be distributed? It also outlines three unifying themes running through the politics of answering these societal questions with regard to food, namely: ecology, technology and property. Furthermore, the book examines the tendency to address the new organization of global civil society around food, its production, distribution, and consequences for the least powerful within the context of the North-South divide; the problems of malnutrition as opposed to poverty, food insecurity, and food shortages, as well as the widespread undernutrition in developing countries; and how biotechnology can be used to ensure a sustainable human future by addressing global problems such as human population growth, pollution, climate change, and limited access to clean water and other basic food production resources. The influence of science and politics on the framing of modern agricultural technologies is also discussed, along with the worsening food crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa, food security and food safety, and the relationship between gender inequality and food security. Other chapters deal with the link between land and food and its implications for social justice; the "eco-shopping” perspective; the transformation of the agrifood industry in developing countries; the role of wild foods in food security; agroecological intensification of smallholder production systems; and the ethics of food production and consumption.

The Oxford Handbook of French Politics provides a comprehensive and comparative overview of political science research on France. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars who specialize in the study of France to reflect on the evolution of the French political system through the lens of political science. The Handbook is organized into three sections: the first sectionidentifies foundational concepts for the French case, including chapters on republicanism and social welfare; the second focuses on thematic large-scale processes, such as identity, governance, and globalization; and the third section examines a wide range of issues relating to substantive politics and policy, among which are chapters on political representation, political culture, social movements, economic policy, gender policy, and defense and security policy. Throughout the volume contributors aim to place France in comparative perspective. To what extent have scholars integrated international and comparative work in their study of France? Has scholarship on France shaped the study of political life outside France? To help answer these questions contributors systematically provide a state-of-the-art review both of the comparative scholarly literature on their topic as well as the work on France. From this basis they also provide suggestions as to how the study of French and comparative politics might move forward in the coming years. In these ways, the Oxford Handbook of French Politics will be highly attractive both to scholars of France and also to scholars of comparative politics and political science more generally.

The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict brings together leading interdisciplinary scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to address a complex range of challenges, contexts, geographies, and issues that arise for women and men in the context of armed conflict. The Handbook addresses war and peace, humanitarian intervention, countering violence and extremism, the United Nations Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, sexual violence, criminal accountability, autonomous weapons, peacekeeping, refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) status, the political economy of war, the economics of conflict, as well as health and economic security. It begins with theoretical approaches to gender and conflict, drawing on the areas of international, peace and conflict, feminist, and masculinities studies. The Handbook explores how women and men’s pre-war societal, economic, and legal status relates to their conflict experiences, affecting the ways in which they are treated in the post-conflict transitional phase. In addition to examining these conflict and post-conflict experiences, the Handbook addresses the differing roles of multiple national and international actors, as well as the UN led Women, Peace, and Security Agenda. Contributions survey the regulatory framework and gendered dimensions of international humanitarian and international human rights law in situations of conflict and occupation as well as addressing, and critiquing, the gendered nature and content of international criminal law. The Handbook also includes grounded country case studies exploring different gendered experiences of conflict in various regions. As a whole, this Handbook seeks to critically examine the contemporary gender-based challenges that emerge in conflict and post-conflicts contexts.

Global health politics has emerged over the last two decades as a distinct, interdisciplinary field of study which, although its boundaries are not set, is beginning to demonstrate signs of maturity. It is concerned with the actions, practices, and policies that govern the sphere of global health. Its emergence is intimately linked with the reconceptualisation of health as global. The field addresses not only the processes of decision-making, but also the structures of power that shape what is possible and the requirement for collective action to address global problems. Politics is unavoidable, necessary, and integral to effectively addressing global health challenges. The study of global health politics therefore is not about how to minimise interference in rational decision-making, but rather about explaining and improving the quality of political institutions and processes that will, in turn, improve global health action and, ultimately, outcomes. Fundamental to this is an understanding of the nature of politics and the workings of power. But the field also requires knowledge and techniques from a variety of disciplines, which intersect to produce a more complete understanding than any one discipline can provide. The result is inherently both multi- and interdisciplinary, characterised by methodological pluralism and varied theoretical perspectives.

Global justice is an exciting area of refreshing, innovative new ideas for a changing world facing significant challenges. Not only does work in this area often force us to rethink ethics and political philosophy more generally, but its insights contain seeds of hope for addressing some of the greatest global problems facing humanity today. This book has been selective in bringing together some of the most pressing topics and issues in global justice as understood by the leading voices from both established and rising stars across twenty-five new chapters. The book explores severe poverty, climate change, egalitarianism, global citizenship, human rights, immigration, territorial rights, and much more.

This Handbook contains chapters on the struggles for LGBT rights and the security of sexual and gender minorities around the world, with a substantial number of contributions from the Global South. It contextualizes the regional case studies within relevant theoretical frameworks from the sociology of sexualities, critical race studies, postcolonialism, indigenous theories, social movement theory, and international relations theory. Therefore, it provides readers with up-to-date empirical material as well as various ways of assessing the analytical significance, commonalities, and differences of global LGBT politics. As such, the chapters combine to present an overall interdisciplinary and critical perspective on contemporary LGBT politics.

Global policy making is unfurling in distinctive ways above traditional nation-state policy processes. New practices of transnational administration are emerging inside international organizations but also alongside the trans-governmental networks of regulators and inside global public—private partnerships. Mainstream policy and public administration studies have tended to analyse the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies. By contrast, this Handbook investigates new public spaces of transnational policy making, the design and delivery of global public goods and services, and the interdependent roles of transnational administrators who move between business bodies, government agencies, international organizations, and professional associations. This Handbook is novel in taking the concepts and theories of public administration and policy studies to get inside the black box of global governance. Transnational administration is a multi-actor and multi-scalar endeavour having manifestations at the local, urban, sub-regional, subnational, regional, national, supranational, supra-regional, transnational, international, and global scales. These scales of ‘local’ and ‘global’ are not neatly bounded and nested spaces but are articulated together in complex patterns of policy activity. These transnational patterns represent an opportunity and a challenge for the study of both public administration and policy studies. The contributors to this Handbook advance their analysis beyond the methodological nationalism of mainstream approaches to re-invigorate policy studies and public administration by considering policy processes that are transnational and the many new global spaces of administrative practice.

This publication presents an analysis of the social science literature on governance. It puts forth the core concepts and knowledge that have evolved in the study of governance in different levels and arenas of politics and policymaking. In so doing, it establishes itself as the essential point of reference for all those studying politics, society, and economics from a governance perspective. The volume comprises fifty-two articles from leaders in the field. These articles are organized into nine sections dealing with topics that include governance as the reform of the state, democratic governance, European governance, and global governance.

Unpacking the major debates, leading authors of the field provide a state-of-the-art guide to governance in areas of limited statehood (ALS) where state authorities lack the capacity to implement and enforce central decision and/or to uphold the monopoly over the means of violence. While ALS can be found everywhere—not just in the global South—they are neither ungoverned nor ungovernable. Rather, a variety of actors maintain public order and safety, as well as provide public goods and services. While external state ‘governors’ and their interventions in the global South have received special scholarly attention, various non-state actors—from non-governmental organizations to business to violent armed groups—have emerged that also engage in governance. This evidence holds for diverse policy fields and historical cases. The handbook gives a comprehensive picture of the varieties of governance in ALS from interdisciplinary perspectives including political science, geography, history, law, and economics. Twenty-nine chapters review the academic scholarship and explore the conditions of effective and legitimate governance in ALS, as well as its implications for world politics in the twenty-first century. The authors examine theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as the historical and spatial dimensions of ALS. The chapters deal with the various governors as well as their modes of governance. They cover a variety of issue areas and explore the implications for the international legal order, for normative theory, and for policies toward ALS.

Grand Strategy is a state’s “theory of victory,” explaining how the state will utilize its diverse means to advance and achieve national ends. A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles to formulating and implementing grand strategy are, by all accounts, imposing. The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy addresses the conceptual and historical foundations, production, evolution, and future of grand strategy from a wide range of standpoints. It seven constituent sections present and critically examine the history of grand strategy, including beyond the West; six distinct theoretical approaches to the subject; the sources of grand strategy, ranging from geography and technology to domestic politics to individual psychology and culture; the instruments of grand strategy’s implementation, from military to economic to covert action; political actors’, including non-state actors’, grand strategic choices; the debatable merits of grand strategy, relative to alternatives; and the future of grand strategy, in light of challenges ranging from political polarization to technological change to aging populations. The result is a field-defining, interdisciplinary, and comparative text that will be a key resource for years to come.

The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism offers an authoritative and accessible state-of-the-art analysis of the historical institutionalism research tradition in Political Science. Devoted to the study of how temporal processes and events influence the origin and transformation of institutions that govern political and economic relations, historical institutionalism has grown considerably since the mid-1990s. With its attention to past, present, and potential future contributions to the research tradition, the volume represents an essential reference point for those interested in historical institutionalism. Written in accessible style by leading scholars, 38 chapters detail the contributions of historical institutionalism to an expanding array of topics in the study of comparative, American, European, and international politics .

India has emerged as a leading voice in global affairs in the past two decades. Its fast-growing domestic market largely explains the ardour with which Delhi is courted by powers great and small. India is also becoming increasingly important to global geostrategic calculations, being the only Asian country with the heft to counterbalance China over time. Nevertheless, India’s foreign policy has been relatively neglected in the existing literature. This Handbook, edited by three widely recognized students of the topic, provides an extensive survey of India’s external relations. The authors include leading Indian scholars and commentators of the field and several outstanding foreign scholars and practitioners. They address factors in Indian foreign policy flowing from both history and geography and also discuss key relationships, issues, and multilateral forums through which the country’s international relations are refracted.

This Handbook—one of a new series—sets out to describe the current state of the art in International Political Theory, and to advance this discourse into new areas. A key feature of the Handbook is the way in which its contributors engage with “real politics”: although the importance of developing so-called ideal theory is acknowledged in several chapters, the main emphasis of the book is on an engagement with empirical data and real-world politics. Conventional distinctions such as that between “critical theory” and “problem-solving theory” are challenged—the underlying contention is that, ultimately, all theory is problem-solving, and an emphasis on norms and normative theory cannot be understood as separate from so-called positive International Relations Theory. The contributors have approached the themes of the Handbook from different angles in relation to a wide range of different topics in ways that showcase the diversity of perspectives and traditions that make up the field of International Political Theory. The Handbook consists of fifty chapters organized into nine sections, covering History, Traditions and Perspectives, International Justice, Violence and Conflict, Humanitarianism and Human Rights, Democracy, Accountability and Global Governance, Ethics and International Public Policy, New Directions in International Political Theory, and, finally, a section which puts in question the relationship between International Political Theory and Real Politics.

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of the field of international relations. Bringing together an impressive collection of international relations scholars, this Handbook debates the nature of the field itself, critically engages with the major theories, surveys a wide spectrum of methods, addresses the relationship between scholarship and policy making, and examines the field's relation with cognate disciplines. The Handbook takes as its central themes the interaction between empirical and normative inquiry that permeates all theorizing in the field and the way in which contending approaches have shaped one another. In doing so, the Handbook provides an authoritative and critical introduction to the subject and establishes a sense of the field as a dynamic realm of argument and inquiry.

Future-oriented questions are woven through the study and practice of international security. The 48 essays collected in this Handbook use such questions to provide a tour of the most innovative and exciting new areas of research as well as major developments in established lines of inquiry. The results of their efforts are: the definitive statement of the state of international security and the academic field of security studies, a comprehensive portrait of expert assessments of expected developments in international security at the onset of the twenty-first century’s second decade, and a crucial staging ground for future research agendas.