This volume seeks to make the case for Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology as a powerful, comprehensive and integrated paradigm for studying everything political.

Bringing together a collection of experts writing on a wide range of topics organised into thematic sections, it not only shows that the applicability of Bourdieu's concepts is broader and more productive than previously thought, but it also demonstrates how Bourdieu's relational sociology advances on other perspectives and offers a 'joined-up' approach to the political, seamlessly capable of illuminating subjects as diverse as Brexit, voter choice, post-socialist transition, civil war, revolution, international relations and the structure of political science discourse itself.

This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of politics, whether they are sociologists, political scientists or international relations specialists.

This book critically examines how international law can address the pressing issues of labour regulation in the airline industry, highlighting the insufficiencies of current international labour standards and air law in safeguarding workers' rights and improving working conditions.

In an era of rapid growth and globalisation within the civil aviation sector, the labour landscape has become increasingly complex and hybrid, characterised by diverse business models, atypical employment arrangements, and weakened union influence. This complexity, coupled with gaps in international legal frameworks, leaves aviation workers vulnerable to inadequate labour protection and skewed bargaining power. By delving into social and technical deficiencies, the book underscores the challenges posed by forum shopping, fragmented employment structures, and the limitations of Comprehensive Air Transport Agreements (CATAs). Proposing a pragmatic "crawl-walk-run" approach, the book advocates for the progressive enhancement of labour regulations, starting with refining CATAs and advancing towards more comprehensive and enforceable standards. This seeks to harmonise decent work principles with the demands of a liberalised aviation market. Offering an in-depth exploration of landmark legal cases, international agreements, and State practices, this book provides a nuanced understanding of the interplay between international law and aviation labour.

This book will be of interest to researchers in labour law, international law, and air and space law.

This book comprehensively examines the European Union (EU) judiciary's approach to international sanctions, drawing on recent case law from the Court of Justice and the General Court. It addresses the procedural framework governing judicial review, alongside a substantive evaluation of restrictive measures in terms of their legality and conformity with fundamental rights and procedural guarantees.

As a cornerstone of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), restrictive measures, particularly international sanctions, serve as the Union's primary tool for addressing actions that conflict with its core values. Today, the EU stands as a leading global authority on sanctions, both through implementing United Nations Security Council measures and through independently enacted, autonomous sanctions. These complex mechanisms, blending preventive and punitive approaches, impose financial freezes, sector-specific embargoes, and various restrictions targeting governments, legal entities, and individuals outside the EU. Providing a detailed analysis of how these measures intersect with repressive administrative and criminal law, the book sheds light on the judicial balance between effective enforcement and the protection of fundamental rights. Examining both technical legal issues and broader principles of justice and human rights, the book includes recommendations for refining restrictive measures within the EU.

This book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of EU law, international security, and human rights, offering a nuanced understanding of the judicial review processes that shape the EU's sanctioning powers.

This Open Access book provides detailed practical guidance on how to do a Delphi study to establish a consensus across the broad range of social, psychological, health and environmental sciences. The book informs the design of Delphi studies by drawing on wisdom-of-crowds research on the conditions under which groups make better-quality judgements. It covers the development of the Delphi method and its many variations, as well as the ways this method has been used to make judgements of facts where the evidence is imperfect, set methodological standards, make predictions, define foundational concepts, determine collective values, and improve professional practice and policy. It takes the reader through the steps in carrying out a Delphi study and the choices that have to be made at each step. It also covers the implementation of Delphi findings in practice. Case examples are included throughout drawing from a variety of disciplines.

This book offers a political anthropological discussion of our contemporary situation regarding sceptical attitudes towards scientific expertise and authority, and the increasing role of power and politics. It does so through an exploration of the 'fool' or 'Gnostic fool' as a type, drawing on ideas about the modality of the anthropological trickster figure and the mentalities that this type disseminates.

Arguing that a recent dissolution of stable identities has made orderly action and connections impossible, the author shows that we are now entering into a confused understanding of ourselves, no longer linked to history or society, nor to our sexes or personality. In this period, the growing interest in magical and occult traditions reflects increasing feelings of powerlessness against the whims of politics, power and authority; where rational thinking disappoints and fails, a new Gnostic universe is born. The relationship between standard uses of the 'fool' and the 'Gnostic fool' is addressed using political and social theory, sociology and anthropology, religious studies, and the history of ideas. The book thus combines a study of familiar, traditional texts with unusual phenomena from both recent and distant history, elucidating their surprising prevalence in surrounding contemporary power structures. Addressing a crucial aspect of contemporary reality, characterising and interrogating the (self-)production of fools and the Gnostic intellectual type, it details a serious and puzzling blind spot in academic scholarship.

As such, it will be of central relevance to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students working in anthropology, ethnography, sociology, historical sociology, religious studies, and philosophy worldwide.

The monograph presents scenarios of situations where foreign investments suffer damage. These model scenarios are based on thorough analysis of real cases, facts from the ground and recent arbitral practice (relating namely to arbitrations against Russia, Syria or Libya). This allows the author, in the next step, to ascertain what rules are applicable to the conduct of states towards foreign investments, but also to demonstrate how they apply in real-case scenarios. In particular, the work identifies and applies to these tailored scenarios relevant norms of international investment law, international humanitarian law and international human rights law. These regimes are relevant for protection of foreign investment, but they differ as to the situations they govern, parties whose conduct they regulate and obligations they stipulate. It is therefore appropriate to analyse in their interconnection how these rules govern typical situations that may arise during armed conflict and what particularly they prescribe. On the basis of application of these rules on the defined scenarios, the monograph focuses on the issue of applicability of investment treaties in occupied territories and on interactions and on the issue of conflict of norms in situations where foreign investments qualify as military objectives.

Today's volatile political and social climate, is characterised by demagogues, populism, and increasingly AI driven misinformation, combined with growing global crises ranging from obesity to the environment. This eclectic collection brings together a diverse array of international contributors to tackle these crucial issues. These include leading thinkers, policymakers, and activists drawn from the world of business, politics, education, religion, law, the arts, science, medicine, health and social enterprise. The book explores how people engage with ideas, particularly the lure of dark ideas, and proposes innovative policy solutions to combat susceptibility to 'dark' ideas such as misinformation, conspiracy theories and science denial.

Recent trends and events across the UK, US, and many European countries, including the war in Ukraine, Brexit, the election of Trump, numerous immigration crises, and the perceived lack of solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic, suggest a shift away from an 'ideas-informed' democratic society. Demagogues, Populism and Misinformation examines two crucial factors that influence ideas engagement: the allure of 'dark ideas' and the necessary preconditions for effective engagement with ideas, such as tolerance, intellectual humility, intellectual empathy (a willingness to engage with other perspectives), and intellectual curiosity.

This book offers a philosophical reconstruction of Gandhi’s political thought as a form of devotional democracy in which the sovereign people speak the voice of truth as God’s voice.

Part One addresses Gandhi’s relationship to the history of modern Western political thought, and key thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hegel.?

Part Two explores the concept of a Gandhian devotional democracy in relation to contemporary political thought and decidedly illiberal thinkers, such as Ivan Ilyin and Curtis Yarvin, as well as contemporary trends including populism, traditionalism, along with important developments like AI superintelligence and interspecies politics.

The book aims not only to locate Gandhi in the historical context of modern and contemporary political philosophy but to also demonstrate the potential for his political thought to undergo sympathetic and constructive reinterpretation. It encourages readers to reassess and rethink the role of ‘soul force’ as superior to state power as well as a nation’s capacity to realize truth devotionally.

Gandhi’s Popular Sovereignty of Truth?is essential reading for all scholars, researchers and advanced students of political philosophy especially those focussing on the thought of Mahatma Gandhi.?

This book explores the main biological dimensions underlying functional integration and examines how they contribute to defining a biological individual as both a physiological and evolutionary unit. Functional integration lies at the heart of most definitions of both organisms and biological individuals, making it explanatorily relevant to biology as well as to the philosophy of biology. However, the notion?typically referring to any causal interdependence among biological functions?remains broad and lacks a coherent theoretical framework. This work addresses that gap by focusing on functional integration at the cellular level, which presents both a minimal degree of complexity (relative to multicellular organisms) and maximal conceptual significance for this inquiry. By analysing the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, the book sheds light on how spatial constraints, system-level regulatory mechanisms, spatio-temporal coordination, and system-level reproduction contribute to characterizing biological organization as a functionally integrated physiological unit. This study opens the way for a fresh reflection on the foundations of biological individuality, offering insights not only for researchers, but also for students and non-specialist readers.

This book examines the underlying social pathology of Trump and Putin’s political orientations. The assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Russia’s war on Ukraine in February 2022 both reveal a disturbing drift towards new forms of populism. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Sigmund Freud and Norbert Elias regarding the impulses of the masses and the social trauma triggered by the quest for lost origins, Trump and Putin’s populist policies are revealed in a new light: shaped by love and hate, feeding on the frustrations and resentments of the masses, the two figures?and their followers?are driven to violence. For these leaders violence even fuels belief in a renewal of democracy?a democracy by the people and for the people, at the service of the masses. It is based on the idea that a single, pure truth is the source of appeasement and well-being that excludes outsiders. The book is a continuation of work previously published with Palgrave (The politics of destruction) and is the result of several years of interdisciplinary research and a dialogue between psychoanalysis and the social sciences.

Focused on some of the most conspicuous forms of social, psychological, and ideological resistance to the very idea of reparations,?Whiteness, Fair Play, and Reparation?develops a new fairness-based argument designed to help sensitize opponents to the force of more familiar calls for racial redress. Drawing on a range of empirical literature on whites’ attitudes toward race-conscious policy, and related sociological analyses of the white moral imagination, the book argues that the lens of "fair play" can help provide socially and morally threatened whites with a psychologically viable route toward appreciating their personal enmeshment within structures of racial hierarchy.

This book centres on the contribution of strategic litigation to the enforcement of international humanitarian law (IHL) with regard to armed conflicts around the world. It examines the instrument of strategic litigation as a vehicle for access to justice and scrutinizes its possibilities and challenges for enforcing compliance with IHL in Germany. In particular, the novel approach of connecting IHL duties set out to protect civilians with individual rights claims and the increased presence of such arguments in strategic cases before domestic courts is analysed.

The monograph first provides a general introduction to the term of strategic litigation, its actors and approaches. It then explores the framework for access to justice in Germany and beyond as well as important past and current strategic cases. Further, the crucial impacts as well as raised concerns and key potentials of such cases are discussed. Two detailed case studies are undertaken of the landmark proceedings before German courts in the Ramstein drone case with plaintiffs from Yemen and in the case on the Kunduz (Afghanistan) air strike. These case studies scrutinize the procedural avenues, the legal arguments, the resulting court decisions, the strategic litigation context, and the important impact of the proceedings.

The work contributes significant and novel findings to the literature on IHL, human and fundamental rights and strategic litigation. Next to a primary research audience, the book's findings are highly relevant for IHL practitioners, individual and collective actors in strategic litigation, NGOs, courts and governments.

Vera Strobel is a researcher at the Chair of Professor Dr. Thilo Marauhn in Public Law and International Law at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.

This book offers an answer to the question, "Why are Presidential debates so bad?" The answer could be that the Commission on Presidential Debates ruined them, or it could be that we don't really know how to watch or judge a debate. This book offers both an explanation of how we historically ended up with these terrible debates and how to make lemonade out of them. The book provides a method to watching this madness without going or getting mad yourself, and what perhaps we can say to others about these debates. It concludes with speculation beyond 2024 now that the Commission on Presidential Debates appears to be irrelevant. What types of debate can we expect, and what should we demand?

Fusing critical social theory to critical and political phenomenology, Political Poverty?presents a substantial contribution to current discussions on democratic inequality, political agency, political exclusion, and the role of experience in critical theorizing. Political Poverty puts forward an experiential account of political agency that can untangle theoretical knots of the discussion on the inequality of political participation. It also delivers a set of thinking tools that enable political theorists to better understand the motivational aspect of political agency, as well as suggestions on how even seemingly hopeless situations can be addressed by determined bottom-up efforts. Readers will come away from the book with a new perspective on political agency and the problems of encouraging democratic participation.

This volume of primary sources examines electric power, politics and culture in Victorian Britain. The materials review the formalization of electric power infrastructures or "grids" as they took shape on a local, national, and imperial scale, and explore how citizens, novelists, doctors, politicians, and electrical engineers imagined electric power networks impacting the present and future.

This book provides a comprehensive review of the relationship between utopia and democracy, challenging the tendency in Western scholarship to assume that an ideal society is inherently democratic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book covers an extensive range of historical periods and genres, and places emphasis on an understudied issue in the field, namely the role of Eastern and Central Europe in the study of utopianism. The various chapters reflect on the frequently overlooked role utopian thought plays in the development of democratic political structures, despite the fact that the history of classical utopianism demonstrates a multitude of non-democratic patterns. With contributions from political theory, history, cultural and literary studies, the volume explores a range of contexts, demonstrating how utopias offer both a critique and an inspiration for the evolution of democratic societies.