This volume brings together some of the most recent scholarship on government and civil society. It examines the axis of the relationship between national governments and civil society organisations (NGOs) by highlighting commonalities as well as differences among four key regions in the world. Using the stability vs. instability framework, the book explores a range of pertinent issues, including human rights, development, foreign policy, state-building, regime change, governance frameworks, wars and civil liberties. It studies diverse situations, from those entailing comprehensive cooperation to those involving politically contentious and revolutionary activities. With case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of political science, global politics, international relations, sociology, development studies, global governance and public policy, as well as to those in the development sector and NGOs.

The relationships between Africa and Europe are of high strategic importance. This volume studies the ongoing dynamics between the two continents by adopting a pluralist understanding of international relations which encompasses non-state actors as well as states. Going beyond pure intergovernmentalism, this focus of this book is on activists, business people, religious believers, local politicians as well as transnational networks and by hybrid coalitions. Such plurality of socio-economic and political interactions underpinning the relationship between Africa and Europe is underexamined and yet of great importance. The text identifies new patterns of cooperation and recurrent obstacles in the African-European multistakeholder dynamics, thus opening the way for a more accurate understanding of the future relationship between Africa and Europe. This book brings African and European reflections together, on an equal standing, in order to achieve a true dialogue among civilizations. This book is aimed at all those who are interested in African-European relationships, including students and researchers, as well as activists, business people, civil servant and functionaries at local and national level.

The triangular relationship between the social, the political, and the cultural has opened up social and political theory to new challenges. The social can no longer be reduced to the category of society, and the political extends beyond the traditional concerns of the nature of the state and political authority. This Handbook will address a range of issues that have recently emerged from the disciplines of social and political theory, focusing on key themes as opposed to schools of thought or major theorists. It is divided into three sections which address: the most influential theoretical traditions that have emerged from the legacy of the twentieth century the most important new and emerging frameworks of analysis today the major theoretical problems in recent social and political theory The Second edition is an enlarged, revised, and updated version of the first edition, which was published in 2011 and comprised 42 chapters. The new edition consists of 50 chapters, of which seventeen are entirely new chapters covering topics that have become increasingly prominent in social and political theory in recent years, such as populism, the new materialism, postcolonialism, Deleuzean theory, post-humanism, post-capitalism as well as older topics that were not covered in the first edition, such as Arendt, the gift, critical realism, anarchism. All chapters retained from the first edition have been thoroughly revised and updated. The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory encompasses the most up-to-date developments in contemporary social and political theory, and as such is an essential research tool for both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers working in the fields of political theory, social and political philosophy, contemporary social theory, and cultural theory.