For nine years, Carwyn Jones was at the helm of Welsh politics. As First Minister from 2009 to 2018, he led the governance of an increasingly devolving Wales through turmoil and success. Not Just Politics follows Carwyn from his roots in a small corner of Wales and childhood brought up as a Welsh speaker in Bridgend, to the 1980s miners' strike which inspired a career in politics. After graduating with a degree in law from Aberyswyth, Carwyn juggled being a barrister and local councillor while also caring for his wife Lisa, who was diagnosed with leukaemia shortly after their marriage. As part of the first cohort of Welsh Government Ministers, Carwyn has been at the heart of the growing shift from Westminster to Cardiff, and as First Minister he oversaw landmark moments that put Wales firmly on the world stage.

Not Just Politics: A Guide to Grassroots Activism is a user-friendly introduction for people of any age from all walks of life who want to become politically active, perhaps for the first time in their lives. It explains how political issues are not just about politics, but about the ideas behind such issues. About the Author Lila Pifer edits and publishes a quarterly newsletter, NOT JUST POLITICS. She has a Master’s degree from Northeastern Illinois University and a para-legal certificate from Roosevelt University in Chicago. She is the proud mother of a teacher daughter and grandmother to two teenage grandsons. After spending most of her adult life in Chicago, she has moved back to her hometown in Ohio. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, keeping up with current events, and staying involved with important issues in her local community.

Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers – Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin – in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition.

This book examines the intersection of caste and politics in North India and highlights its contribution to the anthropological study of democracy. It argues that the long-term process of internalization of democracy within the caste body has fundamentally changed the workings of the Indian party system. Drawing on an in-depth ethnographic case study of the Gujjars, a marginalized caste group in India, the book presents a systematic analysis of the political mobilization and culture of political participation of the Other Backward Classes to understand why and how certain caste groups have been more successful in politics than others. It discusses various key themes such as popular democracy and the politics of caste, regional politics and territoriality, myth, legends and heroes in the Gujjar community, the transition from lineage deities to caste deity, and the (re)formation of caste-community identity. It reveals the symbiotic relationships between religion and caste and shows how religion shapes contemporary caste. The book makes an important contribution to the study of marginalised groups and their politicization and fills a significant gap in the political sociology of India. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of sociology, history, exclusion studies, Dalit studies, political studies, history, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

Fully up-to-date to reflect the evolving Medvedev presidency, the 2008 Georgian war and the impact of the economic downturn, this volume is a much needed objective and balanced examination of the ways in which security has played, and continues to play, a central role in contemporary Russian politics.

First Published in 1992. The federal budget has attained unparalleled significance at the heart of American politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The modern budget system has become the mechanism by which a distinctively American administrative state was put in place and made operative. The growth of the administrative state has transformed politics in America, but many Americans are unaware of its existence. This study looks at budget control within the realms of Congress, the Presidency and the development of the Administrative State.

But the work emphasizes not simply federal government initiatives to curb freedom of choice, but how this extends to sociological and ideological trends in which extremists pit the values of liberty and virtue against each other

Bringing critical attention to a particular set of science fiction and fantasy films--Larry and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix, George Lucas' Star Wars saga, and Joss Whedon's Avengers--this book utilizes a wide-ranging set of critical tools to illuminate their political ideologies, while also examining any resistant and complicating turns or byways the films may provide. What they all have in common ideologically is that they--or at least the genres they belong to--tend to be regarded as belonging to politically conservative frames of sociocultural reference. With the Star Wars saga, however, this idea is shown to be superficial and weak.

Few challenges to the modern dream of democratic citizenship appear greater than the presence of severe ethnic, religious, and linguistic divisions in society. With their diverse religions and ethnic communities, the Southeast Asian countries of Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia have grappled with this problem since achieving independence after World War II. Each country has on occasion been torn by violence over the proper terms for accommodating pluralism. Until the Asian economic crisis of 1997, however, these nations also enjoyed one of the most sustained economic expansions the non-Western world has ever seen. This timely volume brings together fifteen leading specialists of the region to consider the impact of two generations of nation-building and market-making on pluralism and citizenship in these deeply divided Asian societies. Examining the new face of pluralism from the perspective of markets, politics, gender, and religion, the studies show that each country has developed a strikingly different response to the challenges of citizenship and diversity. The contributors, most of whom come Southeast Asia, pay particular attention to the tension between state and societal approaches to citizenship. They suggest that the achievement of an effectively participatory public sphere in these countries will depend not only on the presence of an independent "civil society," but on a synergy of state and society that nurtures a public culture capable of mediating ethnic, religious, and gender divides. The Politics of Multiculturalism will be of special interest to students of Southeast Asian history and society, anthropologists grappling with questions of citizenship and culture, political scientists studying democracy across cultures, and all readers concerned with the prospects for civility and tolerance in a multicultural world.

This innovative and theoretically sophisticated book investigates how aesthetic judgment forms the groundwork for understanding political identities. It posits aesthetics as central to conceptions of politics that are based on how people understand the relationship between themselves and larger communities. Ferguson focuses not only on how different theoretical conceptions of political judgment relate to one another, but also on their historical development and potential meaning for contemporary scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on recent contributions to philosophy, economics, cultural studies, feminism, psychology, and anthropology, The Politics of Judgment demonstrates how modern political identities depend upon and are formed by aesthetic judgment. Political theorists, social scientists, philosophers and cultural critics will find this book especially useful, though general readers will also be attracted by the author's keen insight into contemporary political questions.