This revised textbook for courses on urban politics challenges the notion that the field is dominated by political economy, showing that despite the undeniable importance of economic issues, citizens do play a significant part in urban politics.

The Politics of the Police offers a geographical and historical overview of the law and politics of the police. This fifth edition covers a wider range of empirical and theoretical issues, encompassing a transnational scope and reflecting the growing diversity of policing forms in today's globalized world.

This fourth edition of Robert Reiner's popular and highly-acclaimed text contains substantial revisions, to take into account the recent and profound changes in the law, policy and organisation of policing.

This book examines the relationship between immigration, crime, police and politics in the city of Buenos Aires during the Cambiemos ("Let's Change") administration, which took place in Argentina between 2015 and 2019. It draws on semi-structured interviews with migrants to offer insights into interactions between police and migrants, narratives of police violence, police attitudes towards migrants, the nexus between police and politics and the perception of the vulnerability of the migratory community of belonging to police action. Using a mixed methods approach, it also draws on secondary quantitative data regarding police practices of detention of migrants and examines political discourses around the immigration-crime association. In essence, it discusses the changes in attitude of the police towards different ethnic-national groups during the administration Cambiemos. In this sense, it presents empirical research and methodological insights from the Global South.

There is a Russian saying that "police mirror society." The gist of this is that every society is policed to the extent that it allows itself to be policed. Centralized in control but decentralized in their reach, the police are remarkably similar in structure, chain of command, and their relationships with the political elite across post-Soviet nations--they also remain one of the least reformed post-communist institutions. As a powerful state organ, the Soviet-style militarized police have resisted change despite democratic transformations in the overall political context, including rounds of competitive elections and growing civil society. While consensus between citizens and the state about reform may be possible in democratic nations, it is considerably more difficult to achieve in authoritarian states. Across post-Soviet countries, such discussions most often occur between political elites and powerful non-state actors, such as criminal syndicates and nationalistic ethnic groups, rather than the wider citizenry. Even in countries where one or more rounds of democratic elections have taken place since 1991, empowered citizens and politicians have not renegotiated the way states police and coerce society. On the contrary, in many post-Soviet countries, police functions have expanded to serve the interests of the ruling political elites. What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the police as merely an institution of coercion, this book defines it as a medium for state-society consensus on the limits of the state's legitimate use of violence. It thus considers policing not as a way to measure the state's capacity to coerce society, but rather as a reflection of a complex society bound together by a web of casual interactions and political structures. The book compares reform efforts in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, finding that bottom-up public mobilization is likely to emerge in the aftermath of transformative violence--an incident when the usual patterns of policing are interrupted with unprecedented brutality against vulnerable individuals. Ultimately, The Politics of Police Reform examines the various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing.

This book discusses the forms and dynamics of political processes in rural India with a special emphasis on West Bengal, the nation's fourth-most populous state. West Bengal's political distinction stems from its long legacy of a Left-led coalition government for more than thirty years and its land reform initiatives. The book closely looks at how people from different castes, religions, and genders represent themselves in local governments, political parties, and in the social movements in West Bengal. At the same time it addresses some important questions: Is there any new pattern of politics emerging at the margins? How does this pattern of politics correspond with the current discourse of governance? Using ethnographic techniques, it claims to chart new territories by not only examining how rural people see the state, but also conceiving the context by comparing the available theoretical frameworks put forward to explain the political dynamics of rural India.

This unique volume is about how ordinary people construct political meanings, form political emotions and identities, and become involved in or disengaged from political contests. Drawing on psychological anthropology, it illustrates the complexities of political subjectivities through engaging personal stories that complicate our understanding of the relationship between culture and politics. Chapters examine the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in the United States, third gender activism in India, Rastafari in Jamaica, Courage to Refuse in Israel, the environmental movement in the U.S., Salafi movements in northern Nigeria, post-socialist labor politics in Romania, and anti-immigrant activism in Denmark.