Patrimonial Power In The Modern World

During the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world, protesters demanded the ouster of authoritarian forms of rule and an end to the influence of ruling families on politics, society, and the economy. These upheavals revealed that patrimonial power in its diverse forms is still a dynamic force in global politics, able to shape world events. This volume brings the study of patrimonialism back to center stage and presents the concept as a useful tool to analyze how nations, global developments, and international relations are influenced and transformed. Leading scholars show that patrimonial practices, present throughout history, are important features of global capitalist modernity. The authors analyze patrimonial politics in regions throughout the world, including in the United States, Tunisia, Chile, France, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Poland, and Russia. This volume will appeal to students of politics and policy and to a multidisciplinary scholarly audience in political sociology, historical social science, history, and social theory.

During the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world, protesters demanded the ouster of authoritarian forms of rule and an end to the influence of ruling families on politics, society, and the economy. These upheavals revealed that patrimonial power in its diverse forms is still a dynamic force in global politics, able to shape world events. This volume brings the study of patrimonialism back to center stage and presents the concept as a useful tool to analyze how nations, global developments, and international relations are influenced and transformed. Leading scholars show that patrimonial practices, present throughout history, are important features of global capitalist modernity. The authors analyze patrimonial politics in regions throughout the world, including in the United States, Tunisia, Chile, France, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Poland, and Russia. This volume will appeal to students of politics and policy and to a multidisciplinary scholarly audience in political sociology, historical social science, history, and social theory.

This volume focuses on the ways in which gender interacts with generation. Developed as the contributors lived through the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapters offer a timely examination of gender-related changes that have occurred against the backdrop of changing socio-dynamics such as increasing and decreasing fertility and the aging of populations.

Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond is a collection of critical essays on the economist’s iconic 2014 book, from the perspective of critical theory, global political economy or public sociology, mostly drawn from the Marxist tradition.

This volume focuses on the interconnected formations of patrimonialism, colonialism/empire and capitalism. The articles show that patrimonial practices, which often form the backbone of empire, are present throughout history, including in global capitalist modernity.

Patriarchy, particularly as embedded in the Old and New Testaments, and Roman legal precepts, has been a powerful organising concept with which social order has been understood, maintained, enforced, contested, adjudicated and dreamt about for over two millennia of western history. This brief book surveys three influential episodes in this history: seventeenth-century debates about absolutism and democracy, nineteenth-century reconstructions of human prehistory, and the broad mobilisations linked to twentieth-century women's movements. It then looks at the way feminist scholars have reconsidered and revised some earlier explanations built around patriarchy. The book concludes with an overview of current uses of the concept of patriarchy – from fundamentalist Christian activism, over foreign policy analyses of oppressive regimes, to scholarly debates about forms of effective governance. By treating patriarchy as a powerful tool to think with, rather than a factual description of social relations, the text makes a useful contribution to current social and political thought.

This book examines the regime changes in Iraq and Libya to unravel the complexity of statebuilding in countries emerging from authoritarianism and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Framed in a comparative study of post-2003 Iraq and post-2011 Libya, the book examines changes in key state dimensions – representation and political authority, security, and wealth creation and distribution – in a continuous dialogue with past trajectories in these two countries. To grasp the nature and degree of these changes, the mechanisms of state formation are explored in light of a statebuilding agenda that, in its application from Iraq to Libya, has adapted to different political prerogatives. The analysis of Iraq and Libya serves the book’s ultimate goal to address the debate on statebuilding from a regional (MENA) perspective and to lay the ground for the study of other contemporary cases undergoing radical and violent process of changes, such as in Syria and Yemen. The book grapples with problems associated with the difficult process of transition from authoritarianism through conflict and towards peace by focusing on the state, its structure and function. The work is informed by a large quantity of materials collected over the past five years, including secondary literature, policy papers and reports, and semi-structured interviews with key informants on Iraq and Libya. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, Middle Eastern studies, peace and conflict studies, and International Relations in general.

This book explores the issue of selective law enforcement, arguing that the manipulation of the legal system by powerful insiders is a distinctive feature of Putinism, reflecting both its hybrid authoritarianism and Russian legal culture. Based on extensive research including interviews with the victims of selective law enforcement, the book analyses how selective law enforcement works in Russia, discusses the link between law and power, and relates the Russian situation to examples from elsewhere and to general legal theories and ideas of political hybridity.