Performing Sovereign Aspirations

Challenges state-centric interpretations of insurgent politics by offering a performative perspective on Sri Lanka's Tamil nationalist movement.

This book gives an education leader a practical path to organizational effectiveness, shared sense of direction, and clear focus on outcomes for students. Setting a clear direction, structuring personnel for the greatest productivity, engaging everyone in meaningful work, tracking organizational performance, and encouraging innovation are fundamental concerns for every kind of education organization—schools, districts, state agencies included. Yet, education leaders struggle to give due attention to these organizational matters while also tackling the challenges of meeting the needs of their students. They are searching for a path leading to both organizational productivity and excellence in learning for students, a path that enlists the passions and efforts of all personnel. Strategic Performance Management (SPM) integrates strategic planning with performance management into a seamless process by which an education organization develops and operationalizes a strategic direction. This direction goes beyond the basic elements of vision, mission, values, goals, and strategies to include careful analysis of the functions performed by the organization, its units, and its positions (roles) to facilitate effective placement, assignment, and training of personnel. SPM emphasizes planning through strategic thinking that enables the organization to make critical adjustments as needs and context change. It provides the flexibility to act in times of crisis. Most of all, it gets everyone moving in the same direction, aimed at goals for students.

Since its generic inception in 1516, utopia has produced visions of alterity which renegotiate, subvert, and transcend existing places. Early in the twentieth century, H. G. Wells linked utopia to the World State, whose post-national, post-Westphalian emergence he predicated on English national discourse. This critical study examines how the discursive representations of England’s geography, continuity, and character become foundational to the Wellsian utopia and elicit competing response from Wells’s contemporaries, particularly Robert Hugh Benson and Aldous Huxley, with further ramifications throughout the twentieth century. Contextualized alongside modern theories of nationalism and utopia, as well as read jointly with contemporary projections of England as place, reactions to Wells demonstrate a shift from disavowal to retrieval of England, on the one hand, and from endorsement to rejection of the World State, on the other. Attempts to salvage the residual traces of English culture from their degradation in the World State have taken increasing precedence over the imagination of a post-national order. This trend continues in the work of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, J. G. Ballard, and Julian Barnes, whose future scenarios warn against a world without England. The Nationality of Utopia investigates utopia’s capacity to deconstruct and redeploy national discourse in ways that surpass fear and nostalgia.

"Increasingly powerful, prosperous, and authoritarian, China under the leadership of Xi Jinping has become a more intense competitor across the globe-economically, technologically, diplomatically, militarily, and in seeking to influence people's hearts and minds. But what does China ultimately want in the world? This timely and illuminating book explains the fundamental motivations driving the country's more dynamic, assertive, and risk-taking approach to the world under Xi Jinping. With original and perceptive analysis, Daring to Struggle focuses on six increasingly important interests for today's China-legitimacy, sovereignty, wealth, power, leadership, and ideas-and details how the determined pursuit of them at home and abroad profoundly shapes its foreign relationships, contributing to a more contested strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. The book offers rich insights on the increasing role of the Chinese Communist Party in the country's international affairs, the looming risks of conflict in areas of contested sovereignty around China's periphery, Beijing's dramatically changing approach to foreign economic relations, its expanding use of economic leverage and military coercion, China's aspirations to greater leadership in global governance, and the well-resourced promotion of its ideas, image and influence across the world. This lively and accessible perspective on China's global ambitions draws from authoritative Chinese-language sources. The resulting analysis will inform policymakers, executives, China watchers, students, and other globally engaged citizens seeking to understand China's ambitions and how our governments and societies can respond"--

Performing Identities brings together essays by scholars, artists and activists engaged in understanding and conserving rapidly disappearing local knowledge forms of indigenous communities across continents. It depicts the imaginative transactions evident in the interface of identity and cultural transformation, raising the issue of cultural rights of these otherwise marginalized communities.

Sovereign debt is necessary for the functioning of many modern states, yet its impact on human rights is underexplored in academic literature. This volume provides the reader with a step-by-step analysis of the debt phenomenon and how it affects human rights. Beginning by setting out thehistorical, political and economic context of sovereign debt, the book goes on to address the human rights dimension of the policies and activities of the three types of sovereign lenders: international financial institutions (IFIs), sovereigns and private lenders.Bantekas and Lumina, along with a team of global experts, establish the link between debt and the manner in which the accumulation of sovereign debt violates human rights, examining some of the conditions imposed by structural adjustment programs on debtor states with a view to servicing their debt.They outline how such conditions have been shown to exacerbate the debt itself at the expense of economic sovereignty, concluding that such measures worsen the borrower's economic situation, and are injurious to the entrenched rights of peoples.

Exceptional States examines new configurations of marriage, immigration, and sovereignty emerging in an increasingly mobile Asia where Cold War legacies continue to shape contemporary political struggles over sovereignty and citizenship. Focused on marital immigration from China to Taiwan, the book documents the struggles of these women and men as they seek acceptance and recognition in their new home. Through tracing parallels between the predicaments of Chinese marital immigrants and the uncertain future of the Taiwan nation-state, the book shows how intimate attachments and emotional investments infuse the governmental practices of Taiwanese bureaucrats charged with regulating immigration and producing citizenship and sovereignty. Its attention to a group of immigrants whose exceptional status has become necessary to Taiwan’s national integrity exposes the social, political, and subjective consequences of life on the margins of citizenship and sovereignty.

Political scientists and political theorists have long been interested in social and political performance. Theatre and performance researchers have often focused on the political dimensions of the live arts. Yet the interdisciplinary nature of this labor has typically been assumed rather than rigorously explored. Further, it is crucial to bring the concepts of theatre and performance deployed by other disciplines such as psychology, law, political anthropology, sociology among others into a wider, as well as deeper, interdisciplinary engagement. Embodying and fostering that engagement is at the heart of this new handbook. The Handbook brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and Performance to map out the evolving interdisciplinary engagement. The authors--drawn from a wide range of disciplines--investigate the relationship between politics and performance to show that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines, and that they also share, to a large extent, a common communicational base and language. The volume is organized into seven thematic sections: the interdisciplinary theory of politics and performance; performativity and theatricality (protest, regulation, resistance, change, authority); identities (race, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, indigeneity); sites (states, borders, markets, law, religion); scripts (accountability, authority and legitimacy, security, ceremony, sustainability); body, voice, and gesture (representation, leadership, participation, rhetoric, disruption); and affect (media, care, love empathy, comedy, populism, memory).