Struggles For Hegemony In Italy S Crisis Management

This book investigates the struggles for hegemony, and a possible ‘crisis of crisis management’ at the core of Italy’s political economy. With a specific focus on the conflict over the 2012 labour market reform, the book also explores the country’s trajectory in the area of economic and social reproduction. It presents a framework for critical policy analysis that draws on cultural political economy and explores its potential synergies with complementary approaches such as historical materialist policy analysis and critical discourse analysis. Readers will gain an understanding of crisis dynamics in the aftermath of 2008, and insights into related political reactions. The book will also help them develop the analytical tools needed to make sense of these puzzling phenomena.--

This book investigates the struggles for hegemony, and a possible ‘crisis of crisis management’ at the core of Italy’s political economy. With a specific focus on the conflict over the 2012 labour market reform, the book also explores the country’s trajectory in the area of economic and social reproduction. It presents a framework for critical policy analysis that draws on cultural political economy and explores its potential synergies with complementary approaches such as historical materialist policy analysis and critical discourse analysis. Readers will gain an understanding of crisis dynamics in the aftermath of 2008, and insights into related political reactions. The book will also help them develop the analytical tools needed to make sense of these puzzling phenomena.

In Crises and Hegemonic Transitions Fusaro reconsiders the concept of hegemony at the international level by returning to the critical edition of Gramsci’s Quaderni thereby offering a novel way to interpret past and present developments within the world economy.

This book provides a series of contemporary and international policy case studies analysed through discursive methodological approaches in the traditions of critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and discourse theory. This is the first volume that connects this discursive methodology systematically to the field of critical policy analysis and will therefore be an essential book for researchers who wish to include a discursive analysis in their critical policy research.

The Politics of Prison Crowding investigates recent transformations in Italy’s penal system to make the key analytical observation that conditions of overcrowding have become the ‘new normal’ under which the modern prison system continues to operate and deliver punishment. Engaging with the politics of crowding thus entails a direct and pertinent engagement with the modern state’s politics of criminal justice and social control. Worldwide, over the last decades, a growing number of jurisdictions have prison systems operating above or to the limit of their capacity, yet little attention has been paid to these elements in the analysis of prison politics and day-to-day functions. By exploring the crowding issue, this book offers an original and interesting insight into the politics and dynamics characterising contemporary prison systems. The hypothesis of this book is that the politics of prison crowding have become the template for the daily administration of the prison system, which incorporates not just policy and rules but day-to-day functions and practices regulating life behind bars. Through interviews in modern Italian prisons, the book brings to light a radical redefinition of a carceral system that harshens the delivery of punishment while justifying this exacerbation of pain by adding new bureaucratic logic to the administration of the penal system within a narrative of compliance to human rights standards. By shedding new light on prison politics to open new critical perspectives and research paths, The Politics of Prison Crowding offers a fundamental tool to scholars, students, and all professional policymakers and practitioners dealing with prison policies and the politics of justice.

Sri Lanka has been regarded as a model democracy among former British colonies. It was lauded for its impressive achievement in terms of human development indicators. However, Sri Lanka's modern history can also be read as a tragic story of inter-ethnic inequalities and tensions, resulting in years of violent conflicts. Two long spells of anti-state youth uprisings were followed by nearly three decades of civil war, and most recently a renewed upsurge of events are examples of the on-going uneasy project of state-building. This book discusses that state-building in Sri Lanka is centred on the struggle for hegemony amidst a kind of politics that rejects individual and group equality, opposes the social integration of marginalised groups and appeals to narrow, fearful and xenophobic tendencies among the majority population and minorities alike. It answers the pressing questions of - How do the dynamics of intra-Sinhalese class relations and Sinhalese politics influence the trajectories of post-colonial state-building? What tensions emerge over time, between Sinhalese hegemony-building and wider state-building? How did these tensions manifest in majority and minority relationships?

Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci are two of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. This book explores the similarities and the differences between their philosophical and political theories. The first and second chapters deal with a still under-investigated aspect of Trotsky’s thought, i.e. his reflections on the issue of hegemony. The third chapter focuses on Gramsci’s critique of Trotsky in his Prison Notebooks, analysing Gramsci’s knowledge of Trotsky’s positions as well as the scope and limits of Gramsci’s critique. The fourth chapter consists of a critical rereading of Perry Anderson's essay Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, originally published in 1976 and republished in 2017 and an analysis of the book Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism by Emanuele Saccarelli. The result is an investigation that offers new insight into both Trotsky’s and Gramsci’s thought, while proposing a new point of view from which to interpret revolutionary theory and strategy in the contemporary scenario. One of the main topics addressed throughout the three essays is the specific position of the problem of hegemony in a theory of permanent revolution, demonstrating that Trotsky had a particular understanding of the question of hegemony and that Gramsci, in turn, introduced a concept of hegemony that is closely associated with an idea of permanent revolution, such that the dynamics of the relationship between democratic struggles and socialist struggles presented in both theories are very similar.

The financial malaise that has affected the Eurozone countries of southern Europe – Spain, Portugal, Italy and, in its most extreme case, Greece – has been analysed using mainly macroeconomic and financial explanations. This book shifts the emphasis from macroeconomics to the relationship between uneven geographical development, financialization and politics. It deconstructs the myth that debt, both public and private, in Southern Europe is the sole outcome of the spendthrift ways of Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, offering a fresh perspective on the material, social and ideological parameters of the economic crisis and the spaces where it unfolded. Featuring a range of case examples that complement and expand the main discussion, Crisis Spaces will appeal to students and scholars of human geography, economics, regional development, political science, cultural studies and social movements studies.