Struggling For Recognition

As a religious and cultural minority in Turkey, the Alevis have suffered a long history of persecution and discrimination. In the late 1980s they started a movement for the recognition of Alevi identity in both Germany and Turkey. Today, they constitute a significant segment of Germany's Turkish immigrant population. In a departure from the current debate on identity and diaspora, Sökefeld offers a rich account of the emergence and institutionalization of the Alevi movement in Germany, giving particular attention to its politics of recognition within Germany and in a transnational context. The book deftly combines empirical findings with innovative theoretical arguments and addresses current questions of migration, diaspora, transnationalism, and identity.

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This book describes the struggles in which inclusive-minded administrators find themselves when they promote equity initiatives. Administrators routinely struggle when they attempt to include all members of their school communities – teachers, students, and parents – in the various aspects of schooling. Given the presence of a host of obstacles, setting right the injustices associated with racism, classism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and other exclusive practices is not an easy thing to do. Resistance from colleagues who fail to recognize exclusive practices when they see them, and from others who do recognize them but see no harm, too few resources, exclusive policies, personal uncertainties or insecurities, and conflicted priorities are just a few of the phenomena that get in the way of these efforts. This book explores these struggles. It looks at the contexts within which these encounters occur, the various challenges that inclusive-minded administrators encounter, and the strategies that they employ to meet these tests. Employing the results of original empirical studies, surveys of current research, recent theoretical literature and personal experiences, this book seeks to provide school leaders with a sense of what it is like to promote inclusion and equity in the contemporary neoliberal context. Among other things, it looks to provide educators of an understanding of the obstacles that stand in the way of inclusion, the nature of the struggles that await them, and ideas for what they might do. Among other things, the book concludes that in relation to the pursuit of inclusion: (1) exclusion continues to be part of contemporary schools and communities; (2) struggles for inclusion transcend individual educators, students and parents; (3) administrators are sometimes part of the problem of exclusion; (4) administrators struggle with issues of difference; (5) administrators struggle with circumstances they inherit, people with whom they work, and with themselves; and (6) administrators have resources to employ in their struggles for inclusion.

Struggling for Recognition posits that the drive for personal recognition is a prime motivation behind the pursuit of democracy. The book presents an alternative to the theories of social and political changes that fail to test the causal assumption they make about human psychology. The theory presented underscores a fundamental aspect of human nature: the pursuit of recognition, that is, the drive for positive self-esteem and status and the aversion of negative self-esteem and subordination. This pursuit of recognition becomes the impetus for action and is used to overcome fear as well as rational costs and benefits calculations involved in collective action. The book examines the mechanisms by which this disposition is triggered and converted into political pressures that eventually lead to democratic reforms.Struggling for Recognition will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in political science, including those researching social movements, social change, democracy, and democratic transitions. A unique multidisciplinary work, it will foster better understanding of key political events such as democratic transitions.

"As Bush I took the United States into the Gulf War he proclaimed it an "historic moment" that would afford the United States "the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order." This unipolar moment for the US was anchored in a dense web of economic, political, and military institutions that allowed it to assert its power worldwide. Two decades later the United States still holds this power position but, as history demonstrates, its moment will inevitably come to an end as new great powers, like China, rise and challenge the prevailing international order. Leaders in the United States have emphasized that a strong and prosperous China has the potential to be a stabilizing force in the world. Even so, many analysts worry that as China's power continues to grow, so too will the assertiveness of its foreign policy and territorial ambitions, leading to an inevitable clash with the United States over the terms of the international order. Thus, the challenge facing policymakers-and the subject of this book-is the question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet? Or, rather, how can an established power manage the peaceful rise of a new major power? This book provides a framework, grounded in the struggle of rising powers for recognition, for understanding the social factors that shape the outcome of a power transition"--

This study frames the social dynamics of Latin American in terms of two types of cultural momentum: foundational momentum and the momentum of global order in contemporary Latin America.