Under Threat

Water has been described as 'the oil of the 21st century' with rapid population growth, climate change and pollution conspiring to make it the resource over which wars may be fought in years to come. But does water have a price? Is it a right or a need? Increasingly, water is viewed as a commodity whose function is to generate profits. In this book, Larbi Bouguerra argues that instead we should view it as a common good of humanity. Water has an exceptional cross-cultural symbolic value and its use raises enormous questions about our lifestyle, our ethics and our relationship to nature. Bouguerra makes a powerful case for a society that is more economical with water and manages it openly and democratically, as a global resource.

Everyday life as an immigrant in a deportation nation is fraught with risk, but everywhere immigrants confront repression and dispossession, they also manifest resistance in ways big and small. Immigrants Under Threat shifts the conversation from what has been done to Mexican immigrants to what they do in response. From private strategies of avoidance, to public displays of protest, immigrant resistance is animated by the massive demographic shifts that started in 1965 and an immigration enforcement regime whose unprecedented scope and intensity has made daily life increasingly perilous. Immigrants Under Threat focuses on the way the material needs of everyday life both enable and constrain participation in immigrant resistance movements.

Introduction -- On stupidity -- On superstition -- On spite -- Conclusion.

This book illuminates the importance of threat on the representation of everyday life, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Divided into three parts, the book sets out by addressing the conceptual aspects of threat and by opening views on phenomena and social processes associated with threat. It shows how threat constitutes an analytical category that simultaneously involves social, psychological, religious, historical and political factors, and calls for a sufficiently broad conceptual definition to integrate pluri-disciplinary contributions. The second part focuses on the building of threats, mainly the environmental threats that have reached a tragic dimension today and are a core aspect of world concerns, the contemporary global terrorism, the migrations and the challenges these bring to contemporary societies, as well as the threats associated with the emergence of nationalism and the diverse aspects of excluding the Other. The final part examines the coping strategies, including oblivion, denial and defiance associated with different sources of threats, for instance those arising from epidemic and collective diseases, financial technology, natural disasters and collective traumas.

Demographically, nineteenth-century London, or what Victorians called the “new Rome,” first equaled, then superseded its ancient ancestor. By the mid-eighteenth century, the British capital had already developed into a global city. Sustained by its enormous empire, between 1800 and the First World War London ballooned in population and land area. Nothing so vast had previously existed anywhere. A Mighty Capital under Threat investigates the environmental history of one of the world’s global cities and the largest city in the United Kingdom. Contributors cover the feeding of London, waste management, movement between the city’s numerous districts, and the making and shaping of the environmental sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

War Reporters Under Threat describes the threat of violence facing war reporters from the United States government and some of its closest allies. Chris Paterson argues that what should have been the lesson for the press following the invasion of Iraq – that they will be treated instrumentally by the US government – has been mostly ignored. As a result, even nominally democratic states cannot be counted upon to protect journalists in conflict, and urgent reform of legal protections for journalists is required. War Reporters Under Threat combines critical scholarship with original investigation to assess the impact of the US governments obsession with information control and protection of its own troops. While the press-military relationship has been well researched, this book is the first to elaborate the US government threat to journalists, a threat usually dismissed by the global journalism industry.

What do prisoner laborers, graduate students, welfare workers, and college athletes have in common? According to sociologist Erin Hatton, they are all part of a growing workforce of coerced laborers. Coerced explores this world of coerced labor through an unexpected and compelling comparison of these four groups of workers, for whom a different definition of "employment" reigns supreme—one where workplace protections do not apply and employers wield expansive punitive power, far beyond the ability to hire and fire. Because such arrangements are common across the economy, Hatton argues that coercion—as well as precarity—is a defining feature of work in America today. Theoretically forceful yet vivid and gripping to read, Coerced compels the reader to reevaluate contemporary dynamics of work, pushing beyond concepts like "career" and "gig work." Through this bold analysis, Hatton offers a trenchant window into this world of work from the perspective of those who toil within it—and who are developing the tools needed to push back against it.

This book addresses some of the most pressing questions of our time: Is democracy threatened by globalisation? Is there a legitimacy crisis in contemporary democracies? Is the welfare state in individual countries under pressure from global trends? What are the implications of high-level migration and rising populism for democracy? Does authoritarianism pose a challenge? The volume builds on a cross-cultural study of democracy conducted by the Transformation Research Unit (TRU) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa for nearly twenty years. Three of the countries studied – South Africa, Turkey and Poland – receive individual attention as their respective democracies appear to be the most vulnerable at present. Germany, Sweden, Chile, South Korea and Taiwan are assessed in their regional contexts. Further insights are gained by examining the impact on democracy of the global screen culture of Television and the Internet, and by pointing out the lessons democracy should learn from diplomacy to fare better in the future. The book will appeal to both students and practitioners of democracy as well as the general reader.