Partisan Interventions

Partisan Interventions
Author: Brian C. Rathbun
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501729624

Ideological differences among political parties result in consistently different understandings of the national interest, Brian C. Rathbun shows. These differences between parties are critical as major international events unfold. In the first comprehensive treatment of the effects of partisan politics in foreign affairs, Rathbun examines domestic party disagreements across the 1990s in Britain, France, and Germany regarding humanitarian interventions and the creation of a European Union security force. The different reactions of the left and the right in the Western European nations had, for example, profound implications for the resolution of conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. Rathbun argues that leftist parties, compared to their rightist counterparts, believe less in the efficacy of force, are more willing to rely on multilateral cooperation to realize their goals, and have a broader conception of the national interest that includes the promotion of human rights abroad. Cultural factors, such as a nation's unique history with the use of force, do not constrain partisan debate but rather make particular issues controversial and help parties resolve value conflicts. Partisan Interventions is based on interviews with dozens of senior party and government officials. Rathbun draws on the experiences of former foreign and defense ministers, heads of the armed services, ambassadors to the United Nations and NATO, and party spokespersons on foreign and defense policy.

Meddling in the Ballot Box

Meddling in the Ballot Box
Author: Dov H. Levin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-08-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197519911

Why do world powers sometimes try to determine who wins an election in another country? What effects does such meddling have on the targeted elections results? Great powers have attempted for centuries to intervene in elections occurring in other states through various covert and overt methods, with the American intervention in the 2013 Kenyan elections and the Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections being just two recent examples. Indeed, the Americans and the Soviets/Russians intervened in one out of every nine national-level executive elections between 1946 and 2000. Meddling in the Ballot Box is the first book to provide a comprehensive analysis of foreign meddling in elections from the dawn of the modern era to the 2016 Russian intervention in the US election. Dov Levin shows that partisan electoral interventions are usually an "inside job" occurring only if a significant domestic actor within the target wants it. Likewise, a great power will not intervene unless it fears that its interests are endangered by an opposing party or candidate with very different preferences. He also finds that partisan electoral interventions frequently have significant effects on the results--sufficient in many situations to determine the winner. Such interference also tends to be more effective when it is conducted overtly. However, it is usually ineffective, if not counterproductive, when done in a founding election. A revelatory account that explains why major powers have meddled so frequently across the entire postwar era, Meddling in the Ballot Box also provides us with a framework for assessing the cyber-future of interference.

Our Common Bonds

Our Common Bonds
Author: Matthew Levendusky
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2023-03-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0226824691

A compelling exploration of concrete strategies to reduce partisan animosity by building on what Democrats and Republicans have in common. One of the defining features of twenty-first-century American politics is the rise of affective polarization: Americans increasingly not only disagree with those from the other party but distrust and dislike them as well. This has toxic downstream consequences for both politics and social relationships. Is there any solution? Our Common Bonds shows that—although there is no silver bullet that will eradicate partisan animosity—there are concrete interventions that can reduce it. Matthew Levendusky argues that partisan animosity stems in part from partisans’ misperceptions of one another. Democrats and Republicans think they have nothing in common, but this is not true. Drawing on survey and experimental evidence, the book shows that it is possible to help partisans reframe the lens through which they evaluate the out-party by priming commonalities—specifically, shared identities outside of politics, cross-party friendships, and common issue positions and values identified through civil cross-party dialogue. Doing so lessons partisan animosity, and it can even reduce ideological polarization. The book discusses what these findings mean for real-world efforts to bridge the partisan divide.

Rules and Allies

Rules and Allies
Author: Johannes Bubeck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108483763

Examining more than three hundred elections in over a hundred countries, this book shows when and how states intervene in elections in other countries.

International Intervention, Identity and Conflict Transformation

International Intervention, Identity and Conflict Transformation
Author: Timea Spitka
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317584430

This book addresses the challenges of international intervention in violent conflicts and its impact on groups in conflict. When the international community intervenes in a violent internal conflict, intervening powers may harden divisions, constructing walls between groups, or they may foster transformation, soften barriers and build bridges between conflicting groups. This book examines the different types of external processes and their respective contributions to softening or hardening divisions between conflicting groups. It also analyses the types of conflict resolution strategies, including integration, accommodation and partitioning, and investigates the conditions under which the international community decides to pursue a particular strategy, and how the different strategies contribute to solidification or transformation of group identities. The author uses three case studies, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine, to reveal how different types of external interventions impact on the identities of conflicting groups. The volume seeks to address how states and international organizations ought to intervene in order to stimulate the building of bridges rather than walls between conflicting groups. In doing so, the book sheds light on some of the pitfalls in international interventions and highlights the importance of united external process and inclusive identity strategies that promote transformation and bridge differences between conflicting groups. This book will be of much interest to students of intervention, peace and conflict studies, ethnic conflict, security studies and IR.

Radical Representations

Radical Representations
Author: Barbara Foley
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780822313946

In this revisionary study, Barbara Foley challenges prevalent myths about left-wing culture in the Depression-era U.S. Focusing on a broad range of proletarian novels and little-known archival material, the author recaptures an important literature and rewrites a segment of American cultural history long obscured and distorted by the anti-Communist bias of contemporaries and critics. Josephine Herbst, William Attaway, Jack Conroy, Thomas Bell and Tillie Olsen, are among the radical writers whose work Foley reexamines. Her fresh approach to the U.S. radicals' debates over experimentalism, the relation of art to propaganda, and the nature of proletarian literature recasts the relation of writers to the organized left. Her grasp of the left's positions on the "Negro question" and the "woman question" enables a nuanced analysis of the relation of class to race and gender in the proletarian novel. Moreover, examining the articulation of political doctrine in different novelistic modes, Foley develops a model for discussing the interplay between politics and literary conventions and genres. Radical Representations recovers a literature of theoretical and artistic value meriting renewed attention form those interested in American literature, American studies, the U. S. left, and cultural studies generally.

Partisan Aesthetics

Partisan Aesthetics
Author: Sanjukta Sunderason
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503613003

Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India's Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political participations and dissociations. Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sunderason activates, instead, distinctly locational histories that refract transnational currents. She analyzes largely unknown and dispersed archives—drawings, diaries, posters, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside paintings and prints—and insists that art as archive is foundational to understanding modern art's socialist affiliations during India's long decolonization. By bringing together expanding fields of South Asian art, global modernisms, and Third World cultures, Partisan Aesthetics generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization.

Destabilising Interventions in Somalia

Destabilising Interventions in Somalia
Author: Debora Valentina Malito
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351122495

This book is a critical reading of contemporary interventionism, exploring how interventions shape the course of conflicts and reconciliation processes in Somalia. In a critical departure from the state-capacity consensus that has dominated the debate on terrorism and state failure, this book argues that conflict and sovereignty transformations in Somalia cannot be understood as the result of a gap in state-capacity, as multiple interventions have compromised the autonomy of the target state and society to act as sovereign. Destabilising Interventions in Somalia focuses on the humanitarian intervention of the mid-1990s, the Ethiopia–Eritrean regional proxy war in the late 1990s and the Global War on Terror in the 2000s. Examining the politics and mechanisms of multiple interventions, this book shows how interveners complicate and amplify existing conflicts, how they reiterate the international dimension of the conflict itself, and how they orient the target state towards the outsourcing of sovereignty functions. Key to this process has been the violent and exclusionary nature of interventions grounded in the aspiration of transforming existing political orders. Destabilising Interventions in Somalia will be of interest to students of African peace and conflict studies, international intervention and International Relations.