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The world of welfare has changed radically. As the poor trade welfare checks for low-wage jobs, their low earnings qualify them for a hefty check come tax time—a combination of the earned income tax credit and other refunds. For many working parents this one check is like hitting the lottery, offering several months' wages as well as the hope of investing in a better future. Drawing on interviews with 115 families, the authors look at how parents plan to use this annual cash windfall to build up savings, go back to school, and send their kids to college. However, these dreams of upward mobility are often dashed by the difficulty of trying to get by on meager wages. In accessible and engaging prose, It's Not Like I'm Poor examines the costs and benefits of the new work-based safety net, suggesting ways to augment its strengths so that more of the working poor can realize the promise of a middle-class life.

Why do politicians intervene in some chieftaincy succession disputes but not others? The key actors and their motivations in these processes remain understudied. In this article I leverage a comparative analysis of two similar chieftaincy disputes in Ghana's Upper West Region, and develop inductively a theory of local aspirants – political actors with dual memberships in chieftaincy and politics. I find that local aspirants from disputing factions that seek to change the status quo of the dispute have particular interests in politicising the chieftaincy disputes. These findings contribute to our knowledge about how chieftaincy disputes become politicised, by emphasising the roles played by politicians embedded in chieftaincy.

All societies must deal with the possibility of violence, and they do so in different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger social science and historical framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked. Most societies, which we call natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of the economy to create privileged interests. These privileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doing so hinders both economic and political development. In contrast, modern societies create open access to economic and political organizations, fostering political and economic competition. The book provides a framework for understanding the two types of social orders, why open access societies are both politically and economically more developed, and how some 25 countries have made the transition between the two types.

Since its emergence at the end of the seventeenth century, industrial capitalism as a specific form of social organisation has set recurrent challenges to its own persistence, and until today, it has proved to be successful to develop new ways of accumulation based on its capacity of adaptation. Is this process of transition now accelerating or reaching an end point? This book is a critical exploration of capitalism in transition, bringing together cutting edge, world renowned scholars who reflect from different disciplinary points of view. This collection engages with the primarily Western themes of welfare capitalism and social fragmentation. Structured over three parts, the book analyses; the transformations of welfare societies and capitalism with a focus on South European welfare states and their (in)capacity to tackle poverty; the transformation of work and migration with a special attention to informality and the question of social rights; and the transformation of cities.

This is a best-seller in China and a geopolitical book for our times. As a leading thinker from China, Zhang Weiwei provides an original, comprehensive and engrossing study on the rise of China and its effective yet controversial model of development, and the book has become a centerpiece of an unfolding debate within China on the nature and future of the world's most populous nation and its possible global impact. China's rise, according to Zhang, is not the rise of an ordinary country, but the rise of a different type of country, a country sui generis, a civilizational state, a new model of development and a new political discourse which indeed questions many of the Western assumptions about democracy, good governance and human rights. The book is as analytical as it is provocative, and should be required reading for everyone concerned with the rise of China and its global implications.

Of the 15 republics that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, six have predominantly Muslim populations. These nations are Azerbaijan, in the southern Caucasus, and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, with a combined population of approximately 65 million people. As Soviet power declined and then finally collapsed, these six newly independent nations found themselves confronted with a world of competing philosophies ranging from the liberal secularism of Russia and Turkey to various moderate and reformist religious movements to varieties of fundamentalism and Islamist political movements emanating from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. During the transition period since 1991, the region has been afflicted by acute problems, including endemic state crisis, crime and narcotics, ethnic tensions, corruption, and competition over energy resources. ... This article examines the role of education in the maintenance of social cohesion and the formation of new identities amid the economic decline and political volatility of these six new nations. One of the most acute questions is whether the degradation of the state-sponsored secular educational systems is approaching a \"tipping point.\" This is the point at which institutional and professional capacity drain away so that the educational systems are no longer capable of regenerating themselves. If the state-sponsored secular educational systems continue to fail, will young people continue to emigrate or seek escape in drug abuse, illegal activities, or social alternatives in the form of nationalism, political radicalism, or religious extremism? In this article, [the authors] first describe the historical legacies in education in the period before independence in 1991. Then [they] analyze the systemic crises in education since 1991, as well as the newly independent nations' often halfhearted attempts to embrace Islam and to find some place for religious and ethical thought and values in what had been aggressively secular educational systems. [They] pay particular attention to the ways in which the educational systems have deteriorated since 1991, examining economic deterioration, the degradation of educational infrastructure, and the decline in enrollment and retention, while considering the effects of these crises on social cohesion and political legitimacy. [The authors] conclude with some thoughts about the potential struggles that lie ahead as the peoples of Azerbaijan and Central Asia seek to reform their educational systems and thereby stabilize and revitalize the processes of social cohesion in their societies. (DIPF/Orig.).

The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination is a groundbreaking collection of essays by a diverse set of leading scholars who examine the entangled and evolving global array of corporate-state structures of hegemonic power—what the editors refer to as “the power complex”—that was first analyzed by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic work, The Power Elite. In this new volume edited by Steven Best, Richard Kahn, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Peter McLaren, the power complex is conceived as co-constituted, interdependent and imbricated systems of domination. Spreading insidiously on a global level, the transnational institutional relationships of the power complex combine the logics of capitalist exploitation and profits and industrialist norms of efficiency, control, and mass production, While some have begun to analyze these institutional complexes as separate entities, this book is unique in analyzing them as overlapping, mutually-enforcing systems that operate globally and which will undoubtedly frame the macro-narrative of the 21st century (and perhaps beyond). The global industrial complex—a grand power complex of complexes—thus poses one of the most formidable challenges to the sustainability of planetary democracy, freedom and peace today. But there can be no serious talk of opposition to it until it is more popularly named and understood. The Global Industrial Complex aims to be a foundational contribution to this emerging educational and political project.

In recent years sub-Saharan African states, including Malawi, have adopted the Education for All (EFA) goal of universal, fee-free primary education (UPE). The EFA process is often linked to the expansion and sustainability of universal rights, democratic processes, and political systems. ... The purported egalitarian and democratizing effects of EFA are regularly touted in arguments made for international support of EFA. At the same time, measures of good governance and political democratization are increasingly included among the aid criteria considered by international donors. And yet, despite the supposed linkage between EFA and political democratization, there have been few empirical studies of the effects of EFA on democratization, or vice versa. The research reported here explores the case of UPE and political democratization in Malawi, a country in central eastern Africa. ... This research is one part of a 3-year, multisite, multilevel ethnography, undertaken in four periods between 1996 and 2002. The research was designed to explore the intersections of political democracy, FPE, gender, and HIV/AIDS in Malawi. This article presents results derived principally from ethnographic research conducted in 2001-2 in three schools and the villages they served. However, the analysis also draws on investigations with government offices at the district, divisional, regional, and central levels, with local and national nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and with international lenders and NGOs. (DIPF/Orig.).

This paper examines a football doping incident that occurred at the University of Waterloo (UW) in Canada, and critically analyzes the doping policy recommendations for intercollegiate sport sparked by the scandal. In March 2010 a police raid led to the discovery of a large quantity of performance-enhancing drugs at a home linked to a former student-athlete, which resulted in an entire football team being subjected to mandatory drug testing. After the release of the test results, a task force was formed by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) to investigate doping in Canadian sport. Using a triangulation approach, which includes a case study of the UW doping scandal, semistructured interviews with student-athletes, and policy analysis of the reports that transpired, we critically examine the potential effects and scope of applicability of the new recommendations put forward by the task force. In critiquing the resulting recommendations, this paper cautions that replacing a culture of silence with a culture of surveillance can have detrimental effects in the fight against doping in sport. Verf.-Referat.

Review of the monograph: John S. Saul, Liberation Lite: The Roots of Recolonization in Southern Africa, Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-59221-835-6, 133 pagesBesprechung der Monographie: John S. Saul, Liberation Lite: The Roots of Recolonization in Southern Africa, Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-59221-835-6, 133 Seiten