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This article makes a claim for re-engaging the concept of 'act' in the study of securitization. While much has been written about the discursive and communicative aspects of securitizing, the concept of 'act' that contains much of the politicality of the speech-act approach to security has been relatively ignored. The task of re-engaging 'acts' is particularly pertinent in the contemporary context, in which politically salient speech acts are heavily displaced by securitizing practices and devices that appear as banal, little security nothings. The main purpose of the article is to begin the framing of a research agenda that asks what political acts can be in diffuse security processes that efface securitizing speech acts.

In the mid-2000s, the decline of opposition politics in Russia was so sharp and undisputed that the title of an article I wrote at the time, ‘Political Opposition in Russia: A Dying Species?’ (Gel'man 2005) met with little objection. At that time, the impact of the opposition was peripheral at best. The ‘party of power’, United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya—UR), dominated both nationwide (Remington 2008) and sub-national (Ross 2011) legislatures, and the few representatives of the opposition exerted almost no influence on decision making. Political opposition in Russia was driven into very narrow ‘niches’ (Greene 2007), if not into ghettos, and spectators were rather gloomy about the chances of its rebirth. Ten years later, Russia's political landscape looks rather different. Protest meetings in Moscow and other cities in 2011–2012 brought together hundreds of thousands of participants under political slogans, and the Russian opposition was able to multiply its ranks, to change its leadership, to reach a ‘negative consensus’ vis-à-vis the status quo political regime, and to come to the front stage of Russian politics. What were the causes of the rebirth of the political opposition in Russia in the 2010s, and what are the factors that continue to drive this process?

After 1945, neo-liberal thinkers and think-tanks in the US and UK outlined different state welfare systems for the poor, such as Milton Friedman's negative income tax. These were underpinned by a rational, economistic conception of human nature. Between 1975 and 1979, Thatcher's Conservative party abandoned attempts to develop comprehensive, state-led, paternalistic schemes to tackle poverty. Thatcherites focused instead on creating what they saw as a rational tax/benefit system which would provide a safety-net for the poor, but encourage effort and thrift. They attempted to marginalize the importance of state welfare for the middle classes, to re-invigorate the ‘bourgeois virtues’ which had flourished in Victorian Britain. A family-centred, moralistic individualism underpinned Thatcherite policies; this individualism was not precisely congruent with that of neo-liberal theorists. Its roots lay in personal sources (particularly Methodism), as well as home-grown discourses on poverty and a Hayekian fear of the state. Though Thatcherites took ideas from diverse sources, their political project had a single guiding purpose: the moral (and, secondarily, economic) rejuvenation of Britain. Thatcherism was, thus, an ‘ideology’ in the sense used by Michael Freeden.

We argue that party government in the U.S. House of Representatives rests on two pillars: the pursuit of policy goals and the disbursement of particularistic benefits. Existing theories of party government argue that the majority party in the House is often successful in biasing policy outcomes in its favor. In the process, it creates \"policy losers\" among its own members who nevertheless support their party on procedural votes. We posit that the majority party cretes an incentive for even the policy losers to support a procedural coalition through judicious distribution of particularistic benefits that compensates policy losers at a rate commensurate with the policy losses that they suffer. We evaluate our theory empirically using the concept of \"roll rates\" in conjunction with federal domestic outlays data for the period 1983-96. We find that, within the majority party, policy losers are favored in the distribution of \"pork barrel\" spending throughout this period.

The Putin system is based on control and the ‘manual’ management of political processes. In part this was a response to what was perceived to be the ‘anarcho-democracy’ of the 1990s, but it was also an attempt to find a way of dealing with more immediate challenges of societal and political management. The regime devised a whole series of strategies for dealing with opposition, ranging from cooptation to coercion. The ideological framework was a distinctive form of neo-Soviet depoliticisation based on an inclusive ‘centrism’. This model of political management was challenged during the 2011–2012 electoral cycle by a mass protest movement and a degree of intra-elite political contestation. This was accompanied by the radicalisation of a traditionalist counter-movement accompanied by a revanchist spirit at the heart of Putin's centrist coalition, which spawned a range of restrictive legislation in the Sixth Duma from 2012. This essay examines the classic mode of Putinite political management and the challenges it has faced since Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. Both the Putin system and its opponents have become locked into a type of politics in which they feed off each other, reducing the potential for a breakthrough into a genuinely pluralistic and competitive system. At the same time, the very diversity of the new era of contentious politics has generated political pluralism in society, while the multifaceted regime response has combined coercion with elements of decompression. Contestation has taken place both within and between the regime and oppositional forces, creating opportunities for cross-cutting alliances and hostilities.

The recent political, economic and social histories of Bolivia and Ecuador point to a broader, post-neoliberal trend emerging in Latin America. Presidents Evo Morales and Rafael Correa have closely followed the basic model of twenty-first-century socialism as an alternative to free market capitalism. In theory, both leaders have successfully re-founded their countries with new constitutions that encompass the interests of all sectors of society. In practice, however, we argue that a volatile economic climate, poorly implemented reforms, increased opposition, and low political tolerance all indicate limitations to the viability of twenty-first-century socialism as a post-neoliberal development model.

The article analyses the evolution of European competition policy. It is argued that the content, form, and scope of competition regulation has undergone a major transformation over the past fifty years, which is related to broader socio-economic developments. Until the mid-1980s, competition policy formed part of the institutional nexus of the postwar order of 'embedded liberalism', underpinned by a Fordist accumulation regime and Keynesian welfare institutions. It exemplified strong neo-mercantilist and protectionist traits, allowing for significant distortions of competition, whenever justified for general reasons of industrial and social policy. Since the mid-1980s, gradually, a neoliberal 'competition only' vision came to dominate, giving rise to a more market-based competition regime, in which private rather than public actors prevail, and which seeks to create an ever-bigger 'level playing field' of free markets. This transformation is linked to the broader context of the disruption of the postwar social order and the rise of neoliberalism. A public-private alliance of transnational actors, consisting of the European Commission's DG Competition and transnational business elite networks, were the driving forces behind the 'neoliberalisation' of competition policy.

NATO has throughout its history been the subject of prognostications of crisis and dissolution. Indeed, the alliance has been written off so many times that crisis as normality has come to typify its development. In the twenty-year history of NATO's post-Cold War development, Operation Allied Force stands midway between the existential moment that was the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the current travails being experienced in Afghanistan. A comparison of NATO's experience in the Balkans and in the Afghan theatre suggests that the view of a NATO perched permanently at the edge of collapse is problematic and misleading. This is not to defend alliance actions as such but rather to suggest that the narrative of crisis and collapse makes for poor analysis and underestimates NATO's proclivity for adaptation and endurance.

Evidence from the Nixon tapes, now available to researchers, shows that President Richard Nixon pressured the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, to engage in expansionary monetary policies in the run-up to the 1972 election. This paper quotes the relevant conversations from the Nixon tapes. Questions remain as to whether Burns followed an expansionary policy in an already-inflationary environment out of conviction or because of political pressure.

Despite the wealth of literature generated over the past two decades on the apology as a speech act, the political apology has been relatively neglected as a research topic. This article aims to examine the pragmatics of such apologies as a generic type of discourse by identifying their salient characteristics: they are in the public domain and highly mediated; they are generated by (and generate) conflict and controversy; on the basis of media and viewer evaluations/judgements, they need to contain both an illocutionary force indicating device (Ifid) and an explicit expression of the acceptance of responsibility/blame for the 'Offence' in order to be clearly perceived as valid apologies; and they rarely, if ever, involve an expression of absolution. Drawing primarily on data concerning recent political events in the UK (especially the Iraq War), the article attempts to set out and illustrate the different types of political apology. The resulting analysis is related both to previous and current apology research and to recent developments in politeness theory.