Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
214,156
result(s) for
"Social power"
Sort by:
The power book
Takes a look at different types of power, what it means to have power, and what you can do with your own power to create positive change in the world, no matter who or how old you are.
Book
Can Russia Modernise?
In this original, bottom-up account of the evolution of contemporary Russia, Alena Ledeneva seeks to reveal how informal power operates. Concentrating on Vladimir Putin's system of governance - referred to as sistema - she identifies four key types of networks: his inner circle, useful friends, core contacts and more diffuse ties and connections. These networks serve sistema but also serve themselves. Reliance on networks enables leaders to mobilise and to control, yet they also lock politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen into informal deals, mediated interests and personalised loyalty. This is the 'modernisation trap of informality': one cannot use the potential of informal networks without triggering their negative long-term consequences for institutional development. Ledeneva's perspective on informal power is based on in-depth interviews with sistema insiders and enhanced by evidence of its workings brought to light in court cases, enabling her to draw broad conclusions about the prospects for Russia's political institutions.
eBook
The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City
The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortés and his followers conquered the city. Cortés boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was \"destroyed and razed to the ground.\" But was it?Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city's indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city's extraordinary waterworks—the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century—to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.
eBook
Police Reform Through a Power Lens
Scholars and reformers have in recent years begun to imagine new and different configurations for how the state can design policing institutions. These conversations have increased in volume and urgency in response to the 2020 national uprising against police violence, when radical demands born within social movements have gained steam—demands to defund the police, to institute \"people's budgets,\" and to give communities control over the state provision of security. In recent years, within this time of foment and possibility, social movements have been proposing, creating, and sometimes establishing new governance arrangements that shift power over policing to those who have been most harmed by mass criminalization and mass incarceration. These recent pushes by social movements for power shifting surface a fundamental set of questions about the very purpose of police reform, adding a new way for scholars and reformers to think about the contours and objectives of the state's provision of safety and security—what this Article terms the power lens. This Article examines the movement focus on power shifting in the governance of the police at both the local and national levels. It fleshes out a three-part theoretical account of why the power lens is an important and necessary addition to how scholars and reformers view the regulation of policing. First, shifting power to policed populations is reparative, in the sense that it shifts power downward toward populations who have been denied political power directly as a result of the history of policing policies and practices in their neighborhoods. Second, power shifting is a means of promoting antisubordination, based on the idea that it is wrong for the state to engage in practices that enforce the inferior social status of historically oppressed groups. Third, a power lens on police reform promotes a particular view of contestatory democracy, one in which democratic policing has as one of its objectives the facilitation of countervailing power for those subject to the domination of the state. Taken together, the power lens brings a critical eye to the ways in which the construction of the notion of \"expertise\" often denies agency to the people who most often interact with police in the streets and on the roads. More broadly, the power lens opens up discussions of reform to first-order questions about how the state should go about providing safety and security in our time, with or without the police as we know it.
Journal Article
State Building in Putin’s Russia
This book argues that Putin's strategy for rebuilding the state was fundamentally flawed. Taylor demonstrates that a disregard for the way state officials behave toward citizens - state quality - had a negative impact on what the state could do - state capacity. Focusing on those organizations that control state coercion, what Russians call the 'power ministries', Taylor shows that many of the weaknesses of the Russian state that existed under Boris Yeltsin persisted under Putin. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews, as well as a wide range of comparative data, the book reveals the practices and norms that guide the behavior of Russian power ministry officials (the so-called siloviki), especially law enforcement personnel. By examining siloviki behavior from the Kremlin down to the street level, State Building in Putin's Russia uncovers the who, where and how of Russian state building after communism.
eBook
The Franco-Mauritian elite
Mauritian independence in 1968 marked the end of a regime favorable to the Franco-Mauritians, the island's white colonial elite. Now, in postcolonial Mauritius, this group is faced with a much more diverse power constellation and often feels in competition with others vying for their privileges. Though this is a clear departure from the colonial heydays, Franco-Mauritians have been able to continue their elite position into the early twenty-first century. This book focuses on the power of white elites still lingering on in postcolonial realities, and with regards to elites and power in general, addresses anew how an elite group aims to prolong its position over time.
eBook