Government & Politics

This new edition offers:
-A revised structure to aid navigation and understanding
-New learning features, ‘Using Theory’ and ‘Exploring Problems’, designed to help students think comparatively
-Empirical global examples, with increased coverage of non-Western scholarship and analyses
-Coverage of important contemporary topics including: minorities; LGBTQ+ issues; identity politics; women in politics; political trust; populism; Covid-19.

Featuring a wide range of engaging learning features, this book is an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Comparative Politics, Comparative Government, Introduction to Politics and Introduction to Political Science.

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In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter.

Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages.

The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.

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Islam is often associated with words like oppression, totalitarianism, intolerance, cruelty, misogyny, and homophobia, while its presumed antonyms are Christianity, the West, liberalism, individualism, freedom, citizenship, and democracy. In the most alarmist views, the West’s most cherished values—freedom, equality, and tolerance—are said to be endangered by Islam worldwide.

Joseph Massad’s Islam in Liberalism explores what Islam has become in today’s world. He seeks to understand how anxieties about tyranny, intolerance, misogyny, and homophobia, seen in the politics of the Middle East, are projected onto Islam itself. Massad shows that through this projection Europe emerges as democratic and tolerant, feminist, and pro-LGBT rights—or, in short, Islam-free. Massad documents the Christian and liberal idea that we should missionize democracy, women’s rights, sexual rights, tolerance, equality, and even therapies to cure Muslims of their un-European, un-Christian, and illiberal ways. Along the way he sheds light on a variety of controversial topics, including the meanings of democracy—and the ideological assumption that Islam is not compatible with it while Christianity is. Islam in Liberalism is an unflinching critique of Western assumptions and of the liberalism that Europe and America present as salvation to Islam.

“Essential reading for all scholars of Islam and Middle East politics.” —Cambridge Review of International Affairs

“Reminds us that in order to move beyond scholarship revolving around a simplistic binarism between West and non-West, we must never forget how this opposition has shaped and continues to actively influence scholarship today.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

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‘This book – the fourth in a path-breaking series – demonstrates why a critical political economy approach is more crucial than ever for understanding Southeast Asia’s transformation. Across a wide range of topics, the book explains how capitalist development and globalisation are reshaping the societies, economies and politics of a diverse group of countries, casting light on the deep sources of economic and social power in the region. This is a book that every student of Southeast Asia needs to read.’ (Professor Edward Aspinall, Australian National University, Australia)

‘This book does what a work on political economy should do: challenge existing paradigms in order to gain a deeper understanding of the processes of social transformation. This volume is distinctive in three ways. First, it eschews methodological nationalism and focuses on how the interaction of national, regional, and global forces are shaping and reshaping systems of governance, mass politics, economies, labor-capital relations, migration, and gender relations across the region. Second, it is a bold effort to show how the “Murdoch School,” which focuses on the dynamic synergy of internal class relations and global capitalism, provides a better explanatory framework for understanding social change in Southeast Asia than the rival “developmental state” and “historical institutionalist” approaches. Third, alongside established luminaries in the field, it showcases the younger generation of political economists doing pathbreaking work on different dimensions of the political economy of the region.’ (Walden Bello, State University of New York at Binghamton, USA, and Former Member of the Philippines’ House of Representatives)

‘This very timely fourth edition explores Southeast Asia’s political economy within the context of hyperglobalisation and China’s pronounced social-structural impacts on international politics, finance and economics over the past decade and a half. The volume successfully adopts a cross-cutting thematic approach, while also conveying the diversity and divergences among the Southeast Asian states and economies. This will be an important resource for scholars of International Relations and Comparative Politics, who need to take an interest in a dynamic and increasingly significant part of Asia.’ (Professor Evelyn Goh, Australian National University, Australia)

“This ambitious collection takes a consistent theoretical approach and applies it to a thematic, comparative analysis across Southeast Asia. The yield is impressive: the social, political and economic forces constituting the current conjuncture are not simply invoked, they are thoroughly identified and explained. By posing the deceptively simple questions of what is happening and why, the authors demonstrate the reciprocal relation between theory-building and empirical inquiry, providing a model of engaged scholarship with global resonance. Bravo!’ (Professor Tania Li, University of Toronto, Canada)

‘Counteracting the spaceless and flattened geography of much literature on uneven development, this book delivers a forensic examination of the unevenness of geographical development in Southeast Asia and the relations of force shaping capital, state, nature and civil society. This is the most compelling theoretical and empirical political economy book available on Southeast Asia.’ (Professor Adam David Morton, U

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In the dark days of Covid time, confined to quarters in lockdown, the authors, William Scally and Tim Bourke retained their sanity by engaging in what proved to be an all-engrossing contest: devising a complex and broad-reaching series of questions that would brighten the pandemic days. The result was a slim volume that made a fine debut title.

Later, during 2022, Bourke and Scally reviewed and fully revised the first edition, eliminating certain material and introducing some 230 brand new questions and solutions. This culminated in the book you hold in your hand – a second edition boasting a generous make-over, with a broad range of updated puzzles for the discerning reader.

The Ultimate Politics and History Quiz contains five hundred thought-provoking queries, together with their exceptionally diverse solutions. The questions traverse the world of Irish and international politics and history, and while some of them are relatively straightforward, many pose quite the conundrum. The brain that likes a challenge will relish this book.

Tim Bourke and William Scally have both worked in various areas of industry, education and politics.

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Jürgen Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in 1962, has long been recognized as one of the most important works of twentieth-century social thought. Blending philosophy and social history, it offered an account of the public sphere as a domain that mediates between civil society and the state in which citizens could discuss matters of common concern and participate in democratic decision-making through the formation of public opinion.  Now, in view of the digital revolution and the resulting crisis of democracy, he returns to this important topic.

In this new book Habermas focuses on digital media, in particular social media, which are increasingly relegating traditional mass media to the background. While the new media initially promised to empower users, this promise is being undermined by their algorithm-steered platform structure that promotes self-enclosed informational ‘bubbles’ and discursive ‘echo chambers’ in which users split into a plurality of pseudo-publics that are largely closed off from one other. Habermas argues that, without appropriate regulation of digital media, this new structural transformation is in danger of hollowing out the institutions through which democracies can shape social and economic processes and address urgent collective problems, ranging from growing social inequality to the climate crisis. 

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