Authoritarian Russia has adopted five strategies to preserve the Kremlin's political power: insulate, bolster, subvert, redefine and coordinate. Thomas Ambrosio examines each of these in turn, all of which seek to counter or undermine regional democratic trends both at home and throughout the former Soviet Union. Policies such as these are of great concern to the growing literature on how autocratic regimes are becoming more active in their resistance to democracy. Through detailed case studies of each strategy, this book makes significant contributions to our understandings of Russian domestic and foreign policies, democratization theory and the policy challenges associated with democracy promotion.
This book offers the most thorough, detailed inside story of the preparation, negotiation, performance, and achievements of G20 gatherings from their start at the finance level in 1999 through their rise to become leader-level summits in response to the great global financial crisis in 2008. Follow the moves of America’s George Bush and Barack Obama, Britain’s Gordon Brown and David Cameron, Canada’s Stephen Harper, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and other key leaders as they struggle to contain the worst global recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This book provides a full chapter-long account of each of the first four G20 summits from Washington to Toronto with summaries of the ensuing summits. It uses international relations theory to build and apply a model of systemic hub governance to back its central claim to show convincingly that G20 performance has grown to successfully govern an increasingly interconnected, complex, crisis-ridden, globalized twenty-first century world.
Tracing the use of legal themes in the gothic novel, Bridget M. Marshall shows these devices reflect an outpouring of anxiety about the nature of justice. On both sides of the Atlantic, novelists like William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Charles Brockden Brown, and Hannah Crafts question the foundations of the Anglo-American justice system through their portrayals of criminal and judicial procedures and their use of found documents and legal forms as key plot devices. As gothic villains, from Walpole's Manfred to Godwin's Tyrrell to Stoker's Dracula, manipulate the law and legal system to expand their power, readers are confronted with a legal system that is not merely ineffective at stopping villains but actually enables them to inflict ever greater harm on their victims. By invoking actual laws like the Black Act in England or the Fugitive Slave Act in America, gothic novels connect the fantastic horrors that constitute their primary appeal with much more shocking examples of terror and injustice. Finally, the gothic novel's preoccupation with injustice is just one element of many that connects the genre to slave narratives and to the horrors of American slavery.
This book describes and explains the development of international parliamentary institutions and asks why international organizations establish parliamentary institutions without, however, granting them relevant decision-making powers.
The setting of this volume is the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, where Christianity and Islam co-existed side by side as the official religions of Muslim al-Andalus on the one hand, and the Christian kingdoms in the north of the peninsula on the other. Its purpose is to examine the meaning of the word 'Mozarab' and the history and nature of the people called by that name; it represents a synthesis of the author's many years of research and publication in this field. Richard Hitchcock first sets out to explain what being a non-Muslim meant in al-Andalus, both in the higher echelons of society and at a humbler level. The terms used by Arab chroniclers, when examined carefully, suggest a lesser preoccupation with purely religious values than hitherto appreciated. Mozarabism in León and Toledo, two notably distinct phenomena, are then considered at length, and there are two chapters exploring the issues that arose, firstly when Mozarabs were relocated in twelfth-century Aragón, and secondly, in sixteenth-century Toledo, when they were striving to retain their identity.
This entertaining and useful book provides a comprehensive survey of films about the ancient world, from The Last Days of Pompeii to Gladiator. Jon Solomon catalogues, describes, and evaluates films set in ancient Greece and Rome, films about Greek and Roman history and mythology, films of the Old and New Testaments, films set in ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Persia, films of ancient tragedies, comic films set in the ancient world, and more. The book has been updated to include feature films and made-for-television movies produced in the past two decades. More than two hundred photographs illustrate both the films themselves and the ancient sources from which their imagery derives.
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