Bøker i Political Science (COL)-serien

Since 2008, foreign land acquisitions have attracted international attention under the term »land grabbing.« Illustrated by rich and nuanced empirical accounts of forty Chinese and British investment projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, Ariane Goetz explains the phenomenon of »land grabbing« from the perspective of two investor countries. She reflects on Chinese and British public policy, state-society relations, national developmental contexts, ideologies, and international relations and thereby gives insights into the political economies that enable these investments as well as the development ambitions and institutionalized paradigms of which they form a part.

In the Global South, Indigenous and Native people continue to live under colonial relations within formally independent nation-states. Sebastian Garbe offers a critical perspective on contemporary expressions of international solidarity and transnational advocacy. He combines approaches from critical race and decolonial studies with an activist ethnography on networked spaces of encounters created through solidarity activism by Mapuche and non-Mapuche actors. Departing from those experiences, this book not only presents potential pitfalls of transnational advocacy but suggests new ways of understanding and practicing solidarity.

Where are all the bodies? Political institutions are populated by living, breathing human beings, who eat, sleep, gesture, desire and suffer. And yet participants of the political realm are often depicted as disembodied minds, detached and distinct from their corporeal existence. Amanda Machin considers six embodied modes of democratic politics: representation, deliberation, disagreement, protest, occupation and counsel. Drawing on diverse thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, Simone de Beauvoir, Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, she offers an absorbing illustration of the ways human bodies are not only the disciplined objects of politics, but the generative subjects of democracy.

Human rights violations linked to norms of health, fitness, and social usefulness have long been overlooked by Historic Justice Studies. Kathrin Braun introduces the concept of »injuries of normality« to capture the specifics of this type of human rights violation and the respective struggles for historic justice. She examines the processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the context of coercive sterilization, institutional killings, as well as the persecution of homosexual men and of »asocials« under Nazi rule. She argues that an analytic perspective on political temporality allows us to better understand the formation of these biopolitical human rights violations and their exclusion from memory and historic justice.

Gender impact assessment has been both celebrated as a beacon of hope for the cause of gender equality and criticised as being ineffectual. More than 20 years of gender mainstreaming have demonstrated that equality governance with and through impact assessment is an intersectional and still evolving process.Arn T. Sauer's study examines the instruments of gendered policy analysis and the conditions under which they are being used by the Canadian federal government and the European Commission. Interviews with experts from public administration and instrument designers as well as document analyses reveal benefits and challenges and show that the success of equality governance depends upon whether knowledge about gendered policy and appropriate administrative practices are embedded, embodied and entrenched in public administration.