EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

When we think of a “woman entrepreneur”, what comes to mind? Women entrepreneurs hold a dominant presence in political, social, economic and development imaginaries, as a global class of workers typifying the contemporary, neoliberal era. Their enterprise is readily proffered as the evidence of a nation’s progress, inclusion and development. International institutions, development banks, states, civil society groups, corporations and international financial institutions promote women’s enterprise in nearly every corner of the globe. A powerful mythology has grown up around the idea of women as empowered, financial saviour-mothers who benefit the prosperity, inclusivity, and security of a nation and the global economy. In this book, Melissa Langworthy exposes these myths for what they are and in offering a political economy of women’s enterprise, she asks what value women’s enterprise gives, not to women, but to the institutions that have shaped them and placed them in the centre of the global imaginary.

Constitutional ambiguity has been an important enabler of European integration. Achim Hurrelmann argues that although this can cause problems, it often remains the best option for holding the European Union together and has shaped how the EU has responded to its recent crises. This book reinterprets European integration using the concept of “constitutional abeyances” – originally developed by Michael Foley and not previously applied to the EU – which are unresolved issues that political elites avoid politicizing to prevent conflict. Hurrelmann shows that it is a concept that can help us better understand the EU: what it is, how it works, why it sometimes does not work, and how it responds when crises hit. He shows that, although these strategies may be criticized, they ultimately have contributed to the EU’s resilience in face of the crises over the euro, migration and rule of law.

News media reporting on female political violence invariably portrays the perpetrators as duped, naive and exploited, acting from personal rather than political motivations, as anomalous intruders in a masculine realm and de-feminized as monsters. By diminishing their agency, the challenge that women’s violence poses to the gendered national order is contained. Drawing on five comparative case studies spanning more than 70 years of militant campaigns against the UK and France, this book interrogates how media representations of politically violent women are shaped by gender, race, religion, class and geography. It considers how women’s political violence is framed, what influences these portrayals, and what ideological work they perform. In answering these questions, the book reveals how these representations operate as a battleground where the nation’s gendered boundaries are defined and defended, and the national order is reproduced.

In this carefully argued case for a federal Europe, Céline Spector proposes that national sovereignty has become increasingly untenable as mechanisms perpetuating fiscal, social and environmental inequities transcend borders. Indeed, in the face of Russian aggression and America’s apparent retreat from its protective role, strengthening European integration has become essential and federalization appears increasingly necessary. Although the concept of the sovereign people has become symbolic within nation-states, Spector show that it has become devoid of substantive political force. Rather than lamenting the decline of direct democracy, she advocates for a democratized European Union that could redefine popular sovereignty and protect human rights. The transformation of state sovereignty need not signal democracy’s end or the subordination of politics to law. Instead, it could facilitate new forms of political community at the European level and enable a reconceptualization of popular sovereignty beyond the nation-state.

Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term "animal style", this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbours to showcase worldliness and control over the "Other". In this study of enormous geographical scope, the author raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the art-historical canon.

The way we work is radically changing, due to advancements in technology, shifting work norms, changes to the landscape of labour policy, and unprecedented global events, like the Covid-19 pandemic. As the changes have played out with increasing speed and intensity, in public and in private spheres, many have questioned whether work is something we need to do at all. After all, much work has become bad. Many forms of it are physically dangerous, psychologically harmful, dehumanizing, unfulfilling, or just plain bullshit. Much of it is underpaid and unfairly compensated. Many toil for much of their lives in jobs they dislike with little or nothing to show for it. The anti-work view argues – persuasively so – that humanity would be better off in a world without work. But while some forms of work can be very bad, there is much evidence to suggest that it can also be very good – perhaps even an essential component of people’s happiness and well-being. A person’s work can be the thing that gets them out of bed in the morning, fills them with a sense of purpose, and provides them with a social community, all while meeting their material and financial needs. Above all, work is a social activity: one that we do together with others, in response to their needs and our own, in the context of the institutions and structures that give shape to our social world. Working For Each Other challenges the anti-work narrative by proposing an alternative view: that work is not an individual necessity, but a social one. As an individual, people have certain needs that allow them to live and thrive in the world: things like food, shelter and resources. In the same way, our communities and societies have requirements – like infrastructure and essential services – that they can’t do without. Work is one of these fundamental collective needs: even if one does not work, someone else must. Recognising the role that work plays in how we communicate with each other about our contributions to our communities and societies can allow us to reimagine the promise of work to be part of a good life – in particular, a life shared with others.

Taylor Knight reveals the way in which phenomenology initiates a return to ontology construed through a dialectical relationship between being and element. Within phenomenology’s return to the elemental, Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy is a key locus, opening critical paths forward into an ontology for the ecological age. With reference to his phenomenological forebears - Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas - his non-phenomenological influences - Bachelard, Schelling, Freud - and his dialogue with Greek thought - Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle – Knight shows what is authentically new in Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology.

Drawing on a wide variety of Chinese-language publications and in-depth interviews with high-school students, Mobilising China's One-Child Generation provides systematic evidence of the spread of martial logic and techniques into Chinese schools. The book explores how China has implemented Patriotic Education and National Defence Education programmes to foster love for the nation and the Party-state, mobilise the population to fight modern wars in the information age, and encourage youth to join the army. It studies how these programmes present the tropes of war and the military to youth, and how they are related to shifting constructions of gender and the national collectivity. It also documents students' varied perceptions–and notably contestations–of this militarised ethos, complicating our understanding of popular nationalism and militarisation processes in this authoritarian global power.

Western thinking on sexuality has historically affirmed not only a binary division between two sexes, each of which is defined by unique fixed attributes that delineate its essence, but also a privileging of the masculine over the feminine and heteronormative relations over alternatives. By engaging with psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, feminist and gender theory, and the new materialisms, Gavin Rae shows how this model came under sustained and heterogeneous attack in the twentieth century. Rather than affirm one of these critical trajectories, Rae rethinks the problematic by turning to Walter Benjamin’s notion of concepts as constellations to develop an alternative model called sexuality as constellation.

The Origins of the Christ Movement in Corinth: Paul’s Chord of Gods argues that Paul’s language about his god (father, lord Jesus Christ and pneuma) would have been familiar to Corinthian gentiles as a small group of gods – a chord of gods. Worship of Paul’s chord of gods matches the common religious practice (in Theodore Schatzki’s sense) around the ancient Mediterranean and in Corinth and would have been familiar to the Corinthians. This religious practice could have formed the basis of attraction for the Corinthians to join Paul’s Christ group, served as a social engine for its growth among gentiles in Corinth and been a source of conflict with Paul that he tries to address in his letters to the Corinthians.

Timothy Deane-Freeman traces Deleuze’s remarks about the digital to reveal both their origins and implications. In so doing, we encounter a position which is fundamentally ambiguous. On the one hand, digital techniques are intimately related to what Deleuze calls ‘societies of control’, which deploy them in order to close down potential spaces of creativity and resistance. On the other, digital images take up the mantle of cinema, displacing habitual forms of cognition and forcing us to think in new ways. Deane-Freeman traces these dual impulses through the images of cinema, television and social media, as well as explicating key Deleuzian concepts, including virtuality, immanence and the outside.

During the Scottish Revolution (1637-1651), royalists and Covenanters appealed to Scottish law, custom and traditional views on kingship to debate the limits of King Charles I’s authority. But they also engaged with the political ideas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant and Catholic intellectuals beyond the British Isles. This book explores the under-examined European context for Scottish political thought by analysing how royalists and Covenanters adapted Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic political ideas to their own debates about church and state. In doing so, it argues that Scots advanced languages of political legitimacy to help solve a crisis about the doctrines, ceremonies and polity of their national church. It therefore reinserts the importance of ecclesiology to the development of early modern political theory.

Bill Ross demonstrates the relation between Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and the conceptual foundations of contemporary physics through careful engagements with the theory of relativity, quantum physics and chaos and complexity theory. Ross shows that recent work in cosmology by figures such as Lee Smolin and David Bohm calls into question the assumption that the laws of physics are universal and unchanging, a view that Deleuze anticipates. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that order in the universe as a whole is destined to break down. Against this, Ross demonstrates that, given Deleuze’s conception of the event as an expression of non-locality, and his emphasis on dissymmetry over symmetry, at the cosmological scale the universe is not destined towards disorder: evolution outruns entropy.

This book uses 'The Innocence of Muslims' controversy as an entry point into the study of relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Instead of dismissing the condemnations and joint reactions as shallow and ritualised displays of solidarity, Anna Hager argues that they offer insights into the mechanisms of Christian–Muslim relations. Christians and Muslims, including Islamist figures, channelled the potential violence – turning it into an occasion to strengthen inter-communal relations and, crucially, their own positions.

This book presents a thought-provoking challenge to the commonly held belief that Islamists uniformly reject the Western-dominated world order. In the wake of George W. Bush's declaration of a 'global war on terror' in 2001, Islamists have often been associated with violence, opposition to liberal values and the disruption of order. However, a closer examination reveals that only a fraction of the groups categorised as 'Islamist' genuinely combat the global order. Through an in-depth analysis of the discourses of Tunisian Ennahda and Lebanese Hezbollah, this book demonstrates that Islamist stances toward the world order involve a delicate balance between resistance to certain aspects of the Western-dominated order and recognition of others.

Settler Military Politics provides a thorough investigation of the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation drawing from the Australian experience. In this book, Caso develops the concept of settler military politics to identify the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation. The book argues that militarisation is a rationality for governing the settler polity and consolidates the settler colonial project. It investigates settler military politics through an in-depth analysis of the under explored aesthetics of war commemoration in Australia and the role of the Australian War Memorial.