EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS strana 3 z 5

The post-Cold War global order has unravelled. Liberal values and institutions are in full retreat, while authoritarians everywhere are emboldened. International law has given way to the rule of lawlessness. The world is more globalized than ever, but also increasingly fragmented and disorderly. Meanwhile, humanity faces a perfect storm of threats from runaway climate change to escalating geopolitical confrontation. In this trenchant critique, Bobo Lo argues that revitalizing global order is the central task of our time, the key to addressing the realities and demands of the twenty-first century. He proposes a new internationalism, centred on a broad view of self-interest, greater representativeness and inclusiveness, and the acceptance of flexibility and diversity. The world has moved on, and so must its governance.

The concept "we" is central to every field in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, yet it has been overdetermined by the question of “who we are”, leaving its basic conceptual operations undertheorized. In What is We? Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan argues that “we” is not a collective to belong to or be excluded from, nor is it a specific group to be identified. Rather, “we” functions as a method – one that organizes inclusion and exclusion, communion and isolation, coercion and liberation, division and incorporation, forgetting and remembering. Across ten linked chapters, the book unfolds social, historical, political, grammatical, linguistic, literary, and personal responses to its titular question. By seeing “we” as a method for enacting, apprehending, contesting, and instrumentalizing boundaries, it invites us to confront the challenge of failure, embrace the possibility of impossibility, and acknowledge the hallucinatory nature of the universal.

At a time when democratic government is under attack, Chibli Mallat offers a new definition of democracy: the necessary representation in government of citizens as ''members of historically subordinate groups'', a concept first opened up by Michel Chiha (1891-1954) during his drafting of the Lebanese Constitution of 1926.The book rests on two main research pillars: the first is a detailed historical and institutional examination of Levantine and Lebanese institutions, drawing on dozens of 19th and 20th century documents, including Chiha?s constitutional papers. With unprecedented access to the Chiha Archive, Mallat constructs a world vision of Chiha through his writings and political positions which act as the background to his constitutional contributions. The second pillar examines the success and failures of an enduring Lebanese Constitution to advance this radically new view of majoritarian democracy, based on extensive research in political science and in constitutional law.

This book analyses the Scottish kirk’s use of public shame to persecute the kingdom’s Catholic minority. In early modern Scotland, where the national church mandated that a specially constructed stool of repentance be placed directly in front of every minister’s pulpit, the dreadful spectacle of public penance was a routine feature of parish life. The book examines this process of ritualised shame. Drawing on recent advances in the study of kirk discipline, underground Catholicism and the history of emotion, it unsettles understandings of religious persecution. Ryan Burns analyses the psychological pressure inflicted on religious dissidents, some of whom attempted suicide rather than submit to the repentance stool. The book examines the spectacle of public penance, as well as the Presbyterian kirk’s often creative means of inducing humiliation.

This book explores how capitalism uses and abuses life, and presents communities of life as a practical means of resistance. In particular, the book shows how capitalism exploits life?s capacity for self-production across myriad species, enlists us in environmentally damaging behaviour, inflicts immense physical and mental suffering in unjust and avoidable ways, and undermines the ethical quality of life for all. The best chance to find meaning in this context, James A. Chamberlain argues, is resistance, and the affirmation of communities of life. The book proposes eight theses on communities of life, including: the orientation of communities of life to satisfy the needs of all beings that constitute them, and to the growth of life rather than economic growth; the abolition of private property in favour of various forms of shared ownership; post-work politics; and the need to recognize the interdependence of life to enact multi-species communities.

In dialogue with Derridean deconstruction, this book highlights Nancy's distinctive figurative philosophical style which emerges as a transformative force, one that radicalises différance and draws out its creative potential. Through this generative logic, Nancy reconfigures how we conceptualise Christianity—not as an entity apart from philosophical reflection, but as intricately intertwined with it. Ashok Collins offers a bold new perspective on the 'turn to religion' within deconstruction, charting fresh pathways for debate and reflection far beyond its established boundaries.

This book explores the affective dimension of Scottish Protestant public worship in early modern Scotland. It examines how the intensely emotional character of Scottish Puritan or godly piety was reflective of the emotional norms many Scots had to navigate in congregational worship following the Protestant Reformation. Using historiographical approaches developed within the history of emotions discipline, the book argues that in corporate rituals such as prayer, preaching, public repentance, fasting and the Lord's Supper, Scottish Protestants were expected to experience and express a variety of feelings that were associated with the cycle of conversion. These prescribed emotions were seen as integral to the efficacy of the liturgy, playing a vital role in the individual's, community's and nation's encounter with God. The book argues that these standards of emotion were informed by medieval, secular and protestant sources and new perspectives emerge on their profound impact upon the major political events that shaped seventeenth century Scotland.

This book considers how the long-standing superhero genre has been reinvigorated in the twenty-first century as an interlocutor of security and surveillance discourses following the events of ?9/11?. While superheroes have a long cultural history, Schmid argues that their contemporary representations in Hollywood films and TV shows create and deepen specific discourses on security, terrorism and violence. He shows how the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, in particular, are important artefacts that can help us to understand how these discourses are popularised and ultimately normalised.The book offers a rich account of the emergence of superheroes against the backdrop of America?s history since its founding in 1776 and their rise to popularity through comic books since the 1930s. Analysing the connections between superheroes, foreign policy and security from ?9/11? to the present, it demonstrates the significance of superheroes for the construction of heroism and security in contemporary times.

Is there a way of being human that could invite people away from today’s models of violence and consumerism? Looking forward to a new, increasingly creolized century, in 1997 the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant asked, ‘Do we have the right and the means to live another dimension of humanity? But how?’Building on the defense of human rights he outlined in Choose Your Bearing, Benjamin P. Davis traces figures of 'the human' and ‘humanity' in W. E. B. Du Bois, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said. He concludes with a reflection on Hannah Arendt’s post-war correspondence with Karl Jaspers, which offers lessons for a new humanism as we witness ongoing wars today.

This largely new collection of essays explores how the history of empire has impacted the intellectual life of the Atlantic world through treatments of key figures in Atlantic theory, including Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Léopold Senghor and Édouard Glissant. Out of these critical and comparative readings emerges a portrait of Atlantic theory as a distinct orientation toward complex relations of colonial power, memory of atrocity, negotiation of the aftermath of empire, and the creativity of the oppressed living under impossible conditions of violence.

The Israeli destruction of Gaza has returned the idea of genocide to the centre of world politics, with sharp conflicts between protesters and lawyers who invoke it and governments and media that deny it. This book, by the foremost sociological theorist of genocide, defends the idea against thinkers who have questioned it, and argues that it is essential to the understanding of mass atrocities. It maintains that Gaza has opened a new age in which the West not only fails to prevent, but also participates in genocide. As well as discussing the genocide idea, the book analyses the Gaza genocide in the context of the longer histories of the problem, both globally and in Palestine. Further chapters deal with "forgotten genocides", the attempted Russian elimination of Ukraine, and the history of British complicity. The New Age of Genocide brings the debate up to date and is essential reading.

Across England, one of the wealthiest yet most unequal nations in the world, families are being trapped in debt and homelessness. In this blistering expose, Katherine Brickell and Mel Nowicki take the reader inside this national scandal. Hundreds of thousands of children are living in "prison-like" hotel rooms and other deadly temporary accommodation for months, years and sometimes their entire childhood. Debt Trap Nation offers an intimate and politically energised account of a failing state in technicolour. The decimation of social housing, an out-of-control private-rented sector, austerity, welfare cuts and a cost-of-living crisis has deepened poverty and fed a debt trap that consumes families and is now driving local authorities to bankruptcy. Mothers and their children have not fallen into this trap, they have been pulled into it. The personal and sobering stories recounted here reveal how government choices have forced these mothers and survivors of domestic abuse into impossible hardship. The book urges the reader to rail against state-cultivated and politically convenient stigma that equates debt and homelessness with personal moral failure. It is time to flip the script. It is not women who are failing, women are being failed. Author royalties will be donated to the charity Surviving Economic Abuse.

Connected to a divided island, British Cypriots have participated in the reproduction of conflict and partition but have also been active agents of peacebuilding and reconciliation. Focusing on the latter, Diasporic Futures traces the transnational politics of Greek Cypriots in London during a significant historical period in which space opened for diasporic involvement in peace politics at ‘home’. It applies a temporal framework and proposes that diasporas and transnationalism - often analysed through an emphasis on space - must also be understood through an investigation of time. The book argues that diasporas do not exist linearly, but are made, reorganised or enervated in and by time, aggregating at particular historical points and dissipating at others. Moreover, Diasporic Futures illustrates that, although imagined as anchored in the past and ‘out of sync’, diasporas are ‘horizonal’, made by their orientations towards the future and a politics of hope.

Explicitness is one of the fundamental mysteries in which our lives are wrapped. Our capacity, as conscious subjects, to make things explicit, so that what-is presents itself as “that-it-is” or “that-it-is-the-case” is at the heart of the mystery of human being. Circling Round Explicitness is an endeavour to make explicitness explicit or, at least, more explicit. Its ambition is rooted in the belief that the failure to acknowledge the centrality to our nature as human beings of our capacity to make things explicit explains many false directions in contemporary philosophy, most importantly the embrace of scientism. With characteristic erudition and acuity across a breathtaking range of subjects, Ray Tallis explores how explicitness connects with fundamental ontological, metaphysical and epistemological questions, including the gap between matter and persons, and between mind and brain, the nature of ourselves as embodied subjects and as agents, the phenomenology of thought, the realm of possibility (and probability) and the ideas of reality and truth. Although the attempt to grasp explicitness is fraught with challenges – to reach out to that which comprises one’s act of reaching – the task is a fascinating endeavour that takes us closer to understanding what it is to be, to be human, and our connection with the material world. In circling round explicitness, we are circling round Man, the Explicit Animal, around ourselves.

This historical biography of Chrystal Macmillan, one of Scotland’s most prominent campaigners for women’s equality, justice and peace in the early twentieth century, is the first account of her life and work. It describes her early life in a comfortable home in Edinburgh, her school and university years in Scotland, and her rise to prominence as the main appellant in the ‘Scottish Women Graduates’ Case’ when it went to appeal in the House of Lords. She was an important figure in the suffrage movement both in Scotland, and in England where she lived from 1913, becoming influential in several national and international women’s organisations. She used her legal skills and training to scrutinise, draft and suggest amendments to legislation that had direct impact on women’s lives, including their right to their own nationality, to become members of the legal profession and to be treated equally with men in the workplace. In 1915 she was an organiser of the International Women’s Congress at The Hague, which urged political leaders to use mediation to stop the war. In 1924, she qualified as a barrister in London and was active on the Western Circuit and London courts. Although she left no diary, the recollections of friends, obituaries and memorials provide a vivid image of a woman of considerable ability, commitment and courage.

This book examines how journalists should deal with the growing tide of political disinformation and public scepticism towards news media. Informed by the latest research from the UK and around the world, the book draws on a series of UK-based studies over a six-year period between 2019-2024, systematically analysing over 4000 news items and sources across fact-checking sites and broadcast programming. It examines audiences through a survey of more than 1,000 people, a news diary study of 200 participants, and fourteen focus groups, in addition to interviewing some of the most prominent news editors and journalists in broadcast news. The authors look beyond disinformation emanating from online and social media platforms to identify where and how misinformation can spread across mainstream media. To enhance the legitimacy of journalism and better serve the public, they argue that news reporting should more regularly and robustly confront false and misleading information from politicians.