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This book offers an in-depth and yet-unexplored analysis of the evolution and actions of Moroccan Islamist association Justice and Spirituality (al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane). By examining its mobilisation structure, the book enhances the understanding of Islamism as an oppositional force in non-democratic regimes, with a particular focus on Morocco. Contrary to the common premises of inclusion?moderation theory, al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane has undergone a politicisation process but rejects political inclusion; it promotes street mobilisation but refuses to resort to violence. Despite its illegal status and disregard for the regime?s red lines, al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane remains highly relevant as an anti-establishment actor. This book fills a significant gap in knowledge about al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane. It further broadens the understanding of inclusion?moderation theory by introducing novel explanatory factors for al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane?s evolution and strategies, such as responses to shifts in opportunity structures and the impact of internal dynamics and learning mechanisms.

This volume focuses on contemporary Algerian feminist documentary filmmaker Habiba Djahnine as a "memory-bearer" who gives voice to her compatriots to tell their own stories in her films. It introduces the reader to key issues in contemporary Algerian culture and history (colonial, the Algerian War, the Black Decade of the 1990s), memory and human rights. The book gives a brief overview of Algerian cinema, Algerian women filmmakers and situates Djahnine?s oeuvre and its significance within this context. It examines her work as a feminist, teacher and poet and how she transmits this locally and transnationally. The book also explores how Djahnine uses documentary film form for personal and autobiographical explorations of Algerian history, culture, memory and trauma.

The book investigates lines of connection and shared literary heritage between the Persianate and Malay-Indonesian worlds over many centuries. Majid Daneshgar provides a critical and comparative study of Persianate-Malay stories, with specific focus on Durr al-Majalis, or Pearl of Gatherings – a classical Islamic text produced by Sayf Zafar (late thirteenth–mid-fourteenth centuries CE), a writer and scholar of Central Asian background, during the Delhi Sultanate. The book illustrates how the Durr al-Majalis contains various legal, theological-philosophical, metaphysical, chivalrous and mystical accounts. In addition, it traces how the book travelled beyond the so-called ‘Balkans-to-Bengal’ borders and was copied, translated and annotated across Eastern Africa, Eastern Turkistan, Mongol-dominated China, Arabic-speaking Egypt and South East Asia. It demonstrates how this Persian collection of stories shaped the idea of Islam, Islamic teachings and stories across the Muslim World, and in the Malay-Indonesian World in particular.

For centuries, Russian imperialism has shaped the fate of its neighbours, from the tsarist conquests to Soviet domination and today’s relentless aggression. This book exposes the Kremlin’s enduring ambition to control its periphery, dismantling the myths used to justify its actions – from claims of shared history to the weaponization of security and culture. It reveals how Russia has sought to subordinate neighbouring states, and how these nations have resisted, asserting their sovereignty in defiance of Moscow’s pressure. In this incisive and compelling analysis of Russia’s enduring imperial mindset, Donnacha Ó Beacháin sheds critical light on how history, politics and power continue to collide in Ukraine and beyond, and why breaking the cycle of domination is vital for global security. It is essential reading for grasping the complexities of the current geopolitical crisis.

Jonathan Parry presents a history of Liberalism that is organized around themes in British Liberal politics since the early nineteenth century. In the first half of the book, he shows how the Liberal Party shaped national politics between 1830 and 1914 by organizing a series of campaigns against what it saw as over-dominant interest groups in British and Irish political, economic and religious life. Some of these campaigns succeeded, some failed, but they gave the party a strong identity as a political movement hostile to concentrations of power. The last two chapters chart its response to its political marginalization by Labour and Conservatives since the 1920s. They show how Liberals have continued to organize against over-centralized institutional power. They have defended civil liberties, urged devolution, criticized the rigidity of the electoral system, and attacked exaggerations of Britain?s capacity to act independently in the world. British Liberalism?s focus has never been the defence of laissez-faire economic principles, as many claim; it has always been political.

A fresh account of the remarkable rise of Dundee as a global industrial city ? and the origins of its later demise. The background to jute, the product most closely associated with Dundee, is investigated in unprecedented depth. The role of flax and linen as foundations for the jute industry is emphasised. The book challenges many perceptions of Dundee. Linen was as important to Dundee before c.1850 as jute was afterwards; the significance of jute pre-1850 has often been exaggerated by historians. Traditionally Dundee?s success was attributed to the production of cheap coarse cloth for sacks, bagging etc. Yet many firms manufactured high quality, admiralty grade canvas, and colourful rugs and carpets in imitation of Brussels and other woollen floor coverings. Design was important. So too were enterprising merchants and manufacturers from the early eighteenth century onwards. Although squalor and industrial and social conflict became the norm after the 1870s, prior to that Dundee was relatively buoyant economically, and greatly admired by visitors including those from as far afield as the US. In short, Dundee was one of Scotland?s industrial powerhouses ? a fact too often overlooked.

This book identifies a new apocalyptic work—the Apocalypse of the Birds—contained in the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 85-90), and argues that it is born of the chaotic Jewish-Christian world of the first-century CE. Through close analysis of texts and manuscripts in Ge’ez, Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, alongside historical and numismatic evidence, the book situates the Apocalypse of the Birds alongside literature and historiography of the first-century CE. It argues that the Apocalypse of the Birds belongs to the heady early days of the First Jewish Revolt, and represents crucial evidence for the early optimism of the revolutionaries, the dynamic and progressive evolution of the Animal Apocalyptic tradition, and the blurred and porous boundaries between Jew and Jesus-follower in the first-century CE.

Spinoza and Marx would seem to be two very opposed philosophers. Spinoza was interested in contemplating eternal truths of nature while Marx was interested in the history of capital. Franck Fischbach suggests that by reading the two together we may better understand both history and nature, as well as ourselves, making possible a new understanding of human nature. Rather than see history and nature as opposed, history is nothing but the constant transformation of nature. Central to this transformation is a new understanding of alienation not as loss of the self in a world of objects, but as loss of objects in a world that disconnects us from nature and social relations, leaving us isolated as a subject. The isolated individual, the kingdom within a kingdom, as Spinoza put it, is not the condition of our liberation but the basis of our subjection.

Aristotle and Tragic Temporality treats a theme that has drawn scholarly attention for millennia: Aristotle on time and our experience of it. It does so, however, in a wholly unprecedented way, grounding its interpretation in his Poetics and Ethics, rather than the natural philosophy of the Physics. Sean D. Kirkland first takes up Aristotle''s discussion of our tragic temporal situatedness?our having to act, think, and live always between a determining past we can never fully master and a projected future we can never fully anticipate. It is this condition that comes powerfully to light for Aristotle on stage in the performance of a tragic drama. The familiar Aristotelian ?virtue ethics? then becomes something radically new in the transforming light of the Poetics? temporality - an outline of how humans can inhabit that irremediably tragic condition, never overcoming or suspending it, and arrive nonetheless at something like happiness and excellence.

Mission, race and colonialism were three forces shaping Malawi?s history during the early years of the twentieth century. These three found a concentrated meeting point in the life of Scottish missionary Alexander Hetherwick, who led Blantyre Mission from 1898 to 1928. This book presents a fresh assessment of this towering figure in Malawi?s history, contesting the scholarly consensus that Hetherwick betrayed the early ideals of Blantyre Mission by compromising too much with the colonial system that was in force during his leadership. The book assesses the pervasive influence of colonialism, from which Hetherwick was not exempt, and traces the ways in which he resisted such influence through his relentless commitment to the interests of the African community and the inspiration he found in the emergence of the African church.

Sidonius stands at a crossroads between the last days of the Roman Empire in the Auvergne and Provence and the emergence of Burgundians and Visigoths as territorial powers. An aristocrat, politician, author and bishop, he was involved in and bore witness to this takeover. His literary prose is characterised by a floweriness which at times makes his letters ambiguous and ostentatiously obscure. This volume provides readers with a tool to understand this convoluted prose, enabling them to see the troubled political waters of the fifth century through the eyes of Sidonius. The book contains a new critical edition of the first ten letters of Book 5 of Sidonius’ Epistulae, together with an accessible English translation and a philological and historical commentary. It provides a general introduction to the book as a whole and a detailed exploration of the letters that covers literary themes, models, prosopography, dating problems and prose rhythm. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it addresses historical questions relevant to the specific letters and to Sidonius’ position at the centre of the Romano-Gallic aristocracy.

The erosion of trust in politicians and political institutions is a major challenge in early twenty-first-century democratic politics, not least in the United States. This book argues that, rather than being a flaw or corruption, the potential for political distrust must be understood as an essential feature of representative democracy because representation works through performance. The book explores performance as a constellation of factors: scripts, embodiment, ideas of selfhood, and historical norms and ideals. It draws on key scholarship of political representation, rhetoric, and populism; on theories of performativity, theatricality, and acting; and on interviews the author conducted with political speechwriters spanning presidential administrations and campaigns from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama to demonstrate both that distrust is inherent in representative politics and that in mainstreamed populism distrust becomes a focal point around which the theatre of politics revolves.

Anthropocene Religion argues that addressing a future, and present, shaped by worldwide catastrophic climate change involves not only radically rethinking the ideas of nature, and humanity?s place within it, inherited from Western modernity. It also demands a reconceptualization of the nature and role of religion. The advent of the Anthropocene simultaneously displaces the human from the centre of the world and erodes all sharp distinctions between the natural environment and the realm of human activity. Similarly, the Anthropocene renders untenable concepts of religion that rely on reference to realms, beings or forces that wholly transcend nature. It is, however, possible to understand both religion and its divine referents in worldly rather than transcendent terms, just as it is possible to understand nature as dynamic and creative. The Gaia hypothesis offers us a figure through which to approach these concepts in their interconnectedness.

Between 1050 and 1128 the nomadic Seljuq Turks and European Crusaders subjected northern Syria to a series of invasions from the east and west. The migration of militant peoples from the Eurasian Steppe and Western Europe inserted a new set of political elites into a complex frontier zone already beset by numerous conflicts fought along several ethno-cultural and religious contours. Surveying this turbulent chapter of Syrian history from multiple perspectives, this book recalibrates the underlying power dynamics of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Through this regional focus, it reassesses both the impact that the establishment of Turkish and Crusader lordships had upon bilad al-sham (Greater Syria) and the reactions of Syria’s established ruling elite to this unprecedented sequence of events. Providing a unique reinterpretation of the political situation in bilad al-sham during one of the most important periods in Middle Eastern history, this book proposes a new model for understanding the political dynasties of this period and questions the significance ascribed to the establishment of the Crusader States by modern historians.

This book rediscovers a lost history of the Roman Empire, written by Sextus Aurelius Victor in the middle of the fourth century A.D. Though little regarded today, Victor was the most famous historian of his day, read by Jerome and Ammianus, honoured with a statue by the pagan Emperor Julian, and a prestigious prefecture by the Christian Theodosius. Our rediscovery of the original scope and scale of his Historia revolutionises our understanding of the writing of history in late antiquity, with profound implications for the study of Roman history and the transmission of the Classics.

François Zourabichvili wrote two major contributions to Spinoza scholarship. While Une physique de la pensée (PUF, 2002) concerns Spinoza’s epistemology and metaphysics of ideas, Spinoza’s Paradoxical Conservatism focuses on his political philosophy. Zourabichvili’s interpretation of Spinoza’s political philosophy is radically unlike the established tradition. In this book he explores Spinoza’s philosophical theory of change across three different studies. First, within ethical transition, secondly within the image of the infant in Spinoza’s work and third dealing with absolute monarchy which was dominant during Spinoza’s time and provided his polemical writings with a concrete target. The book’s challenging and carefully-argued claims will be of serious interest to anyone working in political theory, early modern philosophy or contemporary French thought.