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Since 2008, Greece has been at the centre of European current affairs due to the financial and economic crisis. However, it should not be forgotten that before the current crisis the political upheavals of the early 1990s and the collapse of Marxist-inspired regimes had already radically transformed the face of the country. These transformations have been seen as a return of the Balkans’ question, raising issues of border disputes and migration, minorities and national inclusion. They have had far-reaching consequences on the relations between Greek society and its peripheries, and what some have deemed to be its destabilising diversity. In this context, the material presented in this book examines the strengthening of discourses of belonging which draw legitimacy from a glorification of the past and tradition. The fieldwork carried out over the past 15 years on the fringes of Greece has focused on groups who were stigmatised and distanced from standard definitions of Greekness. It provides an original perspective on the changes that the country has undergone in recent decades. The question of the nation-state’s future is raised through close observation on the local scale, leading to a debate about the relationship between areal and reticular territory within the framework of globalisation. This book also aims to provide non-Francophone readers with access to research carried out on these issues in France, shifting the focus of Balkan Anglophone specialists for whom French publications remain a distant province.

The work explores the spread of French science and culture beyond the borders of France, and focuses on the deliberate measures enacted by successive French governments to make such dissemination as effective as possible. This well-established French tradition is explored over time particularly since the closing years of the twentieth century. There is a very full description of the institutions, both former and current, established by France in the many locations worldwide. Soft power is redefined and contrasted with the more familiar hard power across the arts-to-science spectrum. The propagation of ideas and practices abroad is demonstrated in terms of a diplomatic push through varying and differing means and channels. Francophone initiatives are underscored, including the roles of French-speaking countries both as receptors and generators of French culture. The 2011 New Start is highlighted, reorienting action for the arts and for science and university diplomacy, particularly those aspects receiving increasing attention. International cooperation, both linguistic and educational, is seen as key to government involvement through the organization and implementation of French cultural and scientific activities abroad, and these are described in later chapters. Philippe Lane steers us through a myriad of acronyms for which he provides a very useful list.

The first edition of this book included essays from Senator George J. Mitchell, Sir David Goodall, Sir George Quigley, Lord Owen, and Niall O'Dowd among others, and demonstrated the evolution of peace in Ireland, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement. It has now been updated with new essays to ensure that this vital resource for students, scholars, politicians, and the interested general reader continues to illuminate the peace process through the words of some of its pivotal figures. The essays all relate to the nature of peacemaking as a process rather than an event signalled by the signing of an agreement. The significant role of ‘third party’ diplomacy is touched on by many contributors, as is the need for pragmatism, compromise, and a recognition that it is those people at the polar extremes of any dispute that have to be drawn in if a lasting agreement is to be achieved.

The MacBride Principles contained nine affirmative action proposals aimed at eliminating religious discrimination in the employment practices of United States corporations with subsidiaries in Northern Ireland. The weapon used by the MacBride campaigners was the federal constitution of the United States. States and cities in the Union could pass their own corporate legislation incorporating the MacBride Principles and use their pension fund investments to table shareholder resolutions seeking the Principles' inclusion in employment policies. Later developments saw their application to US and foreign firms supplying goods and services to states and cities. Using devolved legislation, the MacBride Campaign broke the stranglehold on the discussion of Irish issues maintained by the US, UK and Irish governments in the Congress. It was debated in state legislatures and city councils. Irish-America was motivated to participate in a nonviolent campaign to achieve social justice in Northern Ireland. Supported by the United States government, there was a fierce reaction by the British government to the Principles. Its attempts to suppress them were unsuccessful.

For almost a hundred years, the academic study of migration concentrated on evolving standardised models of migration behaviour based on data from censuses or the registration of births, marriages and deaths. More recently, it has been realised that such models fail to take into account the decision-making behind migration and that better understanding will come from study of the behaviour of individuals as well as aggregate numbers. In this book the imaginative use of alternative sources – for example, apprentice books, guild and craft records, legal and court documents, diaries and biographies – gives fresh insights into the processes of movement to reveal much more complex circulatory behaviour than the standard models derived from census and registration sources alone have suggested. The first chapter confronts the issue of rural mobility in post-famine Ireland and is followed by a study centred on Alpine rural families that built impressive networks across pre-industrial Western Europe. Two chapters focus on the particular characteristics of worker groups: mining families of south Lancashire during the period of rapid increase in coal production in the eighteenth century; and the organised mobility of skilled labour in nineteenth-century central Europe. Next, a rigorous deployment of the techniques of family reconstruction and record linkage embracing a variety of sources (vital event registers, wills, port books, apprentice records) teases out the migration histories of those who settled in eighteenth-century Liverpool.

This book is an assessment of the ideological and organizational development of Provisional republicanism since 1985. It explores how the Republican movement has changed from an anti-state insurgency to a potential partner in governing the state it was pledged to destroy, and, in particular, attempts to consider the origins of what has become known as ‘New Sinn Féin’.

This book is a study of the constitutional and political development of the Isle of Man. It analyses three broad aspects of twentieth-century political development: constitutional progress towards self-government, elections and public policy and the changing role of the state in Manx society. One of the most important political changes the study addresses is the gradual ascendancy of the directly elected House of Keys in Manx politics. The book concludes with a look at the final two decades of the century, a period of population growth and unprecedented prosperity for the small offshore island.

The Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, headed by Lord Patten, concluded in its 1999 report: ‘A new beginning for democratic accountability is key to a new beginning for policing and to involving the community as a whole in the delivery of policing. We recommend that an entirely new Policing Board be created …’ This book is about the delivery of that new beginning for policing, achieved at a time when most commentators considered the Policing Board was itself likely to fragment along traditional community lines. The story of the Policing Board, from its establishment in 2001 through to the reconstitution of the membership in 2009 is in many ways an inspirational one, showing what can be done by politicians and community representatives working together to bring about a fundamentally different way of policing that better meets the needs of the whole community. The book offers valuable lessons and contemporary insights for law enforcement officers, accountability ‘bodies’ and academics world-wide, in key areas, including the need for a police service’s composition to reflect the community that it serves, promoting public confidence in policing and policing with the community; upholding human rights in the context of policing civil unrest and terrorism; how to hold a police service to account while providing the support it requires; and dealing with the legacy of inter-communal violence with over 3,500 deaths.

J. T. Murphy was one of the most important worker-intellectual figures in the history of labour in early twentieth-century Britain. Using material from the Communist Party of Great Britain's archives and the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Recent History in Moscow, this book not only tells the story of Murphy's political trajectory, but also provides a critical re-examination of the historical and social significance of the early British revolutionary movement in which he played such a prominent role.

The question of religion, its contemporary and future significance and its role in society and state is currently perceived as an urgent one by many and is widely discussed within the public sphere. But it has also long been one of the core topics of the historically oriented social sciences. The immense stock of knowledge furnished by the history of religion and religious studies, theology, sociology and history has to be introduced into the public conscience today. This can promote greater awareness of the contemporary global religious situation and its links with politics and economics and counter rash syntheses such as the ‘clash of civilizations’. This volume is concerned with the connections between religions and the social world and with the extent, limits, and future of secularization. The first part deals with major religious traditions and their explicit or implicit ideas about the individual, social and political order. The second part gives an overview of the religious situation in important geographical areas. Additional contributions analyse the legal organization of the relationship between state and religion in a global perspective and the role of the natural sciences in the process of secularization.

This collection of essays explores the character and quality of the Holocaust's impact and the abiding legacy it has left for social theory. The premise which informs the contributions is that, ten years after its publication, Zygmunt Bauman's claim that social theory has either failed to address the Holocaust or protected itself from its implications remains true.

This is a translated edition of five of the nine papers and the responses presented at the first conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) that was held in 1910. These are seminal contributions by some of the founders of classical German sociology and social theory, including Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Ernst Troeltsch and Werner Sombart. A substantial introduction discusses the lives and works of the five thinkers, placing them in the context of Germany in the early twentieth century and discussing their personal and societal connections. The works are a testament to the developing thought of key scholars. The year 1910 was a defining year for German sociology. There were still no sociology schools, departments or even professorships, but a significant number of important thinkers had published crucial sociological works. Through such publications Tönnies, Simmel, Weber, Troeltsch and Sombart had founded considerable reputations, and by 1909 the first three had banded together with other scholars to form the DGS. The works show German sociology at a decisive moment, when these thinkers were at their prime and were engaged in building a new society devoted to investigation of social reality based upon sound scholarly principles and free from biased social dogmatics. The topics continue to have relevance and the exchanges provide a lively dimension, one that is not found simply by reading the books of these five founders of sociological thinking.