Launch for Workers, State and Development in North East Brazil

Workers, State and Development in North East Brazil, by Ben Selwyn, will be launched at the Agrarian Change Seminar on 8th March, 5.15 - 7.00pm. The seminar, and launch event, will be held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

If you would like to attend, please email bethan.hirst@manchester.ac.uk.

Launch details
8th March 2012, Russell Square: College Buildings, 4418, London 5:15 PM - 7:00 PM

LAUNCH EVENT

Britain and Africa under Blair, by Julia Gallagher, will be launched on 2nd March at the Brunei Gallery, University of London.

Gallagher's book is an authoritative account of British policy in Africa during the Tony Blair premiership. It draws on over fifty interviews with key government officials, ministers and politicians including Clare Short, Chris Mullin, Jenny Tonge and John Bercow.

More details can be found here or email cas@soas.ac.uk if you would like to attend.

Devolution in the UK

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

The hardback edition of Devolution in the UK sold extremely well when it was published in early 2009. It received high praise from many academics and students from the field of politics,

'An important and necessary book on a vital topic. James Mitchell's expertise and original research produce an authoritative analysis, and one which questions assumed inevitabilities in the UK's past, present and future.'
Richard English, Professor of Politics, Queen's University, Belfast

The paperback edition has just landed on our desk, making the title more affordable for the average student (RRP £15.99).

Use the link to Amazon (top right) to order your copy today!

2012 International Year of Co-operatives

The United Nations has designed 2012 the International Year of Co-operatives. Over 1.4 million co-operatives from across the globe will be coming together to promote effective and sustainable ways of doing business.

Co-operatives across the world will celebrate the start of the International Year of Co-operatives on January 12th. Co-operatives UK will be kicking off the year with many different events, including an online panel with The Guardian, with key figures from the co-operative sector.

Manchester University Press are planning their own celebrations to mark the publication of The Hidden Alternative. Two simultaneous launches will take place on the 12th January. An event at Waterstone's Gower Street in London, will be opened by the eminent co-operative scholar Professor Stephen Yeo. Economist and co-operative expert Robin Murray will open the event in Manchester.

The Hidden Alternative demonstrate that co-operation offers a real and much needed alternative for the organisation of human economic and social affairs, one that should establish its place at the forefront of public and academic discussion and policy making.

The book includes chapters on education, fair trade, politics and governance, planning and sustainability and on how co-operatives have coped with the global economic crisis.
If you would like to attend one of the launch events, please contact rebecca@co-op.ac.uk to confirm places are still available on the guest list.

Upcoming conferences

AAH Conference

We're at the AAH conference tomorrow; come and visit our stand and browse our titles. We'll be located in the Geoffrey Manton building, on the Manchester Metropolitan University campus.

Everything on the stand will be discounted - take this opportunity to get hold of titles at juicily reduced prices! We'll be there until Saturday.

SHS/EHS Conference

Friday and Saturday of this week, we'll also be here at the University of Warwick. Our book stand will be located in Warwick Arts Centre, at the heart of the campus. We'll have numerous discounted books on display and available to buy.

Then on Saturday evening starting at 6:30pm, we'll be launching The secret battle by Michael Roper in the Scarman building bar. Come and join us - the book will be available half price!

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We'll be at many more conferences over the Summer - keep checking back here for updated news.

Meanwhile, here are some of the titles we've published recently, grouped by subject. Click on the title links to find out more about each book, including how to order.

POLITICS

Identities, discourses and experiences

The international dimension of the failed Algerian transition

Global justice networks

Full participation

IRISH INTEREST

Michael Logue and the Catholic Church in Ireland, 1879–1925

Women, marriage and property in wealthy landed families in Ireland, 1750–1850

The making of the Irish poor law, 1815-43

CHANGE IS FOR LIFE – DAVID CAMERON’S DILEMMA

Kieron O’Hara
University of Southampton

Strange things happen in politics, but at the time of writing, John McCain winning the US Presidency would be one of the strangest. There are many reasons why he is up against it, George Bush and Sarah Palin being two of them. But for me, the most telling is that McCain built a career around personal integrity and unwillingness to bend for party advantage (which nearly got him the nomination in 2000).

However, McCain in 2008 bent. The supporter of sound government finances offered big tax cuts. The sponsor of the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act offered a ‘gas-tax holiday’. He reassured the religious right (whom he had previously labelled ‘agents of intolerance’) of his opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Shifting long-term positions is at best high risk: one is quite likely to disillusion one’s supporters and repel independents without convincing those to whom one is moving.

Promising change is not a political tactic, it is a commitment. If you have decided that the problem is with your party and you offer to change it, then change it you must. Of course, change is a necessary condition for success, but not sufficient. Three leaders of the British Conservative Party (William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard) offered change, but reversed direction when opinion polls refused to budge, as Andrew Denham and I describe in our recent book for Manchester University Press, Democratising Conservative Leadership Selection: From Grey Suits to Grass Roots.

The heart of the book narrates David Cameron’s rise to the leadership of the Conservative Party, during the unprecedentedly long contest in 2005, and follows his attempt to use his mandate to force change through until the end of Tony Blair’s Premiership in 2007.

He used several methods, including reversing well-known positions that were deemed counter-productive (refusing to promise tax cuts), opening up new policy fronts (a new-found interest in greenery, bicycles and windmills), and making structural changes in Conservative Party procedures (introducing the ‘A-list’ of favoured Parliamentary candidates). It provoked a lot of opposition from many in his party and the press (which paradoxically helped cement the image of change), and helped the Conservatives build up large poll leads over Summer 2008.

As Denham and I argue, the mandate for change which Cameron received from the leadership election was conditional on his delivering those poll leads, and on his being able to promise the Conservatives election victory in 2010. But things have changed for Cameron.

The global financial crisis has focused attention on the economy, which is Gordon Brown’s area of expertise, and he has been able to shine as a problem-solver. At the same time, the Conservatives have spent three years trying to make the running on social policy – now they have to try to develop distinctive economic ideas without leaving too many hostages to fortune. Those giant poll leads have started to shrink.

The temptations to lapse back to previous styles of rhetoric must be strong, as politics seems to be polarising. On the left, Polly Toynbee has already opined that the next few years will see a battle between the ideas of Keynes and Hayek, while on the right Simon Heffer and others have called for John Redwood to be promoted to the Shadow Cabinet.

These are hard times for Cameron. His long-term strategy was always tough, and as recently as 2007, as I argued, although it was necessary it was not at all obvious that it would pay dividends in the life of this Parliament. By Summer 2008, the situation had changed radically, and Cameron appeared a shoo-in. A few weeks later and all is up for grabs once more.

But the point about a long-term strategy is that it is long-term. The vicissitudes of day-to-day politics cannot be used to judge it. One cannot plan for the long term, and then make sweeping changes because the polls have moved. That is not to say that one cannot adjust tack, and the Tories have called for some relaxation in taxes and regulations. But they have sensibly drawn the line at reversing previous policy commitments by calling for an actual tax cut.

Denham and I spell out the struggle Cameron and his team were faced with to try to motivate and implement change in the Conservative Party, and also review the failures of the three previous Tory leaders to achieve the same shift. It is absolutely no coincidence that Cameron is the only one of the four to enjoy a large and prolonged lead in opinion polls. Voters may or may not like the direction of change, but they certainly will resist someone who backtracks when the going gets rough.

The Irish Voter wins prestigious award

The Irish Voter has won the Political Studies Association of Ireland book award for 2008, as the best book published in Irish politics this year.

It's only the second year of the award, which was won last year by Richard English, for his title Irish Freedom: A History of Nationalism in Ireland.

The Irish Voter is a comprehensive, academic survey of the motives, outlook and behaviour of the Irish voter. Visit the MUP website for more details.

Exclusive blog by Richard Jackson

In 2005, I published Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-terrorism (MUP). It was one of the first critical analyses of the public language employed by the Bush administration to make sense of the 9/11 attacks and justify the nation's mobilisation for a global 'war on terrorism'. In the book, I tried to argue firstly, that the political elite carefully and deliberately chose the language they used because they had certain goals in mind. It was not a spontaneous or objective reflection of reality, but part of a carefully conceived political strategy to pursue a range of domestic and foreign projects. Second, I argued that the particular narratives and language they employed was chosen from a range of possibilities, and that it was not in any inevitable that 9/11 had to interpreted as an act of war requiring a military response, for example. Other interpretations and narratives were available and could have been deployed. Third, I argued that the core narratives and assumptions of the overall discourse were then reproduced and institutionalised across American society through powerful discursive sites such as the media, churches, and the new Department of Homeland Security. Finally, I tried to show how the language of the war on terror was much more than merely words or propaganda; instead, it had a number of concrete consequences in the 'real' world of public policy. These ideological effects included a number of extremely negative patterns of behaviour, such as the torture and abuse seen at Abu Ghraib and the ongoing cycle of violence between al Qaeda and Western and Western-supported states. I suggested that we needed to find new ways of speaking and thinking about the challenge of terrorism if we were to move beyond simply responding to violence with even greater counter-violence which actually increased insecurity.

I am very pleased that since the book was published, a great many other books, articles, research projects, and PhDs have confirmed my overall arguments, and provided further analytical and empirical depth to our understanding of the way the political language of elites functions ideologically. Interestingly, in a follow-up project with Matt McDonald from Warwick University I looked at several hundred speeches by George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard in the run-up to the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. The data revealed that all three leaders used the same core narratives about terrorism and all of them ended up justifying the attacks very similar ways. In other words, the discourse of the war on terror spread and was used instrumentally by other political leaders pursuing the same kinds of policies.
Despite this growing evidence for my thesis however, a number of questions have been raised about my arguments which I would like to respond to. First, I have been criticised by some for promoting a 'conspiracy theory' approach to the use of political language by elites. I would respond that it is not a conspiracy as such, but rather a carefully conceived political strategy by politicians who are deeply aware of the power of language, particularly in a media-based society. Moreover, there is now a great deal of evidence (which is growing further all the time) to show that political elites in the US and UK worked extremely hard and purposively to promote certain key messages to the public, even though in the case of Iraq's WMD they knew that the evidence did not hold up. It is not necessarily a secret conspiracy therefore, but simply political actors constructing a discourse to promote their own interests. This is something which other political actors, such as pressure groups, also do.

Second, it has been argued that existing structures and narratives within American society made it virtually inevitable that a war-based interpretation of 9/11 would prevail and a 'war on terror' would be launched. The political elite, in this sense, had no real choice and the war on terror discourse just emerged of its own accord. I agree that American society is highly militaristic, that narratives of American exceptionalism and the chosen nation are deeply embedded in the political culture, and that existing foreign policy structures are oriented towards certain kinds of dominant perceptions and responses. With this genealogy and set of existing structures therefore, it was always highly likely that the political elite would choose these particular narratives to frame their policies in order to ensure that they resonated with the public and gained widespread acceptance.

Nonetheless, I still maintain that the political elite always retain a certain amount of agency and in this case, there were definite choices about exactly what kind of narrative framing they could employ to frame the response they chose. Moreover, although it cannot be tested, I think that if Al Gore had been president instead of George W., a different set of narratives and approach to fighting terrorism would have emerged. There are numerous examples of both individuals and groups working hard to introduce a new discourse or language into politics and succeeding, even though the existing structures mitigated against it. Examples of such so-called 'norm entrepreneurs' include: Gorbachev's perestroika; the efforts of human rights activists to construct an international human rights regime; the now widely used language of green politics; gender neutral language; etc. If we abandon the notion of human agency, it becomes difficult to explain change in international politics.

A key point that emerges from this is that language and discourse is never monolithic or static; it has to be reproduced and remade every day by actors and institutions. This suggests that even though the language of the war on terrorism has now been institutionalised in numerous agencies, government departments and laws, and has become an accepted part of entertainment culture, there is still room for struggle and resistance. If we as scholars and citizens continue to challenge the core narratives and language used by elites and their supporters, I believe that the war on terror will in the years to come, go the way of the cold war. This is a valid emancipatory goal, as the war on terror has proved to be nothing short of a disaster for human security, human rights, democratic politics and progressive politics.

Visit the MUP website for details of Writing the War on Terrorism (2005) by Richard Jackson

THE ROOTS OF CAMERON’S SUCCESS: THE 2005 LEADERSHIP CONTEST

By Kieron O’Hara
University of Southampton

So overwhelming is the Conservatives’ lead in the opinion polls that it is easy to overlook how precarious their future seemed not so very long ago. In the Summer of 2007, when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, Tory leader David Cameron started off in a difficult position which got steadily worse; newspaper headlines on the eve of the Tory Party Conference were declaring him dead and buried.

A series of calamities of varying magnitude followed for Brown, and the Tories came back from the brink. Nevertheless, even with several weeks of poll leads behind him, Cameron was still under pressure from the Tory right well into the Spring of 2008. There was a great deal of argument in March about why the Tory lead was so narrow.

Now support for Brown has collapsed, and the Tories seem certain to get in. Well, maybe, maybe not; the electoral demography is still difficult for them, the electorate is volatile, the economy may improve and Brown will certainly come out fighting after his Summer break. Nonetheless, Tories are hot favourites.

This seemed impossible after the last election, and much if not all of the credit must go to Cameron himself. The period 2005-6 was vital in the recovery of the Conservative Party, with the extraordinary seven-month leadership contest at the centre. The resurgence in Tory fortunes really began with Cameron’s famous conference speech of 2005, when he turned the contest on its head.


In our new book for Manchester University Press, Democratising Conservative Leadership Selection: From Grey Suits to Grass Roots, Andrew Denham and I examine the role of leadership contests in understanding the successes and failures of Conservative leaders. We provide a historical perspective back to 1881, and examine the conduct and effects of every Tory leadership election, with a detailed focus on the 2005 contest and the immediate aftermath.

Cameron’s modernisation of the Conservative Party is key, bringing the party back to the centre, altering its rhetoric, changing the profile of its candidates and mapping out a conservative ideological space distinct from that of Thatcherism, as I had earlier argued was essential in my book After Blair (reviewed by David Cameron in The Guardian). Cameron changed both image and substance – and carefully used the change of image to reinforce the change of substance.

Denham and I describe in some detail how the centrist project came under attack from Tory Ultras almost immediately, and how Cameron doggedly resisted – certainly making mistakes at times, but basically staying on course. We argued that the mandate from his decisive victory in the leadership election would be temporary, and that eventually Cameron’s legitimacy as leader would depend on electoral and poll success.

At the time of writing the book, it was an open question whether Cameron would stay the course – perhaps an election called in Autumn 2007 would have derailed him. But he did not deviate, shrugged off the (false) accusations that he has no right wing ideological content, and is now reaping the benefits. He has certainly had some luck; nevertheless his long-term strategy, the forging of which during the dark days of 2005 is described in our book, is paying off much more quickly than he had a right to expect.

Erotic Awards 2008

By Lucy Robinson, author of Gay Men and the Left in Post War Britain: how the personal got political.

Forty years after the ‘swinging sixties’ and sexual liberation it seems that the boundaries around sexual liberty are still highly contested and contradictory.
The lines around what is and isn’t legal or acceptable do seem more blurred than ever. This hasn’t been helped in some ways by the recent changes to the Sexual Offences Act which have left criminal offence very much in the eyes of the offended. On the one hand, commercialized sadomasochistic imagery of Betty Page and Dita Von Teese are popular to the point of ubiquity, cheap confessional chat shows are filled with tales of resisted monogamy, and the life of Mary Whitehouse made a recent rather jolly television comedy starring Julie Walters. In the academic world the new historians of sexuality are demonstrating the varieties of ways in which sexuality and sexual politics can unlock History and students are grabbing the opportunity to take courses that focus on, rather than briefly skirt over, the sexual past.

Yet on the other hand, as the new laws on extreme or violent pornography and the case of Max Mosley show, some perversions really are more acceptable than others. It might be ok to play around with fluffy handcuffs at Ann Summers parties, but heaven help anyone who engages in the practices and identities around the more challenging end of the sexually transgressive scale.

It was for these reasons that when I found out my first book Gay Men and the Left in Post War Britain: how the personal got political was a finalist in the academics’ category of this year’s Erotic Awards I was absolutely blown away. Firstly because any sense that an academic book has made connections with a wider audience is good for soothing ivory tower guilt, but secondly because of the Awards themselves. The Awards’ website explains that they, “honour stars in the erotic world” in fourteen categories of “artists, performers, sex workers, campaigners, film makers, websites, blogs and podcasts – include the famous, the struggling and the previously unknown”. The awards, and the awards’ organizers, also do much more than that; they impact on the world at large. On a practical level the awards and the erotic ball, The Night of the Senses, that follows the final ceremony raise money for Outsiders, which facilitates and campaigns around disabled people as sexual partners. Beyond that the Awards and the organization behind them, the Leydig Trust, offer a key part of the process through which we can draw the boundaries around sexual liberty for ourselves. At the heart of this stands the awards’ organizer and long time sex activist Tuppy Owens.

The celebration of sexuality in the Erotic Awards’ performance categories works with the more explicitly writerly, activist and political categories. Because they celebrate the consensual, the nominees, Outsiders and the Leydig Trust, also have an important role in highlighting and challenging the coercive and showing how publicly important the private worlds of sex can be. Each nominee represents one of a possible variety of ways in which sexual freedom can be envisaged and expressed. I will just suggest three possible examples from this year’s nominees. Joy, one of the finalists in this year’s Striptease category, has a background in the International Union of Sex Workers and was herself first inspired to strip by the awards. She has since performed her act for disabled audiences and is now setting up the London Erotic Film Festival which will function as a fund-raiser alongside the awards and Night of the Senses. Katie Sarra, a finalist for Artist of the Year, epitomizes the ways in which practitioners, activists and academics have refocused their gaze on the construction and reconstruction of the body. In her work ‘witnessing in paint the right of passage that tattoos symbolise’ the body is no longer the constant bit on to which we map the social construction of gender, it is itself a space to be reformed, re-performed and re-examined. But I think that the awards’ specific relevance is perhaps most startlingly demonstrated by two of the nominees in the Campaigners category. Robbie Swan’ and Fiona Patten’s book Hypocrites was published by the Eros Foundation in 2000. Hypocrites raised awareness of the levels of abuse by church clergy in Australia and inspired a mass rally in Sydney. On the back of this Pope Benedict XVI apologized to those victims of abuse during his trip to Australia in July this year.

In May the awards held a showcase of the nominees in the performance categories at the Clapham Grand. I took my friend the documentary maker Daisy Asquith as my guest and we had a front row view of the acts. The showcase was introduced by the world’s most talented MC Mat Fraser and opened with the Oddballs and their ‘Balloon Dance’ which I had last seen in the comedy tent at Glastonbury at some point in the 80s. Whilst the more mainstream approach found on hen nights and in high street strip clubs was well represented at the showcase, Burlesque aesthetics and innovative historical and cultural allusion held the spotlight. The cultural historian in me appreciated Syban V Manticore’s swan lake en point , Suzie Q’s Harlem Renaissance , classic Burlesque from Miss Bijou Noir, Tiffany’s embodiment of a 40s living (pin-up) doll, and Lazlo’s exploration of consumption (think La Grande Bouffe) which was sexy, funny and clever and as Mr Fraser said, included the best reveal I’ve ever seen.

What stayed with me was the Erotic Awards’ celebration of consensual sexual expression of all kinds which broke down the barriers found in so many other ‘scenes’. The venue, company, food and wine certainly made the showcase an infectiously enjoyable night and I am looking forward to meeting my fellow finalists at the Erotic Awards exhibition on the 4th September and taking my friends Daisy and Dom to the final ceremony on the 12th as Tuppy says it’s “more a celebration than a competition”.

Lucy Robinson is currently a Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Sussex.

Erotic Awards exhibition at the Jago Gallery, 77 Redchurch Street, Hoxton, London E2, 4th- 10th September,
The Erotic Awards (8pm) followed by Night of the Senses at Mass and Babalou Brixton Hill, London SW2 1JF, 12th September

MUP author asks difficult questions in the FT

Tom Gallagher, whose new book Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong, will be published by MUP in 2009, has written an article for The Financial Times this week.

Entitled How the EU let Romania off, it asks a few uncomfortable questions about the EU's attitude towards joining countries, particularly Romania.

Read the article online, for free.

Bestselling author, Bill Jones, examines political communication in the 21st century

I suppose I’m fairly experienced at political communication in that I’ve taught politics since 1972 when I first arrived at Manchester University.
As well as the spoken word and books, the third form of communication I have used is the internet.

In May 2005 I began to write a blog:

http://skipper59.blogspot.com/

and have kept up posting on it ever since. The idea of a blog is to create a kind of personal diary, but given the subject it’s also to attract some comment from other readers. I don’t get anything like the traffic on my site as the big ones like Iain Dale’s Diary or Guido Fawkes (both available via a click if you visit my site) but some 60,000 have visited since I started, including a fair number of students and some teachers too.

How to become an expert blogger...

1. To write a good blog you need to master a minimum amount of the required IT know-how; if I can do this it must be easy.

2. You also need to follow politics quite closely and be able to form views on what is happening. It helps if you are a bit of a ‘political anorak’ as I suppose I have become.

3. You need a rather thicker skin than is normal given most civilised political discussion. Some comments can be rude and occasionally brutal. This is unfortunate maybe, but it’s inevitable given that comments can be posted ‘anonymously’ and at least it keeps things lively. I recently posted on an article by Max Hastings agreeing that the absence of inhibitions regarding obscene language these days has overall reduced our quality of life. Comments included one or two anonymous choice Anglo-Saxon words which I suppose were all too predictable.

So, are blogs really that important?

Some bloggers see themselves as being at the cutting edge of a new medium, setting an agenda of their own which challenges the ‘Metropolitan Commentariat’. I’m not sure this is true- at least not yet it isn’t. Bloggers are mostly one- person shows lacking the resources to cover events as they happen and able to influence things only on the margins: mostly on matters concerning gossip and the transgressions of individuals. Readership of the political blogosphere is still quite small- though the big blogs attract over a million hits a month- and it would be absurd to consider it as a genuine competitor to the press and broadcasting just yet. However, it is lively, provides interaction and is a genuine alternative; it can only develop further and become more influential. Personally, I do it because it’s fun; you can feel as if you are producing your own online newspaper, complete with pictures and editorials.

Bill Jones

See also http://politicaleducationforum.com/site/content_home.php for a range of products and services for teachers and students of politics.

Just arrived into the office...

Piercing the bamboo curtain

Tentative bridge-building to China during the Johnson years

by Michael Lumbers

This new study is the first comprehensive account of U.S. Policy toward China during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, a critical phase of the Cold War immediately preceding the dramatic Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s.

Based on a thorough review of a wide array of recently declassified government documents, this book offers a fresh perspective by challenging the popular view that Johnson’s approach to China was marked by stagnation and sterility.

For more information, click on the title above.

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Victorians and the Virgin Mary

Religion and gender in England 1830 - 1885

by Carol Engelhardt Herringer

this book seeks to revise our understanding of the Victorian religious landscape by retrieving Catholics from the cultural margins to which they are usually relegated. By showing that the Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics constituted a significant proportion of Victorian society that was opposed to the Protestant majority, this analysis more accurately evaluates their contributions to Victorian culture.

For more information, click on the title above.

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Eleventh-century Germany

The Swabian chronicles

Translated and selected by I. S. Robinson

In the abbey of Reichenau, in the south-western duchy of Swabia, the great polymath Herman 'the Lame' composed a chronicle that contains the most detailed account of the reign of Emperor Henry III (1039-56). His pupil and biographer, Berthold of Reichenau continued his master's work, composing a rigorous extant account of the years 1076-1079 in Germany.

The Swabian chronicles reveal how between 1049 and 1100 the centripetal attraction of the reform papacy became the dominant fact of intellectual life in German reformed monastic circles.

For more information, click on the title above.