Search results for ""Ibidem-Verlag""

How did the Ukrainian oligarchy survive the institutional disruption of the Euromaidan revolt of 2013/2014? How did it manage to continue its extractive political and economic practices, amid deep changes in Ukraine's society and polity? To answer these questions, this book analyzes the evolution of the Ukrainian super-rich in 2006-2017, tracing the process of conversion of wealth into political influence through vote-buying in the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) and of the transformation of political influence back into wealth via elite rent-extraction schemes within the Ukrainian gas sector. A key argument is that continuity in informal practices between the Yanukovych and Poroshenko presidencies, and of the networks that conduct them, meant a prolongation of the dominant political economy regime. The study conceptualizes the processes of the recreation of Ukrainian oligarchy as a "currency flow," or circuit, of wealth and power. It adds to the literature on the dynamics of informally dominated post-communist political economy regimes a detailed, integrated, and internally comparative case study of Ukraine.

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Joey Torino is a man who has tired of the busy, and dangerous, life he has led, and has simply decided to opt out. He is done with all that-the pressures of doing something that someone else wants him to do, the risks of doing things he questions, resents, or even disagrees with. And he has managed to escape that life, quietly, without fanfare or animosity, and with just enough income to be able to live, in the northern forests of Maine, in the secluded, modest style he prefers. And he is happy in his simple life here.But then a message from his past arrives. Pen Highsmith has another difficult mission for him, and although those dangerous episodes in Russia are long past now, Joey's "special skills" are needed again.Joey faces a difficult situation, involving the Russians, a complicated low-key civil conflict, ancient suspicions and animosities, and a ruthless, relentless enemy, hidden in the mountains-in Afghanistan. And the monumental investments of the Wilde Oil company might be put at risk, under certain circumstances and in some situations.There are clear risks, and potential dangers, which have to be dealt with and surmounted, in a country, in a region, which is complicated and potentially dangerous. So Highsmith reaches out to Joey Torino.

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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many new techniques for remaining healthy have been introduced, but there has been little to no public discussion about how to live well. "Social distancing" is good medicine for the body, but the health of the spirit depends on wisdom. When we find ourselves in new and dangerous conditions, we can only look to the past for counsel.In this book, originally published as Plague Literature and now in its second edition, the philosopher Dustin Peone offers reflections on ten literary classics set during plague times. From each work, he draws one central insight that is applicable to our situation today and all future pandemics. These insights are lessons in prudence, taught by the sages of the past. This is a book about how to pursue the good life during a pandemic and what it means to flourish in dark times, not just to survive.

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This collected volume investigates the ways in which historical training supports current activism and advocacy in global times by highlighting models of social activism and political representation in different parts of the world, with diverse social actions, strategies, and protest spaces.Morocco is a fascinating society to examine protest movements in an authoritarian regime. For the first time ever, the contributors reply in detail to questions, challenges and findings regarding the implications of historically informed activism in Morocco. The cooperative perspective is the key to a better understanding as it reinvigorates a conversation between social scientists-sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists-and historians about how to analyse social and political activism.The main findings relate to the great structural transformations that have shaped the current power regimes in a longue durée perspective. How are social movements born, how do they mature, and how do they die? Through the dynamics of social mobilisation, we discover the structure of the power regime, the responses (strategies), and its forms of survival (resources and capacities).How does history inform and empower current activism? The book covers 22 scenarios of popular revolts -urban, rural, and peripheral. Casablanca (1907, 1965, 2000), Fez (1907, 1990), the Eastern Rif (1909, 1921, 1958, 1984, 2004), Meknes (1937, 2011), Tangiers (1952, 2011, 2015), Salé, (1930, 2008), Taza (1915), and Imider (2011).

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Dead phones, chaos in hospitals, looming nuclear meltdowns: For years, experts all over the world have been warning of a widespread power blackout-and the devastating consequences for society as a whole. However, just as before the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians and the public are hardly aware of the far-reaching risks: A blackout would catch us almost completely unprepared.As for other (supposedly improbable) disruptive events, disaster movies and sci-fi series have long shown what would happen if modern society were to lose its lifeblood. Denis Newiak looks into those filmic fictions for answers to pressing questions: How can we prepare ourselves for the dramatic consequences of such a crisis? And can the collapse of modernity still be stopped?

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While the COVID-19 pandemic overshadowed all else and would quickly have a lasting impact on our daily lives, other events related to the radical right in 2020 soon surfaced. From terrorist attacks in Germany and India to anti-mask protests across the U.S. and Europe, radical right violence escalated in the midst of circulating conspiracy theories and disinformation. The yearbook draws upon insightful analyses from an international network of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners who explore the dynamics and impact of the radical right. It explores a wide range of topics including reflections on authoritarianism and fascism, the role of ideology and (counter-)intellectuals, and radical-right responses to the pandemic and calls for police reform in the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. It ends with important assessments on best approaches towards countering the radical right, both online and offline. This timely overview provides a broad examination of the global radical right in 2020, which will be useful for scholars, students, policymakers, journalists, and the public.

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In Statu Nascendi is a new peer-reviewed journal that aspires to be a world-class scholarly platform encompassing original academic research dedicated to the circle of Political Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Theory of International Relations, Foreign Policy, and the political Decision-making process. The journal investigates specific issues through a socio-cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approach to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the "stage-of-becoming" plays a vital role. Issue 2019:2 comprises, among others, the following interviews & articles:Charity Begins at Home: Resolving the Tensions of Liberalism(s), "White Privilege", and African Corruption via Rawls and Transnational Digital-CommunitarianismLukács, Kojève, and Verene's interpretations of Hegel's recollection in his "Phenomenology of Spirit" Interview with Sami Mehmeti on the political situation in the newly established Republic of Northern Macedonia Madonnas and Whores or Blood and Gore? Roles for Women in the So-Called Islamic StateDonald J. Trump's Policy Toward North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran – a Comparative StudyContrariwise and Inconsistent Positions on Turkey's EU Membership – Do Party Politics Matter in German Foreign Policy?

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To the older generations in her native Slovakia, Hana Ponická is well-known for her successful children's books and courageous fight against the communist regime. Her psychological ordeal began in February 1977 when the elderly lady refused to sign the so-called anticharta, a condemnation of the human rights group Charter 77, which had published its first manifesto in the West on 1 January 1977. All Slovak and Czech artists had to sign the anticharta; they were forced by the regime to condemn the dissidents, the most prominent among them being Václav Havel (1936–2011), who were standing up against the violation of basic human rights enshrined in the Czechoslovak constitution following the conclusion of the CSCE treaty of Helsinki. Ponická, like most of her fellow artists, had neither read the Charter 77 manifesto nor the text of the anticharta; she thus refused to sign. Her courage prompted the regime to terrorize her psychologically. This political biography is the first ever written about Ponická, despite her being a household name in Slovakia. Josette Baer's analysis is based on Ponická's memoirs of that cruel year of 1977, newspaper articles she published prior to 1971, when the regime effectively banned any critical voice from publication, and newspaper articles she published after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 to promote the establishing of a rule-of-law state and democracy. The documents of the StB, the Slovak and Czech Security Services, are analyzed for the first time; they are evidence of how the StB tried to pressure the resilient and disciplined grandmother of three into obedience. Oral history interviews with Dirk Matthias Dalberg, Vlasta Jaksicsová, and Mary Šamal inform the reader about the situation of the Slovak dissidents of Charter 77, how normal citizens lived in the regime, and how the Czech and Slovak exile communities in the USA saw the dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia.

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This study provides an overview of current nation building processes in contested states. With a specific focus on the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, and Kosovo, original data is presented, collected in English in a single work for the first time. Viktoria Potapkina presents an analysis and comparison of contested states from an internal perspective, looking at the processes that help legitimize such entities from within and creating support for their ongoing existence.The work strives to fill a gap in the literature on contested states, as well as to contribute to the overall understanding of nation and state building, state formation, and sovereignty. It provides a new way of looking at the puzzle that contested states are, offering insight into why they still exist in their current forms.

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In a collection of sixteen essays, Gagiano addresses over twenty texts from various African regions and periods. The works discussed here range from transcriptions of ancient (Khoikhoi / San) folktales to some of the classic texts of the African English literary canon and include recent writing about urgent contemporary social and gender issues. As the title indicates, Annie Gagiano's focus is on the way these texts engage with the forces that damage and threaten life and quality of life in various African contexts. She pays tribute -- by means of carefully argued analyses -- to the authors' political courage and social concern and to their subtle delineations of their African character' experiences. Central to her focus is the verbal artistry of these authors' memorable and complex representations. Her collection as a whole insists on the philosophical and aesthetic importance of African texts of the kind discussed here -- to the global reading public as much as to the 'real world' of their original contexts. Along with a new preface, several new essays have been added to the new 2014 edition to bring the collection up to date with the latest developments in the field of study.

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This book follows the increasing focus on Irish identity in Joyces major works of prose. This study traces the development of the idea of Ireland, the concept of Irishness, the formation of a national identity and the need to deconstruct a nationalistic self-conception of nation in Joyces work. Through close reading of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Hero and Ulysses, Joyce articulates the problems that colonialism poses to a nation-state that cannot create its identity autonomously. Furthermore, this reading uncovers Joyces conception of national identity as increasingly sophisticated and complicated after Irish independence was won. From here, Halloran argues that Joyce presents his readers with ideas and suggestions for the future of Ireland. As Irish studies become increasingly imbricated with postcolonial discourse, the need for re-examination of classic texts becomes necessary. This book provides a new approach for understanding the dramatic development of Joyces oeurve by providing a textual analysis guided by postcolonial theory.

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The essays in this revised and expanded volume explore a variety of structuring taxonomies, the relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the artists in the genre are as varied as the interests of the period in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, aesthetics, medicine, and the paranormal. But the formalising tendencies of investigative process remain, and it is this adherence, in artist and detective alike, to seeing crime and its resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on disorder that is under examination.

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This book is a contribution to European comparative history involving Portugal and Slovakia, but also the larger geographic units of Iberia and Slavic Central Europe. While developments in Portugal and Slovakia predominate, Spain, the Czech lands, and other regions are discussed as well. The subjects investigated include the position of women and the activities of messianic thinkers in the seventeenth century as well as semi-fascist Catholic political movements in the twentieth century. The authors look at the subject matter from the viewpoint of politics, social phenomena, and culture. The cultural dimension includes religion and ideology, both of which have clearly been of critical importance in Portuguese and Slovak history. It also includes problems of ethno-linguistic and national identity and the more recent phenomenon of multiculturalism, whose social promotion is controversial and uncertain.

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The book examines the relation between art created during the so-called Revolution of Dignity–Maidan Events (November 21, 2013 – February 23, 2014, Ukraine) and the mission of the Maidan Museum (Kyiv, Ukraine) born from the ashes of Euromaidan, to preserve the 'Spirit of Maidan'. The Maidan events, defined as the Maidanization process, produced a post-colonial discourse language, a new apolitical ideology based on the concepts of dignity and Ukrainianness; generated symbols, social myths, and collective imaginary; triggered the 'Spirit of Maidan' that changed the consciousness of the participants in the demonstrations; and functioned as a ritual of intensification-aggregation-initiation passage, in which the identity of new Ukraine was shaped. In this transformative process, in which the human being is seen as an 'animal identitarium' struggling, defending, and fighting for his/her own identity, artists played a crucial role in assembling the main elements of the post-Maidan Ukrainian identity (homo Maidan), were able to empower the whole movement with concrete ideas, and finally reworked objects, symbols, and music already present in the Ukrainian DNA through a process of meaningization, symbolization, mythization, canonization, sacralization, and interpellation. This volume is based on interviews with artists who dramatically participated in the Maidan events and fieldwork at the Maidan Museum, and unfolds and identifies the main elements, emotions, expectations, and motivations of the relation of art creation and Ukrainian post-Maidan identity formation based on the 'Spirit of Maidan'.

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Youth language data provides interesting perspectives on gender dynamics and gendered usage in society. However, the gender perspective has not received the deserved focus in youth language studies in Africa. This is partly due to the general perception that youth languages and classic youth language practices, such as slang and anti-language, are male-oriented. This collected volume focuses on gender dynamics and gendered usage in African youth languages and youth language practices, against the backdrop of urbanity as well as rurality. With representations from different parts of Africa, the volume examines sundry youth usage in different contexts and domains. While avoiding strict binarizations and potentially flawed dichotomies, the contributing scholars observe some of the motivations for different gender performatives and how these manifest in a variety of language forms and through predominated categories of use. Data samples were obtained through sociolinguistic and anthropological instruments, ranging from questionnaires and structured interviews to street-based observations and corpus analyses. On the whole, the volume engages the literature and debate on language, youth, and especially on gendering dynamics in African youth language practices.

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This book is directed at both researchers and teachers with an interest to establish a multilingual and cosmopolitan culture within classrooms; it contributes to research in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on multiple levels. The theoretical part sketches a conceptual framework with a competence model for the promotion of global discourse competence as the center of gravity for multilingual CLIL in the social sciences. Along the leitmotif of climate change, the construction of 'cosmopolitan classroom glocalities' for supporting learners' 21st century skills is suggested. Besides defending design-based action research as a research method for bridging the gap between theory and practice, two empirical contributions from a German 10th grade CLIL classroom with English as target language make the preceding theoretical framework tangible. One chapter deals with more language-related issues, whereas the subsequent chapter takes a subject turn. At first, a comprehensive model for multilingual CLIL is presented. It builds on the novel concept of translanguaging, adapted to 'trans-foreign-languaging' for facilitating multilingualism as a daily norm. Thereafter, the model's effect on political judgments is investigated. This chapter concludes in proposing the genesis of a 'perfect equilibrium of emotional and rational learning' for promoting empathy, solidarity, and justice within a democratic and transnational civil society.

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This anthology brings together scholarship in the field of Friendship Studies.In recent decades, friendship has been a site of analysis for understanding the connections between people and groups, and as a fabric for holding the political and social together. Starting with the theoretical debates about how to conceptualize friendship as a political idea, the anthology then looks at friendship's relationship with justice, the state, and civic relations. The collection presents cutting-edge research which moves the theorization of friendship beyond western confines to consider the themes in cross-cultural and decolonized contexts.

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IN STATU NASCENDI is a peer-reviewed journal that aspires to be a world-class scholarly platform encompassing original academic research dedicated to the circle of Political Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Theory of International Relations, Foreign Policy, and the political Decision-making process. The journal investigates specific issues through a socio-cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approach to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the stage-of-becoming plays a vital role. Issue 2021:2 comprises, amongst others, the following articles: Culture as Understood in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Hans-Georg Gadamer; Literature as a Modern Art (Letërsiasi art modern); Aristotles Phronesis and Socratic Skepticism: A Starting Point for the Development of Applied Ethics; The 30th Anniversary of the Visegrád Group (V4) Seen through the Perspective of Selected Integrationist Theories; Book Review: Conflict Resolution Beyond the International Relations Paradigm Evolving Designs as a Transformative Practice in Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria by Philip Gamaghelyan.

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This study launches a systematic inquiry into the nature of the concept of humanitarian intervention, focusing on its primary function of the protection of the endangered civilian populations who find themselves at the grave risk of genocide. This is strengthened by a recollection of selected historical examples of similar events and the responses to them by the international community, empowered by our modern understanding of the principle of state sovereignty, human rights, and anti-genocide legislation. Applying the in-statu-nascendi ontology that accounts for the latest hybridized compartmentalisation of various IR-related theories, the author provides a deep ontological inquiry into the nature, origin, and genesis of the idea of humanitarian intervention and opens up a broader debate on the limits of the principle of state sovereignty as well as on the international community's ignorance of some of the most severe cases of human rights abuses around the world.

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The bilingual, French-English journal Méthod(e)s, founded in 2015, is an African initiative with the objective to enlarge the methodological debates on the Global South. The desire for a strong understanding of methodology is to situate it above academic trends, thereby placing it in line with a universal history of the sciences. Just as calling dominant paradigms into question leaves room for creative opportunities, so does the comparison of theoretical approaches and technical models of data collection. Questions related to methods are not purely technical or merely philosophical reflections. The examination of the method used in scientific investigations necessarily leads us to question the validity and consequences of research results. From this point of view, the journal Méthod(e)s is not a forum for simple discussions on the mechanics of research but a tool to question social interests influencing academic research and giving it a political function. It is also intended to lead to a more critical look at the creation of theories dealing with the status of individuals and societies in Africa and the Global South. Méthod(e)s aims to bring into question, connect, and compare the theoretical, technical, and political foundations of the social sciences as applied to human societies. Each contribution is followed by a summary in the respectively other language. In order to ensure a broad intellectual reach, the editors reserve the right to include articles written in other languages. All the abstracts of the papers are also available in Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish.

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What is the relationship between writing systems and nationalism? How can different alphabets coexist in the same country? What is the destiny of the Cyrillic alphabet in Europe? Giustina Selvelli's original work provides detailed answers to these far-reaching and potentially divisive questions and many more by examining several intriguing debates on topics of alphabets and national identity in a number of countries from the Balkan area over the course of the last 100 years. Following an encompassing perspective on alphabetic diversity, Selvelli, an expert on Southeast European Studies, reconstructs the ideological context of national discourses connected to the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, also taking a look at the Arabic and Glagolitic scripts, and interweaving issues on the symbolism of the alphabet with the complex recent history of the region, marked by the parallel influences of the East and the West. She also sheds light on the impact of a range of alphabet policies on ethnolinguistic minorities, proposing a new definition of "alphabetic rights" with special regard to the multiethnic legacy of the former Ottoman and Habsburg empires. This comprehensive book makes us discover the privileged role that writing systems played in the region's delicate post-imperial and post-socialist transitions, leaving us captivated by peculiar stories such as that of the utopian "Yugoslav alphabet".

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The contributors to this collection explore the multidimensional transformation of independent Ukraine and deal with her politics, society, private sector, identity, arts, religions, media, and democracy. Each chapter reflects the up-to-date research in its sub-discipline, is styled for use in seminars, and includes a bibliography as well as a recommended reading list. These studies illustrate the deep changes, yet, at the same time, staggering continuity in Ukraines post-Soviet development as well as various counter-reactions to it. All nine chapters are jointly written by two co-authors, one Ukrainian and one Western, who respond here to recent needs in international higher education. The volumes contributors include, apart from the editors: Margarita M. Balmaceda (Seton Hall University), Oksana Barshynova (Ukrainian National Arts Museum), Tymofii Brik (Kyiv School of Economics), José Casanova (Georgetown University), Diana Dutsyk (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), Marta Dyczok (University of Western Ontario), Hennadii Korzhov (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute), Serhiy Kudelia (Baylor University), Pavlo Kutuev (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute), Olena Martynyuk (Columbia University), Oksana Mikheieva (Ukrainian Catholic University), Tymofii Mylovanov (University of Pittsburgh), Andrian Prokip (Ukrainian Institute for the Future), Oxana Shevel (Tufts University), Ilona Sologoub (Kyiv School of Economics), Maksym Yenin (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute), and Yuliya Yurchenko (University of Greenwich).

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This handbook is the first collection of comprehensive teaching materials for teachers and students of Central Asian Studies (CAS) with a strong pedagogic dimension. It presents 22 chapters, clustered around five themes, with contributions from more than 19 scholars, all leading experts in the field of CAS and Eurasian Studies. This collection is not only a reference work for scholars branching out to different disciplines of CAS but also for scholars from other disciplines broadening their scope to CAS. It addresses post-colonial frameworks and also untangles topics from their 'Soviet' reference frame. It aims to de-exoticize the region and draws parallels to European or to historically European-occupied territories. In each chapter, the handbook provides a concise but nuanced overview of the topics covered, in which way these have been approached by the mainstream literature, and points out pitfalls, myths, and new insights, providing background knowledge about Central Asia to readers and intertwine this with an advanced level of insight to leave the readers equipped with a strong foundation to approach more specialized sources either in classroom settings or by self-study. In addition, the book offers a comprehensive glossary, list of used abbreviations, overview of intended learning outcomes, and a smart index (distinguishing between names, locations, concepts, and events). A list of recorded lectures to be found on YouTube will accompany the handbook either as instruction materials for teachers or visual aids for students. Since the authors themselves recorded the lectures related to their own chapters, this provides the opportunity to engage in a more personalized way with the authors. This project is being developed in the framework of the EISCAS project (www.eiscas.eu), co-funded by the Erasmus + Program of the European Union.

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Robert Radins Teaching English to Refugees does it all, weaving together memoir, philosophy of language, social-justice advocacy, and graphic narrative into a haunting meditation on what can happen when the least powerful among us escape oppression and seek refuge in the United States. With the unerring precision of both linguist and poet, Radin tells a story of teaching English to refugees from such troubled areas of the world as Iraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As he struggles to find ways to reach across languages and cultures so disparate they do not even seem to be part of the same world, a quieter story plays out -- his own, where multi-generational Jewish legacies get compressed into incisive and singular moments of prose you wont soon forget. Through it all, the voices of his Muslim students -- haltingly at first, and then with increasing confidence -- carve out a space for being all their own. Like Jenny Erpenbecks Go, Went, Gone, this spare, unsparing, and intrepid book takes a close, unwavering look at some of the hardest stories of our times until nothing is what it seems at first and students become teachers to us all. -- Katharine Haake, Professor of English, California State University Northridge, author of The Time of Quarantine and That Water, Those Rocks

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Urban space is an important part of the political environment-a place where people congregate to discuss, deliberate, and interact with each other. In times of great public discontent, people often turn to urban spaces to make their opinions heard and to demand change, with varying degrees of success. How are mass protests affected by the urban public space in which they occur? This book provides a theoretical model to analyse city spaces, based on the use of theories from political science, urban planning, and sociology. Hansen's approach consists of a mapping of the causal mechanisms between spatial elements, the political environment, and their combined effects on protests. This mapping is applied to three case studies-Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow. In addition to the spatial perspective model, Urban Protest provides new insights as to how the interactions in space occur, and demonstrates how geography can create limitations and opportunities in a large variety of ways.

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