Series: Studies in Critical Social Science

Critical Approaches to International Relations: Philosophical Foundations and Current Debates explores the achievements of a wide variety of critical approaches in International Relations theory. It discusses the barrage of criticism and theoretical openings they have brought against the IR orthodoxy and suggests future potential for critical IR scholarship to improve not only our explanatory possibilities but also our ethical and...

Social Security in the Balkans - Volume 1 offers a comprehensive overview of social security in the Balkan states. Social security is presented from a broad perspective as a mechanism that addresses human needs, provides protection against social risks, reduces social tensions, and secures peace. Various sectors of social policy, such as pension systems, health care systems, disability insurance, and...

In The Making of Modern Japan, Myles Carroll offers a sweeping account of post-war Japanese political economy, exploring the transition from the post-war boom to the crisis of today and the connections between these seemingly discrete periods. Carroll explores the multifarious international and domestic political, economic, social, and cultural conditions that fortified Japan's post-war hegemonic order and enabled decades of...

Urban Emergency (Mis)Management and the Crisis of Neoliberalism places the Flint, Michigan, water contamination disaster in the context of a broader crisis created by neoliberal governance in the United States. Authors from a range of disciplines—including sociology, criminal justice, anthropology, history, communications, and jurisprudence—examine the failures in Flint, with an emphasis on comparison. Their analysis calls attention to similar trajectories...

In From Online Platforms to Digital Monopolies: Technology, Information and Power, Jonas C.L. Valente discusses the rise of platforms as key players in different social activities, from economy to culture and politics. These companies have a daily presence in the lives of the majority of the world population, from social interactions to digital payments and transactions. They are gaining a...

Asian Canadians—whether immigrant, international students, naturalised, native-born, or other—are hampered in their exploration and articulation of self by the dearth of critical writing both for them and by them. Despite the influx of Asian students and their inflated tuition rates to Canadian postsecondary institutions, they are strikingly underrepresented in the literature of the academy. Critical theory focusing on Asian identity,...

In Gender and Biopolitics, Pnar Sargl sheds new light on the life spheres of the woman as a means of examining neoliberal Islamic thinking about individuals and populations. Sargl's exploration of the governmental rationality of post-2002 Turkey's Islamic neoliberalism is especially informed by Michel Foucault's critical perspective. The tenets and merits of Islamic neoliberalism bring moral and religious practices into...

Andy Blunden's Hegel, Marx and Vygotsky, Essays in Social Philosophy presents his novel approach to social theory in a series of essays. Blunden aims to use the cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky and the Soviet Activity Theorists to renew Hegelian Marxism as an interdisciplinary science. This allows psychologists and social theorists to share their insights through concepts equally valid in...

A much-needed, Marxist economic account of service and retail work, as well as the political alternatives. In Service Workers in the Era of Monopoly Capital, Fabian van Onzen uses Marxist theory to analyse the process by which service and retail workers are exploited by the capitalist class. His analysis takes us through the primary concepts of Marxism—surplus-value, commodity form, etc.—and...

In African-Australian Marriage Migration: An Ethnography of (Un)happiness, Henrike A. Hoogenraad follows journeys of marriage migration among African-Australian couples. The study narrates these journeys as 'happiness projects' since for cross-border couples, happiness is connected to dreams for a life-long partnership that begins with the visa application. Yet, happiness is invoked as an aspired state rather than an achieved goal. The...

In The Right to Development in Africa, Carol Chi Ngang provides a conceptual analysis of the human right to development with a decolonial critique of the requirement to have recourse to development cooperation as a mechanism for its realisation. In his argumentation, the setbacks to development in Africa are not necessarily caused by the absence of development assistance but principally...

In Co-operative Struggles, Denise Kasparian expands the theoretical horizons regarding labour unrest by proposing new categories to make visible and conceptualise conflicts in the new worker co-operativism of the twenty-first century. After the depletion of neoliberal reforms at the dawn of the twenty-first century in Argentina, co-operativism gained momentum, mainly due to the recuperation of enterprises by their workers and...

Controversies about History, Development and Revolution in Brazil is a critical exploration of the history of Brazilian economic thought in light of the country's own historical and political development. Editors Maria Malta, Jaime Len, Carla Curty, and Bruno Borja present an analytical interpretation of the facts, which reveals the power of debates constructing a genuinely Brazilian contribution to world economic...

Farewell to Work? presents the large process of capital's productive restructuring, triggered in the 1970s—a process with tendencies to both intellectualise labour power and increase the levels of the working class' precariousness on a global scale. This book hypothesises that instead of work's loss of centrality in contemporary capitalism, when the world of production is analysed in its global dimension,...

The neoliberal policy response to the crisis in Ghana did not succeed in reversing the economic decline in either the medium or long term. In fact, quite the opposite: rather than undoing the economic decline, Francis Boateng Frimpong argues that these policy prescriptions further weakened the country's ability to develop. This is because the policies intentionally and unintentionally encouraged factors...