look for the political in the wrong place, on the wrong floors and on the wrong pages of the newspapers. Those decision-making areas which had been protected by the political in industrial capitalism – the private sector, business, science, towns, everyday life and so on – are caught in the storms of political conflicts in reflexive modernity. (Beck 1994:18) We have been brought up with a clear...

Perhaps the crowning achievement of mature democracies is the peaceful acceptance of the ballot box as the primary instrument for deciding who should hold power in society. We do not have to go far back in the history of most democratic states, however, to find a distinct role for political violence. Moreover, many inhabitants of the globe still remain at risk of falling prey to widespread viol...

political trust addresses the relation between people and state. researches say political trust has had a declining trend in iran since the victory of the revolution. religion is among the factors which affect political trust, and has been emphasized in the theories of the classical and contemporary sociologists and social capital theorists. this fact is more considerable in iran where a religi...

The distinction between state and civil society is deeply rooted in both sociology and political theory (Barkey and Parikh 1991:525; Bobbio 1999:115; Habermas 1989:19). Even thinkers who argue that civil society and the state ‘interact’ often retain the basic conceptual opposition between the terms. Barkey and Parikh go so far as to characterize recent work on the state as “the state-society li...

• A state must be developmental in nature if it is to enable a pace and pattern of growth which is pro-poor • Institutions matter — attempts to reform or build robust pro-growth institutions must first identify a narrow and specific set of ‘growthenhancing’ institutions, and then support them • Overt opposition to pro-poor change is less common than indifference, and the wealthy can often be pe...

Research on growing American political polarization and antipathy often studies effects on public institutions and political processes. Less attention has been paid to civil institutions like close familial ties. Using smartphone-tracking data and national precinct electoral results, we show time spent at Thanksgiving dinner fell by 20-30 minutes within politically divided families following th...

geopolitical imagination, by definition, is the competition between powers in forming individuals’, institutions’ and political factors’ perception of the characteristics and contents of geographical space, on the basis of their intended interests. in this article, as a case study, the us perception of the :union: of soviet socialist republics during the cold war era is analysed. the authors ar...