Books on the topic 'Dictatorship (Rome)'

This book considers the growing awareness in the wake of World War I that culture could play an effective political role in international relations. Tamara van Kessel shows how the British created the British Council in support of those cultural aims, which took on particular urgency in light of the rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe. Van Kessel focuses in particular on the activities of the British Council and the Italian Dante Alighieri Society in the Mediterranean area, where their respective country's strategic and ideological interests most evidently clashed.

Carles Riba, one of the most relevant personalities in Catalan letters, not only as a poet but also as a linguist, has been considered a difficult writer. This book aims to examine how his theoretical preparation and his ideas in linguistics influenced his work in the particular case of some early stories in which he tries “uns utilíssims exercicis de simplicitat”. Carles Riba did not present his linguistic theories in a single text in a complete and articulated way but we can evaluate them in various papers he wrote and published up until his death in 1959. The first part of this work, after an introduction which sets the author in the context of European linguistics, is a review of the ideas that can be found in the collections of essays: Escolis i altres articles (1921), Els marges (1927), Per comprendre (1937), ... més els poemes (1957), and in a few other particularly interesting papers.This part focuses also on some of the controversies in which Carles Riba is involved as a linguist during the spanish dictatorship: especially his role on the publication of the second edition of Pompeu Fabra’s dictionary in 1954 and the consequences of the prologue he wrote for the volume. Joan Coromines considers an attack on the linguist Pompeu Fabra the negative comparison Riba proposes with the honnête homme: in our research we re-evaluate this consideration and analyse the historical and semantic value of this expression belonging to 17th-century French culture.The second part of this paper is a strictly linguistic analysis of three texts, chosen among Carles Riba’s works for children. The interest of those texts is in the author’s deliberate intent of using the most simple language, which enables us to determine what he considers the basic aspects of linguistic quality. Furthermore, the existence of different editions of those texts permits a philological analysis of those versions showing Carles Riba’s ‘simple’ language in three very representative moments, from the beginning of his career as a writer to the difficult situation during the dictatorship.

This chapter examines the anti-monarchical discourse that was indigenous to Rome since the expulsion of the kings. Through a study of the lexicographic range of the words rex (king) and regnum (kingship), it parses the accusations of ‘regal aspirations’ abounding in political writings of the late Republic. Although associated with the last Roman king, the ‘tyrannical’ Tarquin, these terms were not indicative of constitutional positions. Rather, in the rhetoric of faction politics, they suggest the traits of arrogance and rampant ambition. Thus refining our understanding of political discourse in the final years of the Republic, the chapter also paves the way for a new understanding of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship and its critical assessment before and after his assassination.

Chapter 5 analyzes Schmitt’s theory of dictatorship. Schmitt’s theory of dictatorship was part of his broader criticism of positivism and its inability to effectively respond to the instabilities mass democracy wrought on the state and constitution. Positive laws, including constitutional amendment procedures, could themselves become threats to the fundamental commitments of public order. The suspension of positive laws might be justified. Schmitt argued dictatorship was a necessary final bulwark against this sort of revolutionary threat. The dictator, as guardian of last resort capable of acting outside positive law, could become necessary for a state to survive internal enemies. Yet, although dictatorship could suspend positive law, Schmitt argued it did not suspend the fundamental public order of the state and constitution—a distinction positivism was unable to recognize. This chapter concludes with an analysis of Schmitt’s discussion of the role of the president as guardian of the constitution.

Considering incidents that make headline news internationally, given the modern information and communication technology revolution, the facility of citizens to rapidly mobilize represents a considerable threat to autocratic survival. While the speed with which popular movements emerge has increased exponentially, and the news of their existence spreads faster and farther, civil unrest has threatened the stability and survival of dictators for centuries. The paranoia and machinations of dictators depicted in films, such as the portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, while sensationalized, capture the astounding array of threats with which unelected leaders must concern themselves. On the one hand, they must worry about insider threats to their standing, such as conspiratorial plots from people within the dictator’s own circle or mutiny among government soldiers. On the other hand, dictators also must monitor threats originating from non-regime actors, such as new alliances forming among once-fragmented opposition groups or the possibility of sustained insurgency or a popular revolution. From force to finesse, autocratic leaders have developed a broad and evolving range of tactics and tools to diminish both internal and external domestic threats to their reign. The success of dictators’ endeavors to insulate their regimes from forces that might challenge them depends on accurate and reliable information, a resource that can be as valuable to the leader as would a large armory and loyal soldiers. Dictators invest significant resources (monetary as well as human capital) to try to gather useful information about their existing and potential opponents, while also trying to control and shape information emitted by the regime before it reaches the public. New information and communication technologies (ICTs), which have drawn a great deal of scholarly attention since the beginning of the 21st century—present both risks and rewards for dictators; inversely they also create new opportunities and hazards for citizens who might utilize them to mobilize people opposed to the regime. While civil unrest could encompass the full range of domestic, nonmilitary actors, there also needs to be a specific focus on various forms of mass mobilization. Historically, more dictators have been forced from office by elite-initiated overthrows via coups d’état than have fallen to revolution or fled amid street protests. Civil unrest, in its many forms, can affect autocratic survival or precipitate regime breakdown. While mass-based revolutions have been a relatively rare phenomenon to date, the actions of many 21st-century dictators indicate that they increasingly concern themselves with the threats posed by popular protests and fear its potential for triggering broader antigovernment campaigns. The ease of access to information (or the lack thereof) help explain interactions between authoritarian regimes and citizens emphasizes. The role of information in popular antigovernment mobilization has evolved and changed how dictators gather and utilize information to prevent or counter civil unrest that might jeopardize their own survival as well as that of the regime.

This chapter explains why the military plays a decisive role in almost all revolutions and why, in some cases, the military may be the only actor available to ignite democratic regime change. An authoritarian regime extinguishes or significantly stifles the press, political opposition, civil society, and other reformist institutions, but it often leaves the military intact. The armed forces, after all, are necessary for the survival of most nations. As a result the military may be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind: the only available institution relatively independent of the dictatorship and capable of cracking its edifice.

Unrevolutionary Mexico addresses how the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) turned into a capitalist dictatorship of exceptional resilience. While soldiers seized power across the rest of Latin America, in modern Mexico the civilians of a single party moved punctiliously in and out of office for seventy-one years. The book uses the histories of the states of Guerrero and Veracruz as entry points to explore the origins and consolidation of this unique authoritarian state on both provincial and national levels. An empirically rich reconstruction of over sixty years of modernization and revolution (1880-1945) revises prevailing ideas of a pacified Mexico and establishes the 1940s as a decade of faltering governments and enduring violence. The book then assesses the pivotal changes of the mid-twentieth century, when a new generation of lawyers, bureaucrats and businessmen joined with surviving revolutionaries to form the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which held uninterrupted power until 2000. Thematic chapters analyse elections, development, corruption and high and low culture in the period. The central role of military and private violence is explored in two further chapters that measure the weight of hidden coercion in keeping the party in power. In conclusion, the combination of provincial and national histories reveals Mexico as a place where soldiers prevented coups, a single party lost its own rigged elections, corruption fostered legitimacy, violence was concealed but decisive, and ambitious cultural control co-existed with a critical press and a disbelieving public. In conclusion, the book demonstrates how this strange dictatorship thrived not despite but because of its contradictions.

The Nazi regime dominated European history for twelve years between 1933 and 1945, and left a legacy that still echoes today. Nazi Germany: A Very Short Introduction provides a highly relevant reminder of the fragility of democratic institutions, and the ways in which a mass political movement, the exploitation of popular fears, and frail political opposition can lead to the imposition of dictatorship. After considering the emergence and popular appeal of the Nazi party, it examines the relationships between belief, consent, and terror in securing the regime, alongside the crucial role played by Hitler. Arguing that war and conquest were intrinsic to National Socialism, this VSI shows how genocide became its ultimate goal, and concludes with a discussion of the place of Nazi Germany in history and public memory.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book is about the soft force of Islamic cultural production in the decades leading up to the 2011 revolution in Egypt. It is about the role women play in articulating that revolution, in their writings, activism, and discursive transformation of Egypt's social, cultural, and political institutions. It is intended as an antidote to dominant representations of women as oppressed by Islamic politics, movements, and groups. The book details women's contribution to the emergence of an Islamic public sphere—one that has trenchantly critiqued successive dictatorships in Egypt, partly through a liberal ideology of rights, democracy, freedom, equality, and family values.

This chapter examines the role of public prosecutors in Francophone Africa. Most of Francophone Africa inherited and has maintained the French civil law tradition which confers on the public prosecutor constitutional and institutional status of dependence on, and limited independence from, the executive and judiciary. It is a delicate balance which tilted more in favour of dependence than independence before the 1990s, during the long era of dictatorship that followed independence. The chapter discusses the historical origins of the public prosecutor in France and its adoption in Francophone Africa; the functions of the public prosecutor and his status vis-à-vis the other branches of government. It points out that the relationship of dependence on the executive and judiciary has largely remained unchanged and poses challenges not only to the good administration of justice but also the entrenchment of a culture of constitutional democracy. A number of reforms are suggested.

In the aftermath of recent popular uprisings in dictatorships, many observers argued that information and communication technologies, notably the Internet, played a key role in the mobilization of political protest. This book unpacks when and under which circumstances Internet technology can benefit opposition activists aiming to mobilize protests, and when the technology plays into the hands of autocratic governments. Since autocratic governments enjoy a high degree of control over the introduction and expansion of Internet technology and over digital communication ows, the book argues that it should help them keep levels of protest low in the long-term. However, once protest has started, short-term government intervention becomes more difficult, which is why Internet technology can catalyze ongoing episodes of unrest. The book presents detailed empirical analyses of the relationship between the use of Internet technology and protest in autocracies. By leveraging new sub-national data on political protest and Internet penetration, these analysis cover more than sixty autocratic countries at the level of cities. The results show that higher levels of Internet penetration in cities reduce the overall occurrence of protest in dictatorships, but once protest has started, the Internet contributes to the continuation of protest in the same city as well as its diffusion to other locations. By examining the use of the Internet by governments in relation to other means of autocratic repression, the book also demonstrates the technological modernization of autocratic politics, where digital repression via the Internet partly substitutes traditional forms of political control.

Few issues in the historiography of the “Third Reich” have provoked as much acrimony in the academy as the debate over the nature of the Nazi state. To enable readers to appreciate Fraenkel’s contribution to this debate, this chapter provides a critical review of contending theories of the Nazi state, with particular reference to Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, first published in 1942, and in an enlarged edition in 1944, which has inspired much scholarship on the racial state. The rise of Behemoth corresponded directly with the decline of The Dual State in the final war and early postwar years. Neumann’s Behemoth, which has never gone out of print, exemplifies major shortcomings—theoretical, empirical, methodological—in early studies of Nazi rule. I argue that it gave rise in the 1950s and 1960s to an intellectual trajectory in scholarship on the Third Reich that has done a fair amount to obscure—rather than illuminate—the logic of Nazi dictatorship, including law’s role in it.

Violence was key to state administration and politics in interwar Europe, particularly in the major authoritarian regimes on the Continent: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union. Yet the nature and level of violence varied substantially among these three regimes, as did the importance of violence in daily policing operations and in people’s lived experiences. This chapter examines the role of violence in state administration in these three dictatorships between 1919 and 1939, focusing on surveillance, political policing, and mass repression. Each regime utilized violence in highly different ways, and it is difficult to speak of a single model of interwar authoritarianism. All three are similar, however, within a broader context of modern European state practices and especially military practices: each promoted a particular vision of social transformation that made sense only in the broader field of military conquest and the framing experiences of two totalizing global wars.

This chapter explains the logic of the selection of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay as the focus of analysis on exile, diaspora, and return, indicating the puzzling divergence of their paths from authoritarian rule into democratization. Against the background of regional closeness and cooperation, cycles of authoritarian dictatorships, and varied workings of democracy, we explore the role of key intellectual and political figures affecting the distinctive paths of the new and restored democracies. The chapter also positions this work as maintaining an analytical/theoretical and empirical dialogue with several interrelated corpuses of research in the humanities and social sciences; namely, the chapter addresses issues dealing with exile, expatriation, and forced migration; diaspora and transnationalism; processes of political transition, transitional justice, and cultural transformation; and the construction and reconstruction of collective identities, including hybrid identities. Finally, the chapter provides readers with a road map to the remaining chapters of the book.

This book provides an overview of the films of the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, who counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers from Latin America and as a leading female global auteur. It situates Martel’s cinema in the context of a post-dictatorship, neoliberal democracy, as well as within the emergence of a new wave realism (New Argentine Cinema), which profits from and is critical of the privileged role cinema assumes in this new economy. The book argues that Martel’s films challenge the primacy of the visual by emphasizing modes of perception such as hearing, feeling, and smelling to question not only the veracity of what we see but, more fundamentally, the epistemological foundations on which the visual is built. Focusing on her native region of northwestern Argentina, Martel’s Salta trilogy employs a heightened realism, combined with aspects of genre cinema, to articulate a powerful critique of dominant power relations and forms of entitlement. Her radical aesthetics force viewers to rethink privileges of race and class associated with Argentine bourgeois society. Martel’s more recent literary adaptation, Zama, traces the origins of the exploitation of indigenous populations to colonial times and unearths its long-lasting legacies.

In the decades leading up to the Arab Spring in 2011, when Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime was swept from power in Egypt, Muslim women took a leading role in developing a robust Islamist presence in the country's public sphere. This book examines the writings and activism of these women—including scholars, preachers, journalists, critics, actors, and public intellectuals—who envisioned an Islamic awakening in which women's rights and the family, equality, and emancipation were at the center. Challenging Western conceptions of Muslim women as being oppressed by Islam, this book shows how women used “soft force”—a women's jihad characterized by nonviolent protest—to oppose secular dictatorship and articulate a public sphere that was both Islamic and democratic. The book draws on memoirs, political essays, sermons, newspaper articles, and other writings to explore how these women imagined the home and the family as sites of the free practice of religion in a climate where Islamists were under siege by the secular state. While they seem to reinforce women's traditional roles in a male-dominated society, these Islamist writers also reoriented Islamist politics in domains coded as feminine, putting women at the very forefront in imagining an Islamic polity. The book transforms our understanding of women's rights, women's liberation, and women's equality in Egypt's Islamic revival.

Where do strong conservative parties come from? While there is a growing scholarly awareness about the importance of such parties for democratic stability, much less is known about their origins. In this groundbreaking book, James Loxton takes up this question by examining new conservative parties formed in Latin America between 1978 and 2010. The most successful cases, he finds, shared a surprising characteristic: they had deep roots in former dictatorships. Through a comparative analysis of failed and successful cases in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Loxton argues that this was not a coincidence. The successes inherited a range of resources from outgoing authoritarian regimes that, paradoxically, gave them an advantage in democratic competition. He also highlights the role of intense counterrevolutionary struggle as a source of party cohesion. In addition to making an empirical contribution to the study of the Latin American right and a theoretical contribution to the study of party-building, Loxton advances our understanding of the worldwide phenomenon of “authoritarian successor parties”—parties that emerge from authoritarian regimes, but that operate after a transition to democracy. A major work, Conservative Party-Building in Latin America will reshape our understanding of politics in contemporary Latin America and the realities of democratic transitions everywhere.

In the mid-1970s, Latin America entered a period of profound social and economic crisis, marked by the rise of brutal military dictatorships across much of the region and the near-collapse of some of Latin America’s largest economies, in Mexico and Brazil. In response to this crisis, governments across the region adopted neoliberal structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s onwards, under the auspices of international organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These reforms typically entailed sweeping cuts to public health and welfare programmes, the privatisation of large parts of the public infrastructure, the redistribution of wealth to economic elites, and a notable growth in poverty. As a result, these structural adjustment programmes faced growing resistance from the early 1990s onwards. Social and political movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, formulated powerful challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy, while the election to government of left-wing populist leaders such as Hugo Chávez (1998), Evo Morales (2005) or Rafael Correa (2006) opened the door to experiments with a range of anti-neoliberal political programmes. The failures of these programmes and ongoing conflicts between neoliberal and anti-neoliberal elites and social movements have by the mid-2010s resulted in growing social instability. This book examines cultural responses to this instability. It looks at a wide range of cultural forms, such as literature, underground cinema, street fairs and self-help books to explore how Latin Americans construct subjectivities, build communities and make meaning in their everyday lives in during a profound crisis of the social. In this context, the book emphasises the role which neoliberal and anti-neoliberal narratives of self and social relationships may come to play in popular culture and everyday lived experience in Latin America today.