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Delusions of electronic persecution have been a preeminent symptom of psychosis for over two hundred years. In The Technical Delusion Jeffrey Sconce traces the history and continuing proliferation of this phenomenon from its origins in Enlightenment anatomy to our era of global interconnectivity. While psychiatrists have typically dismissed such delusions of electronic control as arbitrary or as mere reflections of modern life, Sconce demonstrates a more complex and interdependent history of electronics, power, and insanity. Drawing on a wide array of psychological case studies, literature, court cases, and popular media, Sconce analyzes the material and social processes that have shaped historical delusions of electronic contamination, implantation, telepathy, surveillance, and immersion. From the age of telegraphy to contemporary digitality, the media emerged within such delusions to become the privileged site for imagining the merger of electronic and political power, serving as a paranoid conduit between the body and the body politic. Looking to the future, Sconce argues that this symptom will become increasingly difficult to isolate, especially as remote and often secretive powers work to further integrate bodies, electronics, and information

In the ancient South Asian texts about ritual known as Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇas, the wives of the king play an interesting role in terms of bodily actions and ritual rhetoric. Especially the so-called "chief wife" (mahiṣī) is described as a central and liminal player who serves as a sexual counterpart of the king at the main solemn rituals, i.e. Aśvamedha and Rājasūya, involving the travel of a horse in unconquered lands and the royal consecration, respectively. In this essay I suggest that the construction of female sexuality is a crucial point to fix the boundaries around the notion of authority, not only that of the king, but also that of his practitioner, i.e. the brāhmaṇa or purohita. From this starting point I suggest also that the chief wife of the king may be reconsidered as one of the most strategic actor on a ritual and political stage. I will try to show that the mahiṣī's sexual function in the ritual exegesis had gained value, in connection with the attempt to deify the human primus inter pares of the political organisation, i.e. the king. More specifically, I will deal with the ritual language and codification concerning the mahiṣī's sexuality in order to illustrate the formulation of her body in the rituals prescribed in the Brāhmaṇas about solemn rites. I will discuss how the persuasive force of description and prescription about her bodily actions served as a means of persuasion in displaying the king's power. Finally, I suggest rethinking the role of gender in royal rituals from the perspective of literary criticism.

"Explores the influence of gender on political speech by analyzing the performances of three female party leaders who took part in televised debates during the 2015 UK General Election campaign. The analysis considers similarities and differences between the women and their male colleagues, as well as between the women themselves. It also discusses the way gender - and its relationship to language - was taken up as an issue in media coverage of the campaign."--

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Power to Divide in Alliance Politics -- 1. The Theory of Selective Accommodation -- 2. Germany Fails to Detach Japan, 1915–16 -- 3. Germany Keeps the United States Neutral, 1914–16 -- 4. The Entente Fails to Keep Turkey Neutral, 1914 -- 5. The Entente Realigns Italy, 1915 -- 6. Britain and France Fail to Neutralize Italy, 1936–40 -- 7. Germany Divides the USSR from Britain and France, 1939 -- 8. Britain and the United States Neutralize Spain, 1940–41 -- 9. Germany Fails to Realign Turkey, 1941 -- 10. When Does Selective Accommodation Work? Claims and Case Comparisons -- 11. Selective Accommodation in Great Power Competition and U.S. Grand Strategy -- Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index

Voter turnout is declining across all groups, but the slide is even more pronounced amongst young people. In this new joint IPPR and Democratic Audit publication, Guy Lodge, Glenn Gottfried, and Sarah Birch set out the scale of the problem, and propose a radical solution: a requirement for first time eligible voters to turn out on polling day. Doing so, they argue, would help redress the political power gap which sees spending skewed towards the oldest members of society, at the expense of the young.

On 21 August 2013, an estimated 1,400 people died in a poison gas attack in the suburbs of the Syrian capital Damascus. As a result, the United States and its allies were faced with the decision of whether to use direct military intervention in Syria, 30 months after the outbreak of the uprising and two years after it had escalated into bloody civil war. An external military strike against the Syrian regime would have permanently shifted the complex nexus of local, regional and international actors and interests in Syria. Such an action would have been unlikely to resolve the conflict, but would have quite possibly exacerbated it. In the third year of the uprising in Syria, there is no sign of a solution. Neither the regime nor the broad spectrum of opposition forces appears capable of winning this destructive power struggle. There are strong indications that there will (almost) only be losers in the end. There are numerous external actors involved in the Syrian conflict who financially, diplomatically and militarily support either the regime or the various opposition camps. This is what saw the initial insurrection turn into a civil war; and the civil war, into a proxy war. Today, Syria is center stage of the struggle for the reconfiguration of the Middle East after the Arab Spring. An alternative to military intervention would be to exert political pressure on the participants to resolve their conflict through nonmilitary means and to develop a negotiated power-sharing arrangement. The accession of Syria to the Chemical Weapons Convention on 14 October 2013 has presented an opportunity for further negotiated solutions by bringing the previously isolated Bashar al-Assad regime back to the international negotiating table. Now, regional and international actors must push both the regime and the opposition to engage in serious talks. Achieving this in the context of Geneva II negotiations (for which have been scheduled for 22 January 2014) may be unrealistic considering the extensive preconditions of both sides. Without a negotiated compromise, however, the most likely outcome will be regional conflagration.

"How do corporations use their instrumental and structural power within markets and states to advance their policy agendas? Capitalism and Class Power examines corporate power through chapters on the U.S. military industrial complex, the rise of billionaire wealth in the U.S., the role of a transnational investment bloc in U.S.-Saudi relations, the rise of global disinformation firms, Canadian imperialism in the English-speaking Caribbean, the power of an EU corporate bloc in Caribbean trade agreements, the relationship between capitalism and poverty in rich capitalist countries, and the relationship between "neoliberalism" and capitalism. Professor Cox concludes the volume with reflections on the importance of corporate power research to achieving systemic change. Contributors are: Melissa Boissiere, Aram Eisenschitz, Jamie A. Gough, Adam D. Hernandez, Tamanisha J. John, Mazaher Koruzhde, Rob Piper and Bryant William Sculos. Ronald W. Cox is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. He has published six books on corporate power in the global economy and is editor of the open access online journal Class, Race and Corporate Power"--

In an interview, Coca-Cola Co chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent, talked about how global power dynamics are shifting and what that means, tactically and strategically, for a $180 billion company dealing with customers and governments in more than 200 countries, from Suriname to Vietnam. He said that businesses need to proactively create models that make a difference in society and let everyone else use them, talk about them, emulate them -- and build on them. An example is Coca-Cola's "5 by 20" campaign, a movement to enable the economic empowerment of 5 million women entrepreneurs by 2020 by bringing capital, training, mentoring, and by working with governments. If they can create 5 million entrepreneurs in 10 years, just through one business working closely with government, working closely with organizations like the International Finance Corp, by working with Mexico City, Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Delhi, or Mumbai, that's a big thing. Adapted from the source document.

International audience The concept of power provides a unique analytical tool to study, understand and explain organized action set ups. The paper lists a series of examples derived from the research practice of its author. Such a perspective does not imply that this tool by definition makes sense only for theoretical agendas dealing with power and domination issues. The paper also explores some scientific enigmas that are still open for further inquiry

My commitment to combining normative concerns with empirical social science led, perhaps a bit counterintuitively, to early adoption of rational choice political economy. However, it was a modified form of rational choice that takes into account ethical and societal concerns. This was the approach I applied to considerations of compliance and consent with government, what makes a trustworthy government, the formation of legitimating beliefs, and finally the construction of an expanded and inclusive community of fate as a building block for a new moral political economy.

The European Union's (EU's) 2006 Global Europe communication established an offensive Free Trade Agreement (FTA) agenda premised on serving the interests of the EU's upmarket exporters at the expense of the EU's remaining "pockets of protection". This has remained in place with the advent of the 2010 Trade, Growth and World Affairs strategy. Such a development defies both rationalist International Political Economy (IPE) explanations – which emphasise the protectionist bias of societal mobilisation – and accounts stressing the institutional insulation of policy-makers from societal pressures because the recent economic crisis and the increased politicisation of EU trade policy by the European Parliament have coexisted without leading to greater protectionism. Adopting a constructivist approach, we show that this turn of events can be explained by the neoliberal ideas internalised by policy-makers in the European Commission's Directorate-General (DG) for Trade. We then deploy a novel heuristic to illustrate how DG Trade acted upon these ideas to strategically construct a powerful discursive imperative for liberalisation.

While celebrated as a new 'win-win' initiative, Belt and Road narratives sidestep the fact that current investment regimes originating in China must contour to existing political economies in host countries. Drawing on the examples of Pakistan and Tajikistan, both of which share land borders with China, and both of which have been eager recipients of recent Chinese investments, we forward two arguments: (1) In both countries the narrative of connectivity promoted through the Belt and Road Initiative builds on previous bilateral engagements with China. (2) Within Pakistan and Tajikistan, engagement with China has enabled the utilization of BRI as a political technology for domestic purposes, with the attempt to rule, re-define, order and exploit. Put differently, new investments from China serve to consolidate existing authority structures.