Books published by Lexington Books

Mienie examines the interrelationship between the police and private security companies suggesting the security sector is an indicator for economic challenges which may be undermining the stability of South Africa in ways undetected by commonly used measures of state fragility.

Speaking Private Authority argues that to better understand the global governance phenomenon known as private authority, investigators must interrogate the strategic social maneuverings of actors-particularly how actors leverage discursive maneuverings to gain advantageous social positions to more effectively exercise private authority.

Advocating for Refugees in the European Union draws on different strands of theory in political science to examine how civil society groups use norm-based advocacy strategies to change the nature of the public and political debate surrounding refugee and asylum policy in five European countries and at the EU level.

David G. LoConto explores the development of the Star Trek fandom through a social psychological approach, using symbolic interaction theory and strategic ritualization theory as well as ideas from Habermas and Foucault to track the fandom's movements, values, and evolution.

This book critically examines the dialectical relationship between Ethiopian colonialism, Oromo culture, and the collective grievances of the Oromo nation. It identifies the chains of sociological and historical factors that developed the Oromo national movement and demonstrates how that movement is transforming Ethiopian imperial politics.

This book examines the life and legacy of John Lowell Jr (1799-1836) through the establishment of the Lowell Institute, still active in Boston, which offers free education.

Paradox and contradiction constitute the two ways of the world. Polka traces these ideas and the way they have shaped the Western philosophical world view through close readings of Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, and Vico.

This constructive theological work enhances Tillich's German religious socialism by creatively integrating it with Tillich's theological insights throughout his American career. Bringing Tillich into conversation with contemporary developments in just peacemaking, this book presents a refurbished version of religious socialism.

This book reconstructs the synchronic system of tense and aspect in Old Japanese. Watanabe takes a fundamentally different approach from previous analyses by examining the syntactic distribution of temporal suffixes in Manyoshu, an eighth-century poetry collection.

Women Theorists of Psychotherapy and Counseling expands upon the traditional theories to which most students are exposed. The authors highlight the remarkable women who have pioneered theories and impacted the fields of psychotherapy and counseling.

The Weight of Whiteness invites white people to wade mindfully into the inherited epistemic and affective weight of whiteness. It examines the ways that white supremacy and privilege continue to anesthetize white people from the inherited damage that whiteness does to our collective humanity.

This book analyzes the rhetoric of Donald Trump to argue that Trump embraces conflicting populist and Republican values, and as a result has relied on populist and polarizing rhetoric, along with fabricated crises, to reconcile these combating ideals and uphold his image of an "anti-status quo politician."

With extensive ethnographic and archival work, this book analyzes the works of Carlos Vives and La Provincia, the most influential artists of Colombia's music scene in the last twenty-five years, to uncover the basis of the Land of Oblivion, a musical and literary metaphor for Colombia's national identity.

This book argues that mainstream popular has failed to provide multi-dimensional representations of transgender people. To contrast, it illustrates how the work of trans masculine YouTube vloggers helps audiences unlearn such binary narratives of sexual identity through fostering awareness, empathy, and compassion.

This book explains how revamped consumer protection regulations, allowing greater individual choice, along with the government partially shifting to more of an advisory role, can save many thousands of lives annually, and make medicines and other products radically cheaper. Major case studies include the FDA and Uber versus taxis.

May God Avenge Their Blood consists of three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks translated for the first time into English. With narrative flair and vivid detail, Bryks brilliantly captures interwar Jewish life in his hometown of Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland, the early days of World War II, and his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps.

This book explicates and defends the reality of time against its scientific, philosophical, and theological detractors, and it discusses how a proper view of the nature of time serves as a way to comprehend the challenges of human existence and confront the current ecological crisis.

Exploring the role of imagination in trauma recovery, the author shares the arresting dreams and stories of traumatized adolescents engaging in interventions designed to restore neurophysiological balance and facilitate restorative dreaming. These interventions nurture meaningful self-narrative, spiritual development, and posttraumatic growth.

Through the voices of 51 trans men, Baker A. Rogers analyzes what it means to be a trans man in the southeastern United States. Rogers argues that the common themes that pervade trans men's experiences in the South are complicated by other intersecting identities, such as sexuality, religion, race, class, and place.

By analyzing the history and current practice of two prewedding rituals commonly practiced by women in North-eastern Scotland, this book provides fresh insights into identity, gender, social class, contemporary attitudes to ritual, and what it means to approach marriage in the twenty first century.

Law and Economics in Jane Austen traces principles of law and economics in sex, marriage and romance as set out in the novels of Jane Austen, unveiling how those meticulous principles still control today's modern romance. You will learn fascinating new insights into law and economics by seeing these disciplines through Jane Austen's eyes. Readers who find themselves wishing Jane Austen had written just one more novel, or that she had somewhere offered more examination and analysis of her characters' predicaments, or who desire to go deeper with her investigation of love, money and culture will praise this book. Discovering the legal and economic principles that drove her stories, Jane Austen's Law & Economics reveals that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Love and money are constants in social connection. While culture may have changed over 300 years, principles of law and economics remain staples of modern romance which is why Jane Austen continues to fascinate the modern mind. So sit back, enjoy, and be pleasantly taught and surprised at what you will learn from the methodical mind of Jane.

Thirty-five years ago Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue established virtue ethics as a major challenger to competing visions of morality, but there is still considerable disagreement concerning which version of virtue ethics provides the best approach. The Supremacy of Love describes and advocates an agape-centered vision of Aristotelian virtue ethics that portrays love as the most important moral virtue, and the goals of love as a partial constituent of every genuine virtue. This structural improvement to Aristotelian virtue ethicsfound originally in the ethics of Thomas Aquinasenables this account to address several controversial topics in contemporary virtue ethics, including why the virtues cannot be used badly, in what sense is there a unity between the virtues, how the virtues benefit the virtuous person, and how virtues provide action guidance. Eric J. Silverman demonstrates how and why a distinctly love-centered approach to virtue ethics should make the view widely attractive in comparison to alternative accounts of virtue ethics, duty based deontological theories, as well as results-based consequentialist views.

Richard Wright analyzes the current state of violence in America, the criminal justice system's response, and the experiences of survivors in the aftermath of a violent crime. Despite decades of advocacy, change, and research, our policy responses embedded with historic and systemic values which rank victims and survivors not based on their trauma and loss, but by race, social status, gender, location, and age, remain quite flawed. Keeping the big picture in mind, Wright analyzes the unintended consequences of current, well-meaning policies, critiques the victim hierarchy, and sheds light on why American responses to the needs of violent crime victims have accrued a more failures than successes.

This volume challenges a long history of normalizing patriarchal approaches to the Qur'an and calls for a questioning of the interpretive credibility of many inherited Qur'anic commentaries. The author presents a fresh reading of the sacred text and Islamic teaching traditions as the rediscovery of a lost humanitarian and gender-egalitarian textual richness that has been poorly and loosely handled for centuries. The book stresses the importance of reviewing the interpretive linguistic choices that jurists and exegetes over the last fourteen centuries have adopted to semantically reshape the Qur'anic text. The vigilant reading the author provides of carefully chosen texts and commentaries suggests that many interpretive approaches to the Qur'an are dominated by sociopolitical factors alien to the intrinsic values of the text itself. More importantly, inconsistencies across putatively sound books of tafsir indicate that the Qur'anic text often suffers from historical and systematic drainage of its humanitarianism, gender-egalitarianism, and religious pluralism.

This book argues that the Arab Spring brought to the forefront numerous societal, political, and historical problems in the Middle East that scholars and practitioners throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century have continually glossed over or reduced in their analysis and analytical frameworks when studying the Middle East. These include the prevalent and persistent impact of Islam on political life, an impact of transnational and subnational identities, including sect, tribe, and regional identity, as well as the overuse of the state as the fundamental unit of analysis when studying the region. As a result, this book asserts that primordial identities including religion, sect, and tribe have, and will continue to have, a significant impact on the conduct of politics in the Middle East.

At the conclusion of the twentieth century, the US economy was booming, but the gap between the rich and poor widened significantly in the 1990s, poverty rates among women and children skyrocketed, and there was an unprecedented rise in familial homelessness. Based on a four-year ethnographic study, Anne R. Roschelle examines how socially structured race, class, and gender inequality contributed to the rise in family homelessness and the devastating consequences for parents and their children. Struggling in the Land of Plenty analyzes the appalling conditions under which homeless women and children live, the violence endemic to their lives, the role of the welfare state in perpetrating poverty, and their never-ending struggle for survival.

This book explores the rise of Hizbullah as a direct consequence of both the Iranian Revolution and the entanglement of Lebanon in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Protracted civil war and overwhelming foreign intervention by Lebanon's neighbors enabled Hizbullah to emerge as the country's dominant politico-military force. Hizbullah disabled the Lebanese political system and, in its capacity as Iran's premier foreign proxy, allowed the Islamic Republic to take the lead in the regional tug of war with Israel. In its quest for achieving a distinguished regional status commensurate with its ambitions, Iran used Hizbullah to abort the Syrian uprising, actively contribute to its burgeoning influence in Iraq, and participate in its propaganda war against Saudi Arabia on a range of issues. The renewed U.S. sanctions on Iran coincided with a worldwide campaign to dry up Hizbullah's sources of funding and compromised its integrity as a critical provider of patronage to its Lebanese Shi'ite base of support. The emergence of Russia as the real power player in Syria made it extremely difficult for Hizbullah to justify the high human cost it incurred to salvage the regime of Bashar Asad. This book examines the rise of Hizbullah and the marginalization and repression of Shi'ites that made them susceptible to exploitation by their sectarian leaders.

This book explores the mind of our epoch, defined as the period since the Nuremberg Trial and the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. It focuses on four central philosophical ideas of our time: global justice, cosmopolitanism, crimes against humanity, and cultural toleration.

This volume examines the unique historical and religious forces that led to the Balfour Declaration and argues that Britain, for more than two centuries, already possessed the ingredients for a theopolitical vision of a Jewish home state.