The volume considers politics as cooperative group action and takes the position that forms of government can be posited on a continuum with endpoints where governance is shared, and where hegemony dictates, ranging from politics as interaction to politics as imposition. Similarly, dialogue and dialogic action can be superimposed on the same continuum lying between truly collaborative where co-participants exchange ideas in a cooperative manner and dominated by an absolute position where dialogue proceeds along prescribed paths. The chapters address the continuum between these endpoints and present illuminating and persuasive analyses of dialogue in politics, covering motions of support, the relationship between politics and the press, interviews, debates, discussion forums and multimodal media analyses across different discourse domains and different cultural contexts from Africa to the Middle East, and from the United States to Europe.

We are witnessing the collapse of democracies in many parts of the world and a general tendency to the resurgence of right-wing and left-wing populisms led by authoritarian leaders. This book centres on the political dialogue in one of these democracies. The focus is on Venezuela, the rich Latin American oil producing country, and its transformation from a stable democracy to a very unstable and controversial revolution in which the dialogue has been occupied by only one party for 18 years. The central characters of the book are Hugo Chávez, who remained in power for 14 years as the main speaker and controller, and the people who either followed or opposed him in Venezuela and other countries. Contrary to critical analyses which are mainly based on social representations that conceive dialogue as implicit or normative, this book proposes a dialogue-centred approach, which articulates linguistics, conversation analysis, socio-pragmatics and political science from a critical perspective, and offers the theoretical foundations and procedures for analysing micro dialogues between specific persons and the macro social dialogue, which unveils the processes of domination and resistance to power. The book will be useful for scholars and students of linguistics, media, communication studies and political science wishing to learn more about dialogue in political interaction.

This book is about a widely shared desire: the desire among citizens for a vibrant and effective social discourse of legitimation. It therefore begins with the conviction that what political philosophy can provide citizens is not further theories of the good life but instead directions for talking about how to justify the choices they make—or, in brief, "just talking." As part of the general trend away from the aridity of Kantian universalism in political philosophy, thinkers as diverse as Bruce Ackerman, Jürgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty have taken a "dialogic turn" that seeks to understand the determination of principles of justice as a cooperative task, achieved in some kind of social dialogue among real citizens. In one way or another, however, each of these different variations on the dialogic model fail to provide fully satisfactory answers, Mark Kingwell shows. Drawing on their strengths, he presents another model he calls "justice as civility," which makes original use of the popular literature on etiquette and work in sociolinguistics to develop a more adequate theory of dialogic justice.

Leszek Koczanowicz sheds new light on the problem of contemporary democracy in crisis, using the ideas of M. M. Bakhtin and others to show that dialogue in democracy can transcend both antagonistic and consensual perspectives.

Offering a detailed analysis of post-colonial South Asia, The Politics of Dialogue discusses the creation and impact of borders and the pervasive tension between the new nations. Neither all-out war nor complete peace, this fragile condition makes political leaders and strategists feel claustrophobic - a war produces an end result but peace allows the rulers to carry out their policies for governing along their preferred path of development. The book shows how cartographic, communal and political lines are not only dividing countries, but that they are being replicated within countries, creating new visible and invisible internal frontiers. It argues that, in a situation where geopolitics constrains democracy, the political class becomes incapable of coping with the tension between the inside/outside, eg democracy appears as an internal problem and geopolitics appears as a problem related to the 'outside'.

In the U. S. and around the world, we are mired in political conflicts that lead to discrimination, divisive language, and combative processes that diminish our ability to solve pressing global problems. This book offers a guide for facilitating and engaging in collaborative, interest-based dialogues about today's most important topics.