Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, defines, illustrates, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Featuring contributions from distinguished political scientists working in this field, this volume addresses canonical theorists and contemporary environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial volume focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry, engaging both traditions of political thought and the academy. In the second section, the handbook explores conceptualizations of nature and the environment, as well as the nature of political subjects, communities, and boundaries within our environments. A third section addresses the values that motivate environmental theorists—including justice, responsibility, rights, limits, and flourishing—and the potential conflicts that can emerge within, between, and against these ideals. The final section examines the primary structures that constrain or enable the achievement of environmental ends, as well as theorizations of environmental movements, citizenship, and the potential for on-going environmental action and change.

In authoritarian states, the discourse on freedom of speech, conducted by those opposed to non-democratic governments, focuses on the core aspects of this freedom: on a right to criticize the government, a right to advocate theories arid ideologies contrary to government-imposed orthodoxy, a right to demand institutional reforms, changes in politics, resignation of the incompetent and the corrupt from positions of authority. The claims for freedom of speech focus on those exercises of freedom that are most fundamental and most beneficial to citizens - and which are denied to them by the government. But in a by-and large democratic polity, where these fundamental benefits of freedom of speech are generally enjoyed by the citizens, the public and scholarly discourse on freedom of speech hovers about the peripheries of that freedom; the focus is on its outer boundaries rather than at the central territory of freedom of speech. Those borderline cases, in which people who are otherwise genuinely committed to the core aspects of freedom of speech may sincerely disagree, include pornography, racist hate speech and religious bigoted expressions, defamation of politicians and of private persons, contempt of court, incitement to violence, disclosure of military or commercial secrets, advertising of merchandise such as alcohol or cigarettes or of services and entertainment such as gambling and prostitution.

Focusing on highly topical issues such as torture, arbitrary detention, privacy, and discrimination, this book will help readers to understand for themselves the controversies and complexities behind human rights.

In the summer of 2014, renowned American Indian studies professor Steven Salaita had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Salaita’s employment was terminated in response to his public tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s summer assault on Gaza. Salaita’s firing generated a huge public outcry, with thousands petitioning for his reinstatement, and more than five thousand scholars pledging to boycott UIUC. His case raises important questions about academic freedom, free speech on campus, and the movement for justice in Palestine. In this book, Salaita combines personal reflection and political critique to shed new light on his controversial termination. He situates his case at the intersection of important issues that affect both higher education and social justice activism.

In The Limits of Liberalism, Mark T. Mitchell argues that a rejection of tradition is both philosophically incoherent and politically harmful. This false conception of tradition helps to facilitate both liberal cosmopolitanism and identity politics. The incoherencies are revealed through an investigation of the works of Michael Oakeshott, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Polanyi. Mitchell demonstrates that the rejection of tradition as an epistemic necessity has produced a false conception of the human person—the liberal self—which in turn has produced a false conception of freedom. This book identifies why most modern thinkers have denied the essential role of tradition and explains how tradition can be restored to its proper place. Oakeshott, MacIntyre, and Polanyi all, in various ways, emphasize the necessity of tradition, and although these thinkers approach tradition in different ways, Mitchell finds useful elements within each to build an argument for a reconstructed view of tradition and, as a result, a reconstructed view of freedom. Mitchell argues that only by finding an alternative to the liberal self can we escape the incoherencies and pathologies inherent therein. This book will appeal to undergraduates, graduate students, professional scholars, and educated laypersons in the history of ideas and late modern culture.

The library controls access to information by the very act of selecting materials, and must, therefore, deal with censorship on a basic level. The author has surveyed a response group of practicing librarians with questions that target some of the toughest questions librarians ever face. Curry's analysis focuses on the factors--personal beliefs, professional ethics, political pressures--that influence responses.