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.

Reflective dialogue asks us to pause before reacting, to ground ourselves in a sense of compassion for ourselves and others, and to use that grounding to open a space to listen and to speak with the goal of recognizing a shared humanity and appreciating difference. In four sections, Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization explores the various ways in which librarians experience and respond to political polarization and its effects, both in our everyday work and in our professional communities.

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 demonstrates that politicians' discussions of race increase policy success and public awareness, improving racial inequality.

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.

Barnett explores the relationships among Arab identity, the meaning of Arabism, and desired regional order in the Middle East from 1920 to the present, focusing on Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.

It is a perennial question: how should Americans deal with racial and ethnic diversity? More than 400 communities across the country have attempted to answer it by organizing discussions among diverse volunteers in an attempt to improve race relations. In Talking about Race, Katherine Cramer Walsh takes an eye-opening look at this strategy to reveal the reasons behind the method and the effects it has in the cities and towns that undertake it. With extensive observations of community dialogues, interviews with the discussants, and sophisticated analysis of national data, Walsh shows that while meeting organizers usually aim to establish common ground, participants tend to leave their discussions with a heightened awareness of differences in perspective and experience. Drawing readers into these intense conversations between ordinary Americans working to deal with diversity and figure out the meaning of citizenship in our society, she challenges many preconceptions about intergroup relations and organized public talk. Finally disputing the conventional wisdom that unity is the only way forward, Walsh prescribes a practical politics of difference that compels us to reassess the place of face-to-face discussion in civic life and the critical role of conflict in deliberative democracy.

Given the rise of globalization and coinciding increase in cultural clashes among diverse nations, it has become eminently clear to scholars of political thought that there exists a critical gap in the knowledge of non-Western philosophies and how Western thought has been influenced by them. This gap has led to a severely diminished capacity of both state and nonstate actors to communicate effectively on a global scale. The political theorists, area scholars, and intellectual historians gathered here by Takashi Shogimen and Cary J. Nederman examine the exchange of political ideas between Europe and Asia from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. They establish the need for comparative political thought, showing that in order to fully grasp the origins and achievements of the West, historians of political thought must incorporate Asian political discourse and ideas into their understanding. By engaging in comparative studies, this volume proves the necessity of a cross-disciplinary approach in guiding the study of the global history of political thought.

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.

Michael Walzer is one of the pre-eminent political theorists in the world today and also a prominent public intellectual. His conception of social justice and his work on just and unjust wars have been hugely influential in political theory and, at the same time, he has taken a public stand on many of the great issues of our time, from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War to 9/11, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq War. He stands out among political theorists and philosophers by virtue of his attention to historical reality and his sensitivity to social and political context. Convinced that philosophical debate is only useful if it is rooted in the concrete practices and morality of societies, he develops a form of social critique that is opposed to a disembodied philosophy which does not respond to concerns of ordinary people. For Walzer, it is useless to try to write a theory of justice: the challenge is to think through issues of justice in relation to the particular contexts in which people live out their lives. The core strength of his work is his practical instinct: if individuals are contextualized, critique must be too. This book takes the form of an extended conversation between Walzer and Astrid von Busekist, ranging from Walzer’s biography and political activism to his work on war, justice and Judaism. Weaving together his theoretical work and his political activism, it provides an outstanding introduction to the life and work of one of the most influential political theorists of our time.