Bücher der Reihe CEU Press Perspectives

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure. The key concept is that of the archipelago - a network of nuclear facilities spread throughout the Soviet territory, but mutually reliant on each other and densely connected.The story traces the emergence of nuclear science and technology for military and civilian purposes through to the post-Soviet Russian nuclear corporations as providers of resources and technology. The book explains how nuclear developments in the Soviet Union interacted with processes of environmental and landscape change. The spatial lens offers an analytically fruitful and pedagogically stimulating way to comprehend the nuclear histories of the Soviet Union and its successor states.

Eric Fassin examines the trend of State anti-intellectualism in France using the nation as a case study to demonstrate that this tendency is not limited to ostensibly illiberal regimes. He argues that today's world requires an examination of this phenomenon beyond Cold War geopolitical divisions and highlights a global shift towards authoritarian neoliberalism. His book is a plea for the political urgency of intellectual work in a global moment of political anti-intellectualism.The book covers the period from President Sarkozy to Prime Minister Valls and includes both firsthand and public cases of attacks against academics, not only in France, but also in Brazil, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and the United States, with examples of State racism and the argument of the State against antiracism. The book also considers issues of censorship and cancel culture, concluding with Fassin's firsthand account of attacks on him from the far-right.

We have politics on our mind-or, rather, we have politics in different parts of our brains. In this path-breaking study, Matt Qvortrup takes the reader on a whistle stop tour through the fascinating, and sometimes frightening, world of neuropolitics; the discipline that combines neuroscience and politics, and is even being used to win elections.Putting the 'science' back into political science, The Political Brain shows how fMRI-scans can identify differences between Liberals and Conservatives, can predict our behaviour with sometimes greater accuracy than surveys, and can explain the biology of uprisings, revolutions, and wars.Not merely a study of empirical evidence, the book shows how the philosophical theories of, among others, Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza can be supported by brain scans. Along the way, it also provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge of the organ that shapes our politics. The book shows that if we rely on evolutionary primitive parts of the midbrain-those engaged when we succumb to polarised politics-we stand in danger of squandering the gains we made through the last eight million years.