In the last decade the term culture war has become hard to avoid. If it is not yet the buzzword of the first part of the twenty-first century, it soon will be. Culture wars seem to be around us everywhere. Each passing week brings some new mention of an outbreak in a public institution, civic space or political arena in some part of the globe. Culture wars are the phenomenon we cannot seem to shake. Battle lines are drawn, rhetorical tools are sharpened and social media awash with vitriol and moralising, and seemingly unbridgeable social gaps. If the immediate post-Cold War period did usher in an era of universal global liberalism, decades on it is now far in the distance, only visible in the rear-view mirror. Instead, around us lie social and political fault lines featuring competing visions of what should be the appropriate normative basis upon which societies should be constituted. They are debates that focus on belonging, on citizenship, on rights and identities.

Rico Isaacs, University of Lincoln, School of Social and Political Sciences

Jonathan Wheatley, Oxford Brookes University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Sarah Whitmore, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Campus

The Central Asia Program invites you to the book launch event

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (EST)

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia offers the first comprehensive, cross-disciplinary overview of key issues in Central Asian studies. The 30 chapters by leading and emerging scholars summarise major findings in the field and highlight long-term trends, recent observations and future developments in the region. The handbook features case studies of all five Central Asian republics and is organised thematically in seven sections: history, politics, geography, international relations, political economy, society and culture, and religion

An essential cross-disciplinary reference work, the handbook offers an accessible and easy to understand guide to the core issues permeating the region to enable readers to grasp the fundamental challenges, transformations and themes in contemporary Central Asia. It will be of interest to researchers, academics and students of the region and those working in the field of Area Studies, History, Anthropology, Politics and International Relations.

This essay establishes a framework for analysing culture wars in the post-communist space. Using Latvia’s debate over the ratification of the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, it outlines the central features of culture wars: moralisation, externalisation of agency, the instrumentalisation of culture and the struggle for power and resources. While existing scholarship conceptualises culture wars as a dichotomous battle between the sacred and the secular, or between liberal and illiberal, our thematic analysis of the Istanbul Convention debate in Latvia finds it was less about culture and more a complex struggle between political and religious actors competing for power and resources.

University of Lincoln, College of Social Science Research

Rico Isaacs, University of Lincoln, School of Social and Political Sciences

Liga Rudzite, Tallinn University of Technology

Issues of diversity in elected bodies have been highlighted in recent years, primarily around the characteristics of elected representatives, but more recently in respect of the treatment of those working in such institutions, particularly women.

However, it is also important to consider who parliaments hear from, with one important element of that being the work of the committees that scrutinise legislation and the actions of governments. There are a variety of academic literatures that can be used to support arguments for a greater diversity of witnesses to parliamentary committees, including those around ‘representation’, ‘policy-making and evaluation’, and ‘engagement, participation and legitimacy’.

University of Lincoln, College of Social Science Research

Hugh Bochel, University of Lincoln, School of Social and Political Sciences

Much attention has been paid by academics and policy-makers in recent decades to declining levels of voter turnout and engagement with traditional political and social institutions in established democracies. These trends are particularly marked amongst young people. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, this article examines the role of higher education (HE) both as a source of unequal participation and as a means of fostering civic and political engagement amongst young Europeans. It uncovers two significant new findings. First, that being in education matters more than an individual’s level of educational attainment for levels of civic and political participation, and second, that HE establishments play a key role as social levellers: being in education neutralises differences between young people from high-income and low-income backgrounds with regards to such participation. The article argues that this places added emphasis on the role of educational institutions in nurturing democratic engagement.

University of Lincoln, College of Social Science Research

James Sloam, University of London, Royal Holloway, Department of Politics and International Relations

Ben Kisby, University of Lincoln, School of Social and Political Sciences

Matt Henn, Nottingham Trent University, Department of Social and Political Sciences

Ben Oldfield, Nottingham Trent University, Department of Social and Political Sciences

The Westminster Parliament is multifaceted, lacks cohesion and collective direction, appearing at times to challenge the very notion of a structured public institution itself. Within an environment with little collective identity, understanding who leads in the UK Parliament is challenging; there are multiple, contestable sites of leadership and governance. The purpose of this article is to explore the understudied concept of legislative leadership, to better understand what goes on inside the legislature. The author presents a decentred and nuanced disaggregation of “leadership as practice” in parliament, examining three faces of legislative leadership.

University of Lincoln, College of Social Science Research

Mark Bennister, University of Lincoln, School of Social and Political Sciences