In recent years, we have witnessed a drastic wave of totalitarian regimes, as noted by Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) in the book entitled How Democracies Die. The authors provide historical examples democratic rupture last one hundred years: from Hitler Mussolini 1930s to current populist right-wing extremism Europe, preceded military dictatorships Latin America the1970s. dizzying growth Brazil’s...

This article examines the discourse of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). Using Dryzek’s (2005) discourse analysis of 1970s survivalism, I assess whether OPT’s work is simply a return to the survivalism described by Dryzek. I look to see how climate change has influenced survivalist discourse in recent years, and at the key role of women’s rights and fertility in OPT discourse. The first secti...

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a ...

CDA is an approach to the analysis of language use that, based on the claims of van Dijk(1995), has a social and ideological approach to discourse. Critical discourse analysis gainssignificance particularly with the analysis of political texts considering their role inestablishing force, identity, and political ideology. This study took an initiative criticalperspective towards the rather under...

In this paper I discuss some of the implications for state education that arise from what I argue is the ambiguous and flexible nature of the term ‘social exclusion’. I briefly consider the conceptual relationship between social exclusion, poverty and deprivation. Using the metaphor of story, I explore the operation of the term in the New Labour project, with particular attention to some of its...