This book examines the ways that nationalist leaders and extremist groups have used football to advance their often-violent ideological narratives and to recruit and radicalise young people.Drawing on applied ethnographic research with the Ultra fan groups of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the book explores the behavioural dynamics of the BiH Ultras both on, and outside of, the football terraces. The book shines important new light on the Ultras' ideology, organisation and youth rec...

Whilst corruption and organized crime have been widely researched, they have not yet been specifically linked to sport. Corruption, Mafia Power and Italian Soccer offers an original insight into this new research area. Adopting a psycho-social approach based mainly on Pierre Bourdieu's praxeology, the book demonstrates that corruption and the mafia presence in Italian soccer reflect the Italian socio-political and economic system itself.Supported by interviews with securit...

Sport is often seen as an indicator of the civic maturity of a community, an aspect of the rights of citizens to health, education and social integration. This book examines the relationships between participation in sport and physical activity, and welfare policies across Europe.It argues that the success of campaigns for the promotion of sport depend on the existence of dedicated welfare policies promoted by the European states and explores variations in cultural models and struc...

As Islam’s visibility in global society increases, Muslim populations grow, and Muslim countries compete to take up positions at the heart of global sport, the interplay between sport and Islam becomes ever more illuminating. Sport in Islam and in Muslim Communities is the first book to analyse this relationship through a pluralist lens, exploring the questions it raises about contemporary Islam, globalisation, and the challenges faced by (in particular young) Muslims in negotiati...

Not to be confused with the English football 'hooligan', the UltraS are the hardcore subculture of fans at the two main Rome football clubs - AS Roma and SS Lazio. With neo-fascist sympathies, these groups (the Boys at Roma and the Irriducibili at Lazio) are political and well-organised.Following years of work inside the groups and interviews with the leading figures within the organisations, Gary Armstrong and Alberto Testa have written a fascinating expose and e...

The Italian love affair with sport is passionate, voracious, all-consuming. It provides a backdrop and a narrative to almost every aspect of daily life in Italy and the distinctively pink-coloured newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport is devoured by almost half a million readers every day. Narrating the history of modern Italy through its national passion for sport, Sport Italia provides a completely new portrayal of one of Europe's most alluring, yet contradictory countries, tracing the highs...

Storming Heaven is the only book which looks at Italian workerist theory and practice, from its origins in the anti-Stalinist left of the 1950s to its heyday twenty years later. It focuses on the theme of workerism, or 'operaismo', which includes the refusal of work, class self-organisation, mass illegality and the extension of revolutionary agency, of of which are still practiced today by workers across the world.Emphasising the dynamic nature of class struggle as the distinguishi...

This is the first in-depth study of the feminist movement that swept Italy during the "long 1970s" (1968-1983), and one of the first to use a combination of oral history interviews and newly-released archive sources to analyze the origins, themes, practices and impacts of "second-wave" feminism. While detailing the local and national contexts in which the movement operated, it sees this movement as transnationally connected.Emerging in a society that was both characterized by tradi...

This book is the first full-length study available in English to trace the extraordinary history of the Italian Northern Leagues during the 1980s and 1990s. At a time when the postwar First Republic entered a crisis amid corruption scandals, the Leagues acted as one of the main protest actors and grew at an unprecedented rate.Drawing on electoral and survey data, existing research, eyewitness accounts of protest events and interviews with activists and leaders, this book provides th...

In Marketing Modernity, Adam Arvidsson traces the development of Italy's postmodern consumer culture from the 1920s to the present day. In so doing, Arvidsson argues that the culture of consumption we see in Italy today has its direct roots in the social vision articulated by the advertising industry in the years following the First World War. He then goes on to discuss how that vision was further elaborated by advertising's interaction with subsequent big discourses in Twentieth ...

Meet the most powerful leader in the world.Chinese premier Xi Jinping graces our television screens and news headlines on a regular basis. But even after a decade in power, he remains shrouded in mystery.From growing up with a father purged in Mao's Cultural Revolution and his mission to eradicate poverty, to his persecution of Uyghur Muslims and paranoia about being likened to Winnie-the-Pooh, Xi Jinping is a man obscured by caricatures. In this short, ess...

The runaway bestselling exposé about Canada's most infamous mafia family is finally available in English, updated to include shocking events and revelations that followed its newsmaking publication in Québec.Queens, New York, 1981. When Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato and two others are found dead in a vacant lot, police fail to solve their murders. For their killer and his Montréal family, their deaths mark the beginning of an epic rise to criminal power that will last over thirty...