Polity Press

When we look back from the vantage point of the 21st century and ask ourselves what the previous century was all about, what do we see? Our first inclination is to focus on historical events: the 20th century was the age of two devastating world wars, of totalitarian regimes and terrible atrocities like the Holocaust - ‚the age of extremes', to use...

Over the past century alone, Russia has lived through great achievements and deepest misery; mass heroism and mass crime; over-blown ambition and near-hopeless despair - always emerging with its sovereignty and its fiercely independent spirit intact.In this book, leading Russia scholar Dmitri Trenin accompanies readers on Russia's rollercoaster...

Born Liquid is the last work by the great sociologist and social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, whose brilliant analyses of liquid modernity changed the way we think about our world today. At the time of his death, Bauman was working on this short book, a conversation with the Italian journalist Thomas Leoncini, exactly sixty years his junior. In these...

Recent startling successes in machine intelligence using a technique called 'deep learning' seem to blur the line between human and machine as never before. Are computers on the cusp of becoming so intelligent that they will render humans obsolete? Harry Collins argues we are getting ahead of ourselves, caught up in images of a fantastical future...

Walmart. Coca-Cola. BP. Toyota. The world economy runs on the profits of transnational corporations. Politicians need their backing. Non-profit organizations rely on their philanthropy. People look to their brands for meaning. And their power continues to rise.Can these companies, as so many are now hoping, provide the solutions to end the mounting...

With more than 500,000 people killed and at least half the population displaced, Syria's conflict is the most deadly of the 21st century. Russia's decision to join the war has broken the long military and political stalemate but it looks unlikely to deliver any of the core demands that spawned the original uprising against the Ba'athist regime.In...