Political Science

How elements of masculinity manifest themselves in all aspects of American political life

While hardly a new phenomenon, masculinity—which includes elements of toughness, independence, and leadership, among others—roared onto the national political stage in America with the 2016 candidacy, election, and presidency of Donald Trump. Research into masculinity dates back over a century, but little attention has been paid to the specific role of masculinity in politics beyond the conventional wisdom that it, rather than femininity, is the dominant force. This lack of research has led to a lack of knowledge on how exactly, and how much, masculinity shapes political structures, attitudes and behaviors, from children’s socialization to our masculine political world, to how a new generation views this traditional dominance.

In Masculinity in American Politics, Monika L. McDermott and Dan Cassino bring together a prestigious group of interdisciplinary scholars to explore these questions and their implications for different aspects of political life. Topics include the challenge of defining and measuring masculinity, how perceptions of gender and masculinity can shape campaign messaging strategies and public opinion, and other discussions of political identity, including age, race, and ethnicity.

With contributions from Melissa Deckman, Jill S. Greenlee, Amanda Bittner, and other high-profile scholars, this comprehensive volume provides insight into masculinity and its high-stakes political manifestations, particularly as Gen Z fights to redefine the contours of their own gender and sexuality. Drawing upon insights from politics, sociology, psychology, and the broader social sciences, Masculinity in American Politics pushes the field to look “beyond the binary” and illuminate this brave, new world of political conflict and possibility.

An investigation of America’s failure to atone for the wrongs of slavery

Ever since the unfulfilled promise of “forty acres and a mule” after the Civil War, America has consistently failed to compensate Black Americans for the wrongs of slavery. Exploring why America has struggled to confront the issue of racial injustice, Long Overdue provides a history of the racial reparations movement and shows why it is more relevant now than ever.

Through an examination of Americans’ unwillingness to address economic injustice, Charles P. Henry crafts a skillful moral, political, economic, and historical argument for African American reparations, focusing on successful political cases. In the wake of successes in South Africa and New Zealand, new models for reparations have found traction in a number of American cities and states, from Dallas to Baltimore and Virginia to California. By looking at other dispossessed groups—Native Americans, Holocaust survivors, and Japanese internment victims in the 1940s—Henry shows how some groups have won the fight for reparations, and explores new ways forward for Black Americans.

From Hurricane Katrina to Hurricane Harvey, the events of the 21st century continue to show that the legacy of racial segregation and economic disadvantage is never far below the surface in America. As the issue of reparations is brought to the national stage by figures such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamala Harris, Long Overdue provides a must-read survey of the political and legislative efforts made toward reparations over the course of American history, and offers a new path toward establishing equality for all Black Americans.

Hip-Hop music encompasses an extraordinarily diverse range of approaches to politics. Some rap and Hip-Hop artists engage directly with elections and social justice organizations; others may use their platform to call out discrimination, poverty, sexism, racism, police brutality, and other social ills. In Pulse of the People, Lakeyta M. Bonnette illustrates the ways rap music serves as a vehicle for the expression and advancement of the political thoughts of urban Blacks, a population frequently marginalized in American society and alienated from electoral politics.

Pulse of the People lays a foundation for the study of political rap music and public opinion research and demonstrates ways in which political attitudes asserted in the music have been transformed into direct action and behavior of constituents. Bonnette examines the history of rap music and its relationship to and extension from other cultural and political vehicles in Black America, presenting criteria for identifying the specific subgenre of music that is political rap. She complements the statistics of rap music exposure with lyrical analysis of rap songs that espouse Black Nationalist and Black Feminist attitudes. Touching on a number of critical moments in American racial politics—including the 2008 and 2012 elections and the cases of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, and Trayvon Martin—Pulse of the People makes a compelling case for the influence of rap music in the political arena and greatly expands our understanding of the ways political ideologies and public opinion are formed.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.

Explains how various Islamists have endorsed human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and mobilize supporters

Islamist political parties and groups are on the rise throughout the Muslim world and in Muslim communities in the West. Owing largely to the threat of terrorism, political Islam is often portrayed as a monolithic movement embodying fundamentalism and theocracy, an image magnified by the rise of populism and xenophobia in the United States and Europe. Reality, however, is far more complicated. Political Islam has evolved considerably since its spectacular rise decades ago, and today it features divergent viewpoints and contributes to discrete but simultaneous developments worldwide. This is a new political Islam, more global in scope but increasingly local in action.

Emmanuel Karagiannis offers a sophisticated analysis of the different manifestations of contemporary Islamism. In a context of global economic and social changes, he finds local manifestations of Islamism are becoming both more prevalent and more diverse. Many Islamists turn to activism, still more participate formally in the democratic process, and some, in far fewer numbers, advocate violence—a wide range of political persuasions and tactics that reflects real and perceived political, cultural, and identity differences.

Synthesizing prodigious research and integrating insights from the globalization debate and the literature on social movements, The New Political Islam seeks to explain the processes and factors leading to distinctive fusions of "the global" and "the local" across the landscape of contemporary political Islam. Examining converts to Islam in Europe, nonviolent Islamists with global reach, Islamist parties in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia, and militant Shia and Sunni groups in Syria and Iraq, Karagiannis demonstrates that Islamists have embraced ideas and practices from the global marketplace and have attempted to implement them locally. He looks closely at the ways in which Islamist activists, politicians, and militants have utilized the language of human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and popular support and to contend for power.

A journey into de facto state-building based on ethnographic and archival research in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

What is de facto about the de facto state? In Sovereignty Suspended, this question guides Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay through a journey into de facto state-building, or the process of constructing an entity that looks like a state and acts like a state but that much of the world says does not or should not exist. In international law, the de facto state is one that exists in reality but remains unrecognized by other states. Nevertheless, such entities provide health care and social security, issue identity cards and passports, and interact with international aid donors. De facto states hold elections, conduct censuses, control borders, and enact fiscal policies. Indeed, most maintain representative offices in sovereign states and are able to unofficially communicate with officials. Bryant and Hatay develop the concept of the "aporetic state" to describe such entities, which project stateness and so seem real, even as nonrecognition renders them unrealizable.

Sovereignty Suspended is based on more than two decades of ethnographic and archival research in one so-called aporetic state, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). It traces the process by which the island's "north" began to emerge as a tangible, separate, if unrecognized space following violent partition in 1974. Like other de facto states, the TRNC looks and acts like a state, appearing real to observers despite international condemnations, denials of its existence, and the belief of large numbers of its citizens that it will never be a "real" state. Bryant and Hatay excavate the contradictions and paradoxes of life in an aporetic state, arguing that it is only by rethinking the concept of the de facto state as a realm of practice that we will be able to understand the longevity of such states and what it means to live in them.

The conflict in Ukraine has deep domestic roots. A third of the population, primarily in the East and South, regards its own Russian cultural identity as entirely compatible with a Ukrainian civic identity. The state’s reluctance to recognize this ethnos as a legitimate part of the modern Ukrainian nation, has created a tragic cycle that entangles Ukrainian politics.

The Tragedy of Ukraine argues that in order to untangle the conflict within the Ukraine, it must be addressed on an emotional, as well as institutional level. It draws on Richard Ned Lebow’s ‘tragic vision of politics’ and on classical Greek tragedy to assist in understanding the persistence of this conflict. Classical Greek tragedy once served as a mechanism in Athenian society to heal deep social trauma and create more just institutions. The Tragedy of Ukraine reflects on the ways in which ancient Greek tragedy can help us rethink civic conflict and polarization, as well as model ways of healing deep social divisions.

In The End of Peacekeeping, Marsha Henry makes use of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks to expose peacekeeping as an epistemic power project in need of abolition. Drawing on critical concepts from Black feminist thought, and from postcolonial and critical race theories, Henry shows how contemporary peacekeeping produces gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies.

The book’s intersectional analysis of peacekeeping is based on data amassed through more than fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork on peacekeeping missions and training centers around the world, including interviews with UN peacekeepers, humanitarian aid personnel, and local populations. Henry demonstrates how focus on the policy and practice of peacekeeping has obscured the geopolitical knowledge project at peacekeeping’s root, allowing its harms to persist unquestioned by mainstream scholarship. Arguing that we must recover critical theoretical contributions that have been sidelined within the field, she brings the insights of feminist and postcolonial scholarship to bear on peacekeeping studies, whose production of empirical data and evidence continues to provide the justification and foundation for policy and global governance actions.

Revealing that peacekeeping is not the benign, apolitical project it is often purported to be, this book encourages readers to imagine and enact alternative futures to peacekeeping.

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist best known for The Revolt of the Masses, first translated into English in 1932. In it, Ortega critiques a populist deformation of democracy by the rise of a “mass mentality” characterized by selfishness, a lack of curiosity, and a general indifference to the opinions and attitudes of others. However, as Brendon Westler makes clear, we need to look beyond Ortega’s arguments about populism and democracy in his most famous work to recover the philosopher’s expansive political outlook and to identify his valuable contributions to the history and advancement of liberalism.

Westler’s book reconstructs Ortega’s political theory, underscoring its distinctive historical origins as well as the ways in which it might be instructive to us today. Through an exploration of works less familiar to an English-speaking audience, such as Concord and Liberty, “Vieja y nueva política,” “De Europa meditatio Quaedam,” and “Democracia morbosa,” combined with a sensitivity to larger social and political ideas circulating within Spain, The Revolting Masses traces the contours of Ortega’s approach to politics. Westler argues that reading texts written over the course of the philosopher’s entire career, in combination with The Revolt of the Masses, offers a more complete picture of Ortega’s political thought—one that advocates for a liberal ethos as an answer to populism and promotes both individual freedom and the preservation of community bonds.

As The Revolting Masses shows, Ortega was, above all, a philosopher who reflected on what it would take for people of differing beliefs to live together. His unique conception of liberalism, grounded in the Spanish tradition, not only emphasizes pluralism and diversity of thought and institutions but also serves as a potential antidote to the populism of our present moment.

Expert analysis of American governance challenges and recommendations for reform

Two big ideas serve as the catalyst for the essays collected in this book. The first is the state of governance in the United States, which Americans variously perceive as broken, frustrating, and unresponsive. Editor James Perry observes in his Introduction that this perception is rooted in three simultaneous developments: government's failure to perform basic tasks that once were taken for granted, an accelerating pace of change that quickly makes past standards of performance antiquated, and a dearth of intellectual capital that generate the capacity to bridge the gulf between expectations and performance. The second idea hearkens back to the Progressive era, when Americans revealed themselves to be committed to better administration of their government at all levels—federal, state, and local.

These two ideas—the diminishing capacity for effective governance and Americans' expectations for reform—are veering in opposite directions. Contributors to Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century explore these central ideas by addressing such questions as: what is the state of government today? Can future disruptions of governance and public service be anticipated? What forms of government will emerge from the past and what institutions and structures will be needed to meet future challenges? And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, what knowledge, skills, and abilities will need to be fostered for tomorrow's civil servants to lead and execute effectively?

Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century offers recommendations for bending the trajectories of governance capacity and reform expectations toward convergence, including reversing the trend of administrative disinvestment, developing talent for public leadership through higher education, creating a federal civil service to meet future needs, and rebuilding bipartisanship so that the sweeping changes needed to restore good government become possible.

Contributors: Sheila Bair, William W. Bradley, John J. DiIulio, Jr., Angela Evans, Francis Fukuyama, Donald F. Kettl, Ramayya Krishnan, Paul C. Light, Shelley Metzenbaum, Norman J. Ornstein, James L. Perry, Norma M. Riccucci, Paul R. Verkuil, Paul A. Volcker.

Developed nations strive to create the impression that their hearts and pockets bleed for the developing world. Yet, the global North continues to offer unfavorable trade terms to the global South. Truly fair trade would make reciprocal concessions to developing countries while allowing them to better their own positions. However, five hundred years of colonial racism and post-colonial paternalism have undermined trade negotiations.

While urging developing countries to participate in trade, the North offers empty deals to "partners" that it regards as unequal. Using a mixed-methods approach, J. P. Singh exposes the actual position beneath the North's image of benevolence and empathy: either join in the type of trade that developed countries offer, or be cast aside as obstreperous and unwilling. Singh reveals how the global North ultimately bars developing nations from flourishing. His findings chart a path forward, showing that developing nations can garner favorable concessions by drawing on unique strengths and through collective advocacy. Sweet Talk offers a provocative rethinking of how far our international relations have come and how far we still have to go.

Originally published in 2012, Dignity Rights is the first book to explore the constitutional law of dignity around the world. In it, Erin Daly shows how dignity has come not only to define specific interests like the right to humane treatment or to earn a living wage, but also to protect the basic rights of a person to control his or her own life and to live in society with others. Daly argues that, through the right to dignity, courts are redefining what it means to be human in the modern world. As described by the courts, the scope of dignity rights marks the outer boundaries of state power, limiting state authority to meet the demands of human dignity. As a result, these cases force us to reexamine the relationship between the individual and the state and, in turn, contribute to a new and richer understanding of the role of the citizen in modern democracies.

This updated edition features a new preface by the author, in which she articulates how, over the past decade, dignity rights cases have evolved to incorporate the convergence of human rights and environmental rights that we have seen at the international level and in domestic constitutions.

This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster, critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions—and they shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk.

As social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality, the goals are subjective, and usually contested. Critical disaster studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of technocratic expertise to maintain power.
Moreover, rather than existing as isolated events, disasters take place over time. People commonly imagine disasters to be unexpected and sudden, making structural conditions appear contingent, widespread conditions appear local, and chronic conditions appear acute. By placing disasters in broader contexts, critical disaster studies peels away that veneer.

With chapters by scholars of five continents and seven disciplines, Critical Disaster Studies asks how disasters come to be known as disasters, how disasters are used as tools of governance and politics, and how people imagine and anticipate disasters. The volume will be of interest to scholars of disaster in any discipline and especially to those teaching the growing number of courses on disaster studies.

A impassioned defense of the European Union and a concise analysis of its present challenges and future

In this provocative book, renowned public intellectual Ivan Krastev reflects on the future of the European Union—and its potential lack of a future. With far-right nationalist parties on the rise across the continent and the United Kingdom planning for Brexit, the European Union is in disarray and plagued by doubts as never before. Krastev includes chapters devoted to Europe's major problems (especially the political destabilization sparked by the more than 1.3 million migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia), the spread of right-wing populism (taking into account the election of Donald Trump in the United States), and the thorny issues facing member states on the eastern flank of the EU (including the threat posed by Vladimir Putin's Russia). In a new afterword written in the wake of the 2019 EU parliamentary elections, Krastev concludes that although the union is as fragile as ever, its chances of enduring are much better than they were just a few years ago.

Lethal autonomous weapons are weapon systems that can select and destroy targets without intervention by a human operator. Fighting Machines explores the relationship between lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS), the concept of human dignity, and international law. Much of this analysis speaks to three fundamental and related problems: When a LAWS takes a human life, is that killing a violation of human dignity? Can states and non-state actors use LAWS in accordance with international law? And are there certain responsibilities of human decision-making during wartime that we should not delegate to machines?

In the book, Dan Saxon argues that the use of LAWS to take human life constitutes a violation of human dignity. Rather than concentrating on the victims of the use of lethal force, Saxon instead focuses on the technology and relevant legal principles and rules to advance several propositions. First, as LAWS operate at increasingly greater speeds, their use will undermine the opportunities for, and the value of, human reasoning and judgment. Second, by transferring responsibility for reasoning and judgment about the use of lethal force to computer software, the use of LAWS violates the dignity of the soldiers, commanders, and law enforcement officers who historically have made such decisions, and, therefore, breaches international law. Third, weapon designs that facilitate teamwork between humans and autonomous systems are necessary to ensure that humans and LAWS can operate interdependently so that individuals can fulfil their obligations under international law—including the preservation of their own dignity—and ensure that human reasoning and judgment are available for cognitive functions better suited to humans than machines.

Fighting Machines speaks to the fields of international humanitarian law, human rights, criminal law, and legal philosophy. It will also be of interest to non-lawyers, especially military officers, government policy makers, political scientists, and international relations scholars, as well as roboticists and ethicists.

A compelling account of politics and social philosophy in Levinas's Talmudic commentaries

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a French philosopher known for his radical ethics and for his contribution to Jewish thought in his commentaries on Talmudic sources. In Levinas's Politics, Annabel Herzog confronts a major difficulty in Levinas's philosophy: the relationship between ethics and politics. Levinas's ethics describes the encounter with the other, that is, with any other human being. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter is a relationship in which the ego is commanded by a transcendent and unquestionable order to take responsibility for the other person. Politics, on the other hand, presupposes at least three people: the ego, the other, and any third party. Among three people, nothing can be transcendent; on the contrary, everything must be negotiated.

Against the conventional view of Levinas's conception of the political as the interruption and collapse of the ethical, Herzog argues that in the Talmudic readings, Levinas constructed politics positively. She shows that Levinas's Talmudic readings embody a pragmatism that complements, revises, and challenges the extreme ethical analyses he offers in his phenomenological works—Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, and Of God Who Comes to Mind. Her analysis illuminates Levinas's explanations of the relationship between ethics and politics: ethics is the foundation of justice; justice contains a necessary violence that must be moderated by mercy; and justice, general laws, and national aspirations must be linked in an attempt to "improve universality itself."

Advocates representing historically disadvantaged groups have long understood the need for strong public relations, effective fundraising, and robust channels of communication with the communities that they serve. Yet the neoliberal era and its infusion of money into the political arena have deepened these imperatives, thus adding new financial hurdles to the long list of obstacles facing minority communities. To respond to these challenges, a professionalized, nonprofit model of political advocacy has steadily gained traction. In many cases, advocacy organizations sought to harness and redirect the radical verve that characterized the protest movements of the 1960s into pragmatic, state-sanctioned approaches to political engagement.

In Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens, Matthew Dean Hindman looks at how and why contemporary political advocacy groups have transformed social movements and their participants. Looking to LGBT political movements as an exemplary case study, Hindman explores the advocacy explosion in the United States and its impact on how advocates encourage citizens to understand their role in the political process. He argues that current advocacy groups encourage members of the LGBT community to view themselves as stakeholders in a common struggle for political incorporation. In doing so, however, they often overshadow more imaginative and transformational approaches that could unsettle and challenge straight society and its prevailing political and sexual norms. Advocacy groups carved out a space within a neoliberalizing political process that enabled them to instruct their members, followers, and constituents on serving effectively as industrious political claimants. Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens thus sheds light on grassroots politics as it is practiced in present-day America and offers a compelling and original analysis of the ways in which neoliberalism challenges citizens to participate as consumers and investors in the advocacy marketplace.

An examination of the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s

Who governs political parties? Recent insurgent campaigns, such as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have thrust this critical question to the center of political debate for casual observers and scholars alike. Yet the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest group dominance both fail to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape.

In True Blues, Adam Hilton tackles the question of who governs parties by examining the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s. Reconceiving parties as "contentious institutions," Hilton argues that Democratic Party change was driven by recurrent conflicts between groups and officeholders to define and control party identity, program, and policy. The outcome of this prolonged struggle was a wholly new kind of party—an advocacy party—which institutionalized greater party dependence on outside groups for legitimacy and organizational support, while also, in turn, fostering greater group dependency on the presidency for the satisfaction of its symbolic and substantive demands. Consequently, while the long conflict between party reformers and counter-reformers successfully opened the Democratic Party to new voices and identities, it also facilitated the growth of presidential power, rising inequality, and deepening partisan polarization.

Tracing the rise of the advocacy party from the fall of the New Deal order through the presidency of Barack Obama, True Blues explains how and why the Democratic Party has come to its current crossroads and suggests a bold new perspective for comprehending the dynamics driving American party politics more broadly.

Transitional justice, commonly defined as the process of confronting the legacies of past human rights abuses and atrocities, often does not produce the kinds of results that are imagined. In multiethnic, divided societies like Uganda, people who have not been directly affected by harm, atrocity, and abuse go about their daily lives without ever confronting what happened in the past. When victims and survivors raise their voices to ask for help, or when plans are announced to address that harm, it is this unaffected population that see such plans as pointless. They complain about what they perceive as the "needless" time and money that will be spent to fix something that they see as unimportant and, ultimately, block any restorative processes.

Joanna R. Quinn spent twenty years working in Uganda and uses its particular case as a lens through which she examines the failure of deeply divided societies to acknowledge the past. She proposes that the needed remedy is the development of a very rudimentary understanding—what she calls "thin sympathy"—among individuals in each of the different factions and groups of the other's suffering prior to establishing any transitional justice process. Based on 440 extensive interviews with elites and other thought leaders in government, traditional institutions, faith groups, and NGOs, as well as with women and children throughout the country, Thin Sympathy argues that the acquisition of a basic understanding of what has taken place in the past will enable the development of a more durable transitional justice process.

The notion of corruption as a problem for politics spans many centuries and political, social, and cultural contexts. But it is incredibly difficult to define what we mean when we describe a regime or actor as corrupt: while corruption suggests a falling away from purity, health, or integrity, it flourishes today in an environment that is often inarticulate about its moral ideals and wary of perfectionist discourse. Providing a historical perspective on the idea, Robert Alan Sparling explores diverse visions of corruption that have been elucidated by thinkers across the modern philosophical tradition.

In a series of chronologically ordered philosophical portraits, Political Corruption considers the different ways in which a metaphor of impurity, disease, and dissolution was deployed by political philosophers from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. Focusing specifically on the thought of Erasmus, Étienne de La Boétie, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, Robespierre, Kant, and Weber, Sparling situates these thinkers in their historical contexts and argues that each of them offers a distinctive vision of corruption that has continuing relevance in contemporary political debates. He contrasts immoderate purists with impure moderates and reveals corruption to be a language of reaction and revolution. The book explores themes such as the nature of civic trust and distrust; the relationship of transparency to accountability; the integrity of leaders and the character of uncorrupted citizens; the division between public and private; the nature of dependency; and the relationship between regime and civic disposition.

Political Corruption examines how philosophers have conceived of public office and its abuse and how they have sought to insulate the public sphere from anticivic inclinations and interests. Sparling argues that speaking coherently about political corruption in our present moment requires a robust account of the good regime and of the character of its citizens and officeholders.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the world's best-known and most translated documents. When it was presented to the United Nations General Assembly in December in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the writing group, called it a new "Magna Carta for all mankind." The passage of time has shown Roosevelt to have been largely correct in her prediction as to the declaration's importance. No other document in the world today can claim a comparable standing in the international community.

Roosevelt and French legal expert René Cassin have often been represented as the principal authors of the declaration. But in fact, it resulted from a collaborative effort involving a number of individuals in different capacities. One of the declaration's most important authors was the vice chairman of the Human Rights Commission, Peng Chun Chang (1892-1957), a Chinese diplomat and philosopher whose contribution has been the focus of growing attention in recent years. Indeed, it is Chang who deserves the credit for the universality and religious ecumenism that are now regarded as the declaration's defining features. Despite this, Chang's extraordinary contribution has been overlooked by historians.

Peng Chun Chang was a modern-day Renaissance man—teacher, scholar, university chancellor, playwright, diplomat, and politician. A true cosmopolitan, he was deeply involved in the cultural exchange between East and West, and the dramatic events of his life left a profound mark on his intellectual and political work. P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first biography of this extraordinary actor on the world stage, who belonged to the same generation as Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Drawing on previously unknown sources, it casts new light on Chang's multifaceted life and involvement with one of modern history's most important documents.

Aristotle listed moderation as one of the moral virtues. He also defined virtue as the mean between extremes, implying that moderation plays a vital role in all forms of moral excellence. But moderation's protean character—its vague and ill-defined omnipresence in judgment and action—makes it exceedingly difficult to grasp theoretically. At the same time, moderation seems to be the foundation of many contemporary democratic political regimes, because the competition between parties cannot properly function without compromise and bargaining. The success of representative government and its institutions depends to a great extent on the virtue of moderation, yet the latter persists in being absent from both the conceptual discourse of many political philosophers and the campaign speeches of politicians fearful of losing elections if they are perceived as moderates.

Aurelian Craiutu aims to resolve this paradox. Examining the writings of prominent twentieth-century thinkers such as Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, Michael Oakeshott, and Adam Michnik, he addresses the following questions: What does it mean to be a moderate voice in political and public life? What are the virtues and limits of moderation? Can moderation be the foundation for a successful platform or party? Though critics maintain that moderation is merely a matter of background and personal temperament, Craiutu finds several basic norms that have consistently appeared in different national and political contexts. The authors studied in this book defended pluralism of ideas, interests, and social forces, and sought to achieve a sound balance between them through political trimming. They shared a preoccupation with political evil and human dignity, but refused to see the world in Manichaean terms that divide it neatly into the forces of light and those of darkness. Faces of Moderation argues that moderation remains crucial for today's encounters with new forms of extremism and fundamentalism across the world.

From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an original and paradigmatic work of science fiction—it is a profound reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth," his scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein's plot. Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed Frankenstein's Creature for what he really was—a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have the right to the fundamental means for their development as humans—namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love, education, and community.

In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that the right to share love and community, especially with parents or fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their genesis, membership, or social status.

From the University of California, Berkeley, to Middlebury College, institutions of higher learning increasingly find themselves on the front lines of cultural and political battles over free speech. Repeatedly, students, faculty, administrators, and politically polarizing invited guests square off against one another, assuming contrary positions on the limits of thought and expression, respect for differences, the boundaries of toleration, and protection from harm.

In Free Speech on Campus, political philosopher Sigal Ben-Porath examines the current state of the arguments, using real-world examples to explore the contexts in which conflicts erupt, as well as to assess the place of identity politics and concern with safety and dignity within them. She offers a useful framework for thinking about free-speech controversies both inside and outside the college classroom, shifting the focus away from disputes about legality and harm and toward democracy and inclusion. Ben-Porath provides readers with strategies to de-escalate tensions and negotiate highly charged debates surrounding trigger warnings, safe spaces, and speech that verges on hate. Everyone with a stake in campus controversies—professors, students, administrators, and informed members of the wider public—will find something valuable in Ben-Porath's illuminating discussion of these crucially important issues.

A fresh interpretation of U.S. relations with the Muslim world since 1979

Americans' concerns about women's human rights in Muslim countries were triggered by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and have evolved within the context of long-standing Western stereotypes about Muslims, as well as transnational feminism and the global human rights movement. As these frameworks simultaneously competed against and reinforced one another, U.S. public conversations about Muslim women intensified, culminating in feminist campaigns and U.S. policies that aimed to defend women's rights in Islamic countries—such was the case with the Clinton administration's decision not to recognize the Taliban regime after they seized control of Afghanistan in 1996.

U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights provides a fresh interpretation of U.S. relations with the Muslim world and, more broadly, U.S. foreign relations history and the history of human rights. Kelly J. Shannon argues that, as U.S. attention to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority regions became more focused and sustained, the issue of women's human rights in Islamic societies was one that Americans gradually identified as vitally important to U.S. foreign policy. Based on an analysis of a wide range of sources—including U.S. government and United Nations documents, oral histories, NGO archival records, news media, scholarship, films and television, and novels—and a wide range of actors including journalists, academics, activists, NGOs, the public, Muslim women, Islamic fundamentalists, and U.S. policymakers—the book challenges traditional interpretations of U.S. foreign policy that assert the primacy of "hard power" concerns in U.S. decision making. By reframing U.S.-Islamic relations with respect to women's rights, and revealing faulty assumptions about the drivers of U.S. foreign policy, Shannon sheds new light on U.S. identity and policy creation and alters the standard narratives of the U.S. relationship with the Muslim world in the closing years of the Cold War and the emergence of the post-Cold War era.

Misunderstanding Terrorism provides a striking reassessment of the scope and nature of the global neo-jihadi threat to the West. The post-9/11 decade experienced the emergence of new forms of political violence and new terrorist actors. More recently, Marc Sageman's understanding of how and why people have adopted fundamentalist ideologies and terrorist methods has evolved.

Author of the classic Understanding Terror Networks, Sageman has become only more critical of the U.S. government's approach to the problem. He argues that U.S. society has been transformed for the worse by an extreme overreaction to a limited threat—limited, he insists, despite spectacular recent incidents, which he takes fully into account. Indeed, his discussion of just how limited the threat is marks a major contribution to the discussion and debate over the best way to a measured and much more effective response.

Directed at a diverse audience of students, legal and public health practitioners, and anyone interested in understanding what human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to health and development mean and why they matter, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity provides a solid foundation for comprehending what a human rights framework implies and the potential for social transformation it entails. Applying a human rights framework to health demands that we think about our own suffering and that of others, as well as the fundamental causes of that suffering. What is our agency as human subjects with rights and dignity, and what prevents us from acting in certain circumstances? What roles are played by others in decisions that affect our health? How do we determine whether what we may see as "natural" is actually the result of mutable, human policies and practices?

Alicia Ely Yamin couples theory with personal examples of HRBAs at work and shows the impact they have had on people's lives and health outcomes. Analyzing the successes of and challenges to using human rights frameworks for health, Yamin charts what can be learned from these experiences, from conceptualization to implementation, setting out explicit assumptions about how we can create social transformation. The ultimate concern of Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity is to promote movement from analysis to action, so that we can begin to use human rights frameworks to effect meaningful social change in global health, and beyond.

Present-day Americans feel secure in their citizenship: they are free to speak up for any cause, oppose their government, marry a person of any background, and live where they choose—at home or abroad. Denaturalization and denationalization are more often associated with twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. But there was a time when American-born and naturalized foreign-born individuals in the United States could be deprived of their citizenship and its associated rights. Patrick Weil examines the twentieth-century legal procedures, causes, and enforcement of denaturalization to illuminate an important but neglected dimension of Americans' understanding of sovereignty and federal authority: a citizen is defined, in part, by the parameters that could be used to revoke that same citizenship.

The Sovereign Citizen begins with the Naturalization Act of 1906, which was intended to prevent realization of citizenship through fraudulent or illegal means. Denaturalization—a process provided for by one clause of the act—became the main instrument for the transfer of naturalization authority from states and local courts to the federal government. Alongside the federalization of naturalization, a conditionality of citizenship emerged: for the first half of the twentieth century, naturalized individuals could be stripped of their citizenship not only for fraud but also for affiliations with activities or organizations that were perceived as un-American. (Emma Goldman's case was the first and perhaps best-known denaturalization on political grounds, in 1909.) By midcentury the Supreme Court was fiercely debating cases and challenged the constitutionality of denaturalization and denationalization. This internal battle lasted almost thirty years. The Warren Court's eventual decision to uphold the sovereignty of the citizen—not the state—secures our national order to this day. Weil's account of this transformation, and the political battles fought by its advocates and critics, reshapes our understanding of American citizenship.

Specifically designed for educational use in international relations, law, political science, economics, and philosophy classes, Human Rights in the World Community treats the full range of human rights issues, including key paradoxes and contestations surrounding human rights, implementation problems, and processes involving international, national, and nongovernmental action. This new, expanded edition reflects the global, large-scale change that has occurred in the field of human rights, including the rise of terrorism and the triple threats of climate change, nuclear proliferation, and poverty, and each section features, as in previous editions, provocatively probing discussion questions. For the first time, the book's set of appendices are available online: a bibliography, which encourages further study; an annotated human rights filmography; and the texts of, and citations to, key human rights instruments.

Contributors: Seyla Benhabib, Fiona Beveridge, Claudia Card, Richard Pierre Claude, Wade M. Cole, Karen Engle, Tony Evans, Richard Fairbrother, Richard A. Falk, Judy Fudge, Conor Gearty, Anna Grear, Cindy Holder, Paul Hunt, Bonny Ibhawoh, Michael Ignatieff, Ratna Kapur, Harold Hongju Koh, Scott Leckie, Richard B. Lillich, Stephen P. Marks, Susan Marks, Robert McCorquodale, Daniel Moeckli, Siobhan Mullally, Martha C. Nussbaum, Jordan J. Paust, Christopher N. J. Roberts, Douglas Roche, Dinah L. Shelton, Penelope Simons, Margaret R. Somers, Felisa L. Tibbitts, Jonathan Todres, Ineke van der Valk, Jeremy Waldron, Burns H. Weston, Hannah Wittman.

In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and with it a profusion of norms, processes, and institutions to define, promote, and protect human rights. Today virtually every cause seeks to cloak itself in the righteous language of rights. But even so, this universal reliance on the rights idiom has not succeeded in creating common ground and deep agreement as to the scope, content, and philosophical bases for human rights.

Makau Mutua argues that the human rights enterprise inappropriately presents itself as a guarantor of eternal truths without which human civilization is impossible. Mutua contends that in fact the human rights corpus, though well meaning, is a Eurocentric construct for the reconstitution of non-Western societies and peoples with a set of culturally biased norms and practices.

Mutua maintains that if the human rights movement is to succeed, it must move away from Eurocentrism as a civilizing crusade and attack on non-European peoples. Only a genuine multicultural approach to human rights can make it truly universal. Indigenous, non-European traditions of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas must be deployed to deconstruct—and to reconstruct—a universal bundle of rights that all human societies can claim as theirs.

Six-year-old Manuel Diaz and his mother first arrived at Miami's airport in 1961 with little more than a dime for a phone call to their relatives in the Little Havana neighborhood. Forty years after his flight from Castro's Cuba, attorney Manny Diaz became mayor of the City of Miami. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the one-time citrus and tourism hub was more closely associated with vice than sunshine. When Diaz took office in 2001, the city was paralyzed by a notoriously corrupt police department, unresponsive government, a dying business district, and heated ethnic and racial divisions. During Diaz's two terms as mayor, Miami was transformed into a vibrant, progressive, and economically resurgent world-class metropolis.

In Miami Transformed: Rebuilding America One Neighborhood, One City at a Time, award-winning former mayor Manny Diaz shares lessons learned from governing one of the most diverse and dynamic urban communities in the United States. This firsthand account begins with Diaz's memories as an immigrant child in a foreign land, his education, and his political development as part of a new generation of Cuban Americans. Diaz also discusses his role in the controversial Elián González case. Later he details how he managed two successful mayoral campaigns, navigated the maze of municipal politics, oversaw the revitalization of downtown Miami, and rooted out police corruption to regain the trust of businesses and Miami citizens.

Part memoir, part political primer, Miami Transformed offers a straightforward look at Diaz's brand of holistic, pragmatic urban leadership that combines public investment in education and infrastructure with private sector partnerships. The story of Manny Diaz's efforts to renew Miami will interest anyone seeking to foster safer, greener, and more prosperous cities.

Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward critically reflects on the past fifteen years of international efforts aimed at improving health, alleviating poverty, diminishing gender inequality, and promoting human rights. The volume includes essays by leading scholars and practitioners that are centered on the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and its resulting Programme of Action. ICPD, an agreement among 179 governments, UN agencies, and NGOs, was intended to shape population and development policy—reinterpreted and redefined as "reproductive health." More than a decade after the enthusiasm that accompanied ICPD, there is growing concern about its effectiveness in the context of global health and development. Reproductive Health and Human Rights addresses that concern.

The book grapples with fundamental questions about the relationships among population, fertility decline, reproductive health, human rights, poverty alleviation, and development and assesses the various arguments—demographic, public health, human rights-based, and economic—for and against ICPD today.

A number of the chapters address institutional challenges to ICPD and consider how the changing political, religious, academic, and disciplinary contexts matter. Other chapters engage operational and conceptual issues and whether ICPD has been able to move the reproductive health agenda forward on topics such as maternal mortality, abortion, HIV/AIDS, adolescents, reproductive technologies, and demography. Finally, several chapters examine how ICPD has been sidelined by emerging health and development agendas and what could be done in response. Unlike any book yet published, Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward examines the state of the arguments for reproductive health and rights from a multidisciplinary perspective that provides policymakers, scholars, and activists with a better understanding of how reproductive health and rights have developed, their place in the global policy agenda, and how they might evolve most effectively in the future.

Labor rights have traditionally been a concern of labor law scholars and practitioners whose work concentrates exclusively on domestic developments. In the past decade, however, the globalization of investment and production has expanded the bounds of labor rights discourse.

Contributors to this volume provide the first comprehensive view of labor rights in the international system of commerce. They consider the avenues open to worker rights claims in the global economy under international human rights instruments, U.S. trade laws, free trade agreements, labor rights litigation, and corporate codes of conduct. They address worker rights from the standpoints of human rights concerns, trade and development policy, and labor law principles.

How can citizens make sense of the complex mixture of durability and dynamism that animates American party politics? How should Americans understand—and come to terms with—contemporary partisan polarization and the democratic backsliding afflicting politics in the United States today? In this volume, contributors argue that the historical-institutionalist approach practiced by scholars of American Political Development (APD) offers enormous potential and can shed light on the paradoxical character of American party politics in general and the present conflicts plaguing the polity in particular.

Parties, Power, and Change draws together a broad range of contributions from a new generation of historically oriented social scientists for the first time, and foregrounds political parties in the study of APD. By doing so, the volume highlights the ways in which party development has both been shaped by, and contributed to, changes in governing institutions and the democratic polity. The essays illuminate the developments that gave rise to salient features of the contemporary political landscape that occupy both academic and public discourse today, including shifts in ideology, group affiliations, and issue positions of the parties; changes in party structures; and partisan-driven democratic backsliding. Finally, this volume argues that, by viewing American politics through the lens of the historical development of party politics, readers can better understand the essential role that parties play in American history and see how parties can be mediating institutions that both sustain and undermine democracy.

Contributors: Amel Ahmed, Gwendoline M. Alphonso, Julia Azari, Rachel M. Blum, Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, Boris Heersink, Jessica Hejny, Adam Hilton, Daniel Klinghard, Didi Kuo, Matthew J. Lacombe, Verlan Lewis, Nicole Mellow, Sam Rosenfeld, Jeffrey S. Selinger, Daniel Schlozman.

The complete guide to debunking right-wing misinterpretations of the Bible—from economics and immigration to gender and sexuality.

Jesus loves borders, guns, unborn babies, and economic prosperity and hates homosexuality, taxes, welfare, and universal healthcare—or so say many Republican politicians, pundits, and preachers. Through outrageous misreadings of the New Testament gospels that started almost a century ago, conservative influencers have conjured a version of Jesus that speaks to their fears, desires, and resentments.

In Republican Jesus, Tony Keddie explains not only where this right-wing Christ came from and what he stands for but also why this version of Jesus is a fraud. By restoring Republicans’ cherry-picked gospel texts to their original literary and historical contexts, Keddie dismantles the biblical basis for Republican positions on hot-button issues like Big Government, taxation, abortion, immigration, and climate change. At the same time, he introduces readers to an ancient Jesus whose life experiences and ethics were totally unlike those of modern Americans, conservatives and liberals alike.
 

Oil is an unusual commodity in that individual decisions can have an outsized effect on the market. OPEC+’s choice to increase production, for instance, might send prices falling, affecting both oil producers and consumers worldwide. What do the leading oil market players consider before making a fateful move?

Oil Leaders offers an unprecedented glimpse into the strategic thinking of top figures in the energy world from the 1980s through the recent past. Ibrahim AlMuhanna—a close adviser to four different Saudi oil ministers during that period—examines the role of individual and collective decision making in shaping market movements. He analyzes how powerful individuals made critical choices, tracking how they responded to the flow of information on pivotal market and political events and predicted reactions from allies and adversaries. AlMuhanna highlights how the media has played an increasingly important role as a conduit of information among multiple players in the oil market. Energy leaders have learned to manage the signals they send to the market and to other relevant players in order to avoid sending oil prices into a spiral.

AlMuhanna draws on personal familiarity with many of these individual decision makers as well as his participation in decades of closed-door sessions where crucial choices were made. Featuring revelatory behind-the-scenes perspective on pivotal oil market events and dynamics, this book is a must-read for practitioners and policy makers engaged with the global energy world.

A rethinking of American democracy that puts caring responsibilities at the center

Americans now face a caring deficit: there are simply too many demands on people’s time for us to care adequately for our children, elderly people, and ourselves.At the same time, political involvement in the United States is at an all-time low, and although political life should help us to care better, people see caring as unsupported by public life and deem the concerns of politics as remote from their lives. Caring Democracy argues that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. What it means to be a citizen is to be someone who takes up the challenge: how should we best allocate care responsibilities in society?

Joan Tronto argues that we need to look again at how gender, race, class, and market forces misallocate caring responsibilities and think about freedom and equality from the standpoint of making caring more just. The idea that production and economic life are the most important political and human concerns ignores the reality that caring, for ourselves and others, should be the highest value that shapes how we view the economy, politics, and institutions such as schools and the family. Care is at the center of our human lives, but Tronto argues it is currently too far removed from the concerns of politics. Caring Democracy traces the reasons for this disconnection and argues for the need to make care, not economics, the central concern of democratic political life.

No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For Marx (1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship.

This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science.
Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist."

Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history.

A particular dark triumph of modern nationalism has been its
ability to persuade citizens to sacrifice their lives for a political vision
forged by emotional ties to a common identity. Both men and women can respond to nationalistic calls to fight that
portray muscular warriors defending their nation against an easily recognizable
enemy. This “us versus them” mentality can be seen in sectarian violence
between Hindus and Muslims, Tamils and Sinhalas, Serbs and Kosovars, and
Protestants and Catholics. In Muscular
Nationalism, Sikata Banerjee takes a comparative look at India
and Ireland and
the relationship among gender, violence, and nationalism. Exploring key texts
and events from 1914-2004, Banerjee explores how women negotiate “muscular
nationalisms” as they seek to be recognized as legitimate nationalists and
equal stakeholders in their national struggles.

Banerjee argues that the gendered manner in which dominant
nationalism has been imagined in most states in the world has had important
implications for women’s lived experiences. Drawing on a specific intersection of gender and nationalism, she
discusses the manner in which women negotiate a political and social terrain
infused with a masculinized dream of nation-building. India and Ireland—two states shaped by the
legacy of British imperialism and forced to deal with modern political/social
conflict centering on competing nationalisms—provide two provocative case
studies that illuminate the complex interaction between gender and nation.

In this impressive book, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson examine the uses and abuses of the word “genocide.” They argue persuasively that the label is highly politicized and that in the United States it is used by the government, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfere with the imperial interests of U.S. capitalism. Thus the word “genocide” is seldom applied when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is used almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the United States and U.S. business interests. One set of rules applies to cases such as U.S. aggression in Vietnam, Israeli oppression of Palestinians, Indonesian slaughter of so-called communists and the people of East Timor, U.S. bombings in Serbia and Kosovo, the U.S. war of “liberation” in Iraq, and mass murders committed by U.S. allies in Rwanda and the Republic of Congo. Another set applies to cases such as Serbian aggression in Kosovo and Bosnia, killings carried out by U.S. enemies in Rwanda and Darfur, Saddam Hussein, any and all actions by Iran, and a host of others.
With its careful and voluminous documentation, close reading of the U.S. media and political and scholarly writing on the subject, and clear and incisive charts, The Politics of Genocide is both a damning condemnation and stunning exposé of a deeply rooted and effective system of propaganda aimed at deceiving the population while promoting the expansion of a cruel and heartless imperial system.

One of the most comprehensive examinations of US torture policy, from the Cold War to the War on Terror to the debate over accountability

Waterboarding. Sleep deprivation. Sensory manipulation. Stress positions. Over the last several years, these and other methods of torture have become garden variety words for practically anyone who reads about current events in a newspaper or blog. We know exactly what they are, how to administer them, and, disturbingly, that they were secretly authorized by the Bush Administration in its efforts to extract information from people detained in its war on terror. What we lack, however, is a larger lens through which to view America’s policy of torture—one that dissects America’s long relationship with interrogation and torture, which roots back to the 1950s and has been applied, mostly in secret, to “enemies,” ever since. How did America come to embrace this practice so fully, and how was it justified from a moral, legal, and psychological perspective?

The United States and Torture opens with a compelling preface by Sister Dianna Ortiz, who describes the unimaginable treatment she endured in Guatemala in 1987 at the hands of the the Guatemalan government, which was supported by the United States. Then a psychologist, a historian, a political scientist, a philosopher, a sociologist, two journalists, and eight lawyers offer one of the most comprehensive examinations of torture to date, beginning with the CIA during the Cold War era and ending with today’s debate over accountability for torture.

Ultimately, this gripping, interdisciplinary work details the complicity of the United States government in the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners both at home and abroad and discusses what can be done to hold those who set the torture policy accountable.

Contributors: Marjorie Cohn, Richard Falk, Marc D. Falkoff, Terry Lynn Karl, John W. Lango, Jane Mayer, Alfred W. McCoy, Jeanne Mirer, Sister Dianna Ortiz, Jordan J. Paust, Bill Quigley, Michael Ratner, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Philippe Sands, Stephen Soldz, and Lance Tapley.

The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid
global flows of people, culture, and information have intensified the
importance of developing transnational understandings of contemporary issues.
Transnational feminist perspectives have provided a unique outlook on women’s
lives and have deepened our understanding of the gendered nature of global
processes. Transnational Feminism in the
United States examines how transnational perspectives shape the ways in
which we create and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United
States, and how the paradigm of transnational feminism is affected by national
narratives and public discourses within the country itself.


An innovative theoretical
project that is both deconstructive and constructive, this bookinterrogates the limits of feminist
thought, primarily through case
studies that illustrate its power to create new fields of research out of
traditionally interdisciplinary lines of inquiry. Leela Fernandes discusses
ways to approach, analyze, and capture processes that exceed and unsettle the
nation-state within the transnational feminist paradigm. Examining the links
between power and knowledge that bind interdisciplinary theory and research, she shines new light on issues such
as human rights as well as academic debates about transnational feminist
perspectives on global issues. A thought-provoking analysis, Transnational Feminism in the United States powerfully
contributes to the field of Women’s
Studies and related cross-disciplinary scholarship on feminist theory and
gender from a global perspective.

An "Indispensable" Book of The Black World Today website

A fresh new look at the Black Power movement and its leaders

Much has been written about the Black Power movement in the United States. Most of this work, however, tends to focus on the personalities of the movement. In We Are Not What We Seem, Roderick D. Bush takes a fresh look at Black Power and other African American social movements with a specific emphasis on the role of the urban poor in the struggle for Black rights.

Bush traces the trajectory of African American social movements from the time Booker T. Washington to the present, providing an integrated discussion of class. He addresses questions crucial to any understanding of Black politics: Is the Black Power movement simply another version of the traditional American ethnic politics, or does it have wider social import? What role has the federal government played in implicitly grooming social conservatives like Louis Farrakhan to assume leadership positions as opposed to leftist, grassroots, class-oriented leaders? Bush avoids the traditional liberal and social democratic approaches in favor of a more universalistic perspective that offers new insights into the history of Black movements in the U.S.

James Boggs, born in Marion Junction, Alabama in 1919, never dreamed of becoming President or a locomotive engineer. He grew up in a world where the white folks are gentlemen by day and Ku Klux Klanners at night. Marion Junction is in Dallas County where as late as 1963, although African-Americans made up over 57 percent of the total county population of 57,000, only 130 were registered voters. After graduating from Dunbar High School in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1937, Boggs took the first freight train north, bumming his way through the western part of the country, working in the hop fields of the state of Washington, cutting ice in Minnesota, and finally ending up in Detroit where he worked on WPA until the Second World War gave him a chance to enter the Chrysler auto plant. Both a keen analysis of U.S. society and a passionate call for revolutionary struggle, The American Revolution has been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese.

A classic collection of writings on political philosophy from leading thinkers of the late 20th century

Much contemporary political philosophy has been a debate between utilitarianism on the one hand and Kantian, or rights-based ethics on the other. However, in recent decades liberalism has faced a growing challenge from a different direction, from a view that argues for a deeper understanding of citizenship and community than the liberal ethic allows.

The writings collected in this volume present leading statements of rights-based liberalism and of the communitarian, or civic republican alternatives to that position. With contributions from leading theorists such as Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, Liberalism and Its Critics shifts the focus from the familiar debate between utilitarians and Kantian liberals to consider a more powerful challenge to the rights-based ethic—a challenge indebted to Aristotle, Hegel, and the civic republican tradition.

Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories.





This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself.





Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.

Winner of the 2016 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Arab American Book Award

A collection of insightful and heartbreaking essays on Muslim-American life after 9/11

Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake “Mustafa Bayoumi” was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an “anti-American, pro-Islam” agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed.

Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. In This Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present.

Winner, American Sociological Association Section on Environment and Technology Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award

The world currently faces several severe social and environmental crises, including economic under-development, widespread poverty and hunger, lack of safe drinking water for one-sixth of the world’s population, deforestation, rapidly increasing levels of pollution and waste, dramatic declines in soil fertility and biodiversity, and global warming. Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment sheds light on the structural causes of these and other social and environmental crises, highlighting in particular the key role that elite-controlled organizations, institutions, and networks play in creating these crises.

Liam Downey focuses on four topics—globalization, agriculture, mining, and U.S. energy and military policy—to show how organizational and institutional inequality and elite-controlled organizational networks produce environmental degradation and social harm. He focuses on key institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Military and the World Trade Organization to show how specific policies are conceived and enacted in order to further elite goals. Ultimately, Downey lays out a path for environmental social scientists and environmentalists to better understand and help solve the world’s myriad social and environmental crises. Inequality, Democracy and the Environment presents a passionate exposé of the true role inequality, undemocratic institutions and organizational power play in harming people and the environment.

Millions of words have been written about the Cuban Revolution, which, to both its supporters and detractors, is almost universally understood as being won by a small band of guerillas. In this unique and stimulating book, Stephen Cushion turns the conventional wisdom on its head, and argues that the Cuban working class played a much more decisive role in the Revolution’s outcome than previously understood. Although the working class was well-organized in the 1950s, it is believed to have been too influenced by corrupt trade union leaders, the Partido Socialist Popular, and a tradition of making primarily economic demands to have offered much support to the guerillas. Cushion contends that the opposite is true, and that significant portions of the Cuban working class launched an underground movement in tandem with the guerillas operating in the mountains.
Developed during five research trips to Cuba under the auspices of the Institute of Cuban History in Havana, this book analyzes a wealth of leaflets, pamphlets, clandestine newspapers, and other agitational material from the 1950s that has never before been systematically examined, along with many interviews with participants themselves. Cushion uncovers widespread militant activity, from illegal strikes to sabotage to armed conflict with the state, all of which culminated in two revolutionary workers’ congresses and the largest general strike in Cuban history. He argues that these efforts helped clinch the victory of the revolution, and thus presents a fresh and provocative take on the place of the working class in Cuban history.

Can American cities respond effectively to pressing social problems? Or, as many scholars have claimed, are urban politics so mired in stasis, gridlock and bureaucratic paralysis that dramatic policy change is impossible? Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of how America’s largest city has struggled for more than thirty years to meet the crisis of modern homelessness through the landmark development, since the initiation of the Callahan v Carey litigation in 1979, of a municipal shelter system based on a court-enforced right to shelter.

New York City now shelters more than 50,000 otherwise homeless people at an annual cost of more than $1 billion in the largest and most complex shelter system in the world. Establishing the right to shelter was a dramatic break with long established practice. Developing and managing the shelter system required the city to repeatedly overcome daunting challenges, from dealing with mentally ill street dwellers to confronting community opposition to shelter placement. In the course of these efforts many classic dilemmas in social policy and public administration arose. Does adequate provision for the poor create perverse incentives? Can courts manage recalcitrant bureaucracies? Is poverty rooted in economic structures or personal behavior? The tale of how five mayors—Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg and de Blasio—have wrestled with these problems is one of caution and hope: the task is difficult and success is never unqualified, but positive change is possible. Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of what happened—for good and sometimes less good—when New York established the right to shelter.

An in-depth political, legal, and philosophical study into the implications of wealth inequality in modern societies.

Wealth, and specifically its distribution, has been a topic of great debate in recent years. Calls for justice against corporations implicated in the 2008 financial crash; populist rallying against “the one percent”; distrust of the influence of wealthy donors on elections and policy—all of these issues have their roots in a larger discussion of how wealth operates in American economic and political life.

In Wealth a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars in political science, law and philosophy address the complex set of questions that relate to economic wealth and its implications for social and political life in modern societies. The volume thus brings together a range of perspectives on wealth, inequality, capitalism, oligarchy, and democracy. The essays also cover a number of more specific topics including limitarianism, US Constitutional history, the wealth defense industry, slavery, and tax policy.

Wealth offers analysis and prescription including original assessment of existing forms of economic wealth and creative policy responses for the negative implications of wealth inequality. Economic wealth and its distribution is a pressing issue and this latest installment in the NOMOS series offers new and thought provoking insights.

Reveals the ideal of a sustainable ecosocialist world in Marx’s writings

Karl Marx, author of what is perhaps the world’s most resounding and significant critique of bourgeois political economy, has frequently been described as a “Promethean.” According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance—a world where nature is mastered, not by anarchic capitalism, but by a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, not only from mainstream environmentalists but also from ecosocialists, many of whom reject Marx outright.

Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx’s ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx’s central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks—published only recently and still being translated—Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. “It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx’s] critique of political economy,” Saito writes, “if one ignores its ecological dimension.”

Saito’s book is crucial today, as we face unprecedented ecological catastrophes—crises that cannot be adequately addressed without a sound theoretical framework. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism shows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx’s critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world.

A primer on the history of American fascism

Most people in the United States have been trained to recognize fascism in movements such as Germany’s Third Reich or Italy’s National Fascist Party, where charismatic demagogues manipulate incensed, vengeful masses. We rarely think of fascism as linked to the essence of monopoly-finance capitalism, operating under the guise of American free-enterprise. But, as Michael Joseph Roberto argues, this is exactly where fascism’s embryonic forms began gestating in the United States, during the so-called prosperous 1920s and the Great Depression of the following decade. Drawing from a range of authors who wrote during the 1930s and early 1940s, Roberto examines how the driving force of American fascism comes, not from reactionary movements below, but from the top, namely, Big Business and the power of finance capital. More subtle than its earlier European counterparts, writes Roberto, fascist America’s racist, top-down quashing of individual liberties masqueraded as “real democracy,” “upholding the Constitution,” and the pressure to be “100 Percent American.”

The Coming of the American Behemoth is intended as a primer, to forge much-needed discourse on the nature of fascism, and its particular forms within the United States. The book focuses on the role of the capital-labor relationship during the period between the two World Wars, when the United States became the epicenter of the world-capitalist system. Concentrating on specific processes, which he characterizes as terrorist and non-terrorist alike, Roberto argues that the interwar period was a fertile time for the incubation of a protean, more salable form of tyranny – a fascist behemoth in the making, whose emergence has been ignored or dismissed by mainstream historians. This book is a necessity for anyone who fears America tipping ever closer, in this era of Trump, to full-blown fascism.

A collection of Samir Amin’s ten most influential essays of the 21st century

Radical political economist Samir Amin left behind a cherished oeuvre of Marxist writings. Amin’s intellectual range—from economics to culture—was admirable, and his lessons remain essential. Monthly Review Press is honored to publish this volume, culled from the Monthly Review magazine, of ten of Samir Amin’s most significant essays written in the twenty-first century. The collection is introduced by Amin’s friend and comrade, the Marxist philosopher Aijaz Ahmad, who provides a comprehensive survey of Amin’s life and path-breaking work. Ahmad also offers a contextual focus by which to read such stunningly astute pieces as “Revolution or Decadence?” and “Contemporary Imperialism.”

Only People Make Their Own History is a loving and enlightening look at what the work of Samir Amin has meant—and will mean— to millions of people the world over.

Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism

In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism’s relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism’s degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism’s plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.

Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth. Instead we must maintain it for future generations and the innumerable, diverse inhabitants of the planet as part of a process of sustainable human development.

Challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism

BRICS is a grouping of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Volume five in the Democratic Marxism series, BRICS and the New American Imperialism challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism. It offers novel analyses of BRICS in the context of increasing US induced imperial chaos, deepening environmental crisis tendencies (such as climate change and water scarcity), contradictory dynamics inside BRICS countries and growing subaltern resistance.

The authors revisit contemporary thinking on imperialism and anti-imperialism, drawing on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theorists after Marx, who attempted to understand the expansionary nature of capitalism from the heartlands to the peripheries. The richness of Luxemburg’s pioneering work inspires most of the volume’s contributors in their analyses of the dangerous contradictions of the contemporary world as well as forms of democratic agency advancing resistance.

While various forms of resistance are highlighted, among them water protests, mass worker strikes, anti-corporate campaigning and forms of cultural critique, this volume grapples with the challenge of renewing anti-imperialism beyond the NGO-driven World Social Forum and considers the prospects of a new horizontal political vessel to build global convergence. It also explores the prospects of a Fifth International of Peoples and Workers.

Leading scholars examine China’s global strategic plans, from Hong Kong to military power, to economic dominance

Over the past few decades, China has increasingly challenged the global influence of the United States. In China’s Grand Strategy, David B. H. Denoon brings together a group of eminent scholars to explain China’s rapid ascendance on the world stage, as well as its future implications for global politics.

Contributors address the military, economic, diplomatic, and internal political factors shaping China’s strategy, in addition to highlighting Beijing’s objectives in different parts of the world, such as Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Ultimately, they explore the promise and perils of China’s rapidly changing political ambitions, showing how the country has made its mark on the twenty-first century.

China’s Grand Strategy provides insight into China’s quest to become a global leader, particularly at a time when the future of both China and the US remain uncertain in the context of current crises like the coronavirus pandemic, the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, and escalating tension between top leaders and officials. This book cannot predict the future for China or the US, but the insights offered can help make sense of where we have been and where we are going.

An anthology dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist writing influential to today's scholars and radical thinkers

Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is the first collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. Leading feminist theorist, Desiree Lewis, and poet and feminist scholar, Gabeba Baderoon, have curated contributions by some of the finest writers and thought leaders into an essential resource. Radical polemic sits side by side with personal essays, and critical theory coexists with rich and stirring life histories. The collection demonstrates a dazzling range of feminist voices from established scholars and authors to emerging thinkers, activists and creative practitioners.

The writers within these pages use creative expression, photography and poetry in eclectic, interdisciplinary ways to unearth and interrogate representations of blackness, sexuality, girlhood, history, divinity, and other themes. Surfacing asks: what do the African feminist traditions that exist outside the canon look and feel like? What complex cultural logics are at work outside the centers of power? How do spirituality and feminism influence each other? What are the histories and experiences of queer Africans? What imaginative forms can feminist activism take?

Surfacing is indispensable to anyone interested in feminism from Africa, which its contributors show in vivid and challenging conversation with the rest of the world. It will appeal to a diverse audience of students, activists, critical thinkers, academics and artists.

What does a successful socialist Green New Deal look like?

With the cascading effects of multiple ongoing health and economic crises, conditions are ripe for the emergence of a global progressive social project capable of moving us beyond business-as-usual and eradicating the fundamental causes of misery: namely, a global Green New Deal. But simply creating new "green jobs" within the current capitalist system is not nearly enough. If we are to take on climate change, it is imperative that we first of all engage in “system change,” a process rooted in socialism. Shifting beyond the American notion of the Green New Deal and adding vital internationalist dimension, A Left Green New Deal provides just such a blueprint for this worldwide undertaking.

Written by Bernd Riexinger and his team in the German DIE LINKE [the left] Party, A Left Green New Deal unveils the powerful opponents of a genuine, left-wing Green New Deal—corporations, the wealthy, the ultra-rich and their political allies. But it also discloses the creation of a potent new counterforce, embodied in a left-wing mobilization strategy developed by DIE LINKE. This organizing model is based in "connective party politics"— transformative organizing practices that reach across class lines within and beyond the party. This essential book provides both a Left Green New Deal platform and the inspiration necessary to lay a path towards an alternate future.

What if neoclassical economics addressed the question of class? This accessible overview of economic theory launches this investigation

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the economic inequalities pervading every aspect of society— and then multiplied them to a staggering degree. A mere nine months into the lockdown, the net worth of the infamous Forbes 400 increased by one trillion dollars; In a single year the US poverty rate rose by the largest amount ever since record-keeping began sixty years ago. At the same time, mass unemployment imperiled or erased the fragile right to quality health care for a substantial number of people living in states without Medicaid. In Inequality, Class, and Economics, Eric Schutz illumines the pillars undergirding the monstrous polarities which define our times— and reveals them as the very same structures of power at the foundations of the class system under today's capitalism.

Employing both traditional and novel approaches to public policy, Inequality, Class, and Economics offers prescriptions that can genuinely address the steepening and hardening of class boundaries. This book pushes past economists' studied avoidance of the problem of class as a system of inequality based in unequal opportunity, and exhorts us to tackle the heart of the problem at long last.

Features contributions that respond to deep challenges to social cohesion from racial injustice

In the latest installment of the NOMOS series, a distinguished group of interdisciplinary scholars explore the erosion—and potential rebuilding—of civic bonds in response to injustice, wrongdoing, and betrayal. Contributors address the possibility of reconciliation and repair, drawing on cutting-edge insights from the fields of political science, philosophy, and law. Nine timely essays explore our pivotal moment in history, from the question of reparations for slavery to the from the art—and impact—of the public apology.

The editors of this volume encourage us to not only examine the roots of mistrust, but also to imagine a collective way forward, particularly as we face the continuing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reconciliation and Repair provides thought-provoking perspectives in an age where they are desperately needed.

Given recent controversies over suspected WMD programs in proliferating countries, there is an increasingly urgent need for effective monitoring and verification regimes—the international mechanisms, including on-site inspections, intended in part to clarify the status of WMD programs in suspected proliferators. Yet the strengths and limitations of these nonproliferation and arms control mechanisms remain unclear. How should these regimes best be implemented? What are the technological, political, and other limitations to these tools? What technologies and other innovations should be utilized to make these regimes most effective? How should recent developments, such as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal or Syria's declared renunciation and actual use of its chemical weapons, influence their architecture?

The Politics of Weapons Inspections examines the successes, failures, and lessons that can be learned from WMD monitoring and verification regimes in order to help determine how best to maintain and strengthen these regimes in the future. In addition to examining these regimes' technological, political, and legal contexts, Nathan E. Busch and Joseph F. Pilat reevaluate the track record of monitoring and verification in the historical cases of South Africa, Libya, and Iraq; assess the prospects of using these mechanisms in verifying arms control and disarmament; and apply the lessons learned from these cases to contemporary controversies over suspected or confirmed programs in North Korea, Iran, and Syria. Finally, they provide a forward-looking set of policy recommendations for the future.

Once seen as a fringe phenomenon, populism is back. While some politicians and media outlets present it as dangerous to the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, others hail it as the fix for broken democracies. Not surprisingly, questions about populism abound. Does it really threaten democracy? Why the sudden rise in populism? And what are we talking about when we talk about "populism"?

The Global Rise of Populism argues for the need to rethink this concept. While still based on the classic divide between "the people" and "the elite," populism's reliance on new media technologies, its shifting relationship to political representation, and its increasing ubiquity have seen it transform in nuanced ways that demand explaining. Benjamin Moffitt contends that populism is not one entity, but a political style that is performed, embodied, and enacted across different political and cultural contexts. This new understanding makes sense of populism in a time when media pervades political life, a sense of crisis prevails, and populism has gone truly global.

This book examines republicanism in an Anglo-American and European context from the execution Charles I to the publication of Tom Paine's Common Sense. t gives weight not only to the thought of the theorists of republicanism but also the practical experience of republican governments in England, Geneva, the Netherlands, and Venice.

The first six chapters of the book, along with David Wootton's Introduction, consider the meaning of republicanism and its historiography. From its theoretical conception to its historical development, contributors examine how thinkers the likes of Hobbes and Montesquieu discussed the key issues of virtue, commerce, and liberty in conjunction with republicanism, and to what extent republicanism was an inheritor of or departure from classical ideals.

In the latter chapters of the book, contributors turn their attention from theory to application, turning to look at the experiences of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republics such as Geneva, the Netherlands, and Venice.

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines—politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.

Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions—sometimes they are vivid polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics.

Negotiations assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the "political"—more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality.

In this controversial and provocative book, Mary Anne Franks examines the thin line between constitutional fidelity and constitutional fundamentalism. The Cult of the Constitution reveals how deep fundamentalist strains in both conservative and liberal American thought keep the Constitution in the service of white male supremacy.

Constitutional fundamentalists read the Constitution selectively and self-servingly. Fundamentalist interpretations of the Constitution elevate certain constitutional rights above all others, benefit the most powerful members of society, and undermine the integrity of the document as a whole. The conservative fetish for the Second Amendment (enforced by groups such as the NRA) provides an obvious example of constitutional fundamentalism; the liberal fetish for the First Amendment (enforced by groups such as the ACLU) is less obvious but no less influential. Economic and civil libertarianism have increasingly merged to produce a deregulatory, "free-market" approach to constitutional rights that achieves fullest expression in the idealization of the Internet. The worship of guns, speech, and the Internet in the name of the Constitution has blurred the boundaries between conduct and speech and between veneration and violence.

But the Constitution itself contains the antidote to fundamentalism. The Cult of the Constitution lays bare the dark, antidemocratic consequences of constitutional fundamentalism and urges readers to take the Constitution seriously, not selectively.

A Eurasian transformation is underway, and it flows from China. With a geopolitically central location, the country's domestic and international policies are poised to change the face of global affairs. The Belt and Road Initiative has called attention to a deepening Eurasian continentalism that has, argues Kent Calder, much more significant implications than have yet been recognized. In Super Continent, Calder presents a theoretically guided and empirically grounded explanation for these changes. He shows that key inflection points, beginning with the Four Modernizations and the collapse of the Soviet Union; and culminating in China's response to the Global Financial Crisis and Crimea's annexation, are triggering tectonic shifts. Furthermore, understanding China's emerging regional and global roles involves comprehending two ongoing transformations—within China and across Eurasia as a whole—and that the two are profoundly interrelated. Calder underlines that the geo-economic logic that prevailed across Eurasia before Columbus, and that made the Silk Road a central thoroughfare of world affairs for close to two millennia, is reasserting itself once again.

One of the central pillars of US counterterrorism policy is that capturing or killing a terrorist group's leader is effective. Yet this pillar rests more on a foundation of faith than facts. In Leadership Decapitation, Jenna Jordan examines over a thousand instances of leadership targeting—involving groups such as Hamas, al Qaeda, Shining Path, and ISIS—to identify the successes, failures, and unintended consequences of this strategy. As Jordan demonstrates, group infrastructure, ideology, and popular support all play a role in determining how and why leadership decapitation succeeds or fails. Taking heed of these conditions is essential to an effective counterterrorism policy going forward.

China's future will be determined by how its leaders manage its myriad interconnected challenges. In Fateful Decisions, leading experts from a wide range of disciplines eschew broad predictions of success or failure in favor of close analyses of today's most critical demographic, economic, social, political, and foreign policy challenges. They expertly outline the options and opportunity costs entailed, providing a cutting-edge analytic framework for understanding the decisions that will determine China's trajectory.

Xi Jinping has articulated ambitious goals, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and massive urbanization projects, but few priorities or policies to achieve them. These goals have thrown into relief the crises facing China as the economy slows and the population ages while the demand for and costs of education, healthcare, elder care, and other social benefits are increasing. Global ambitions and a more assertive military also compete for funding and policy priority. These challenges are compounded by the size of China's population, outdated institutions, and the reluctance of powerful elites to make reforms that might threaten their positions, prerogatives, and Communist Party legitimacy. In this volume, individual chapters provide in-depth analyses of key policies relating to these challenges. Contributors illuminate what is at stake, possible choices, and subsequent outcomes. This volume equips readers with everything they need to understand these complex developments in context.

As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence, great power conflict looms. Yet few studies have looked to the Middle East and Africa, regions of major political, economic, and military importance for both China and the U.S., to theorize how China competes in a changing world system.

China's Rise in the Global South examines China's behavior as a rising power in two key Global South regions, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and analyzes thirty years of China's interactions with these regions across a range of functional areas: political, economic, foreign aid, and military. From the Belt and Road initiative to the founding of new cooperation forums and special envoys, China's Rise in the Global South offers an in-depth look at China's foreign policy approach to the countries it considers its partners in South-South cooperation.

Intervening in the emerging debate between liberals and realists about China's future as a great power, Murphy contends that China is constructing an alternate international order to interact with these regions, and this book provides policymakers and scholars of international relations with the tools to analyze it.

The U.S. government's prime enemy in the War on Terror is not a shadowy mastermind dispatching suicide bombers. It is the informed American citizen.

With Manufacturing Militarism, Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall detail how military propaganda has targeted Americans since 9/11. From the darkened cinema to the football field to the airport screening line, the U.S. government has purposefully inflated the actual threat of terrorism and the necessity of a proactive military response. This biased, incomplete, and misleading information contributes to a broader culture of fear and militarism that, far from keeping Americans safe, ultimately threatens the foundations of a free society.

Applying a political economic approach to the incentives created by a democratic system with a massive national security state, Coyne and Hall delve into case studies from the War on Terror to show how propaganda operates in a democracy. As they vigilantly watch their carry-ons scanned at the airport despite nonexistent threats, or absorb glowing representations of the military from films, Americans are subject to propaganda that, Coyne and Hall argue, erodes government by citizen consent.

The technology controlling United States nuclear weapons predates the Internet. Updating the technology for the digital era is necessary, but it comes with the risk that anything digital can be hacked. Moreover, using new systems for both nuclear and non-nuclear operations will lead to levels of nuclear risk hardly imagined before. This book is the first to confront these risks comprehensively.

With Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons, Herbert Lin provides a clear-eyed breakdown of the cyber risks to the U.S. nuclear enterprise. Featuring a series of scenarios that clarify the intersection of cyber and nuclear risk, this book guides readers through a little-understood element of the risk profile that government decision-makers should be anticipating. What might have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis took place in the age of Twitter, with unvetted information swirling around? What if an adversary announced that malware had compromised nuclear systems, clouding the confidence of nuclear decision-makers?

Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons, the first book to consider cyber risks across the entire nuclear enterprise, concludes with crucial advice on how government can manage the tensions between new nuclear capabilities and increasing cyber risk. This is an invaluable handbook for those ready to confront the unique challenges of cyber nuclear risk.

Selected among Foreign Affairs's "Best of Books 2024"

China is unique in modern world history. No other rising power has experienced China's turbulent history in its relations with neighbors and Western countries. Its sheer size dominates the region. With leader Xi Jinping's political authority unmatched, Xi's sense of mission to restore what he believes is China's natural position as a great power drives the current course of the nation's foreign policy. When China was weak, it was subordinated to others. Now, China is strong, and it wants others to subordinate, at least on the issues involving what it regards as core national interests.

What are the primary forces and how have these forces driven China's reemergence to global power? This book weaves together complex events, processes, and players to provide a historically in-depth, conceptually comprehensive, and up-to-date analysis of Chinese foreign policy transition since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), arguing that transformational leaders with new visions and political wisdom to make their visions prevail are the game changers. Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping are transformational leaders who have charted unique courses of Chinese foreign policy in the quest for security, prosperity, and power. With the ultimate decision-making authority on national security and strategic policies, these leaders have made political use of ideational forces, tailoring bureaucratic institutions, exploiting the international power distribution, and responding strategically to the international norms and rules to advance their foreign policy agendas in the path of China's ascendance.

Kevin Slack sounds the alarm on how America's failed neoliberal regime has given way to a woke oligarchy that has deployed a radical toolkit to rapidly strip away the rights of citizens.

Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical more or less interchangeably without understanding their place in American history. Kevin Slack describes the distinct aims of the movements they represent and weighs their consequences for the American republic.

Each of the three movements rejected older republican principles of governance in favor of an administrative state, but there were substantial differences between Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers, who battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s secular liberals, who forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals, who protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam. Each sought to overturn what came before.  

Following the revolution of the 1960s, elites on both left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and advance globalization abroad. Each side claimed to serve the interests of disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to advance their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and the outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers. The administrative state became a global American empire, but the neoliberals’ economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy. In the “great awokening” that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used COVID-19 and a myth of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. 

Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire. 

Americans across the political spectrum have turned away from free market capitalism, calling for more government intervention into the economy. This optimistic book explains how a dynamic, Commercial Republic that benefits all Americans is still possible.

"Will someone intent on changing the direction of America’s economy seize on this text and send it far and wide?”
—Hugh Hewitt, author, attorney, and national host of The Hugh Hewitt Show

“Markets grounded in a commercial republic are what America needs. Gregg shows why.” 
—Vernon L. Smith, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor of Business Economics and Law at Chapman University

One of America’s greatest success stories is its economy. For over a century, it has been the envy of the world. The opportunity it generates has inspired millions of people to want to become American.

Today, however, America’s economy is at a crossroads. Many have lost confidence in the country’s commitment to economic liberty. Across the political spectrum, many want the government to play an even greater role in the economy via protectionism, industrial policy, stakeholder capitalism, or even quasi-socialist policies. Numerous American political and business leaders are embracing these ideas, and traditional defenders of markets have struggled to respond to these challenges in fresh ways. Then there is a resurgent China bent on eclipsing the United States’s place in the world. At stake is not only the future of the world’s biggest economy, but the economic liberty that remains central to America’s identity as a nation.

But managed decline and creeping statism do not have to be America’s only choices, let alone its destiny. For this book insists that there is an alternative. And that is a vibrant market economy grounded on entrepreneurship, competition, and trade openness, but embedded in what America’s founding generation envisaged as the United States’s future: a dynamic Commercial Republic that takes freedom, commerce, and the common good of all Americans seriously, and allows America as a sovereign-nation to pursue and defend its interests in a dangerous world without compromising its belief in the power of economic freedom.

This book brings together 11 prominent scholars and political activists to discuss and explore issues around postcolonialism, decoloniality, Theories of the South and Epistemologies of the South.  These wide-ranging discussions touch upon issues from academic research methods and writing conventions to global struggles for justice. Together the chapters, as well as the interventions from forum participants which are characteristic of this series, paint a complex and dynamic picture of areas of thought and action that are constantly evolving in response to the demands of a world in flux. The book is a major intervention in current debates about the geopolitics of knowledge, as well as an illustration of the ways in which scholarship in the Global North(s) is indebted to the diverse traditions of scholarship in the Global South(s).

Examines Black Americans’ suspicion about the potential political harassment of Black elected officials

In Marked Men, Nyron N. Crawford offers a novel perspective on political scandal, corruption, and racial politics in the United States. Contrary to traditional beliefs that politicians are forgiven for their transgressions because of the benefits they provide their constituents, Crawford argues that Black Americans view political misdeeds by Black elected officials through a lens of suspicion towards the criminal legal system.

Crawford’s work reveals that Black Americans often question the motivations behind investigations and indictments of Black politicians, expressing concern that such actions by the state are intended to undermine, embarrass, and harass Black leaders. Through a mixed-method approach including experiments, case studies, and survey data, Crawford illustrates that racialized suspicion shapes the way Black voters rally to protect their embattled Black political representatives.

The book challenges conventional wisdom by highlighting how a tolerance of corruption is not the driving force behind the support for wayward politicians. Instead, racialized mistrust of the criminal justice system plays a pivotal role. By shedding light on this dynamic, Marked Men examines the complexities of political scandals and the intricate interplay between race and politics in contemporary America. The study calls for a deeper understanding of the motivations and attitudes of Black voters, prompting readers to reconsider prevailing assumptions about political accountability and forgiveness in the context of race.

Examines Cuba’s approach to scientific research, and distinguishes it from that of capitalist societies

“Cuba's future must, by necessity, be a future of scientists,” Fidel Castro proclaimed in 1960. As Agustín Lage Dávila shows in this pathbreaking book, Cuba has in fact become a global leader in both the generation and application of scientific knowledge—as demonstrated by its ubiquitous production of socially useful products, from vaccines and medicines, to organic food. Speaking from his position as a noted Cuban immunologist, Dr. Lage shows how Cuba achieved such prominence, positing that the training of its scientists, their scientific practices, and their relationships with the Cuban people are intimately connected to the socialist culture that derived from the Cuban Revolution.

Lage offers clearly written and easily understood answers to questions critical to the very survival of humanity. Why is culture critical to science? What distinguishes Cuba’s socialist culture from that of capitalist societies? What are the social responsibilities of scientists? How has Cuba made such incredible scientific advances in the face of the brutal and illegal U.S. blockade? How can a country like Cuba earn needed foreign exchange through the sale of its knowledge-intensive products to countries in the Global North while maintaining its ethical, socialist ideals? Lage’s interrogation of these questions will be of interest to scientists and economic planners around the world, to all those struggling for a better world–and, no doubt, even to those corporations competing with Cuba in global markets.

Kevin Slack sounds the alarm on how America's failed neoliberal regime has given way to a woke oligarchy that has deployed a radical toolkit to rapidly strip away the rights of citizens.

Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical more or less interchangeably without understanding their place in American history. Kevin Slack describes the distinct aims of the movements they represent and weighs their consequences for the American republic.

Each of the three movements rejected older republican principles of governance in favor of an administrative state, but there were substantial differences between Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers, who battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s secular liberals, who forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals, who protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam. Each sought to overturn what came before.  

Following the revolution of the 1960s, elites on both left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and advance globalization abroad. Each side claimed to serve the interests of disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to advance their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and the outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers. The administrative state became a global American empire, but the neoliberals’ economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy. In the “great awokening” that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used COVID-19 and a myth of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. 

Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire. 

A classic recounting of a unionists' struggle against exploitation and dictatorship—from within the mines of Bolivia

Let Me Speak! is the story of a valiant fighter for indigenous and workers’ rights in the mines of Bolivia. First published in English in 1978, Monthly Review Press is now reprinting Let Me Speak! in this new edition, 45 years later.

Written with the assistance of Brazilian sociologist and popular educator Moema Viezzer, this is a lasting classic of the testimonial genre, or the Latin American “testimonio” of one individual in the service of her community and of justice at large. And this testimonial structure impacts the way Chungara and Viezzer choose to share Chungara’s story.

At one point Chungara is jailed and tortured, but escapes. The army, in collusion with her husband’s employers, drive her, terrified children in tow, from their home – but she makes herself a new home. At other points she is a witness to bloody massacres of miners, and brutal government repression of strikes and labor meetings, but she keeps speaking up, as a death warrant hangs over her head.Indefatigable in her conviction and sense of dignity, Chungara first raises her voice alongside 70 other women in the Housewives Committees, and in spite of every effort on the part of the military to intimidate her into submission and silence, her testimonies eventually reach the world stage, echoing in the halls of the U.N. And at that point the mining company endeavors to bribe her out of dire poverty – but, in an act of integrity that is increasingly rare in the times we live in, she balks in the face of their enticements.

What makes this story especially compelling, and lasting, is not that it catalogues the horrors endured by one woman or documents the horrible conditions of life in the Bolivian mining camps at large. What makes it so compelling is that in documenting one woman’s indomitable pursuit of justice, her refusal to submit to harassment, intimidation, and even torture and the threat of death, she offers a document of courage that can inspire generations to come.

As such, more than just a personal account, it also offers important contextualization of the struggles of her time, such as, for example, a sense of the grip of the ideology that underpinned the potency of the mining sector in Bolivia at that time, analysis of US imperialism in its crackdown on communism and leftists in general, and a vision for praxis going forward.

The new edition of Let Me Speak! includes never-before-translated testimonies, resulting in a fuller picture of both Chungara’s worldview, and the time and place in which she arose, the good, the bad and the ugly -- which scholars of Latin American history, women’s history, and oral history/the testimonial genre, will find of interest. This includes a discussion of her role in bringing down the Hugo Banzer dictatorship, and her work as an internationalist during the period of the García Meza dictatorship, from her position of exile in Sweden.

Her account is enduring in its historical significance and continues to be cited in numerous journal articles in every field imaginable, from Sociology, History and Anthropology survey classes, to Latin American studies, Labor studies, Women’s studies. But apart from all that, it is a very compelling and moving read, that feels as vital as it did when first published, even as it gives us a window on a truly remarkable movement of indigenous workers who so deeply believed in joint struggle that they supported each other in resisting corruption.

Dennis Unkovic asserts that China is, contrary to popular belief, not poised to take over from the United States as the world's pre-eminent superpower.

Chinese President Xi Jinping believes his country is destined to displace the United States as the world’s top military and economic power. Every policy that Xi has put forth since assuming power in 2013 has been carefully crafted with this end goal in mind. 

 Nearly four decades of meteoric economic growth have convinced many in the West that modern China is indeed an invincible regime, and that Xi’s grand plan will come to fruition. Closer examination reveals that China is not invulnerable, but in fact is far more fragile than it outwardly appears.

 In this book, Dennis Unkovic coins the term MaxTrends® to identify critical factors and developments that have the potential to derail Xi’s aggressive ambitions for China. These MaxTrends® include alarming demographic shifts, cracks in the global supply chain, an accelerating global arms race, and the Taiwan conundrum, all of which indicate that China’s strength may be more illusion than reality. Unkovic warns that the world’s democracies must take increasingly aggressive steps to exploit China’s vulnerabilities if they hope to blunt Xi’s ambitions. 

 Right now China and the United States find themselves competing in a tight race to the top. In today’s unprecedented arena of economic, military, and political challenges, the nation that acts more quickly and prudently will win.

Exposes the threats to our personal and political identity in the age of surveillance

It has become alarmingly clear that our online actions are less private than we’re led to believe. Our data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell us something, political actors who want to analyze our behavior, and law enforcement who seek to limit our actions.

The Private is Political explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect our online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Ray Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. This will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and even shape the laws that affect our privacy itself.

Beyond merely identifying the harms to individuals from privacy violations, Brescia furthers our understanding of privacy by identifying and naming political privacy and the integrity of identity as central to democracy. The Private is Political empowers consumers by outlining a roadmap for a comprehensive privacy regime, leveraging various institutions to collectively safeguard privacy rights.

This is a relatively short work focusing on the metapolitics – the deeper structures – of the Second Cold War. It is designed to prompt discussion and debate, and thoughtful reflection on the current state of international affairs. The earlier Cold War conflict between communism and capitalism has given way to a more amorphous but, paradoxically, more intense struggle between representations of the political good. There is some analysis of diplomatic history and processes in international politics, but the focus is on the underlying attitudes and ideologies that have generated and sustained Cold War 2.

The work begins with some definitions of a Cold War and whether the term is applicable to the current condition of international affairs. There is also some discussion of the term ‘culture’ and how it is applied in this study. The fundamental question is why Cold War has returned, after all the hopes after 1989 and the end the First Cold War for a new peace order. The contesting explanations are examined, including perspectives from the ‘political West’ (the term used to describe the distinctive development of the Atlantic alliance system since 1945), from Russia and China, and later in the work, from the global South.

The work then looks at how this Cold War is being conducted, including renewed militarism, the suppression of dissent, the decline of diplomacy and the reduced opportunities for dialogue. This includes some discussion of ‘double standards’, applied not in a moralistic way but identified as a structural characteristic of international politics today. The instruments of Cold War 2 include sanctions and the reinterpretation of history and memory wars. Many of the familiar methods drawn from Cold War 1 are now applied, but in novel ways to reflect technological change as well as the different ideological contexts. Information management and communicative wars reach deep into public consciousness. However, Cold War 2 leaves much of the global South cold, refusing to be drawn into a conflict that is perceived to be largely a matter internal to the global North. The work ends with some reflections on possible ways this cold war could end.