A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Critiques and solutions offered by social changemakers from all walks of life
The United States is living through a period of polarization and upheaval. We hunger for answers, yet too often turn to the same people and institutions, expecting different outcomes. How can this be?
America's Path Forward takes a different angle. It features award-winning social innovators from all walks of life with decades of experience of working in and with their communities across America. In twenty-two deep, idea-packed conversations, they share their analyses, practical insights, and policy recommendations—on how to gain common ground, get the country unstuck, and increase prosperity and well-being for all.
These narratives share a common thread: They see community members—workers, young people, parents, neighbors, from Appalachia to Silicon Valley, from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes— as creative, resourceful, and strong, with unique expertise and lived experience of the problem at hand, whose changemaking energy can be tapped to build a better future for all of us.
"An original and powerful book." --Ilan Pappe, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Haifa University, and author of A Modern History of Palestine
"Very impressive. . . . Some of his findings will astound even the knowledgeable reader." --Salim Tamari, Director, Institute of Jerusalem Studies
What is Israel hoping to achieve with its recent withdrawal from Gaza and the buildiing of a 700 km wall? Journalist Jonathan Cook presents a lucid account of the motives. The heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. Israel fears the moment when the region's Palestinians--Israel's own Palestinian citizens and those in the Occupied Territories--become a majority. Inevitable omparisons with apartheid in South Africa will be drawn. The book charts Israel's increasingly desperate responses, including military repression of Palestinian dissent; a ban on marriages between Israel's Palestinian population and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return "through the back door;" and the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded state. Ultimately, the author concludes, these abuses will lead to a third, far deadlier intifada.
Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian newspaper, has written for the Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, al-Ahram Weekly, and Aljazeera.net. He is based in Nazareth.
More than four decades have passed since the end of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia in 1979. Even so, the country is still coming to terms with the destruction wrought by the Khmer Rouge during both the time they were in power and during the period of guerrilla resistance that lasted until 1998. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, or the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC), was established in 2006 to bring the Khmer Rouge leadership to justice. In many ways a product of the 1990s, when liberal democracy appeared to be on the rise both in Cambodia and internationally, the ECCC was imagined as a transitional justice initiative that would help ease the transition to liberal democracy.
The ECCC has long been the focus of scholarly attention in Cambodia’s recovery, but this compelling study argues that such an approach is dated, noting that the political circumstances in which the ECCC was born have since changed profoundly, both globally and locally. Cambodia’s current situation can no longer be analyzed solely in terms of transitional justice narratives or the work of the ECCC, and other ways in which Cambodians have come to terms with their past and built new lives must be considered. By decentering the ECCC in the scholarly narrative of Cambodia’s recovery, the volume’s authors offer fascinating new insights into the Khmer Rouge period and more recent years of social, cultural, and political change in Cambodia.
For decades, we’ve been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it’s hard for us to imagine the struggles of those living in the midst of the fighting. Now, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes us right into the heart of the conflict with Dark Hope, an eye-opening chronicle of his work as a member of the peace group Ta‘ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for “living together.”
Though Shulman never denies the complexity of the issues fueling the conflict—nor the culpability of people on both sides—he forcefully clarifies the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing us the human dimension of the occupation. Here we meet Palestinians whose houses have been blown up by the Israeli army, shepherds whose sheep have been poisoned by settlers, farmers stripped of their land by Israel’s dividing wall. We watch as whip-swinging police on horseback attack crowds of nonviolent demonstrators, as Israeli settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, and as families and communities become utterly destroyed by the unrelenting violence of the occupation.
Opposing such injustices, Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—doggedly work through checkpoints to bring aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by “that dependable and devastating human failure to feel.”
With Dark Hope, Shulman has written a book of deep moral searching, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might still be brought back.
In Days of Awe, Atalia Omer examines this shift through interviews with a new generation of Jewish activists, rigorous data analysis, and fieldwork within a progressive synagogue community. She highlights people politically inspired by social justice campaigns including the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against anti-immigration policies. These activists, she shows, discover that their ethical outrage at US policies extends to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. For these American Jews, the Jewish history of dispossession and diaspora compels a search for solidarity with liberation movements. This shift produces innovations within Jewish tradition, including multi-racial and intersectional conceptions of Jewishness and movements to reclaim prophetic Judaism. Charting the rise of such religious innovation, Omer points toward the possible futures of post-Zionist Judaism.
For decades we have spoken of the 'Israel-Palestine conflict', but what if our understanding of the issue has been wrong all along? This book explores how the concept of settler colonialism provides a clearer understanding of the Zionist movement's project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, displacing the Palestinian Arab population and marginalizing its cultural presence.
Jeff Halper argues that the only way out of a colonial situation is decolonization: the dismantling of Zionist structures of domination and control and their replacement by a single democratic state, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews forge a new civil society and a shared political community.
To show how this can be done, Halper uses the 10-point program of the One Democratic State Campaign as a guide for thinking through the process of decolonization to its post-colonial conclusion. Halper's unflinching reframing will empower activists fighting for the rights of the Palestinians and democracy for all.
‘Usher ... does the best foreign on-the-spot reporting from Palestine.’ Edward Said, London Review of Books
‘The reader vicariously experiences what will become great moments of popular oral history that official historians will forget in the great scheme of things.’ Middle East International
In carefully crafted official statements, the European Union presents itself as an honest broker in the Middle East. In reality, however, the EU’s 27 governments have been engaged in a long process of accommodating Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
Journalist David Cronin interrogates the relationship and its outcomes. A recent agreement for 'more intense, more fruitful, more influential co-operation' between the EU and Israel has meant that Israel has become a member state of the Union in all but name. Cronin shows that rather than using this relationship to encourage Israeli restraint, the EU has legitimised actions such as the ill-treatment of prisoners and the Gaza invasion.
Concluding his revealing and shocking account, Cronin calls for a continuation and deepening of international activism and protest to halt the EU's slide into complicity.
In 2005 Michael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada. By 2008, he was leader of the country’s Liberal Party and poised—should the governing Conservatives falter—to become Canada’s next Prime Minister. It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where he started, writing and teaching what he learned.
What did he take away from this crash course in political success and failure? Did a life of thinking about politics prepare him for the real thing? How did he handle it when his own history as a longtime expatriate became a major political issue? Are cynics right to despair about democratic politics? Are idealists right to hope? Ignatieff blends reflection and analysis to portray today’s democratic politics as ruthless, unpredictable, unforgiving, and hyper-adversarial.
Rough as it is, Ignatieff argues, democratic politics is a crucible for compromise, and many of the apparent vices of political life, from inconsistency to the fake smile, follow from the necessity of bridging differences in a pluralist society. A compelling account of modern politics as it really is, the book is also a celebration of the political life in all its wild, exuberant variety.
David Shulman knows intimately what it takes to live your beliefs, to return, day after day, to the struggle, despite knowing you are often more likely to lose than win. Interweaving powerful stories and deep meditations, Freedom and Despair offers vivid firsthand reports from the occupied West Bank in Palestine as seen through the eyes of an experienced Israeli peace activist who has seen the Israeli occupation close up as it impacts on the lives of all Palestinian civilians.
Alongside a handful of beautifully written and often shocking tales from the field, Shulman meditates deeply on how to understand the evils around him, what it means to persevere as an activist decade after decade, and what it truly means to be free. The violent realities of the occupation are on full display. We get to know and understand the Palestinian shepherds and farmers and Israeli volunteers who face this situation head-on with nonviolent resistance. Shulman does not hold back on acknowledging the daily struggles that often leave him and his fellow activists full of despair. Inspired by these committed individuals who are not prepared to be silent or passive, Shulman suggests a model for ordinary people everywhere. Anyone prepared to take a risk and fight their oppressive political systems, he argues, can make a difference—if they strive to act with compassion and to keep hope alive.
This is the moving story of a man who continues to fight for good in the midst of despair. An indispensable book in our era of reactionary politics and refugee crises, political violence and ecological devastation, Freedom and Despair is a gripping memoir of struggle, activism, and hope for peace.
In 1994, while nations everywhere stood idly by, 800,000 people were slaughtered in eight weeks in Rwanda. Arriving as U.S. Ambassador to neighboring Burundi a few weeks later, Bob Krueger began drawing international attention to the genocide also proceeding in Burundi, where he sought to minimize the killing and to preserve its fledgling democratic government from destruction by its own army. From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi is a compelling eyewitness account of both a horrific and persistent genocide and of the ongoing efforts of many courageous individuals to build a more just society.
Krueger and his wife Kathleen graphically document the slaughter occurring all around them, as well as their repeated efforts to get the U.S. government and the international community to take notice and take action. Bob Krueger reconstructs the events of the military coup that precipitated the Burundi genocide and describes his efforts to uncover the truth by digging up graves and interviewing survivors. In straightforward and powerful language, Kathleen Krueger recounts her family's experience living amid civil war, including when she faced down a dozen AK-47-wielding African soldiers to save the life of a household worker.
From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi shines a piercing light on a genocide that has gone largely unreported, and identifies those responsible for it. It also offers hope that as the truth emerges and the perpetrators are brought to account, the people of Burundi will at last achieve peace and reconciliation.
In 1991 the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) took over Asmara and completed the liberation of Eritrea; formal independence came two years later after a referendum in May 1993. It was the climax of a thirty-year struggle, though the EPLF itself was formed only in the early 1970s.
From the beginning, Eritrean nationalism was divided. Ethiopia’s appeal to a joint Christian imperial past alienated the Muslim pastoral lowland people in the areas where Eritrean nationalism first appeared. It was not until the early 1970s that the Christian elements of the population finally joined the liberation struggle on a substantial scale.
The unique model of apartheid, colonisation and military occupation that Israel imposes on the Palestinians, along with myriad violations of international law, have made Palestine the moral cause of a generation. Yet many people continue to ask, ‘what can we do?’
Generation Palestine helps to answer this question by bringing together Palestinian and international activists in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The movement aims to pressure Israel until it complies with International Law, mirroring the model that was successfully utilised against South African apartheid.
With essays written by a wide selection of contributors, Generation Palestine follows the BDS movement’s model of inclusivity and collaboration. Contributors include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ken Loach, Iain Banks, Ronnie Kasrils, Professor Richard Falk, Ilan Pappe, Omar Barghouti, Ramzy Baroud and Archbishop Attallah Hannah, alongside other internationally acclaimed artists, writers, academics and grassroots activists.
Over the past century, Israel has been transformed from an agricultural colony, to a welfare-warfare state, to a globally integrated "market economy" characterised by great income disparities. What lies behind this transformation? In order to understand capitalist development, argue Bichler and Nitzan, we need to break the artificial separation between "economics" and "politics", and think of accumulation itself as "capitalisation of power". Applying this concept to Israel, they reveal the big picture that never makes it to the news. Diverse processes – such as regional conflicts and energy crises, ruling class formation and dominant ideology, militarism and dependency, inflation and recession, the politics of high-technology and the transnationalisation of ownership – are all woven into a single story. The result is a fascinating account of one of the world’s most volatile regions.
President Obama has signaled a sharp break from many Bush Administration policies, but he remains committed to federal support for religious social service providers. Like George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, though, Obama’s version of the policy has generated loud criticism—from both sides of the aisle—even as the communities that stand to benefit suffer through an ailing economy. God’s Economy reveals that virtually all of the critics, as well as many supporters, have long misunderstood both the true implications of faith-based partnerships and their unique potential for advancing social justice.
Unearthing the intellectual history of the faith-based initiative, Lew Daly locates its roots in the pluralist tradition of Europe’s Christian democracies, in which the state shares sovereignty with social institutions. He argues that Catholic and Dutch Calvinist ideas played a crucial role in the evolution of this tradition, as churches across nineteenth-century Europe developed philosophical and legal defenses to protect their education and social programs against ascendant governments. Tracing the influence of this heritageon the past three decades of American social policy and church-state law, Daly finally untangles the radical beginnings of the faith-based initiative. In the process, he frees it from the narrow culture-war framework that has limited debate on the subject since Bush opened the White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001.
A major contribution from an important new voice at the intersection of religion and politics, God’s Economy points the way toward policymaking that combines strong social support with a new moral focus on the protection of families and communities.
In the 1990s a nationwide crime wave overtook Côte d’Ivoire. The Ivoirian police failed to control the situation, so a group of poor, politically marginalized, and mostly Muslim men took on the role of the people’s protectors as part of a movement they called Benkadi. These men were dozos—hunters skilled in ritual sacrifice—and they applied their hunting and occult expertise, along with the ethical principles implicit in both forms of knowledge, to the tracking and capturing of thieves. Meanwhile, as Benkadi emerged, so too did the ethnic, regional, and religious divisions that would culminate in Côte d’Ivoire’s 2002–07 rebellion.
Hunting the Ethical State reveals how dozos worked beyond these divisions to derive their new roles as enforcers of security from their ritual hunting ethos. Much as they used sorcery to shape-shift and outwit game, they now transformed into unofficial police, and their ritual networks became police bureaucracies. Though these Muslim and northern-descended men would later resist the state, Joseph Hellweg demonstrates how they briefly succeeded at making a place for themselves within it. Ultimately, Hellweg interprets Benkadi as a flawed but ingenious and thoroughly modern attempt by non-state actors to reform an African state.
Masalha argues that the heart of the conflict between Zionist immigrants/settlers and the native Palestinians has always been about land, territory, demography and water. He documents how Israeli policy has made it a priority to expel the Palestinians, either by war or peaceful measures. But these imperialist tendencies are not restricted to extremist zealots. The author uncovers the expansionist policies found in Labour Zionism and Kookist ideology.
Chapters cover the Whole Land of Israel Movement, Zionist Revisionism and the Likud Party, Gush Emunim and the religious fundamentalists, parties and movements of the far right and the evolution of Israeli Jewish public attitudes since 1967.
In the fall of 2001 Charles Salmon had a Fulbright fellowship in Israel. He was due to depart on September 12. Arriving in Israel a few weeks later, speaking no Hebrew and largely unfamiliar with Judaism and Israeli customs, he immersed himself in Israeli culture.
This collection of correspondence began as a weekly report to friends and was designed to offer an alternative to mainstream media. With the excitement of a tourist and the eagerness of an anthropologist, Salmon emerges as a modern Candide. He describes historical sites and a supermarket in Tel Aviv, discusses the differences between university students in Israel and America, and negotiates the purchase of food and the vagaries of the weather with humor and passion. The letters also discuss Israeli–Palestinian relations, and details terrorist events and responses to them.
This unique book focuses on how everyday hopes and fears transcend geopolitical boundaries and provides valuable lessons on how to thrive in these new and uncertain times.
With budgets squeezed at every level of government, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) holds outstanding potential for assessing the efficiency of many programs. In this first book to address the application of CBA to social policy, experts examine ten of the most important policy domains: early childhood development, elementary and secondary schools, health care for the disadvantaged, mental illness, substance abuse and addiction, juvenile crime, prisoner reentry programs, housing assistance, work-incentive programs for the unemployed and employers, and welfare-to-work interventions. Each contributor discusses the applicability of CBA to actual programs, describing both proven and promising examples.
The editors provide an introduction to cost-benefit analysis, assess the programs described, and propose a research agenda for promoting its more widespread application in social policy. Investing in the Disadvantaged considers how to face America’s most urgent social needs with shrinking resources, showing how CBA can be used to inform policy choices that produce social value.
Following on from their acclaimed book Bad News from Israel, Greg Philo and Mike Berry present a concise guide to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This uniquely accessible book will appeal to anyone looking for an approachable introduction. Uniquely, the authors show how there are many different, competing histories. They offer an overview of the wide range of contending viewpoints, and indicate those which are based on the most considered historical research.
The book covers key events in chronological order, in each case examining the varied historical accounts and presenting the beliefs of key thinkers across the ideological spectrum, from Edward Said to Binyamin Netanyahu. Starting the with emergence of the Zionist movement in the nineteenth century, and the figures who shaped it, the authors go on to cover the founding of Israel and its subsequent history, up to and including the 'roadmap for peace', the construction of the wall, the death of Arafat and the withdrawal from Gaza.
Journalist Jonathan Cook explores Israel’s key role in persuading the Bush administration to invade Iraq, as part of a plan to remake the Middle East, and their joint determination to isolate Iran and prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons that might rival Israel’s own.
This concise and clearly argued book makes the case that Israel's desire to be the sole regional power in the Middle East neatly chimed with Bush’s objectives in the “war on terror”.
Examining a host of related issues, from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to the role of Big Oil and the demonisation of the Arab world, Cook argues that the current chaos in the Middle East is the objective of the Bush administration – a policy that is equally beneficial to Israel.
Raffaella A. Del Sarto examines the creation of Israel's neo-revisionist consensus about security threats and regional order, which took hold of Israeli politics and society after 2000 and persists today. The failed Oslo peace process and the trauma of the Second Palestinian Intifada triggered this shift to the right; conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah and the inflammatory rhetoric of Iranian President Ahmadinejad additionally contributed to the creation of a general sense of being under siege. While Israel faces real security threats, Israeli governments have engaged in the politics of insecurity, promoting and amplifying a sense of besiegement. Lively political debate has been replaced by a general acceptance of the no-compromise approach to security and the Palestinians. The neo-revisionist right, represented by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, has turned Israel away from the peace process and pushes maximalist territorial ambitions. But they have failed to offer a vision for an end to conflict, and there has been little debate about whether or not the hardline policies toward the region are counterproductive. Del Sarto explains this disappearance of dissent and examines the costs of Israel’s policies. She concludes that Israel’s feeling of being under siege has become entrenched, a two-state solution with the Palestinians is highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, and Israel’s international isolation is likely to increase. Del Sarto’s analysis of this tense political situation will interest scholars and students of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Middle East Studies, and International Relations.
Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of “discrepant mobility,” foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel’s future in the Arab Middle East. Itineraries in Conflict is both a cultural history of the Oslo process and a call to fellow scholars to rethink the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict by considering the politics of popular culture in everyday Israeli and Palestinian lives.
"The Limits to Union is a superb book about the complexities of recent political struggles over same-sex marriage. Goldberg-Hiller offers a sophisticated account of egalitarian rights advocacy and the reaction it has generated from established majorities animated by a 'new common sense' of exclusionary sovereign authority. The author's analysis is multidimensional and nuanced, but the core argument is bold, important, and well-supported. I recommend it very highly to everyone interested in understanding the character, possibilities, and constraints of civil rights amid our contemporary culture wars."
-Michael McCann, author of Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization
"In this excellent book, Goldberg-Hiller uses Hawaii's experience to examine the interaction between courts and the political system. . . . Relying on briefs, legislative statements, and interviews with activists from both sides of the question, he views this familiar debate . . . through the unfamiliar prism of gay marriage, which allows him to gauge the viability and the pliability of the American civil rights ideal, and how gay and lesbian issues fit (or don't fit) within that ideal."
-Willian Heinzen, New York Law Journal
"Goldberg-Hiller presents the history of the same-sex marriage question since it first sparked debate in Hawaii. He follows the shifting debate through court cases, state propositions, and state and federal legislatures, considering questions about the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and the concept of equal protection under the law for gays and lesbians. This detailed treatment of the legal issues surrounding same-sex marriages is highly recommended."
-R. L. Abbott, University of Evansville
"[A] valuable contribution to the field, situating the gay marriage debate in broader contexts of theory, law and practice. [S]ame-sex marriage is an important issue...that finds itself caught in the friction points of much larger debates over the nature of rights, the limits of sovereignty and the proper role of courts and law in a democratic society. The Limits to Union should therefore be of interest even to those who do not think of themselves as interested in gay and lesbian rights issues."
-Evan Gerstmann, Loyola Marymount University, Law and Politics Book Review
Abufarha draws on the life histories of martyrs, interviews he conducted with their families and members of the groups that sponsored their operations, and examinations of Palestinian literature, art, performance, news stories, and political commentaries. He also assesses data—about the bombers, targets, and fatalities caused—from more than two hundred martyrdom operations carried out by Palestinian groups between 2001 and 2004. Some involved the use of explosive belts or the detonation of cars; others entailed armed attacks against Israeli targets (military and civilian) undertaken with the intent of fighting until death. In addition, he scrutinized suicide attacks executed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad between 1994 and 2000. In his analysis of Palestinian political violence, Abufarha takes into account Palestinians’ understanding of the history of the conflict with Israel, the effects of containment on Palestinians’ everyday lives, the disillusionment created by the Oslo peace process, and reactions to specific forms of Israeli state violence. The Making of a Human Bomb illuminates the Palestinians’ perspective on the conflict with Israel and provides a model for ethnographers seeking to make sense of political violence.
Drawing on a rich trove of focus group data, interviews, and textual sources, Elaine Weiner's Market Dreams powerfully captures the varied responses of female managers and factory workers in the Czech Republic to their country's transition from socialism to capitalism. Her work, rooted in sociology and comparative feminism, is an important advance for the literature on women in Eastern Europe.
"Market Dreams is a conceptually-sophisticated and empirically-rich account of how the discourses and practices of the free market penetrated the hearts and minds of everyday Czech citizens. Weiner's provocative analysis takes readers inside the worlds of female factory workers to expose the discontinuities between their radiant market dreams and their everyday realities--and juxtaposes them to the continuities experienced by female managers. In the process, it challenges many of our ideas about post/socialism, marketization, and gender and reveals the enduring power of stories in shaping social identities and actions."
---Lynne Haney, Associate Professor of Sociology, New York University
"Through interviews and a careful analysis of newspaper articles written in the first decade after the collapse of state socialism, Weiner explores the complicated interconnections between personal stories and the emerging neoliberal metanarrative of the free market in the Czech Republic after 1989. Her book transcends many of the dichotomies with which researchers of post-state socialism have been struggling: 'East' vs. 'West,' losers and winners, emancipation vs. oppression, etc., and thus makes a truly novel contribution to our understanding of women's lives after state socialism."
---Éva Fodor, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, Central European University
"Weiner's rich and innovative study of female Czech managers and workers exemplifies the importance of narrative analysis for understanding why gender and class have not (yet) reconfigured the sense of postcommunism's alternatives. This is critical reading for feminists, class analysts, and students of postcommunist social change."
---Michael Kennedy, Director, Center for European Studies, University of Michigan
Elaine Weiner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Visit the author's website at: www.mcgill.ca/sociology/faculty/weiner/.
Cover Credit: Frank Scherschel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
George W. Bush had planned to swear his oath of office with his hand on the Masonic Bible used by both his father and George Washington, however, due to the inclement weather, a family Bible was substituted. Almost immediately on taking office, President Bush made passage of "faith-based initiatives"—the government funding of religious charitable groups—a legislative priority. However, "inclement" weather storm-tossed his hopes for faith-based initiatives as well.
What happened? Why did these initiatives, which began with such vigor and support from a popular president, fail? And what does this say about the future role of religious faith in American public life? Amy Black, Douglas Koopman, and David Ryden—all prominent political scientists—utilize a framework that takes the issue through all three branches of government and analyzes it through three very specific lenses: a public policy lens, a political party lens, and a lens of religion in the public square.
Drawing on dozens of interviews with key figures in Washington, the authors tell a compelling story, revealing the evolution of the Bush faith-based strategy from his campaign for the presidency through congressional votes to the present. They show how political rhetoric, infighting, and poor communication shipwrecked Bush's efforts to fundamentally alter the way government might conduct social services. The authors demonstrate the lessons learned, and propose a more fruitful, effective way to go about such initiatives in the future.
Michael Riordon takes us to thousand year-old olive groves, besieged villages, refugee camps, checkpoints and barracks. In the face of deepening conflict, Our Way to Fight offers courageous grassroots action on both sides of the wall, and points the way to a liveable future.
A detailed analysis of Poland and the Czech Republic suggests that alternation between strategies has been the secret to the success of East-Central European countries.
This comparative case analysis identifies the significance of reform mistakes during transition and the corrective benefits of policy alternation, its claims illustrated with an in-depth study of privatization policy in the two countries.
Mitchell A. Orenstein delves into the historic struggle to build capitalism and democracy during a decade of post- communist transition in East-Central Europe and develops a model that explains why democratic policy alternation may accelerate policy learning under conditions of uncertainty and constraint.
Out of the Red is accessible to a general audience and as such is suitable for both graduate and undergraduate courses on political economy. It will be of particular interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, students of postcommunism, and anyone interested in the relations between capitalism and democracy in the contemporary world.
Mitchell A. Orenstein is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University.
Falk explores the intricacies and interconnections within the history and politics of Israel and Palestine, while delving into the complicated relationships the conflict has created within the global community. He refutes the notion that the Palestinian struggle is a lost cause and offers new tactics and possibilities for change. He also puts the ongoing conflict in context, reflecting on the legacy of Edward Said and drawing on the importance of his ideas as a humanist model for peace that is mindful of the formidable difficulties that come with achieving a solution to the long struggle. One of the most established and authoritative voices on the conflict, Falk now presents his most sustained and focused historical overview to date.
The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 has many important economic aspects that are often overlooked. In this highly original book, Shir Hever shows that understanding the economic dimensions of the occupation is crucial to unravelling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hever rejects the premise that Israel keeps control over Palestinian territories for material gain, and also the premise that Israel is merely defending itself from Palestinian aggression. Instead, he argues that the occupation has reached an impasse, with the Palestinian resistance making exploitation of the Palestinians by Israeli business interests difficult, but the Israeli authorities reluctant to give up control.
With traditional economic analysis failing to explain this turn of events, this book will be invaluable for students, activists and journalists struggling to make sense of the complex issues surrounding Israel's occupation.
Lipsitz's ultimate point is not to condemn all white people as racists but to challenge everyone to begin a principled examination of personal actions and political commitments. Exposing the system of unfairness is not enough. People of all groups -- but especially white people because they benefit from that system -- have to work toward eradicating the rewards of whiteness.
George Lipsitz’s classic book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a possessive investment in whiteness that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educational opportunities available to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the friends and relatives of those who have profited most from past and present discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with structured advantages.
In this twentieth anniversary edition, Lipsitz provides a new introduction and updated statistics; as well as analyses of the enduring importance of Hurricane Katrina; the nature of anti-immigrant mobilizations; police assaults on Black women, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray; the legacy of Obama and the emergence of Trump; the Charleston Massacre and other hate crimes; and the ways in which white fear, white fragility, and white failure have become drivers of a new ethno-nationalism.
As vital as it was upon its original publication, the twentieth anniversary edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is an unflinching but necessary look at white supremacy.
In Racialized Politics, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists explore the current debate surrounding the sources of racism in America. Published here for the first time, the essays represent three major approaches to the topic. The social psychological approach maintains that prejudice socialized early in life feeds racial stereotypes, while the social structural viewpoint argues that behavior is shaped by whites' fear of losing their privileged status. The third perspective looks to non-racially inspired ideology, including attitudes about the size and role of government, as the reason for opposition to policies such as affirmative action. Timely and important, this collection provides a state-of-the-field assessment of the current issues and findings on the role of racism in mass politics and public opinion.
Contributors are Lawrence Bobo, Gretchen C. Crosby, Michael C. Dawson, Christopher Federico, P. J. Henry, John J. Hetts, Jennifer L. Hochschild, William G. Howell, Michael Hughes, Donald R. Kinder, Rick Kosterman, Tali Mendelberg, Thomas F. Pettigrew, Howard Schuman, David O. Sears, James Sidanius, Pam Singh, Paul M. Sniderman, Marylee C. Taylor, and Steven A. Tuch.
During the past decade, Democrats and Republicans each have received about fifty percent of the votes and controlled about half of the government, but this has not resulted in policy deadlock. Despite highly partisan political posturing, the policy regime has been largely moderate. Incremental, yet substantial, policy innovations such as welfare reform; deficit reduction; the North American Free Trade Agreement; and the deregulation of telecommunications, banking, and agriculture have been accompanied by such continuities as Social Security and Medicare, the maintenance of earlier immigration reforms, and the persistence of many rights-based policies, including federal affirmative action.
In Seeking the Center, twenty-one contributors analyze policy outcomes in light of the frequent alternation in power among evenly divided parties. They show how the triumph of policy moderation and the defeat of more ambitious efforts, such as health care reform, can be explained by mutually supporting economic, intellectual, and political forces. Demonstrating that the determinants of public policy become clear by probing specific issues, rather than in abstract theorizing, they restore the politics of policymaking to the forefront of the political science agenda.
A successor to Martin A. Levin and Marc K. Landy’s influential The New Politics of Public Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), this book will be vital reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in political science and public policy, as well as a resource for scholars in both fields.
Despite the substantial economic and political strides that African-Americans have made in this century, welfare remains an issue that sharply divides Americans by race. Shifting the Color Line explores the historical and political roots of enduring racial conflict in American welfare policy, beginning with the New Deal.
Through Social Security and other social insurance programs, white workers were successfully integrated into a strong national welfare state. At the same time, African-Americans--then as now disproportionately poor--were relegated to the margins of the welfare state, through decentralized, often racist, public assistance programs.
Over the next generation, these institutional differences had fateful consequences for African-Americans and their integration into American politics. Owing to its strong national structure, Social Security quickly became the closest thing we have to a universal, color-blind social program. On the other hand, public assistance--especially Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)--continued to treat African-Americans badly, while remaining politically weak and institutionally decentralized.
Racial distinctions were thus built into the very structure of the American welfare state. By keeping poor blacks at arm's length while embracing white workers, national welfare policy helped to construct the contemporary political divisions--middle-class versus poor, suburb versus city, and white versus black--that define the urban underclass.
In her provocative ethnography, The Struggling State, Jennifer Riggan examines the contradictions of state power as simultaneously oppressive to and enacted by teachers. Riggan, who conducted participant observation with teachers in and out of schools, explores the tenuous hyphen between nation and state under lived conditions of everyday authoritarianism.
The Struggling State shows how the hopes of Eritrean teachers and students for the future of their nation have turned to a hopelessness in which they cannot imagine a future at all.
Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity integrates the study of politics and public policy across a broad spectrum of regulatory and social welfare policies in the United States and several nations of Western Europe. The editors and a sterling list of contributors look at policymaking in the 1990s through the present—providing a comparative politics framework—stressing both parallel development and the differences between and among the nations. Similar prevailing ideas and political factors can be identified and transatlantic comparisons made—providing for a clearer understanding of the policymaking process.
Faith in regulated markets and the burden of rising welfare costs are concerns found on both sides of the Atlantic. Western democracies also share political climates colored by economic austerity; low trust in government, pressures from interest groups, and a sharply divided electorate. Because of differing political processes and differing policy starting points, a variety of disparate policy decisions have resulted.
Real world policymaking in the areas of welfare, health, labor, immigration reform, disability rights, consumer and environmental regulation, administrative reforms, and corporate governance are compared. Ultimately, the last decade is best characterized as one of "drift," sluggish changes with little real innovation and much default to the private sector. In general, policymakers on both sides of the ocean, constrained by economic necessity, have been unable to produce policy outcomes that satisfy the key segments of the electorate.
The contributors examine the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, as well as a number of other European countries, and study the European Union itself as a policymaking institution. Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity distills the prominent issues, politics, and roles played by governmental institutions into a new understanding of the dynamics of policymaking in and among transatlantic nations.
This book is a comprehensive overview and analysis of the Palestinians’ travail as they move from revolutionary movement to state. Barry Rubin outlines the difficulties in the transition now underway arising from Palestinian history, society, and diplomatic agreements. He writes about the search for a national identity, the choice of an economic system, and the structure of government.
Rubin finds the political system interestingly distinctive—it appears to be a pluralist dictatorship. There are free elections, multiple parties, and some latitude in civil liberties. Yet there is a relatively unrestrained chief executive and arbitrariness in applying the law because of restraints on freedom. The new ruling elite is a complex mixture of veteran revolutionaries, heirs to large and wealthy families, professional soldiers, technocrats, and Islamic clerics. Beyond explaining how the executive and legislative branches work, Rubin factors in the role of public opinion in the peace process, the place of nongovernmental institutions, opposition movements, and the Palestinian Authority’s foreign relations—including Palestinian views and interactions with the Arab world, Israel, and the United States.
This book is drawn from documents in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, as well as interviews and direct observations. Rubin finds that, overall, the positive aspects of the Palestinian Authority outweigh the negative, and he foresees the establishment of a Palestinian state. His charting of the triumphs and difficulties of this state-in-the-making helps predict and explain future dramatic developments in the Middle East.
As a social policy scholar, Campbell thought she knew a lot about means-tested assistance programs. What she quickly learned was that missing from most government manuals and scholarly analyses was an understanding of how these programs actually affect the lives of the people who depend on them. Using Marcella and Dave’s situation as a case in point, she reveals their many shortcomings in Trapped in America’s Safety Net. Because American safety net programs are designed for the poor, Marcella and Dave first had to spend down their assets and drop their income to near-poverty level before qualifying for help. What’s more, to remain eligible, they will have to stay under these strictures for the rest of their lives, meaning they are barred from doing many of the things middle-class families are encouraged to do: Save for retirement. Develop an emergency fund. Take advantage of tax-free college savings. And, while Marcella and Dave’s story is tragic, the financial precariousness they endured even before the accident is all too common in America, where the prevalence of low-income work and unequal access to education have generated vast—and growing—economic inequality. The implementation of Obamacare has cut the number of uninsured and underinsured and reduced some of the disparities in coverage, but it continues to leave too many people open to tremendous risk.
Behind the statistics and beyond the ideological battles are human beings whose lives are stunted by policies that purport to help them. In showing how and why this happens, Trapped in America’s Safety Net offers a way to change it.
In Welfare Discipline, Schram argues that it is time to take stock of the new forms of welfare and to develop even better methods to understand them. He argues for a more contextualized approach to examining welfare policy, from the use of the idea of globalization to justify cutbacks, to the increasing employment of U.S. policy discourse overseas, to the development of asset-based approaches to helping the poor.
Stressing the importance of understanding the ways we talk about welfare, how we study it, and, critically, what we do not discuss and why, Schram offers recommendations for making welfare policy both just and effective.
What is the purpose of the West Bank Wall? Since Israel began its construction in 2002, it has sparked intense debate, being condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice. Israel claims it is a security measure to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks. Opponents point to the serious impact on the rights of Palestinians, depriving them of their land, mobility and access to health and educational services.
In The West Bank Wall, Dolphin explores the Palestinian experience of the Wall and places the debate in its international context. Dolphin's writing is informed by his work for the UN, where for three years he monitored and compiled reports on the Wall's impact on the humanitarian conditions in refugee camps, towns and villages. With an introduction by Graham Usher, who has worked as Palestine correspondent for major international publications including the Economist, Middle East International, al Ahram English Weekly, the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique, this book puts the purpose of the Wall to the test.
What are the real intentions behind the Israeli security argument? Is it a means of securing territory permanently through an illegal annexation of East Jerusalem? Ray Dolphin provides some answers, offering a unique critical account of the impact of the wall and how it affects plans for a Palestinian state and for future peace in the Middle East.
“In a display of rationality uncommon to discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nusseibeh takes an impartial vantage point, trying to sort out a mess largely generated by overblown and hyperactive political identities.”—Boston Review
“[This] philosophical and balanced book is unfailingly sensitive and empathetic to both sides.”—Publishers Weekly
Can a devout Jew be a devout Jew and drop the belief in the rebuilding of the Temple? Can a devout Muslim be a devout Muslim and drop the belief in the sacredness of the Rock? Can one right (the right of return) be given up for another (the right to live in peace)? Can one claim Palestinian identity and still retain Israeli citizenship? What is a Palestinian state worth? For over sixty years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been subjected to many solutions and offered many answers by diverse parties. Yet, answers are only as good as the questions that beget them. It is with this simple, but powerful idea, the idea of asking the basic questions anew, that the renowned Palestinian philosopher and activist Sari Nusseibeh begins his book.
What Is a Palestinian State Worth? poses questions about the history, meaning, future, and resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Deeply informed by political philosophy and based on decades of personal involvement with politics and social activism, Nusseibeh’s moderate voice—global in its outlook, yet truly grounded in his native city of Jerusalem—points us toward a future which, as George Lamming once put it, is colonized by our acts in this moment, but which must always remain open.
This book looks beyond politics to show how the ability of the U.S. government to implement policies is strongly affected by various economic constraints. These include the credibility of the policies, the ability of government to commit to them, the extent to which firms and consumers rationally anticipate their effects, whether the success of a policy further encourages firms and individuals to behave in intended ways, and whether the behavior of such actors can be sustained without continued government intervention.
The authors apply these concepts to four areas of policy: macroeconomic policies to promote employment and economic growth, redistributive policies to benefit the poor and the elderly, production policies to provide goods and services, and regulatory policies to guide the behavior of firms and individuals. In doing so they provide plausible explanations of many puzzling phenomena—for example, why government has been successful in reducing cigarette smoking, but has failed to get people to install and maintain emission-control devices in their cars.
This book recasts debates about public policy, avoiding conventional “pro-government” or “anti-government” positions; rather, it helps to predict when public policy will succeed.
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